Early in his Australian life he adopted a Marxist approach, which didn’t sit well with Australian academic anthropology, notably its doyen, Professor A.P. Elkin. Rose was studying kinship, and his particular interest seems to have been incest and patrilineal systems. As a Marxist, he proceeded from the premise of a predictable sequence of stages of development and the key role of the economy and relations of production in generating change.

The Roses, like many others, joined the Communist Party during World War II. Fred’s experiences on Groote Eylandt had left him highly critical of white authorities and mentors ‘whose objects are almost invariably diametrically opposed to the well-being of the aboriginal’, and later contacts with Aboriginal station workers in the Pilbara alerted him to the question of land rights. One security report of the time describes him as the CPA’s ‘official anthropologist’, and he no doubt aspired to this status, though it was not uncontested. At the same time, in what then seemed less of a contradiction than it might appear in retrospect, Rose was launching himself on a decade-long career as a Canberra bureaucrat, starting at the Ministry of Post-War Reconstruction in 1943.

Rose was a popular and gregarious figure on the Canberra scene, and his bureaucratic career (which led him in 1951 to the Department of Territories under Paul Hasluck) appeared to prosper. But that didn’t keep him out of ASIO’s sights, especially not after the defection of a Soviet diplomat, Vladimir Petrov, in 1954 and the subsequent Royal Commission on Espionage investigating Petrov’s information on spy networks in Australia. Petrov had had no contact with Rose, but there was a damaging allegation from June Barnett, a young leftist civil servant, that Rose had introduced her to someone (probably Wally Clayton, a key communist figure identified as Klod in Petrov’s spy network) who tried to persuade her to pass on information to the Soviets. Called as a witness to the Commission, Rose defended himself effectively and with a certain flair. But it didn’t matter: his career as an Australian civil servant was over.

‘Was Rose a spy?’

Was Rose a spy? Colonel Spry of ASIO thought so, and Desmond Ball and other scholars of the Petrov affair have tentatively identified him as the Soviet informant/agent who went under the code name ‘Professor’ in the Venona transcripts. Certainly, Clayton knew the Roses and visited them when he was in Canberra, but whether this was, as Rose said, to pick up party dues collected by Rose as Canberra branch treasurer or to exchange other information is unclear. Monteath and Munt give a sensible evaluation of the evidence which amounts to a ‘not proven’ verdict. The most damning evidence comes from Clayton himself, who in old age admitted to political scientist Desmond Ball that he was Klod and provided some sketchy information on his network. But this does not appear to have included specific mention of Rose, though Ball took the Rose connection to be implied. Pointing in the opposite direction is the fact that the Soviets had no file on Rose as an agent (the East Germans asked them); and Rose never suggested that he had been one in his many conversations with his Stasi handlers, who would surely have taken it as a recommendation.

This brings us to the most remarkable move of Rose’s career: the one that took him to East Germany and ultimately to a chair of anthropology at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

It was Edith who, along with their three daughters, went there first, in a 1953 trip that initially took her to England to visit Rose’s relatives and then to East Germany to visit her own. She ended up staying, and after a curious interlude in which Rose worked as a waterside worker in Sydney under Jim Healy’s protection, he and their teenage son followed.

‘This is a really odd story, not least because Fred Rose, who broke so many rules, seems to have been quite an ordinary bloke’

Once in the GDR, Fred and Edith both established relationships with East German security. The Stasi was unmatched in the scope of its agent and informer network, and also unique among communist security services in being more a surveillance instrument than a punitive one. The Roses were glad to serve it, not only for ideological reasons but also because of the protection and status it offered. They passed on information about visiting foreigners, locals, and even each other, but the Stasi was loath to upgrade Fred from Kontakt-Person to Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter because he was too well-known to be an effective spy. For Fred, the main point seems to have been telling his Stasi handlers about his professional and personal problems, like a weekly visit to a psychoanalyst or father confessor. (He was ‘inclined to overestimate his attractiveness to young women’, one of the handlers reported.) For biographers, the meetings produced a huge research bonus, now available with the opening of the Stasi archives – 2,000 pages of documentation, much of it conversation about Fred.

After the move to East Germany, Rose made repeated trips back to Australia, even applying, finally successfully, for Australian research grants, though he was also eager to take part in the movement for Aboriginal rights. While the GDR authorities made no objection, ASIO was unhappy about the trips, especially at first, but it proved difficult to prevent his entry as he still had a British passport. The collapse of the GDR in 1989 appalled him, and he died in 1991, leaving what he saw as his magnum opus largely unpublished. How good an anthropologist he was remains unclear from this judicious and well-researched biography, but most other things the reader might want to know are in there. The book has an excellent bibliography, but don’t trust the index to list all the people mentioned in the text.