During the 1930s, Arthur Nelson Field was New Zealand’s most prominent author of right-wing conspiracy theories.  Field’s influence spread to Australia where his books, periodicals and private letters were important sources of information and affirmation for a host of individuals and groupings on Australia’s far right political fringe.  In Australia, Field’s writings were valued as textbooks by a variety of groups and individuals from the extreme nationalists of the Guild of the Watchmen of Australia to the Sydney-based League of Truth, the Catholic Truth Society, the Melbourne-based British-Australian Racial Body, the Evangelical Publishing Agency of New South Wales and, most importantly, Australia’s Douglas Social Credit movement.  Many Social Credit activists and authors made significant use of Field’s writings.  The most notable of these was a young Eric Dudley Butler, later leader of the Australian League of Rights.  This article draws on a variety of sources to throw new light on the hitherto largely unexplored internal life of Australia’s radical right during the 1930s and its trans-Tasman connections.

During the Depression years Arthur Nelson Field was New Zealand’s foremost author of conspiracy theories.  He wrote a string of publications that attacked orthodox economics, the global banking system, ‘creeping bolshevism’ and the perceived Jewish world conspiracy.  While Field is not widely known today, during the 1930s his books and journals were circulated throughout the English-speaking world by monetary reformists, antisemites and those trying to uncover the causes of the economic crisis.1 In Australia, Field’s writings found an avid readership amongst monetary reformers and conspiracy theorists, with a number of propagandists using his writings as ‘textbooks’ to support their own work.2  This paper will explore the career of this hitherto overlooked Kiwi author, and assess Field’s overall influence in Australia from the economic crisis of the 1930s through to the present.  The study of Field’s influence will allow a new vantage point from which to view the inner workings of the Australian extreme right during the twentieth century. 2

Apart from the legendary Joh Bjelke-Petersen, New Zealand’s contribution to Australia’s political culture is not widely acknowledged on either side of the Tasman.  Many New Zealanders have an appreciation of the Australian influence on radical right-wing political organisations in New Zealand.3  Even the late 1980s visit of Australian author and penitent ex-communist, Geoff McDonald, who achieved notoriety with his speaking tour and best-selling conspiracy trilogy exposing the supposed Banker-Communist-Maori plot, is widely remembered in New Zealand.4 Yet influence in the other direction, from New Zealand to Australia, has largely been overlooked.

The activities of the Australian League of Rights in New Zealand have also received a respectable amount of media attention since the 1960s when it first established a New Zealand branch.  Eric Butler, founder-leader of the Australian League of Rights, made regular visits to New Zealand seeking new adherents to his particular strain of Social Credit.  For three decades the Australian League of Rights was a noteworthy player in New Zealand’s far right political milieu.5  In this respect the League was arguably returning the intellectual favour it owed to New Zealand, for much of the group’s political philosophy was influenced by A.N. Field’s writings.

A.N. Field was born in 1882 to a respected settler family in Nelson, a provincial town at the top of New Zealand’s South Island.  Field’s father, Thomas Andrew Field, was a prominent businessman who served as Nelson’s Mayor and later as the district’s Member of Parliament during World War I.  In 1901, at the age of 19, Field joined the staff of the influential Wellington newspaper the Evening Post, embarking on a career in journalism that would see him write for a wide variety of publications, including the Melbourne Argus.

Field’s fierce individualism, imperial patriotism and anti-collectivist beliefs, led him to leave the Evening Post in 1907 to join the founding editorial staff of the Dominion newspaper.  The Dominion, bankrolled by a consortium of businessmen and wealthy farmers hoping to advance the cause of conservatism, was named to celebrate New Zealand’s newly achieved self-governing status within the British Empire.  Its first issue invoked this spirit of political individualism, ending with the call, ‘Here shall a press the People’s cause maintain.  Unawed by Influence and unbribed by Gain'.6  In his own way, Field would stay true to these words throughout his writing career.  Such was his dedication to the cause of individual freedom and responsibility that Field temporarily left the Dominion in 1909 to publish his own journal, the Citizen.  As the title suggests, the journal fiercely espoused the rights and responsibilities of the individual citizen.  Field wrote :

Politically The Citizen believes that the future of New Zealand depends only a very little on the nostrums and recipes of any political party, but a very great deal on what each private citizen is willing to do for it.

This individualism was diametrically opposed to what Field viewed as the growing threat of collectivist forces, in particular the growth of newspaper monopolies, which could eventually ‘throttle' any free newspaper enterprise in New Zealand.8 Despite its professional appearance and broad commentary, Citizen failed to survive its first year.

Field resumed his work for the Dominion, where he provided much of the paper’s philosophical direction.  During the bitter waterfront strike of 1913, in which the Dominion took a vocal and partisan position opposing the strike, Field was said to have had no small influence on the editorial line.  From his office, adjacent to the editor’s, Field oversaw the publication of ‘daily editorial fulminations against the strikers'.9 Described by a colleague of the time as a ‘serious young-old hermit', Field was driven by an abhorrence of socialism and a hatred of foreign agitators.10  In the case of the 1913 strike, a principal alien agitator raising Field’s ire was Harry Holland, Australian socialist and future leader of the New Zealand Labour Party.  The Dominion’s editorials were so provocative that rumours abounded that the strikers were about to storm the paper’s offices.  On receiving word that the rumoured mob was approaching, a staff member of the time recalled that the editor searched through his desk for a revolver while :

Field had no weapon yet he rubbed his hands with expectation, his large eyes shone behind his glasses, a light of battle that was to be revived a year or two later when in World War I.

