Australian Dictionary of Biography

Mr B A Santamaria, 1961

National Archives of Australia, A1200, L37291

Bartholomew Augustine Santamaria (1915–1998), religious and political activist, was born on 14 August 1915 at Brunswick, inner Melbourne, eldest of five children of Joseph Santamaria, fruiterer, and his wife Maria, née Costa, both born on Salina, one of the rugged Aeolian Islands off Sicily. Joseph migrated to Australia in 1893, and met Maria following her emigration in 1912. Bob considered his parents, with their values of tireless work, self-improvement, and dedication to their children, to be the pre-eminent influence on him. They ran a series of successful grocery stores on Sydney Road, Brunswick, in which for many years their very self-willed eldest loyally took his ‘daily turn’ (Santamaria A Memoir, 1997, 3).

After early education at the St Ambrose parish school, St Ambrose’s primary school, and St Joseph’s Christian Brothers’ College, from 1929 Santamaria attended St Kevin's Christian Brothers’ College, East Melbourne. The elite secondary school had been founded in 1918 with the support of the archbishop of Melbourne, Daniel Mannix, to prepare Catholic boys for university: Santamaria later came to consider Mannix ‘the greatest Australian of his time’ (Santamaria A Memoir, 1997, 3). He excelled as a scholar and debater before matriculating as dux in 1931.

Santamaria proceeded to the University of Melbourne (BA Hons, 1934; LLB, 1936), where he won prizes in history and politics. Exhilarating as he found academic life, especially the study of history, it exposed him to political opinions which challenged his firmly orthodox Catholic views. He found that ‘philosophic liberalism was now beginning to discover a new extension in Marxism, with its vision of an earthly paradise this side of the grave,’ marking the beginning of his lifelong ‘against the tide’ campaign to counter materialistic and atheistic values (Santamaria A Memoir, 1997, 10). To help oppose increasing communist influence in the university’s Labour Club he co-founded the Radical Club, and his former teacher at St Kevin’s Frank Maher sponsored his entry into the Campion Society of young Catholic intellectuals.

The Campion Society believed the daily press had a Protestant and secular bias, and overlooked the worst aspects of communist rule in the Soviet Union, that they feared would extend to Australia. In 1936 Santamaria co-founded and commenced editing the society’s popular Catholic Worker. The monthly publication supported the Catholic right in Europe, especially the forces of General Franco in the Spanish Civil War, which it perceived as a struggle for freedom of religion from state persecution and against communism. Although the Catholic Worker continued to support economic equality, and remained critical of Australian business and conservative politicians, to Santamaria atheistic communism was emerging as the central problem facing the contemporary world.

Involvement with the Campion Society led in January 1938 to Santamaria being employed by Mannix as assistant director of the newly formed Australian National Secretariat of Catholic Action. Following international trends, the organisation functioned to strengthen the role of the laity in the Church through training and supporting various youth bodies. It was meant to be non-political, but Santamaria, dedicated, ambitious, and with indomitable self-belief, showed an almost entrepreneurial flair for expanding the reach of the initially rather modest organisation. His main activity soon became organising Catholic opposition to communist influence in trade unions, which had increased rapidly after the Depression of the 1930s.

On 9 October 1939 at the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Hawthorn, Santamaria married Mary Helen Power, a librarian, having overcome his initial assumption that he did not have ’any chance’ with her as he was ‘visibly Italian, five feet five, [and] spoke with a too-obviously Brunswick accent’ (Santamaria 1997, 35). They had five daughters, Christina, Mary Helen, Catherine, Bernadette, and Anne, and three sons, Joseph, Bob, and Paul. Adherence to traditional family values was central to Santamaria’s life, along with the Catholic Church, his political values, and, as he frequently mentioned, the Carlton Football Club.

Politically involved Catholics, mainly trade unionists and often Australian Labor Party (ALP) members, used Santamaria's office as an organisational base. By 1941 their activities were formalised as the ‘Movement,’ deliberately vaguely named consistent with a policy of intense secrecy designed to minimise anti-Catholic attacks. The Movement initially used volunteers from the parish network to encourage Catholic unionists to vote against communists at union meetings which, often poorly attended, were open to manipulation. This and related activity in New South Wales helped check communist influence over unions. Some of Santamaria's Campion colleagues thought his personal views too strident, and during 1941 reduced his editorial influence over the Catholic Worker.

