Anyone who regularly reads ASOPA PEOPLE will know that John Kerr, the Australian Governor-General who engineered the dismissal of the Whitlam Labor Government in 1975, was the first Principal of ASOPA when it received its letters patent 60 years ago. Kerr had earlier been the second-in-command and confidante of Colonel Alf Conlon, who conceived ASOPA and proceeded to wheel and deal so the idea would be realised. You may also recall that Conlon was the second, and according to one of his contemporaries, an unhappy Principal of ASOPA.

The organisation that preceded ASOPA was the School of Civil Affairs, and the organisation that preceded it was the Army Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs. Each was a Conlon creation. But it all nearly didn’t happen. Here, in John Kerr’s words, is the story.

“Alf had me drafted into his research unit, which was established about the time when General Blamey became Commander-in-Chief in the earlier part of 1942.

“In 1942 there was a constant fear of Japanese invasion, and it was one of the army’s problems to consider what should be done about areas that conceivably might be cut off from control by constitutional authorities. One of Alf’s first tasks was to apply himself to this problem, and a detailed plan with draft regulations was drawn up. Of course, fortunately, it was never necessary to establish a system of regional control of a revolutionary constitutional character in Australia because after the Battle of the Coral Sea the whole thing disappeared as a real practical problem.

“Anyhow, the research unit did work of that kind, but it remained a small body until Blamey started to find his feet as Commander-in-Chief. One of the relatively early things Blamey did was to send General Stantke to the Queensland lines of communication area and replace him by General Lloyd as Adjutant-General. General Lloyd was a totally unsympathetic character so far as Conlon was concerned. Lloyd was disposed I think to disband the unit altogether, or to sidetrack it into some relatively unimportant position where it could do its thinking in a way that wouldn’t embarrass him. Some of the people in the unit were actually demobilised at that stage.

“But Alf, who was developing very great skills indeed in influencing people, was not daunted by the prospect of impressing Blamey, and this he did, I think, partly with the help of Brigadier Gorman – Eugene Gorman QC, of Melbourne – who was very close to Blamey. Alf knew Gorman well, and the upshot of it was that Blamey, so far from disbanding this little unit, decided to make it his own, put it on his own staff and converted it into the Army Directorate of Research, which afterwards became the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs.”

[From a collection of memoirs published by Conlon’s friends and colleagues after his death in 1961]