Field’s burning desire to face the enemy of freedom-loving Anglo-Saxons compelled him to volunteer for active service soon after the outbreak of war.  Due to his poor eyesight, however, Field was judged medically unfit and rejected for active service.  Such was the strength of his patriotism that Field re-enlisted seven months later.  By this stage New Zealand’s losses at Gallipoli and elsewhere meant Field’s 6/60 vision was no longer an obstacle to service.  Once enlisted, Private Field found himself bound for Flanders with the Second Battalion of the Wellington Regiment.  On the Western Front, Field was wounded and discharged in November 1916.  The horrors of war did little to dampen Field’s imperial patriotism and pride in his Anglo-Saxon heritage.  Reflecting on his service, Field wrote in his wartime poem ‘The Challenge of the Guns':

By day, by night, along the lines their dull boom rings,
And that reverberating roar its challenge flings.
Not only unto thee across the narrow sea,
But from the loneliest vale in the last land’s heart
The sad-eyed watching mother sees her sons depart.
And freighted full the tumbling waters of ocean are
With aid for England from England’s sons afar.
The glass is dim: we see not wisely, far, nor well,
But bred of English bone, and reared on Freedom’s wine,
All that we have and are we lay on England’s shrine.

Although discharged from the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, Field soon found a way to rejoin the war effort with the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve.  During his time with the reserve at Portsmouth, first as a paymaster and then as a coding officer, Field agitated to be sent back to active service.  In 1917 his efforts were successful and Field was transferred to the HMS Spenser, leader of a Royal Navy scouting group patrolling the North Sea.

After the war, Field returned to the Dominion until 1928, when he resigned to pursue farming and freelance writing.  It is likely that the Dominion’s softening editorial line had encouraged Field to move on.  But his principal motivation for leaving was to deal with the financial problems of the family business.  As Field later wrote to the unrelated G.R. Field of Kimberley, Tasmania, from 1929 he ‘had a sheep farm round my neck in which my father and uncle were mixed up — [and] "mixed is the word"'.13  His move home to manage the family’s heavily indebted farm at Okiwi Bay near Nelson would facilitate a political transformation that changed Field’s life.

Like Australia, New Zealand was reliant on trade with the ‘Mother Country', selling primary products to Britain in return for manufactured goods.  While New Zealanders proudly referred to their country as ‘Britain’s outlying farm', this boast obscured the harsh reality that the dominion was economically dependent on Britain.  The London market also provided New Zealand and Australia with loans and economic leadership.  With the calamitous collapse in commodity prices on the British market, the New Zealand and Australian economies experienced severe contraction during 1930.  In Australia the situation was dire with the already high unemployment of 1929 effectively doubling by early 1930.  Both countries soon witnessed the predictable and miserable consequences of economic crisis, with families evicted from their farms and homes, and many people experiencing poverty, deprivation and despair.  The most powerful image of the early Depression years for many patriotic Anzacs was probably that of the ‘destitute digger', broken not by war but by peacetime economics.

The bitterness this generated was made more acute by the increasing debt burden faced by most ordinary Australians.  While incomes fell, most notably with the Arbitration Court’s wage reduction of January 1931, the cost of bank debt increased, hitting ordinary Australians hard.  Many Australians grew resentful at the crippling burden of state and Commonwealth government debt, sometimes attributed, wrongly, to Australia’s borrowing to finance the war effort.  For example, in a 1930 pamphlet Ernest Jones even accused Britain of marking up the interest on Australia’s war loans to make a profit of two per cent.14  The New South Wales Labor Premier, Jack Lang, also used this claim to great effect during the 1931 election campaign.15  Like their New Zealand cousins, most Australians found it hard to accept that the excessive borrowing of the 1920s, to fund politically popular public works projects and economically questionable land settlement schemes, had contributed significantly to the 1930s economic crisis.  Few Australasians could accept that much of the misery was caused by domestic conditions, such as excessive government spending during the 1920s.  Instead they sought answers in the international situation.

In New Zealand, Field’s discontent with the economic situation motivated him to research and write a series of articles entitled ‘Wobbling Money' which gave his version of the origins of the economic crisis.  The Dominion published Field’s first foray into conspiratorial writing during September 1930.  The series coincided with the arrival of the Bank of England’s economic mission led by Sir Otto Niemeyer, a director of the bank who was accompanied by Professor Theodore Gregory, of the London School of Economics.  On the surface, the mission had its origins in requests made by the Australian and New Zealand governments to the Bank of England to provide expert economic advice for weathering the financial storm.  However, most Australasians perceived the visit as the work of the London ‘Money Power' ensuring that both countries could honour their debts.16  The arrival of the Bank of England’s emissaries in the empire’s loyal South Pacific dominions and the message of economic retrenchment they preached would, however, change Field’s life and send him on a radically new journalistic path.

Field grew suspicious of the mission when an old friend from the Treasury told him Professor Gregory’s real name was Guggenheim, apparently changed to hide his Germanic origins.  Field immediately set off to investigate.  After weeks of scouring the shelves of Parliament’s General Assembly Library, he became convinced that the Niemeyer-Gregory visit was something sinister.  Field would later express his ‘disgust' at the ‘foreign flavour' evident in the Niemeyer-Gregory visit :

Australia[n borrowing] may have been extravagant, but her present financial difficulties would not have been serious but for her debt incurred in fighting Germany.  In face of this fact it is surely a very extraordinary thing that the Bank of England should send out two agents, both from their names obviously of Teutonic descent.

