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Bob Santamaria.

Towards the end of his life, Bob Santamaria, who had been devoted to fighting communism, would wonder aloud if his mission had failed and his life been wasted. Communism, as such, was dead of course, and perhaps he deserved some slight credit. Yet many of the causes and institutions he was for - not least the Catholic church - had seemed to disintegrate in the struggle.

Perhaps it was but a self-pitying effort to get family and friends to contradict him, recite some of his victories and the importance of his influence. But no-one knew the weaknesses of their arguments, or could be more ruthless in demonstrating them than the man himself. That realism had always been part of his armour.

The Australian Communist Party was dead in the water long before the end of the Cold War in 1989. When Santamaria began his crusade against it 50 years earlier, it had been at the height of its power. The Soviet Union, whose policy it then slavishly followed, was heroically winning the war against Hitler, almost all by itself, after an embarrassing period in which it had been more or less on his side. In the earlier period, Australian communists had seemed to be consciously sabotaging the war effort but once Hitler stabbed Stalin in the back, the party was unbanned, and, in part because of publicity for the titanic struggle in Russia and Ukraine, reached its all-time peak strength of about 23,000 paid up and committed members. That was up from about 4000 two years earlier.

One did not join the communist party in the same manner as one joins Facebook. Or joins Labour or the liberals by emailing $5. One joined a movement, a struggle, a religion and a cause that would take almost all parts of one's life. One's conscience and background is closely examined by people suspicious about spies and infiltrators.

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Nor was it a matter of attending the odd meeting, like going to church on Sundays, as membership of Labor or the Liberals could be. One became committed to a life of activism, involvement, causes, front groups and regular embarrassments before workmates, neighbours, schools and family. If there's anything like it in Australia today, apart from within proto-terrorist movements, it is probably more like joining an intense live-in cult or monastic order.

Santamaria was far from the only one who saw a major threat to his religion, to Australia and to western civilisation from the growth of the ACP.

Disciplined party activists were organising themselves inside trade unions and, with classic Leninist tactics, seizing control from complacent, sometimes corrupt moderates. They were doing the same in any number of front organisations, using them, as the ASIO history puts it, to attract "well-intentioned but politically naive people" to support Soviet objectives.

Beyond well-disciplined members of the party were any numbers of bedfellows and fellow travellers broadly sympathetic to the party and its people, or otherwise having interests in common. The ACP preached a violent overthrow of capitalist democracy and its replacement by a "dictatorship of the proletariat" - led, of course, by it. But if avowedly revolutionary, much of its success in penetrating almost all parts of Australian society came from mundane identification with ordinary working class life, trade union affairs, arts, literature, culture, sports and the environment. Communism, like Catholicism and Sharia was a complete system of life, with an answer for everything.

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Did ASIO make the faintest difference?