Witches, Part Four: Red Jessie

In the 1950s, Australians were seeing reds everywhere. Politicians stoked paranoia with talk of “Reds under the bed,” a hidden communist menace burrowed into the nation’s schools, unions, and public service. No doubt there were some communists; a few idealists, writers, and unionists, but the idea of an impending red uprising was fantasy, but useful to those who profited from fear. ASIO, the Australian spy agency, played its part, quietly building files on thousands of citizens, not for what they had done, but for what they believed.

Prime Minister Robert Menzies cast himself as a crusader against creeping communism, determined to save the nation from invisible enemies. He genuinely believed in the threat, that communism was an infection spreading through unions, universities, and Parliament itself, but he also learned how to weaponise that fear. His Communist Party Dissolution Bill promised to cleanse the body politic of the red disease, granting government the power to ban organisations, seize property, and silence dissent, all in the name of protecting democracy. The irony was obvious to many, though few dared say it aloud.

The Bill was Menzies’ Cold War paranoia, a law designed to outlaw the Communist Party, confiscate its assets, and bar its members from public life. But when the High Court struck it down in 1951 as unconstitutional, Menzies doubled down, calling a referendum to let the people decide. Even in that climate of fear, Australians refused (narrowly) to give their government the power to hunt ideas. It was a rare moment when democracy resisted the witch trial.

The 1951 referendum sought to give the Commonwealth powers to make laws in respect of communists and communism.

Then came 1954, and with it, a Cold War scandal that turned anxiety into hysteria. The defection of Soviet diplomats Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, posing as embassy staff in Canberra, set the nation alight. The Petrov Affair was theatre, a spy story with real fear and political gold for Menzies.

The witch hunts began in earnest. Teachers were reported for “leftist tendencies.” Union organisers were branded infiltrators. Writers and artists who had once marched for peace found themselves blacklisted. The state did not need to produce witches; it only needed people to believe they were there.

Jessie Street was just a woman who believed in peace and equality. She had fought for women’s rights, for Aboriginal rights, for international cooperation. But in Cold War Australia, that made her dangerous. When she attended a global peace congress, the tabloids branded her “Red Jessie.” ASIO opened a file on her, tracking who she met, where she travelled, and what she said.

Jessie Street

She was accused of being a communist, not for anything she had done, but for the company she kept and the causes she believed in. Her work with groups like the Australia–USSR Friendship Society was painted as subversion, not solidarity. In the fevered atmosphere of the McCarthy era, such associations were poison. It did not matter that she was not a Party member; suspicion was enough.

The accusations cost her dearly. Political doors closed. Invitations vanished. She was dismissed, discredited, and quietly erased from polite society. They called her un-Australian, a traitor, a mouthpiece for Moscow. Her real crime was simpler: she had ideas that rattled powerful men.

What made Jessie so threatening was not ideology but independence. And that unsettled men who measured patriotism by obedience. So they did what frightened men have always done to defiant women: they hunted her like a witch.

By the mid-1950s, Jessie Street was living in quiet exile. Her husband, Sir Kenneth Street, had become Chief Justice of New South Wales, and her politics no longer fit the part. While he wore the robes of law, she was in London working with the Anti-Slavery Society, pushing them to confront Australia’s own record on human rights.

In 1956, Jessie returned to Australia to gather evidence on the treatment of Aboriginal people. They had been treated appallingly by the establishment since colonisation, and in the 1950s were still legally wards of the state, denied basic citizenship. Jessie joined a group planning a national organisation to lobby for constitutional change to give the Commonwealth power to make laws for Aboriginal people instead of the states that had stripped them of rights, or never granted any in the first place.

At the time, Aboriginal Australians were still fighting for the most fundamental recognition. In Queensland, they gained the right to vote in 1965, with other states and territories following later, and a referendum in 1967 gave them equal rights with non-Aboriginal Australians.

March to support equal rights for “Aborigines” in 1967

jessie used her network of feminists, socialists, and peace activists to build momentum. She had been hunted as a traitor, but she still fought for justice. The witch refused to burn.

After years of being branded “Red Jessie,” she did not fade away. She doubled down. In 1966 she published her autobiography Truth or Repose, reminding everyone she had always chosen truth over comfort. Jessie Street died in 1970, never forgiven, never recanted. The files stayed classified for decades, but history has done what politics would not - cleared her name.

She was the witch of the Southern Cross: unburned, unbroken, and unbowed.