The key to his investigations and solving this puzzle was Field’s discovery of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.18  Writing to F.A.A. Russell, formerly lecturer on Commercial and Industrial Law at the University of Sydney, Field recalled, ‘This made everything I had come across fit together in the most amazing way, and fairly staggered me'.19  From this time on his belief in a Jewish world conspiracy lay at the heart of his writings.

Field was not alone in his indignation and suspicion.  The Bank of England mission provoked intense bitterness and cynicism among many Australians and New Zealanders who believed that these outside advisers would compound the economic misery by calling in London’s loans.20 In the cases of both countries, Niemeyer and Gregory advocated deeply unpopular austerity measures and suggested controversial strategies to stabilise the banking system.21  For many Australians, the visit became the focus of the distress they felt during the economic crisis, prompting them to speak of the visit with undisguised contempt.  Premier Jack Lang was the most vocal in his opposition to the Niemeyer-Gregory visit later describing Niemeyer as, ‘the liquidator sent out by the Bank of England to foreclose on Australia’s remaining assets'.22  Following Niemeyer’s controversial address to the Premiers' Conference in August 1930, in which he called for radical fiscal retrenchment, Melbourne’s Douglas Credit newssheet Freedom charged that Niemeyer ‘becomes for the time virtually the dictator of Australia'.  Freedom asked:  ‘Who governs Australia?  Politician or Banker?'

While Niemeyer only visited for a few months, allowing him only a brief appearance in most historical accounts of the period, the political impact of the Bank of England mission would be felt for years to come.  Two years later, the Sydney Social Credit Paper, New Era, edited by C. Barclay Smith, reflected on Niemeyer’s visit, noting:  ‘There is a trail of economic suffering wherever this financial ghoul casts his shadow'.24  As late as 1947, John Barnes, Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) for Bundaberg, felt the visit worth denouncing in the Queensland parliament.  Echoing Field’s words, and probably also the views of some of his cane-growing constituents, Barnes saw the Niemeyer visit as the culmination of all that was rotten in the world :

When Sir Otto Niemeyer and his friend came out here and told us we were living above our means — and the Labour Government accepted what he said and allowed themselves to be the agents of the world depression — we took notice of what they said, these two agents of the international Jewish financial house, and their Gentile agents.  They came out here and caused the depression, just the same as agents were sent to other countries and caused a world-wide depression.

The economic crisis, along with the Bank of England’s apparent disloyalty, compelled Field to write his best-selling book, The Truth About the Slump.  Published in March 1931, the book was subtitled ‘what the news never tells', indicating the extent to which Field believed that mainstream journalism had failed to adequately cover the crisis.  In a vivid narrative style The Truth About the Slump detailed a mass of happenings and statements from a variety of sources ‘exposing' the web of ‘subterranean forces' behind World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution and the Wall Street Crash.  Even though The Truth About the Slump was only published and promoted by the author, it soon gained a wide readership in New Zealand during the worst years of the Depression.

While Field had no ambition to see The Truth About the Slump distributed beyond New Zealand, Australian monetary reformers began receiving copies of his writings from their political associates across the Tasman.  As a result, Field, up until his death in 1963, received dozens of letters from Australians asking for literature and advice.  Field claimed in September 1932 he had sold around 500 copies of The Truth About the Slump overseas, mostly as a result of a ‘steady demand from Australia'.

As in New Zealand, The Truth About the Slump found a significant readership in Australia among a section of the population struggling to find answers to the economic crisis.  As one contemporary Douglas Credit paper commented, the Depression and the Niemeyer visit had ‘sent Australians to school on the technique and politics of high finance'.28  The Truth About the Slump had the advantage of being very readable in a style of English familiar to Australian readers.  F.J. Williams of Sydney told Field :

I think it the most enlightening book I have read dealing with the Depression.  I have read no other work that gives such a plain, detailed, and truthful account of the workings of men and bodies of men that have resulted in the worldwide ruin and misery ...

Cloaked in this seemingly objective-journalistic style, The Truth About the Slump became a sought-after ‘textbook' on Australia’s economic problems.  When reflecting back in 1960, for example, Eric Pyke of Queensland wrote to a fellow Social Crediter in New Zealand that, ‘Truth About the Slump had quite a vogue in Australia during the slump'.  Pyke even implied that he preferred Field’s writings to those of the late Major C.H. Douglas, the founder of Social Credit.

The letters written to Field over the years indicate that in addition to sales, many copies of The Truth About the Slump were passed on from person to person.  Field told Robert Richter of the Lands Department in Perth during 1934 :

It is very encouraging to hear that you have found my book useful.  After three years and nine months it still goes on selling itself, and its sales has been simply by one person telling the next and in this way it has gone to the most outlandish parts.

The more cash-strapped members of the Queensland Social Credit Party were able to borrow the book from the ‘circulating library' alongside a host of books by C.H. Douglas.

