Spy families are not unheard of, but the usual outcome after the exposure or disgracing of parents is that the children are bamboozled, completely unaware what was going on behind the smooth exterior of suburban life or that their parents weren’t the people they appeared to be. That was the case with the two Foley boys in the United States, who thought Mom and Dad were a typically nice, boring American couple until the FBI raided their home in 2010 and revealed them to be KGB agents. The Foleys rate a brief mention in journalist Sandra Hogan’s With My Little Eye, but the focus here is on another nice suburban family: the Dohertys in Australia, where the three children were recruited into the spy business virtually from the day they were born. What better cover for a young mum chatting to other women in the park than a baby in a pram?

In the 1950s, it wasn’t unusual for a father to often be away on work matters or for his children to regard his occupation as a mysterious concern of such vital importance that it dominated family life. The Dohertys took that concept much further. From a very young age, Mark, Sue-Ellen, and Amanda knew that their parents, Dudley and Joan Doherty, were spies. Indeed, they became trained accomplices in their parents’ work for ASIO. They shared their Sydney living room with a massive device bugging the apartment below, with Joan and other agents wearing headphones, listening in. They knew how to memorise car number plates and how to keep an eye open for any unusual behaviour, while remaining inconspicuous themselves. And they knew not to ask questions or to talk to anyone about what they were doing. As children will, they saw themselves at the centre of their universe, so their universe was normal. The mind-boggling weirdness for the reader lies in the detail. Dudley was a kindly man: if he heard of a child with an amputated limb, he would drop everything and pay a visit, often taking his own children with him. Then he would reveal his own wooden leg and explain how good his life was: ‘You can do anything you want.’ His children used to wish he wouldn’t give everything away, including their pets. Later, they wondered: was he really kind or were the visits just part of his cover?

The spy who liked to sit around exposing his penis was the defecting KGB agent Vladimir Petrov. In 1956, he and Evdokia, his wife and fellow spy, lived in a Surfers Paradise apartment above the Dohertys, who were tasked with looking after them. Joan and Evdokia, known as Peewee, formed an unlikely friendship. While Vladimir went fishing with Dudley and little Mark, the wives would walk along the beach with Sue-Ellen, and Peewee would let off steam about her drunken, disgusting husband.

There are many crazy moments in this story where I laughed out loud. Yet the prevailing reaction is one of sorrow, regret, and sympathy for the three children. It’s likely that Dudley and Joan had the best of motives in recruiting them: both came from families with their own traumatic secrets, and they had decided they would always be honest with their own children. ‘In any family that’s a tall order,’ comments Hogan, ‘but in an ASIO family it is impossible.’

Mark, Sue-Ellen, and Amanda at Kilmaine Street, The Gap (photograph supplied)

The three children were inevitably traumatised, because of what they were and weren’t told and what they were expected to do. Interestingly, their trauma took different forms, and they have different memories. Hogan has extensively interviewed each of them and also their mother, but the main source is Sue-Ellen, who related her story for the first time when she was nearly sixty – to Hogan. She was still seeking to understand why for so many years she could not believe that her father had died of a heart attack in 1970, when she was seventeen. That man in the coffin couldn’t be him. He was always going away on long trips – wasn’t this just another one?

Hogan has turned her meticulous research over the past ten years into a straightforward, no-nonsense narrative, which is all the story needs, though there are occasional passages in italics where she recreates a childhood memory. Dealing with such a clandestine organisation as ASIO means that many questions remain unanswered, though despite all the talk of Dad’s vital work, it emerges in a curious and telling passage that Joan was probably a more important agent than her husband.

The crucial question is: would the children have led happier, more fulfilled lives had their parents kept silent about their secrets and not recruited them as junior spies? We will never know. The three had an emotional reunion to talk about their memories for the purposes of the book. At first Mark said he couldn’t remember anything at all, then certain scenes started coming back.

The siblings have their own children now, all free to go their own ways, unrecruited. They have reknit as a family, though they no longer talk about the past. But they still keep their eyes open. I bet they don’t miss a thing.