But his critics have multiplied ever since. WikiLeaks has been condemned for publishing private information without sufficient public interest as a justification. Analysis by Associated Press found that data dumps by WikiLeaks had unnecessarily revealed personal details of hundreds of people, including sick children and rape victims. The organisation’s publication of emails relating to Hillary Clinton on the eve of the US election in 2016 have drawn allegations of pro-Trump bias and Russian influence. Rape allegations from Sweden linger in public discourse around Assange, despite Swedish prosecutors having dropped their investigation in 2019 (he has always denied the allegations).

None of that justifies Assange’s current treatment. Regardless of your views on him as a person, or on the actions of WikiLeaks, Assange’s prosecution and detention should cause alarm. Following the Espionage Act indictment, Jameel Jaffer of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University described the charges as ‘a frontal attack on press freedom’.

Julian Assange, 2014 (David G. Silvers, Cancillería del Ecuador/Wikimedia Commons)

Nils Melzer, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, has demanded an end to Assange’s ‘collective persecution’. Speaking in 2019, the Swiss academic and lawyer said: ‘In 20 years of work with victims of war, violence and political persecution I have never seen a group of democratic States ganging up to deliberately isolate, demonise and abuse a single individual for such a long time and with so little regard for human dignity and the rule of law.’  These words are damning. The bare facts are even more so. An Australian citizen is detained in solitary confinement almost 24/7 in an allied nation, as another allied nation seeks his imprisonment on charges that effectively criminalise journalistic practice. And yet the Australian government explicitly refuses to involve itself, in stark contrast to its efforts to free other detained Australians in foreign jails.

It is against this rather fraught backdrop that Felicity Ruby from the University of Sydney and Peter Cronau from the ABC’s Four Corners have pulled together what they describe as ‘an eclectic gathering of Australian thinkers’ to consider Assange’s treatment and legacy. In A Secret Australia: Revealed by the WikiLeaks exposés, contributors consider ‘how WikiLeaks revelations had affected Australia, what they had taught Australia about our place in the world, and about the powerful actors that impact Australian society’.

A Secret Australia is timely; as Assange’s extradition proceedings roll on, calls are growing louder for President Donald Trump to pardon the Australian. Another thorn in the side of the United States, Edward Snowden, recently tweeted: ‘Mr President, if you grant only one act of clemency during your time in office, please: free Julian Assange. You alone can save his life.’

Given the reports of Assange’s deteriorating mental and physical condition, if he is not pardoned, he may well die in detention – whether in Belmarsh or while fighting the Espionage Act charges (if he is ever extradited). Scott Ludlam, a former Australian senator and a friend of Assange’s, does not mince his words about the ‘unworkable shit-show’ that has led to the current predicament: ‘every day this sadistic process drags out is another day Julian spends without sunlight, friends, family and freedom. And that’s the whole point.’

The contributions in A Secret Australia range significantly in style, depth, and substance. London-based Australian barrister Jennifer Robinson, who acts for Assange, offers interesting reflections on WikiLeaks’s contribution to human rights accountability. Academics Richard Tanter and Clinton Fernandes each offer thought-provoking consideration of what WikiLeaks disclosures can tell us about Australia’s place in the world. Fernandes observes that WikiLeaks-linked revelations have ‘contributed to a greater public understanding’ of the nature of Australian-American relations.

Assange pioneered a new model of journalism, and several contributors explore this legacy. Suelette Dreyfus notes that WikiLeaks’s anonymous digital dropbox has since been copied by almost every major media outlet. Dreyfus also emphasises that WikiLeaks drove a new era of ‘large-scale collaborative global partnerships’ among media companies. Its leaks of American State Department cables were investigated and published by a coalition of almost a hundred different media outlets worldwide. Without Assange and WikiLeaks, some of the biggest transnational stories of this decade – including the Snowden disclosures (2013), the Luxembourg Leaks (2014), the Panama Papers (2016), and the Paradise Papers (2017) – might never have been published.

A Secret Australia is a noble undertaking, a collection of thoughtful essays on a topic of acute democratic importance. I certainly hope it sells well; all profits from the project are being donated to the Courage Foundation, which supports journalists and whistleblowers. But this significant collective endeavour falls short of its full potential.

As is perhaps inevitable in any edited volume with so many contributors, A Secret Australia lacks much by way of a central, coherent theme, beyond the fact that WikiLeaks has been important and the prosecution of Assange is wrong. The contributions zigzag across issues and timelines without a clear guiding framework. Some chapters are short personal reflections; others read more like academic prose. The combination feels unwieldy.

Another pitfall of the approach adopted is repetition. Contributors frequently tread the same ground to litigate their individual arguments. Readers will lose track of the number of times they are reminded that WikiLeaks won a Walkley Award for ‘Outstanding Contribution to Journalism’. This is no doubt a great honour for Assange and a useful reminder of the journalistic plaudits his work has garnered, but the point loses salience after it is repeated again and again.

Most substantively, A Secret Australia skirts around the balancing act necessary in accommodating secrecy in any liberal democratic state. It is easy to decry overt state secrecy; I have done it myself many times in these pages. But secrecy does have a necessary and proper place in Australian society; even the most ambitious campaigners do not seek open government utopia.

The eternal dilemma, then, is how to balance the competing objectives of opacity and transparency in a democracy. As Rahul Sagar has written in Secrets and Leaks: The dilemma of state secrecy (2013), ‘the existence of state secrecy poses a great quandary ... we cannot do without state secrecy, as it is essential for national security, but so long as there is state secrecy’, we are vulnerable to its abuse.

If the evolving reactions of Australians to Assange and WikiLeaks can tell us anything, it is that we can be simultaneously concerned about too much and too little transparency. We need a more nuanced and constructive public debate about the appropriate balance to be struck. If we choose to embark on that collective undertaking, A Secret Australia provides much food for thought.