A number of groups on Australia’s right-wing political fringe sold, recommended or distributed Field’s writings.  The Sydney-based Australian League of Truth, for example, recommended and advertised The Truth About the Slump as ‘a book that all students of the World Crisis should carefully study'.33  The Sydney League of Truth made extensive use of Field’s insights, viewing him as a great crusader against the Jewish conspiracy on a par with more famous antisemites like Lord Sydenham, Henry Ford and Francis Coty.34  In Patricia Lewin’s antisemitic pamphlet The Key, issued in 1933, The Truth About the Slump was promoted as ‘one of the most sincere and powerful books of these times'.  According to Lewin, ‘each of its two hundred odd pages holds a binding spell over the reader'.35 Similarly, the Sydney-based Guild of the Watchmen of Australia reprinted portions of The Truth About the Slump and sold it.36  Queensland Social Crediter and antisemite, the Rev J. Stuart Roach, also used Field in his pamphlet, The People’s Rights, to reveal ‘the truth' about the Federal Reserve and Gold Standard plots.37  The Angle, the short-lived proto-fascist Melbourne newspaper published by the ‘British-Australian Racial Body', also recommended Field’s book as ‘suggested literature' in each issue.

Despite being in great demand among a number of right-wing Australian political organisations, Field’s main sales effort was through mainstream bookstores.  The Field papers contain dozens of letters and purchase orders from Australian booksellers in almost all the states.39  Writing to the well-known Wellington journalist, Pat Lawlor, Field claimed that over the course of a decade one Sydney bookshop had sold 600 copies of The Truth About the Slump.

As a result of this circulation, Field’s books found their way into the hands of a respectable number of Australians.  The Honorable Les H. Hollins was one person who made significant use of Truth About the Slump as a monetary reform textbook.  Hollins was a well-known Social Credit activist in Melbourne during the 1930s and 1940s.  A successful businessman who owned an automotive engineering firm, Hollins was also one of the few Australian Social Crediters to experience any electoral success.  To the surprise of all observers, he made a strong showing against Robert Menzies in the federal seat of Kooyong during the 1937 elections, polling around 14,000 votes.  Hollins was later elected as an independent member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly from 1940 until 1945.41  He served briefly as a State Minister in the short-lived McFarlan Government of 1945.

Apart from his importance as a fund-raiser, Hollins was known around the Victorian Social Credit movement for his political tracts, most importantly Democracy at the Cross Roads, published in 1934.  In his book Hollins makes significant use of The Truth About the Slump for its account of the mechanical failings of the Federal Reserve System and the gold standard.42  Hollins also used Field’s writings again in Only One Road, published in 1949.  In this book Hollins cites Field to support the identification of the ‘money power' in world affairs, in particular the sinister Bretton Woods plan to implement a world monetary system.43  Hollins shared Field’s belief in the ordained progressive role of Anglo-Saxons in world affairs and the role of the British Empire as a barrier to world revolution.44  Hollins also made use of monetary reform material published by the New Zealand Mirror.  The Mirror carried regular columns by Field and was owned by Field’s friend, patron and fellow monetary reformer, Henry Joseph Kelliher.45  While the Mirror was principally a popular pictorial magazine, it ran numerous conspiratorial articles.  As a result, articles like the one cited by Hollins that opposed the Bretton Woods agreement and any return to the gold standard, were circulated around the Australasian Social Credit movement.

Bruce H. Brown, also a Victorian Social Crediter, relied on The Truth About the Slump as a key textbook in his conspiratorial series the ‘Blight of our Empire', published in the Castlemaine Mail and New Times, which began in late 1935 and continued through 1936.  Brown’s series was the first major exposition of what would become one of the central tenets of the New Times group and, later, the League of Rights.  Brown, like Field, argued that malicious Jewish-American banking interests were hijacking the British Empire to bring about the enslavement of all free democratic people.  The key mechanism for this was the Bank of England and the Empire’s reliance on American finance and the Gold Standard.  While Brown adapted and updated the story, his articles had unmistakably been influenced by Field’s work, although this was not always acknowledged.47  Writing on the establishment of the United States Federal Reserve, as the originator of the Depression crisis, Brown used Field word for word :

President Wilson and Colonel House were mere putty in the hands of the astute financiers, and in the belief that they were freeing America from an octopus they actually fastened its tentacles more firmly than ever on the people of the United States, and created an organisation which has enabled the Money Trust to dominate not only America, but the commerce and industry of the entire globe.

Field’s detailed and ‘objective' account of the plot behind the economic crisis was not the only thing that appealed to Brown and other readers of The Truth About the Slump.  Most importantly for empire-loyal Australians, Field’s writings demonstrated that the slump was not of the empire’s making but had its origins in foreign anti-British influences.  M.J. Henry of Stanthorpe, Queensland, wrote to Field in 1939 espousing this view:  ‘Frankly, I am convinced that some secret insidious force has brought the British Empire into a state of weakness, which might spell its doom'.49 The hostility of empire loyalists, whether New Zealanders or Australians, was not directed at England but the ‘blight' that resided within the City of London on Threadneedle and Lombard Streets.  Brown argued that so long as Britain allowed the German-American bankers of New York to dominate London, Australia and the rest of the Empire would be burdened with crippling debt and low export prices.

Before 1931, Brown ‘regarded the Bank of England with admiration', but with the economic slump his thinking changed radically, as he witnessed the ‘spectacle of the Australian people getting less and less money when they were producing more and more wealth'.50  The conspiracy theory provided by the likes of Field helped to explain the 1930s conundrum of how two highly productive countries like Australia and New Zealand could be thrown into economic crisis.  Like Field, Brown searched for answers and believed both mainstream media and politicians misrepresented the facts.  While Field had to find his own answers, Brown had the luxury of reading Field’s work and adapting his material to the Australian situation.  In Brown’s words ‘every student of world affairs should possess a copy of "Truth About the Slump"'.