In 1945 the Catholic bishops authorised and provided funds for the Movement, giving it the little used name of the Catholic Social Studies Movement. The Communist Party of Australia (CPA) could by this time control half the votes at the Australian Council of Trade Unions annual conference. In response the ALP, concerned at communist control of such unions as the Federated Ironworkers’ Association and the Amalgamated Engineering Union, authorised its own industrial groups to counter such influence. The Movement allied itself with the groups by finding candidates for union positions, and by providing financial and administrative support. Industrial group and Movement supporters became known colloquially as ‘groupers.’ Movement tactics matched those of their communist foes: central direction led by Santamaria, training of cadres, using a disciplined small organisation to control bigger ones such as by establishing cells within unions, and creation of front organisations.

Santamaria usually left union matters to paid organisers with relevant experience. As a brilliant orator, prolific writer, and cogent thinker, he remained the Movement’s strategist and ideologist, closely monitoring often-intricate world communist developments, and acting as an intermediary within the Church and with select politicians and business leaders. The Movement published a provocative journal, at first called Freedom and later News Weekly. This was used to routinely attack ALP policies while promoting Santamaria's characteristically cataclysmic fears that through the unions communism would take over Australia, and also foment revolution in South-East Asia. In 1946 he became director of Catholic Action’s National Secretariat, displacing Maher.

By the early 1950s the groupers had won control of several major communist-dominated unions that consequently reaffiliated with the ALP. The CPA and its allies on the ALP far left were overtly hostile, and a more generalised sensitivity emerged amongst the Australian community’s Protestant majority about the mysterious Catholic Action. By the mid-1950s, resentment was being broadened by the groupers unofficially working on elections for non-communist unions and on ALP preselection of parliamentary candidates. The actual extent of Movement involvement is debatable, but Santamaria, probably hubristic with recent successes but inexperienced in the perils of major politics, certainly wanted it to enter new political fields. However, it is likely that rather than him being the mastermind as often portrayed later, Movement operatives and their allies inevitably became embroiled in more everyday factional contests once the communist union machine had been tamed.

Much more formidable opposition to the Movement came from other Catholics, most notably Cardinal Norman Gilroy in Sydney, but also many intellectuals. They believed that the Movement, especially Santamaria, was over-reaching, risking damage to the Church and exacerbating sectarian division. Liberal Catholics often charged that the Movement claimed for itself an unwarranted right to impose Church discipline. Simmering disputes flared into open hostilities when on 5 October 1954 the ALP parliamentary leader, Dr. H. V. Evatt, issued an inflammatory press statement alleging outside attempts to influence the ALP. Soon Santamaria—until then little known to the public—was being widely named as a sinister figure using the industrial groups as camouflage for a secretive white-anting of the ALP, especially in Victoria. Friends and colleagues nonetheless found it hard to reconcile the sudden public image of an ‘arch plotter’ with the ‘easygoing, friendly Santamaria’ they knew (Niall 2007, 78). He was rarely out of the news again, potential saint to some but to others a devil incarnate keeping Labor from office.

The truth was more mundane, based largely in commonplace, if convoluted, Labor and union factionalism and fear of the Movement's capacity to organise Catholic votes in the unions and ALP branches. Santamaria as the great backroom manipulator, however, was a dramatic and simpler story that lodged in the public and media minds. Evatt's anti-grouper statement brought together a number of disputes that involved Santamaria to varying degrees into an enormous, often hysterical political and religious brawl. His hold on the ALP leadership became precarious after he narrowly lost the 1954 Federal election, not helped by his claiming that the defection of the Soviet diplomat Vladimir Petrov was a plot orchestrated by Prime Minister (Sir) Robert Menzies and involving Santamaria.

Such divisions in the Federal and State parliamentary Labor parties were manageable on their own, as were those within the Church and Catholic Action. Only a small number of parliamentarians were attached to the Movement or promoted its policies, and few had much time for the increasingly erratic Evatt, who had only months earlier sought election help from Santamaria. The main source of the disastrous ALP split of 1955–57 was in the party’s industrial wing, where several otherwise moderate unions changed sides to link with the communists and far left, mainly out of fear of grouper intervention in their own internal politics. The leaders of the breakaway were the aggressive, right wing and critically important Australian Workers’ Union and the secretary of the Victorian Trades Hall Council, Victor Stout.

The ALP Federal Executive intervened in the Victorian branch and, in a series of intricate power plays, opponents manoeuvred twenty-six State and Federal mostly Catholic Labor politicians into being expelled. A bitter, militantly anti-communist Democratic Labor Party (DLP) resulted.

