Australian Dictionary of Biography

Alex Sheppard, by Hazel de Berg, 1983

National Library of Australia, 48490755

Alexander William Sheppard (1913–1997), soldier, journalist, bookseller, and publisher, was born on 2 June 1913 at Collingwood, Victoria, third of eight children of Victorian-born parents William John Sheppard, sewerage labourer, and his wife Alicia, née Simmonds. Growing up in a poor family, Alex took on a newspaper round and sold papers at football grounds and tram stops. Educated at State schools, he left at the statutory age in 1927 and became a messenger boy, eventually at Beam Wireless Service, part of Amalgamated Wireless (Australasia) Ltd (AWA). He taught as a Sunday school teacher at the Church of Christ, North Fitzroy, and studied with the International Correspondence School to gain his Leaving certificate and matriculation. As a part-time student at the University of Melbourne, he studied economics and law, but never completed a degree.

Joining the East Preston branch of the Australian Labor Party (ALP), Sheppard advocated schemes for unemployment relief. He began writing for Labor Call, gave radio talks, and flirted with becoming a politician. Before long, however, he fell foul of the local ALP branches, where corruption appalled him. He became a socialist and a vehement opponent of communism, national socialism, and fascism. Wanting to rise above his family circumstances, he practised improving his grammar and diction. He sometimes pretended to have been born in London, and had a habit of reinventing his life story.

Moving to Sydney in 1937, Sheppard became general secretary of the Professional Radio Employees’ Institute of Australasia. On 4 June 1938 at St Anne’s Parish Church of England, Strathfield, he married Daisie Eileen Douglas, a secretary; the couple settled at East Lindfield. He continued to pretend he was English. In 1930 he had falsified his age in order to serve for two years in the Citizen Military Forces, and in March 1938 he obtained a commission as a lieutenant. One of the first volunteers for overseas service in World War II, he joined the Australian Imperial Force on 13 October 1939 and arrived in the Middle East in February 1940. He served on the staff of the 6th Division in the campaigns in Libya (December 1940–March 1941) and Greece (March–April 1941) as a captain and (from February 1941) temporary major. On 12 April, during the division’s forced withdrawal south through Greece, he was sent to the village of Kerasia, near Kozani, to recover a stockpile of stores. There he met Ypsilantes, a schoolteacher and socialist, who became his friend. With the help of villagers and their donkeys, Sheppard transported most of the stores to the division’s lines over the next three days, in the face of German patrols and air attacks. He and Ypsilantes killed a small enemy patrol. Later, in the evacuation from Greece on the nights of 24–25 to 28–29 April, Sheppard took charge of ‘D’ Beach collecting area at Porto Rafti, east of Athens, successfully embarking some fifteen thousand troops. For his courageous and determined efforts in both tasks, he was awarded the Military Cross. Later he wrote in his diary that ‘most of the English officers’ were ‘quite inept’ (Scarfe and Scarfe 1998, 121). He no longer aspired to be an Englishman.

Back in Australia in March 1942, the next month Sheppard was promoted to temporary lieutenant colonel (substantive April 1945) and posted as deputy assistant adjutant-general, Northern Territory Force. He resented being remote from the land war. In March 1943 he was appointed as director of organisation at Allied Land Forces Headquarters, Melbourne, and in October promoted to temporary colonel. He and his wife lived at Kew. Admitting that he was not English, he introduced her to his two younger sisters. He had a low opinion of the commander-in-chief, General Sir Thomas Blamey, and the two clashed. Delighted when Greece was liberated from German occupation in October 1944, Sheppard was appalled at (Sir) Winston Churchill’s efforts to re-establish the monarchy and suppress the republicans. He obtained approval to transfer to the Reserve of Officers in April 1945 in order to return to Greece on the staff of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.

Arriving in the midst of civil war, Sheppard took charge of refugees in the north of the country. In July 1946 the British Foreign Office appointed him head of the British Economic Mission at Salonika. He encountered evidence of the killing of partisans, deplored the lack of due process in trials, and came to regard the British embassy staff in Athens as ‘the bulwark of conservatism and reaction’ (Scarfe and Scarfe 1998, 195). When British forces departed Greece, he lost his job and was not permitted to stay in the country. Travelling to Britain, he became personal assistant to Sir Ernest Fisk, the former chairman of AWA. Sheppard’s public campaigning for democracy and peace in Greece and against American intervention attracted surveillance by MI5.