The Truth About the Slump’s seemingly plausible account of Australia’s troubles gave it a currency in conspiratorial circles for the rest of the decade and beyond.  Ten years after it was first published, when the Depression was over and Australia was at war, The Truth About the Slump was still being used to explain world events.  William Marshall, MLA for Murchison, for example, cited Field in the Western Australian Legislative Assembly during a tirade against debt finance in 1941.  Marshall argued that, just as Field had revealed in 1931, American banking interests were using the current situation to undermine British interests across the world.

While The Truth About the Slump was Field’s most influential book in Australia during the 1930s, many of his follow-up works had a respectable circulation.  In June 1932 Sydney’s Douglas Credit magazine, New Era, welcomed the release of God’s Own Country, Field’s short-lived journal that followed The Truth About the Slump.  While New Era did not think the New Zealand author was a Douglas adherent, the journal still believed his writings were valuable in ‘exposing the bankster’s [sic] tricks of credit monopoly'.53 Another of Field’s books that found its way into Australia was All These Things, published in 1936 as the first of a planned trilogy on the Jewish conspiracy.54  While All These Things did not match the circulation of Field’s first book, it was still welcomed by Australian conspiracy theorists as an important update on the developing Jewish plot, one which the New Times recommended, ‘every one should read'.55  New Times' endorsement seemed to have helped sales, with Field noting to F.H. Ault of East Kew in Victoria that ‘a considerable number were sold in Melbourne'.

Probably the most influential Australian to endorse All These Things was Tasmanian Labor Senator Richard Darcey.  Elected to the Senate in 1937, Darcey was an outspoken member of the Upper House, well known for his views on monetary reform and his belief in financial conspiracies.  In September 1939 Darcey wrote to Field to show his appreciation for the book, stating:  ‘It is a wonderful book and should be read by everyone and proves that governments do not govern and I told the Senate this today ...'.57  This was one of Darcey’s recurring themes.  A few days earlier he had told the Senate:  ‘I have said previously that countries are ruled not by statesman, but by financiers whose power is stronger than Parliament ... There is a sinister influence over every statesman'.

Like Field, Darcey believed that international financiers were enslaving Australia with debt.59  Darcey, who only served one term as Senator, was so taken with the information Field’s books provided that he distributed them to other members of parliament.  Like Field, Darcey identified the New York banking firm of Kuhn Loeb and Co. as arch conspirators who had not only financed the rearmament of Germany but the Russian Revolution as well.60  Darcey even told the Senate during the 1939 budget debate:  ‘As payment for their assistance in the revolution, the firm of Kuhn Loeb and Company was given the sole-right to finance Russia’s "five-year plan"'.61  Darcey believed that Australia could not fight the war with borrowed money.  Instead, he advocated that the Commonwealth Bank should be used to raise an internal loan based on ‘the national credit'.62  During World War II, the Senator created consternation in Wellington for repeating these same criticisms of the ‘power and influence of International Finance', this time on the policies of New Zealand’s Labour government.  Field wrote in defence of Darcey.

Of more influence than All These Things were Field’s two editions of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.  After a failed attempt to launch his own political movement, stymied due to ill-health and competition from the Social Credit movement, Field moved deeper into ideological antisemitism.  In 1934 he published his first edition of the Protocols, entitled The World’s Conundrum.64  On the surface, Field’s republication of the Protocols was as unremarkable as the numerous other editions and reprints of the antisemitic forgery published around the world during the inter-war years.  What made Field’s edition distinctive and sought after by conspiracy theorists and antisemites in Australia, was its introduction.  By the 1930s the Protocols was discredited as a forgery, produced in 1905 by the Tsarist police, and exposed by The Times of London during August 1920.65  Like The Truth About the Slump, Field’s introduction to the Protocols was draped in journalistic parlance that sounded, at least to those already prone to believing in conspiracies, as objective, measured and well researched.  Field’s introduction was sought after by Australian antisemites because it advanced seemingly plausible reasons as to why the Protocols was still relevant in understanding the world crisis.

The Australian Catholic Truth Society welcomed Field’s study on the Protocols, advertising it on the back of one of their own antisemitic conspiratorial tracts.66  A number of the bookshops that had sold Field’s first book, went on to stock The World’s Conundrum.  In September 1934 Rigby Ltd Booksellers of Adelaide, who had already sold copies of The Truth About the Slump, had no qualms in ordering from Field a dozen copies of The World’s Conundrum and Stabilised Money for their stocks.

Copies of The World’s Conundrum soon reached the hands of conspiracy theorists who used it to explain Australia’s problems.  In July 1935, John Smith, writing for the New Times, used Field’s edition to write a potted history of the Protocols, and to shed some light on the Jewish immigration ‘problem'.68  In particular, Smith used The World’s Conundrum to try to understand the forces bringing about the recent influx of European Jewish immigrants into Australia.  Threatened by their perceived innate business success and ‘anti-Christian' and ‘Asiatic' character, Smith wrote resentfully about the flow of immigrants into Melbourne’s St Kilda, finding solace in the Protocols that explained how the ‘trickle' had turned into a flood ‘like that of locusts'.

