Fair Game

by Steve Cannane

  But Jack Galbally was not about to let up. A week later, he brought a private member’s bill to the parliament to ‘prohibit the teaching and practise of scientology for fee or reward and the use in relation to such teaching or practice of any apparatus or device for recording or measuring personal reactions, impulses or characteristics’. Before Galbally’s Scientology Restriction Bill could be debated, Gilbert Chandler, the leader of the government in the Legislative Council announced that there would be an inquiry into Scientology. The following day, Kevin Anderson QC was appointed to run a one-man Board of Inquiry to ‘inquire into, report upon, and make recommendations concerning Scientology as known, carried on, practised and applied in Victoria’.81

  The response at the Melbourne Scientology headquarters was strangely euphoric. There was dancing in the halls of Spring Street with staff jumping up and down yelling, ‘We’ve won! We’ve won!’82 A banner was draped across the front of the Scientology building praising the parliamentarians across the road for the decision they’d just made: ‘Scientologists thank parliament for the open inquiry,’ it stated.83

  Later, the Scientologists would claim that the descendants of convicts were incapable of holding a proper inquiry. An official release that had all the hallmarks of being written by Hubbard stated, ‘The niceties of truth and fairness, of hearing witnesses and weighing evidence, are not for men whose ancestry is lost in the promiscuity of the prison ships of transportation.’84 But at the time Victoria’s most senior Scientologists had been actively lobbying for an inquiry. Four days before the inquiry was announced, Peter Williams and Denny Gogerly sent a telegram to government ministers Arthur Rylah and Rupert Hamer, stating:

  Sir, Scientologists demand a full independent public enquiry to expose all the facts to public view. We will present all the material to prove our honest financial status. We will show many hundreds of documentary results. We will prove Scientology not harmful. We will give demonstrations of the practices of Scientology at work. We also demand a full public enquiry into those alleging blackmail and harm against us and their sources of information.85

  Later on, when the true ramifications of the Inquiry were known to all, Hubbard distanced himself from the endorsement saying, ‘I okayed only this: That we agree into an Enquiry into all mental health services and activities. This was the order.’86 Hubbard blamed his former secretary Peter Hemery and Melbourne executive Peter Williams for the decision to narrow the Inquiry to just Scientology.

  This seems like historical revisionism on Hubbard’s part. There was no narrowing of the inquiry. It was never going to be about all mental health services, it was only ever going to be about Scientology. Furthermore, a letter whose contents have until now never been published, throws further doubt on Hubbard’s take on events.

  On 17 February 1964, Mary Sue Hubbard wrote a letter from Saint Hill Manor to Peter and Yvonne Gillham in Melbourne. After thanking the couple for a calendar they had sent, and passing on her best wishes to the children, Mary Sue asks the Gillhams, ‘How goes the investigation of Scientology which we asked be made? Has the publicity increased or damaged your business?’87 Mary Sue, in the middle of proceedings, is claiming they had asked for the Inquiry. There’s no complaint that it’s been narrowed, or that it’s become a witch-hunt, Mary Sue simply asks whether the publicity has been good for the Gillhams’ Scientology business.

  Peter Gillham started making inquiries of his own. It didn’t make sense to him that Hubbard would want anything to do with the Victorian inquiry. ‘Well, one of his policies was we don’t accept inquiries into Scientology,’ Gillham asserts. ‘We investigate other people or organisations.’88 Gillham called Peter Williams to find out was going on. ‘He said, “Well, Hubbard’s authorised it.”’89

  If Hubbard did want an inquiry into Scientology, his judgement was way off beam. He certainly wasn’t displaying the kind of supernatural powers that Operating Thetans were meant to have. The Inquiry would not be in the best interests of Hubbard or Scientology. It was to be long, bruising and humiliating for the organisation and its followers and it would have severe ramifications for its leader.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE ANDERSON INQUIRY

  THE ANDERSON INQUIRY HAD a profound impact on the lives of Scientologists around the world. It led to other inquiries in Britain, South Africa and New Zealand, and formed the basis for many of the attacks in the parliament and the press in the UK, which ultimately forced Hubbard into exile. It changed Scientology policy too. Heavier ‘ethics’ policies led to a culture of punishment and abuse. In Victoria, Scientologists’ lives changed almost as soon as the inquiry commenced. Some lost their jobs, others were humiliated in the media and children were bullied in school playgrounds.

