Published Resources Details
Book Section
- Title
- Piesse, Edmund Leolin (1880 - 1947), Foreign policy analyst and lawyer
- In
- Australian dictionary of biography, volume 11: 1891 - 1939 Nes-Smi
- Imprint
- Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1988, pp. 227-229
- Url
- https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/piesse-edmund-leolin-8046
- Description
Published online in 2006
- Abstract
Quotes:
"After leaving the Friends' High School, Piesse graduated in Science from the University of Tasmania in 1900. He abandoned subsequent studies in mathematics at King's College, Cambridge, when obliged to return home following his father's death in 1902, but graduated in law in 1905. He never lost interest in the natural sciences and in 1912-14 was honorary secretary of the local Royal Society."
"In 1909 he joined the newly established Australian Intelligence Corps and as staff officer undertook the first military survey of Tasmania. Following the outbreak of World War I the Defence Department transferred him to the Intelligence section of the Directorate of Military Operations in Melbourne and in March 1916 he was appointed, as a major, director of military intelligence. His duties included drafting and enforcing War Precautions Act regulations, postal and press censorship, counter-espionage, surveillance of enemy aliens and even sometimes of allied aliens, notably the Japanese. Piesse found the collation and analysis of strategic intelligence the most absorbing and challenging of his tasks."