Other media also disseminated Field’s introduction to the Protocols.  Late in 1942, Tasmanians were treated to lengthy excerpts from The World’s Conundrum read by Social Crediter James Guthrie during his regular Sunday evening broadcasts on Station 7HO in Hobart.70  In the course of his two broadcasts on the Protocols, Guthrie emphasised the key arguments in Field’s introduction as to why the text was reliable.  Guthrie noted the prophetic nature of the work.  Given that it was produced 30 years earlier in 1905, it was, for Field and Guthrie, almost incredible that ‘the world’s most amazing book' had accurately predicted the course of world events from world war to revolution and financial ruin.71  Guthrie also found Field’s argument that the conspiracy was the work of a small clique, rather than all Jews, quite convincing.  This explained why the conspiracy had not prevented violent antisemitism in Europe and also how the plot was kept secret.  This view seemingly protected those who promoted the Protocols from the charge of antisemitism.  In his introduction Field wrote:

Only a small number of persons need to be consciously engaged in such a conspiracy as outlined in the Protocols — provided they are in the right places to influence events.  Even those who believe most firmly in the existence of a conspiracy express the opinion that the ordinary Jew probably knows as little of it as the ordinary Gentile.

Father Patrick J. Gearon was another conspiratorial propagandist impressed by the prophetic nature of the Protocols.  Gearon was Professor of Theology at the Carmelite Novitiate in Doonvale, Victoria, and also a supporter of the New Times and the League of Rights.73  In his antisemitic book, Communism — Why Not?, Gearon (writing under the pseudonym ‘Advance Australia') warned of the ‘diabolical' advance of Jewish-inspired communism and the financial might of ‘international Jewry' that lay behind it.74  In referring to the Protocols, Gearon likewise relied on Field’s edition.75  After the war another Melbourne antisemite, R.B. Ising, reproduced Field’s 1934 introduction in full to accompany his own 1945 edition, stating that Field’s effort was ‘one of most comprehensive works on the Protocols'.

Field’s introduction established him in antisemitic circles as an authority on the veracity of the Protocols and the Jewish conspiracy.  His two editions seem to have been particularly influential in Australia among antisemites trying to develop their own propaganda with the trappings of research and scholarship.  Probably the most enduring influence of The World’s Conundrum on Australian far-right politics came about through Eric Dudley Butler, a young Victorian Social Crediter.  Butler’s lengthy political career began when he became active with the New Times group at the age of 20, going on to become the leading figure of the Australian League of Rights.77  Field’s influence on the young Eric Butler, and as a consequence on the League of Rights, is significant.  During the 1960s and 1970s the League was the most organised and effective far-right grouping in Australasia.

Butler first came into contact with Field’s writings in Melbourne’s social credit milieu during the mid-1930s.  Butler’s political beliefs were similar to Field’s.  Both were fierce imperial patriots and British internationalists, proudly Anglo-Saxon, as well as strong advocates of individual responsibility tempered by Christian moral values.78  In the 1930s, when these ideals were threatened, Butler turned to antisemitism to explain the world crisis.  Like Field, Butler was an aspiring ‘conspiratorial scholar' whose many books and pamphlets would become important textbooks to English-speaking far-right activists around the world.  Butler’s writings suggest that Field was an important early influence on how the young Australian understood world events.

In Butler’s series on the Protocols published in the New Times during 1945 and 1946, Field was cited as an authority on the Protocols and was used to help prove their authenticity.  The series was later republished as The International Jew: The Truth About "The Protocols of Zion", and became a key text in defining the politics of the League of Rights in Australia and New Zealand.79  When his articles began in January 1945, Butler focused on trying to revive antisemitism as a viable worldview in the post-Nazi era.  Even though the war was virtually over and antisemitism seemingly discredited, Butler still saw the Jewish world conspiracy as the central driving force in world affairs.  In rehabilitating the document, Butler argued:  ‘It is essential that we refuse to allow the alleged anti-Semitism of Hitler and his associates to colour our investigation of the Protocols'.80  Butler’s belief that the diabolical authors of the Protocols were still at work, convinced him that the end of Hitler merely signalled a new phase of enslavement.  After giving a short history of the document, Butler made his case for its continued authenticity by turning to Field for authority:

As it is sometimes asserted that the "Protocols" have definitely been proved forgeries, the following facts as outlined by the authoritative New Zealand writer, Mr A.N. Field should be read carefully.

Butler went on to quote at length from the second edition of The World’s Conundrum, which attacked the Berne Protocols trial, held in Switzerland during 1935 that had put the veracity of the forgery under the world spotlight.82 While the ruling by the Berne court that the Protocols was an ‘indecent and immoral' publication further undermined the authority of the document internationally, Field argued that the unpublicised 1937 ruling that overturned the Berne decision, on a technicality, made the Protocols as relevant as ever.  Having ‘restored' the authority of the Protocols, Butler was able to assert that the ‘Elders of Zion' were still at work.  Like Field, Butler believed that unfolding world events were designed to ‘smash' the British Empire.83  For Butler, communism was the greatest threat to the British ideal in the post-war world, with international finance as the power lying behind Bolshevism.  Citing Field’s ‘valuable book', All These Things, Butler argued that the Russian Revolution was the work of a conspiracy of Jewish Bolsheviks who were financed by Jewish bankers.