  Janis Gillham got a hint of what was coming when she lined up to run at her athletics carnival at Glenferrie Primary School. The youngest child of Peter and Yvonne Gillham loved to race. Normally before an event she milled around the marshalling area chatting with other girls her age. But this sports carnival was strangely different. Her usual pre-race nerves were instead overtaken by a form of anxiety that could not be alleviated by the starter’s gun.

  ‘Suddenly it was like people didn’t want to talk to me anymore,’ Janis recalls over 50 years later, ‘I said to my friend Elizabeth. “No-one seems to like me.” That’s when I finally found out. She said she’d heard people say, “Don’t talk to the Gillham children.”’1

  Janis Gillham’s parents were two of the 151 witnesses2 who gave evidence at the Anderson Inquiry. Their testimonies were quoted in the newspapers and their faces appeared on the TV news. The blowback wasn’t confined to the playground at Glenferrie Primary School. Peter Gillham Snr lost his job at an accounting firm after he testified before the Inquiry.3

  Other witnesses were subjected to ridicule. Under the Truth headline ‘Joined Sect; Stayed Bald’ Lubomir Lutshetshko, an unemployed teacher who claimed he’d seen a fight between two robots in 9 BC, was described as a victim of a ‘Scientology Flop’ when he testified that Scientology had failed to cure him of his premature baldness.4

  It was to be a long haul for Victoria’s Scientologists and for Mr J May, the Chief Government Shorthand Writer. The Inquiry ran for nearly 18 months, with the evidence filling close to 9000 pages of transcripts that nudged four million words.5 It was an inquiry worthy of Hubbard’s own prolific word count.

  The first formal sitting of Kevin Anderson QC’s one-man Board of Inquiry took place on 6 December 1963 at the Flemington Court House. Later in the day, the hearing shifted to the Scientologists’ headquarters in Spring Street where the contents of 35 filing cabinets and other records were tendered as evidence,6 including the private auditing records of many of the Scientology witnesses.

  In February, the Inquiry resumed in the rooms of the National Herbarium of Victoria, sharing a building with hundreds of thousands of dried plant, algae and fungi specimens from around the world. It was here that Scientology was put under the microscope in depth, in the world’s first ever government-sanctioned inquiry into its practices.

  Phillip Wearne’s campaign against Hubbard was about to crank up a gear. He was granted special leave by Anderson to appear as a representative of the Committee for Mental Health and National Security.7 This allowed him to give evidence and cross-examine witnesses. But the committee that gave him legitimacy had all the authority of Wearne’s ‘Citizen’s Road Safety Council’. The group was formed just three days before the Inquiry first sat.8 The meeting that nominated him to represent the committee at the Inquiry had only three members present – Wearne, his brother and his brother-in-law.9 The only two other meetings held had attracted just two members.10 An ASIO report from the time declared, ‘It appears that this Committee exists in name only.’11

  Wearne found a key ally to discredit Scientology at the Inquiry. Doug Moon was the former Melbourne Scientology staffer who had written to Hubbard in July 1963 warning him that he should refund Wearne.12 In November, Moon remi
nded Hubbard, ‘I advised you some months ago to give Wearne his money back … had you listened to me in the first place instead of the idiot advisers you employ in this part of the world the parliamentary attack would probably not have occurred.’13 When the Inquiry was announced, Moon offered Hubbard tactical help and warned that ‘if it is allowed to run through the way it is planned the results will be disastrous’.14

  Moon was a man who could not stand still. He worked as a nightclub singer in Sydney and Melbourne, had a bread delivery run in Perth, tried his luck with a vaudeville company in Mount Isa, and experimented in radio, TV and photography across three states.15 His skittish employment record mirrored his relationship with Scientology. He was first excommunicated in 1959 after he criticised one of Hubbard’s lectures for being too technical.16 He was allowed back in briefly in 1962 before the E-Meter diagnosed him as having ‘anti-scientology goals’.17

  At various times, Scientology executives labelled him a communist, a spy, and a criminal.18 The latter description bore some truth. Moon had some minor league form in obtaining money under false pretences, failing to pay a hotel bill and ripping off £30 from a department store.19 But as long as Moon was paying for auditing, no matter where the money came from, the Melbourne Scientologists would eventually have him back.

