The Cold War threw Australian’s postwar hopes into stark relief. Social and economic rights became associated with a menacing global ideology, while the imperative of a new type of war saw political and civil rights challenged like never before. This chapter analyses the career of Australian civil libertarians in this decade, particularly in light of the 1949 trial of Communist Party of Australia leader Lance Sharkey for sedition and a 1951 referendum on whether to ban the party wholesale. While such moves drew calls of government hypocrisy in light of the recently passed Universal Declaration from civil libertarians, supporters could equally point to communism’s human rights abuses abroad. These usages commingled with and were enabled by earlier claims of British citizenship rights as instruments of political power and contestation. Similar problems emerged for Indigenous rights campaigners in the 1950s, who saw the UDHR as a roadmap for Indigenous equality. Such hopes soon gave way to the difficult reality of translating the Declaration's precepts into a very alien context and frustration at the limitations of their global influence or enforceability.

As well as introducing key themes and literature, this introductory chapter deals with the concept of rights in Australian pre’s key period of investigation and setting the scene for a discussion of why human rights emerged as a common rhetorical tool in the 1940s. Movements for the abolition of convictism, appropriate treatment of Indigenous people and universal manhood suffrage from the 1820s up until the 1850s grappled with the long, contested history of British subjecthood. These could serve both democratic and elitist ends, as well as exclude those whose position as a subject was unclear. Movements for women’s rights and against restrictions on Chinese immigration are shown to have encountered some of the inbuilt fetters on the notion of Britishness from the 1850s to the 1880s – specifically its gendered and racial exclusions. Yet, inventive uses were found of the “British Rights” concept by activists working within a firmly patriarchal, racist context where ideas of universality were unpopular.

The 1940s are remembered as the birthplace of modern human rights, justifying wartime needs for regimentation and framing the utopian moment of the postwar years. The Catholic Church proved an early partisan of universal human rights in Australia, with the inauguration of the annual Catholic Social Justice Statement in 1940 dubbed a declaration of “fundamental human rights”. The statement and those that followed allowed the Church to eek out a place in the postwar world. At the same time, Australia's Labor Party sought a greater centralisation of state power to ensure that Australians could enjoy the "freedom from fear and want" the Atlantic Charter promised. The 1944 Powers Referendum saw the need for social and economic rights face off against personal liberties in a strenuous debate which informed Australia's approach to negotiating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Decade’s end saw Chinese and Malaysian seamen campaign alongside their white Australian wives for their “human rights”, only to find a less-than-receptive ear from a government and judiciary who, while supportive of the Universal Declaration in the abstract, wanted to protect domestic jurisdiction at all costs