Following the publication of his edition of the Protocols, Field went on to write an array of material that was highly regarded by Australian conspiracy theorists and antisemites.  Probably Field’s most productive years as a writer of antisemitic tracts were during the late 1930s when he published The Examiner.85  Named after the first colonial newspaper in Nelson, The Examiner was devoted to exposing the anti-British forces operating throughout the globe.  The pages of The Examiner show vividly the extent of Field’s international networks, developed since publication of Truth About the Slump.  Reading as a ‘who’s who' of the world’s conspiracy theorists, the journal’s relative sophistication and its international content made it, and the pamphlets derived from it, popular reading among the Australian radical right.

The Examiner became important reading for Australian Social Crediters because of its well-articulated and coherent attack on New Zealand’s first Labour government.  With its landslide election in late 1935, the Labour government was seen by many Australian Social Crediters as the vehicle to introduce Major Douglas’s utopian vision of a society in full production and awash with cheap credit.  The New Era welcomed Labour’s election, proclaiming ‘victory in New Zealand'.86  After Labour’s first year in power the New Times still had high hopes, predicting:  ‘If New Zealand succeeds in showing a satisfactory working model of a new monetary system, it will literally sweep the world'.

Rather than bringing about a Social Credit utopia, however, Labour continued to pursue a more traditional economic path.  While the Labour government did much to appease its monetary reformer supporters, the passing of the Social Security Act in 1938 made many Social Credit observers believe that New Zealand was turning ‘socialist'.  While the 1938 legislation included a raft of ‘socialistic' provisions such as hospital, maternity and universal retirement benefits, the most contentious part of the legislation for Social Crediters was the way the new welfare state was to be funded.  Rather than utilising the country’s ‘national credit', as advocated by C.H. Douglas, the Labour government sought to fund its social program from the usual sources, namely loans from foreign and domestic banks.  For many Social Crediters who had believed in the Labour government, this was a devastating parting of the ways.  Doctrinaire Social Crediters also found it impossible to reconcile the apparent socialism of the legislation with Labour’s support of financial orthodoxy.  Field’s Examiner provided an explanation in the form of the finance-socialist conspiracy of how ‘New Zealand came to jump from the frying pan of Capitalism into the fire of Socialism'.88  As a result, Field’s warnings were well received by Australian conspiracy theorists who feared that their country could be next.

Many conservative anti-socialists within the Australian Social Credit movement, therefore, seized on Field’s 1939 Examiner pamphlet, The Truth About New Zealand.  This sought to destroy the illusions of monetary reformers about New Zealand’s first Labour government by detailing the ‘creeping socialism' of the administration, along with its continued reliance on ‘debt finance'.  The Truth About New Zealand is interesting for the way Field took the immediate situation in New Zealand and wove it into a web of financial and socialist conspiracy dating back to before New Zealand’s foundation as a British colony in 1840.  Field’s new book was particularly well thumbed by Eric Butler, who reviewed it for New Times in late 1939.  Congratulating the ‘reliable investigator' from New Zealand for exposing the truth about the ‘Labour regime', Butler stated :

Those who have studied the writings of A.N. Field, the well known New Zealand writer on finance and the part it plays in national and international affairs, will welcome his latest book ... as a carefully compiled and detailed answer to the many questions which arise concerning the Labour Party administration of our sister dominion.

Influenced by Field’s writings, along with the disillusionment of their ‘co-religionists' in New Zealand, New Times launched ferocious attacks on New Zealand’s government.  In January 1941, while Hitler waged war in Europe, New Zealand’s Labour administration, under the economic guidance of Finance Minister Walter Nash, was castigated by the New Times as ‘Nash-ional Socialist', as well as anti-British, anti-democratic, collectivist and socialist in character.90  The article’s author, Albert Fawcett, also took ‘the truth about New Zealand' to a Melbourne audience, warning about the insidious ‘machinations' underway across the Tasman.91  Fawcett eagerly endorsed The Truth About New Zealand, describing it as the ‘book you have been waiting for'.

The influence of The Truth About New Zealand on Butler’s early thinking is demonstrated by his important 1941 pamphlet The Enemy Within the Empire.  This ‘short history of the Bank of England', makes use of Field’s writings about the bank and about the ‘increasing financial dictatorship' in New Zealand.93 Most importantly for Butler’s developing political ideology, Field’s book demonstrated the inherent risk in trusting any political party.  For Butler the New Zealand experience supported his work with the ‘Electoral Campaign', which lobbied politicians to obtain ‘pledges' from them, rather than supporting parties or standing candidates.  Butler concluded his section on New Zealand by writing that, as a result of Labour’s collectivist programme :

some Socialists believe that New Zealand will become a second Soviet Russia without bloodshed.  Surely New Zealanders will assert their British rights, even at this late hour, and take action to bring their representatives under their direct control.  They will then get the results that they desire and not what someone else thinks is good for them.

The Truth About New Zealand was revived as recently as the 1980s.  At the height of New Zealand’s economic restructuring under the Lange Labour government, the League of Rights republished it through its publishing arm Veritas.95 The republication not only demonstrated the renewed fear of the socialist-finance agenda evident across the Tasman in the economic program known as ‘Rogernomics'; it also showed how highly valued Field’s work was by the League of Rights, even decades after it was first published.

Field’s work was not always so well received in Australia.  When the Examiner claimed Professor Walter Murdoch of the University of Western Australia had received money to write ‘in defence of Jews' in the Melbourne Herald,96 Professor Murdoch wrote a blistering letter to Field :

As a reader who has found himself in full agreement with other things that you have written, especially on economics, I am deeply disappointed to find you descending to depths which I had thought reserved for the gutter press.97 Field was quick to back down and wrote Professor Murdoch an unreserved apology.  More than likely, Field would have issued further apologies if all those named as ‘dupes of the Jewish conspiracy' had confronted the author so directly.