  In 1963, Moon joined Scientology’s staff once more, only to leave again soon after. He moved back to Sydney where he found Wearne, in what he described as a ‘dreadful state’.20 As they helped rehabilitate each other, the nightclub singer couldn’t make up his mind if he thought an inquiry was a good idea or not.21 After returning to Melbourne, Moon offered his services to Scientology as a lobbyist and campaigner against Labor’s attacks in parliament. But the Scientologists wanted him to do much more than that.

  A message was delivered to Doug Moon, letting him know he could get back in good standing with Scientology if he signed a statement declaring that he, Wearne and another former Scientologist were ‘practising homosexuals’ who had ‘signed a pact in 1959 to destroy Scientology and that all our activities since had been to that end’.22 Moon seriously considered signing the statement.23

  If Moon was to sign, he wanted to be compensated. As he told Hubbard, ‘If my career was killed by the publicity and if this move was the only thing that would save Scientology then I would do it. £2000 would cover all my possible losses.’

  Doug Moon laid out the conditions in a handwritten note given to Richard King, a Scientologist and bee removalist from Parkdale, who was a fan of Moon’s nightclub act.24 The note included the following criteria:

  Not get booked on a homo charge.

  [Be paid] £2000

  That HCO (Hubbard Communications Office) Worldwide has a record of this deal

  I shall give you no info that could conclusively prove a homo charge

  Money to be paid when I show the Stat. Dec.

  All parties to realise that I did not come forward and offer this deal. You came to me – these are my terms.

  My ex-wife and daughter not to be mentioned at any time25

  Peter Williams claimed Moon was trying to blackmail them and the deal never got off the ground.26 According to Richard King, Williams was furious with Moon. ‘He said that he had given Doug the chance to do the honest thing,’ King said. ‘And he was finished as far as he was concerned, he had better get out of the country or get a bullet-proof vest. He was really wild over this demand for money.’27

  Within two months Moon was actively going after Scientology. He was adept, as he put it, at ‘flipping in and out of the Scientology universe’.28 One moment he was considering perjuring himself and outing Wearne as part of a fictitious homosexual love triangle, the next he was working with him to bring down Scientology. Moon joined the Committee for Mental Health and National Security29 and got to work turning over another key Scientology witness.

  Max Anderson worked as an industrial chemist at Shell Oil’s Newport terminal in Victoria.30 Within a week of the Inquiry being announced he had written a letter to the Board offering his services as a witness on behalf of Scientology. Anderson had worked at Scientology’s Melbourne headquarters in 1959 and was a friend of the former Bronte lifeguard Roger Boswarva. In his letter Max Anderson claimed Scientology had helped him get his Bachelor of Science and that he was concerned about ‘the untruths and half truths which have been aired concerning this organisation which could prevent it being of use to this society’.31

  But six weeks later, Max Anderson had changed his mind, withdrawing his offer to give evidence. In a letter to the Board he wrote, ‘I believe that in the forthcoming mud-slinging match an amount of this mud will stick to me and adversely affect my future with the company for which I work. I am willing to clarify points in my earlier letter, in writing, but not by personal appearance.’32

  Max Anderson had been got at by Doug Moon. In early 1964, Anderson was attending a 21st birthday party at Melbourne’s Playboy Club when he bumped into Moon who worked at the club as a singer. When he told him he would be willing to testify at the Inquiry on behalf of Scientology, Moon replied, ‘Oh God, we’ll have to dig some dirt about you.’33 A week later, Max Anderson wrote to the Inquiry to withdraw his previous offer.34 He was frightened that Moon would blackmail him and ruin his career.35 Five weeks after praising Scientology in a questionnaire that would be tendered to the Inquiry, he joined Wearne and Moon as a member of the Committee for Mental Health and National Security and began approaching key people to give evidence against Scientology.36

