Rupert Lockwood
Rupert Ernest Lockwood was an Australian journalist and communist activist.
Lockwood was born in Natimuk, Victoria, to newspaper proprietor Alfred Wright Lockwood and Alice Francis. He became a journalist in 1930, working for the Melbourne Herald until 1935, when he went overseas. He worked in Singapore, Japan, China and the United Kingdom before observing the rise of fascism in Germany, Italy and Spain. He returned to Australia in 1938 and joined the Communist Party of Australia, on the day Australia declared war.
After finding work in the minor labour press, Lockwood became associate editor and then editor of the Waterside Workers' Federation newspaper, Maritime Worker. He played a significant part in the Royal Commission on Espionage, in which the government alleged that he was a Russian spy. In 1969, he left the Communist Party, disillusioned after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
He wrote several books including:
Lockwood died in 1997.
''Black Armada''
Source:Black Armada is an account of the Australian contribution to the creation of the Indonesian Republic. Many forces contrived to make that happen. At that time, Australia was led by a Labor government, the Australian shipping unions were largely Communist led, a substantial group of nationalist Indonesian political prisoners had been interned in prison camps in Australia, and the Netherlands East Indies government-in-exile had been installed in Australia, at Wacol, Queensland.
The book details how those forces came together to facilitate mutinies of Indonesian seamen, and Australian boycotts at vital Australian ports, starting in September 1945, affecting Dutch shipping to the Dutch East Indies. Those actions helped to provide vital time for Indonesian nationalists to frustrate Dutch intentions to re-impose colonial rule after the war.