Other Australians were also far from impressed by the contents of the Examiner.  In February 1943, the Commonwealth Security Service in Canberra became concerned with Field’s activities after a cache of his writings were found in the possession of members of Ernest J. Jones' Australian Unity League.  The service wrote to the New Zealand authorities detailing other incriminating material that had been uncovered.  These included a Christmas card from Field to the leader of the Russian Fascist Union in Australia, wishing him season’s greetings and ‘success to the cause!'98  The Australian authorities were also concerned that Field was ‘anti-Semitic and was said to be in communication with leading Nazis and Russian Fascists in Australia'.99  During the late 1930s, Field had been in frequent contact with a white Russian émigré named Rodjestvensky of Woolloongabba in Brisbane who may have been the recipient of the offending Christmas card.  Along with exchanging conspiracy movement gossip, Rodjestvensky also distributed Field’s books.100 A.D. McIntosh, head of the Prime Minister’s Department, who had apparently known Field for years, rejected Canberra’s concerns.  The senior public servant assured the security service that ‘Field has long shown his regard to the welfare of the British Commonwealth of Nations, and that he served King and Country'.

With the outbreak of war in September 1939, Field moved away from producing overtly antisemitic books.  Nonetheless, he continued writing on a variety of conspiracy topics for the New Zealand Mirror.  He also continued publishing, producing Why Colleges Breed Communists in 1941.102  While it avoided the sensitive issue of the world situation and material that could have been deemed Nazi propaganda, Why Colleges Breed Communists was still a full-scale assault on the Jewish-socialist conspiracy that purportedly used the teaching of evolution to undermine morality amongst youth.  The book attracted a new readership in Australia including the Evangelical Publishing Agency of Burwood, New South Wales.  After ordering several dozen copies, W.W. Fletcher of the Agency wrote to Field stating:  ‘We intend to put some effort into the sale of this book ... we believe the book will prove to be a much-needed eye-opener to a great many readers'.103  This interest soon lead Fletcher to write again to Field to request copies of Field’s Examiner pamphlets.  Fletcher’s order was one of the last shipments of books to Australia.  With the strengthening economic recovery, Field’s books were becoming increasingly irrelevant.

Field’s popularity and readership could have been more widespread if it had not been for his remote, ‘hermit-like' existence.  In New Zealand, Field’s sectarianism made it almost impossible for him to find enough common ground to work with like-minded monetary reformers and conservatives.  In particular, Field was highly critical of the Social Credit movement and on the whole refused to work with them.104 Internationally, Field’s influence was limited by his refusal to allow others to republish his works, making his books hard to obtain.  Due to New Zealand’s isolation, the limited print-runs and Field’s one-man operation, his writings were not as well circulated as they might have been.  D. Guy Peele of Longreach, Queensland, wrote to Field in 1934 complaining that The Truth About the Slump ‘is unobtainable here in Australia judging from advices'.105  Likewise, J.P. Murnane of Mathoura, New South Wales, finding it difficult to obtain his own copies of The Truth About the Slump and World’s Conundrum, resorted to appealing to readers of the New Times for help.

Field was also too sectarian and individualistic to join or collaborate with other movements like Social Credit.  While his books were required reading for Social Crediters, Field detested the movement and was prone to attacking it in letters to correspondents.  A provincial bachelor who looked after his mother for much of the 1930s and 1940s, in later years well known in his neighbourhood for riding around on an old bicycle,107 Field never left New Zealand to promote his books and ideas.  If he had toured, or even visited Australia, during the Depression, his impact might have been significantly greater.  As it was, his efforts to build a movement in New Zealand proved unsuccessful.  He suffered repeated ill health and lacked the personal charisma to inspire a movement.  Despite picking up a handful of political adherents, Field exercised influence through the printed word rather than becoming the leader of a political movement.

With the end of the war the potency of Field’s writings declined, although he still enjoyed a strong readership among monetary reformers and antisemites.  Queensland Social Crediter H.F. Brus of Nundah, one particularly spirited student of monetary reform, contacted the now elderly Field in 1957, writing with some exaggeration, ‘your writings also contributed to bring about the crumbling state of our monetary system.  You too helped to put the people wise to its workings'.108  While Brus was more flattering than accurate, Field’s contribution to the Australian conspiratorial and antisemitic movements was significant.  Field’s books, newspapers and private letters all played a part in shaping the Australian radical right.

Field’s most significant impact was in helping to shape the politics of Eric Butler and the League of Rights.  Field articulated their fear of collectivist forces in government, politics and the financial system.  He provided a dynamic, patriotic outlook that was loyal to the British Empire and the global aspirations of the British people.  In a time when the British Empire was at its lowest ebb, Field’s ‘British internationalism' was very attractive to Australia’s radical right.  His career also demonstrates how the Australian right cannot be fully understood if isolated within a national context.  The Australian far right during the interwar years, as today, was surprisingly ‘internationalist' in outlook, open to utilising ideas and political material from other countries to advance its own patriotic mission.  Through appreciating Field’s role and New Zealand’s modest contribution, we can add a new dimension to our understanding of the political culture of the Australian radical right during the turbulent Depression years.