Hostile propaganda heaped on Santamaria included allegations of clerical fascism based on his right-wing views, of turning the ALP into a conservative party, and of wanting to create a peasant society. The implied ridicule in this last accusation was particularly damaging, as one of Santamaria's official jobs was as secretary of the National Catholic Rural Movement, despite his lack of rural experience. The young Santamaria had published grandiose plans for increased Catholic rural settlement, especially of immigrants, as independent farming families living mainly off their own produce. He tried without success to turn some of this into ALP policy, but eventually acknowledged the impracticality of most NCRM policies. Some union enemies also used his Italian background in slogans such as ‘Santa-Stiletto.’ The DLP reflected his anti-communism, including in foreign affairs and defence. Although he was often accused of master-minding the DLP, again this is wildly exaggerated. The CPA did have, as the DLP alleged, influence in the Victorian ALP through the unions after 1955, but the extent and importance of this is difficult to identify. Santamaria himself portrayed his ceaseless activism as part of a greater collective effort, and attributed much to the contributions of such political allies as Frank McManus and Laurie Short.

Mainly as a result of the Labor split, the Catholic bishops themselves divided over Santamaria. In 1954 they disbanded the Australian National Secretariat of Catholic Action, and in 1957 the Vatican ordered an end to the Movement as a church-affiliated body. Santamaria reorganised it as the strictly lay National Civic Council (NCC), which was gradually stripped of official church support. It was strongest in Victoria, and never had more than a few thousand members. One arm of the NCC worked in the labour movement, especially the white-collar unions, to combat the far left influence that continued in various forms after the CPA declined. Another section worked to sway public opinion, especially to support religiously and socially conservative causes. The two NCC wings formally and bitterly split in 1983, partly over Santamaria's allegedly authoritarian and controlling ways internally, and also over his increasing distance from the industrial side.

Following the ALP split, Archbishop Mannix had given Santamaria a commentary segment on a Catholic TV program, Sunday Magazine. This was withdrawn after Mannix died in 1963, but Santamaria gained a bigger audience when the media magnate Sir Frank Packer invited him to take his Point of View commentary to Channel 9, on which it ran nationally until 1991. From 1976 to 1997 Santamaria also wrote a regular column for the Australian newspaper, expressing increasingly conservative views, often with his trademark pessimism but also displaying attractive wit and grace. Many were surprised by the great breadth of his interests, encompassing such positions as warning that the alliance with the United States did not of itself fulfil Australia’s defence needs, and that the nation should emulate Sweden’s self-reliance.

In person, Santamaria was cherubic, and slightly pious in manner, fluent and persuasive in both speech and print. A close family friend concluded that ‘with his contrary mixture of calm assurance and apocalyptic drive, he seemed to operate on a different plane, to be so above things that he came at them from a different perspective’ (Morgan 1998, 28). Some otherwise sympathetic colleagues regarded him as having a ‘tin ear’ for both the blue collar and rural worlds that he fought so hard to influence. Others saw in him a mirror image of the communists—autocratic, and with a tendency to the conspiratorial while being a touch unworldly about mainstream society.

Nevertheless, Santamaria gave the fight against communism intellectually sound, honest, and competent strategic leadership that at the higher levels lifted it above the petty witch-hunting, religious tribalism, and jockeying for advantage that might have developed under others. Over sixty years he courageously and persuasively promoted often unfashionable ideas that nevertheless incorporated a sense of their time. He was much better at enunciating what he was against than what he was for. Never having joined a political party, he preferred to work indefatigably behind the scenes as an organiser and networker. He has also been credited—though again with exaggeration—as leading Catholics, about two-thirds of whom once voted Labor, towards a more even voting split with the conservatives, and for winning state aid for non-government schools. As an increasingly strident critic of capitalism and globalisation, he rejected the deregulation pursued by the Hawke-Keating governments.

Helen Santamaria died on 16 December 1980: on 3 February 1983 Bob married his long-time secretary, Dorothy Jensen. Despite his diminishing influence, he never retired nor doubted his commitment to Catholic orthodoxy whatever the great social and cultural changes that he witnessed. His late life focus on social and moral issues led to a rueful admission to a former DLP State secretary in 1996 that ‘at this moment in our history, we have no “clout” at all’ (Morgan 2007, 520). He died from a brain tumour on 25 February 1998 at Kew, Melbourne. Prime Minister John Howard visited him on his death bed, and granted a state funeral, both gestures a measure of Santamaria’s standing in conservative politics. He was buried next to Helen at Boroondara general cemetery, Kew.