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From 1921 to 1931, Clowes carried out regimental duties, at one time acting as aide-de-camp to the Queensland
governor (1929). He was married in 1925 to Eva Magennis of Yass, New South Wales, and promoted to Major in
the following year.
In 1933 the Lyons Government established a permanent garrison at Darwin, as part of imperial strategy to
contain the Japanese. Lieutenant (later Major-General) R R McNicoll led the engineer detachment of this force
(later 7th Fortress Company), while Clowes commanded 9th Heavy Battery and had overall command of the
garrison. The main task of the garrison was to build fortifications and their own quarters (Larrakeyah Barracks),
a task made difficult by torrid climate and lack of modern equipment. The officers became part of Darwin’s social
elite, a role that Clowes enjoyed: one of the better known tales has him ‘rushing from a lady’s cabin on SS Marcus
as the ship pulled away from the Darwin wharf at 2.30 am one morning, making a mighty leap to the wharf and
thus barely avoiding being carried on to Brisbane’. McNicoll said chat Clowes had ‘average intelligence and
limited imagination’; more diplomatically, war historian Dudley McCarthy was to assess him as ‘learned, cautious
and taciturn’. He continued to find favour with his superiors, being in August 1934 the first Royal Military College
graduate to attain the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel; and by the time he was posted out in April 1936 his small force
had installed a strong artillery defence against naval attack. It was not their fault that the only antiaircraft defence
allocated to Darwin was one battery of three guns.
In July 1936 Clowes embarked for England and remained there for two years on staff courses. In 1939–40
he commanded the 6th Military District, Tasmania, then went in April 1940 to the Middle East as Brigadier in
command of 1 Corps (AIF) Artillery. There he won a Mention in Dispatches. In 1942 he and other high-ranking
AIF officers were recalled to Australia in the face of the Japanese threat. Promoted to Major-General, Clowes
commanded the force that turned back the Japanese advance at Milne Bay in August/September 1942. This was the
pinnacle of his military career and won him the award of Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).
His later commands, of 11 Division and Victoria Line of Commonwealth Area, were in Australia.
In 1945 Clowes was appointed a member of the Army Establishment Investigating Committee, and went on
to become the Director-General of Army Disposals. In February 1946 he was made Adjutant-General at AIF
Headquarters, and one month later was appointed second military member of the Military Board. He retired from
the army in 1949.
Clowes was a keen sportsman, and had been captain of the cricket and football team at Duntroon. The Launceston
Examiner (17 April 1940) described him as ‘the most accomplished sportsman the Royal Military College has
produced’. He long outlived his ‘playboy’ reputation in Darwin to earn the approbation of war historian Gavin
Long as ‘a cool and experienced regular soldier’ and a notable place in Australian military history. He died in 1968,
aged seventy-six, survived by his daughter.
G Long, To Benghazi, 1952; D McCarthy, South West Pacific Area, First Year, Kokoda to Wau, 1959; A Powell, The Shadow’s Edge, 1988;
Sabretache, (Journal of the Military Historical Society of Australia) October/December 1985; AWM card index, 1914–18 war and 1939–45 war
personnel; AWM biographical news cuttings; Australian Military Orders.
J HAYDON, Vol 1.
CLUNE, FRANCIS PATRICK (FRANK) (1893–1971), worker in many occupations, soldier, accountant and
author, was born in Sydney on 27 November 1893. The son of George Clune, an Irish-born labourer, and his
wife Theresa Cullen. He was educated at Catholic schools in Sydney. After an adventurous life and service in the
Australian Imperial Force during the First World War, he qualified as an accountant in the early 1920s and settled
in the wealthy Sydney suburb of Vaucluse. In 1916 he married Maud Elizabeth Roy. They were divorced in 1920
and in 1923 he married Thelma Cecily Smith, who survived him with two sons.
In 1934 he embarked on a writing career, which produced over 60 books, several of which dealt with the
Northern Territory. These included Last of the Australian Explorers (1943), The Red Heart (1944), The Forlorn
Hope (1945), Overland Telegraph (1955) and The Fortune Hunters (1955). Most were concerned with sensational
personalities or historical incidents and took great liberties with evidence. Just about all were, in fact, written for
him by P R Stephensen, being based on travel diaries and research notes that Clune provided. In 1940 Clune was
second only to Ion Idriess as Australia’s best selling author. Although much of his income went in fees to
Stephensen and he also continued work as an accountant, he received free travel and other concessions, which
allowed him to visit the Territory and many other places.
Those for whom long distance travel was impossible eagerly purchased Clune’s jaunty narratives, complete
with what the historian Craig Munro described as their ‘awful puns and continual quips’. They were often very
long, 100 000 words or more. His importance in Australian literature was principally as an historical populariser.
In this capacity he was able to introduce his readers to aspects of Northern Territory history that had hitherto been
little known. In The Forlorn Hope, for example, he recounted the demise of the settlement at Escape Cliffs and
the voyage of a group of settlers there who sailed a whaleboat over 3 000 kilometres to Chapman Bay in Western
Australia. The Fortune Hunters partly dealt with the Newcastle Waters area, which made a very favourable
impression on him. Last of the Australian Explorers is a biography of Donald Mackay, who mapped parts of
Central Australia.
‘Thick-set with close-cropped hair’, Munro wrote, ‘Clune looked more like a roughneck Texan than a Vaucluse
accountant... Boisterous and extroverted, he remained aggressively Australian.’ Politically conservative, he was
a member of the right wing group The New Guard during the early 1930s and was a very strong anti Communist
after the Second World War. But his writing also revealed sympathy for Australian underdogs, particularly those
of Irish Catholic background.