Superintendent MacKay and the curious case of the vanishing secret army : a response to Richard Evans

In History Australia, December 2008, Richard Evans presented a revisionist account of relations between the New South Wales police and the paramilitary New Guard in the early 1930s, criticising my 1989 book, The Secret Army and the Premier. According to Evans, that book's central subject, the secret army known as the Old Guard, did not exist. Here I bring additional evidence of the Old Guard's influence and argue that Evans' article is not only based on inadequate research, an unsophisticated interpretation of archival reports and poor logic, but is also part of a wider trend of right-wing revisionism in history.