Conservative members of the Australian Federal parliament denounced Sheppard as a communist. His booklet An Australian Officer in Greece (1947) brought him further notoriety. He was suspended from membership of the Returned Sailors’, Soldiers’ and Airmen’s Imperial League of Australia. In 1948 he wrote another pamphlet: Inside Story: Greece’s Struggle for Freedom. He gave regular interviews to the press on the plight of Greek children and wrote newspaper articles, his only source of income at the time. Returning to Sydney in early 1949, he became president of the League for Democracy in Greece. As mainstream newspapers would not publish his articles, he started writing for the communist newspaper Tribune. Jack Lang, then a Federal member of parliament, attacked him for ’speaking on behalf of the Communist Party’ (Aust. HOR 1949, 1157).

Sailing for Europe in September 1949, Sheppard found on arrival that the Democratic Army in Greece had been defeated. He arrived back in Sydney in January 1950, and turned to bookselling to make a living, buying the Morgan bookshop in Castlereagh Street. It became a haven for left-wing and Jewish intellectuals. A bitter opponent of the Catholic forces trying to take over ALP branches, he edited another booklet, Catholic Action and Australian Labor, which argued that the mainstream press constantly attacked communists and trade unionists, but stayed ‘dumb on the incessant intrigues of Catholic Action’ (Sheppard [195-], foreword). He later moved the bookshop to premises at Anchor House, and Eileen operated a bookshop in North Sydney. In 1973 he sold his final shop, in Bathurst Street, to the University Cooperative Bookshop. He was heavily involved in non-profit groups, including as president of the Sydney P.E.N. Club, foundation treasurer of the Australian Society of Authors, and a member of the New South Wales Council for Civil Liberties. For six years he worked as a literary agent.

Sheppard became an outspoken critic of Australian book censorship. In 1965 he secured from Penguin the rights to publish C. H. Rolph’s The Trial of Lady Chatterley, then banned in Australia. To get around Commonwealth government import regulations, the book was disbound and small sections sent by airmail to friends and acquaintances. Financed by Leon Fink, a local property developer, Sheppard found a printer and produced the book, sending a copy to every State attorney-general, police commissioner, and chief secretary and suggesting he be prosecuted if they thought he had broken the law. Only the Victorian attorney-general, (Sir) Arthur Rylah, began prosecutions, against two booksellers. Such was the adverse publicity that the Victorian government dropped the action and the Federal government cancelled the ban.

In 1968 Sheppard established Alpha Books, to publish work by Australian authors. He took on manuscripts that would not attract bigger commercial publishers. More than half of his titles were written by women. Of over forty books, the most influential was No Case to Answer (1971), by Jo Stevenson. It examined the treatment of her husband, Captain J. P. Stevenson, who had been in command of the aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne when it collided with the destroyer USS Frank E. Evans in 1969, with seventy-four American fatalities. She argued that an American-led board of investigation had incorrectly found him partly to blame, and that the Royal Australian Navy had then acted unfairly in court-martialling him and posting him ashore immediately following his acquittal. Sheppard also published Jack Lang’s autobiography, The Turbulent Years (1970), which he largely ghost-wrote, a reconciliation of sorts with his old adversary.

During the late 1960s Sheppard’s Committee for Democracy in Greece gained some powerful members, including the politicians Jim Cairns, Don Dunstan, and Tom Uren, and the writers Charmian Clift, George Johnston, and Patrick White. He rejoiced when the military junta collapsed in 1975, the monarchy was abolished by plebiscite, and democratic elections were held. A dapper, stocky man, whose title of ‘Colonel’ was enthusiastically embraced by fellow supporters of left-wing causes, Sheppard strove for self-improvement, not least to rise above his modest origins. He died on 10 June 1997 at Manly, survived by his wife and one of his two daughters, and was cremated. A fellow bookseller, Ron Abbey, recalled that to Sheppard ‘the cornerstone of any culture was a free flow of books and information’ (Sydney Morning Herald 1997, 124).