  Max Anderson later testified that there was no pressure placed on him to change his position.37 Instead he said Moon’s threat, combined with his wife’s disillusionment with Scientology and his own disgust at the ‘phenomenally low salaries’ at the Melbourne headquarters, had accelerated his change of view.38 But Roger Boswarva, who was living with Anderson and his wife Jenny at the time, has a different opinion. ‘He was blackmailed, Jenny confirmed it,’ Boswarva told me.39 He says Anderson was concerned that Moon, who’d had access to the auditor’s records at Spring Street, would pass on confidential information to his employers and ruin any chance he had of a promotion.40

  The champion swimmer was now feeling the pressure himself. According to Boswarva, Jenny Anderson urged him to side with Moon and Wearne and give evidence against Scientology.41 Boswarva had previously been involved in a minor insurance scam and was warned it would be brought up at the Inquiry. Short of the money required to do a Scientology course, which he thought may help him treat his critically ill father, Boswarva had destroyed his prized violin so that he could make a fraudulent insurance claim which would then fund the course. Unbeknownst to Wearne and Moon, he paid the insurance company back of his own accord.42

  When Wearne cross-examined Boswarva at the Inquiry he brought up the violin incident in an attempt to discredit him. It is likely Wearne had accessed the confession through the auditing records at Spring Street, possibly through Moon who had been on staff. But Boswarva had a surprise in return for Wearne. He told the Inquiry he made a decision to pay the insurer back after he’d had Scientology processing. As the former Bronte lifeguard put it, ‘It is actually a win for Scientology, it helped me straighten out.’43 Boswarva went on to tell the Inquiry that opponents of Scientology had tried to use the incident to blackmail him into not giving evidence at the Inquiry.44

  ‘The truth is Scientology is a bad fraud,’ reflects Boswarva 50 years on, ‘but the truth also is Scientology got a raw deal. The Inquiry was not honest. It did not take honest evidence from both sides. It was designed to embarrass Scientology.’ But Malcolm Macmillan, a psychologist who attended every day of the hearings, disagrees.45 ‘I certainly didn’t think it was designed to embarrass,’ he says. ‘It was designed to explore the effects of Scientological practices. Everyone got a fair hearing. The Scientologists had the opportunity to defend themselves.’46

  At the time, Malcolm Macmillan was working as a psychologist at Kew Cottages and was the Recorder (Secretary) of t
he Victorian Group of the Australian branch of the British Psychological Society. After the Inquiry was announced, the group decided to offer its services to the Board to give expert evidence on matters of psychological interest such as personality tests and EMeters. It asked Macmillan to approach members to see if they would give expert evidence. Macmillan’s boss, Dr Eric Cunningham Dax, who was opposed to Scientology and had met with Phillip Wearne before the Inquiry, also asked him to approach medical witnesses to appear. He gave Macmillan time off from Kew Cottages to coordinate witnesses for the Board.47

  Gordon Just, the counsel assisting the Board, asked Macmillan to wade through the collected works of Hubbard to find any points of relevance to the Inquiry.48 Macmillan provided the inquiry with 54 pages of quotes from Hubbard’s writings on everything from the E-Meter, engrams and radiation sickness, to treatment claims about cancer, arthritis and poor eyesight.

  Experts in the fields of physics, psychiatry, psychology, radiology, obstetrics, hypnosis and medicine were lined up by Macmillan to give evidence about Hubbard’s claims. The Board’s report later found, ‘they were uniformly of the opinion that Hubbard’s writings revealed him as ignorant and ill-informed in those sciences in which they were expert.’49

  Dr Hendrik Van den Brenk, the doctor in charge of the Radio-Biological Research Laboratories at the Cancer Institute Board in Melbourne, testified that Hubbard’s statements about cancer were ‘quackery of the worst nature’ and that in relation to his writings on radiation, ‘basic and fundamental established truths of science are ignored and replaced by imaginative fiction, without a vestige of corroborative experiment designed to support such hypotheses’.50

  The Board of Inquiry was wise to Hubbard’s fraudulent claims about being a doctor, a nuclear physicist and a civil engineer. It asked Scientology executive Peter Williams to write to Hubbard and clarify his qualifications.51 Hubbard was not impressed at being asked to justify his credentials. ‘I keep forgetting Australia would not be conversant with standard biographical texts or reference works considered ordinary in civilised countries,’ he huffed to Williams.52 The Board received confirmation from George Washington University that Hubbard had not completed a degree there and had the Australian Consul-General in San Francisco check up on his diploma mill PhD.