Annie’s death occurred as the Victorian Socialist Party celebrated its first anniversary and embarked on a campaign that would win it wide public support and new converts to the cause. The party’s crop of speakers and their supporters continued to mount weekly street corner meetings in many of Melbourne’s working-class areas as well as the traditional Sunday meeting at the Yarra Bank. Strollers on the pier at Port Melbourne, bargain-hunting shoppers in Collingwood’s Smith Street, at the Eastern Market in the city and the market in South Melbourne, all heard the appeal of the party. The Socialist had become so successful that it changed from a fortnightly to a weekly publication in September 1906. Selling a thousand copies a week at a penny a copy, it appeared each Friday at newsagents and at street corner meetings.1 However, the problem was in keeping the party members committed to the struggle for a social revolution when the party had disavowed revolutionary methods to achieve it. It was difficult to remain passionate about a party and its cause when its methods were restricted to propaganda. So it was providential for the party that its street corner meetings in the Melbourne suburb of Prahran provoked the local council into banning them.
Although they had been meeting there for several months, and were sometimes moved on by police for blocking traffic, the situation changed on 6 October 1906. A leading VSP speaker, Joe Swebleses, refused to move on and was arrested for his defiance, thereby sparking what became known in socialist circles as the Prahran Free Speech Fight. It was, claimed Bertha Walker, the campaign that put the VSP ‘on the map as a serious, courageous political party’.2 It elicited wide support because the council action was palpably unfair as it allowed groups like the Salvation Army to hold similar street corner meetings without interference. By banning the political speeches of the socialists, the council was breaching what most Australians would have regarded as a fundamental civil liberty. But the real coup for the party came when its members, both men and women, agreed they would resist the council to the point of going to gaol. Any fines levied on them would not be paid and they would serve their term in prison in a defiant campaign of civil disobedience.
Swebleses was the first to go inside, serving fourteen days. Over the next six weeks, 21 other party speakers were arrested for refusing to move on when requested to do so by police. Eighteen of them went to gaol. Frank Hyett was arrested on Saturday 20 October after stepping onto the party’s finely crafted speaker’s box and launching forth through the megaphone. He was sentenced to fourteen days’ gaol on the following Monday. It seems that Curtin attended his friend’s court case, as he later visited Hyett’s ailing mother to inform her of the result.3 The members, including four women, served sentences that ranged from three days to as much as five weeks. The latter sentence was handed down on Tom Mann following his second arrest. While in gaol, Mann was visited by future British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald, who was then on a tour of Australia.4 Just as the Salvationists did when their church faced similar oppression in the 1880s and won its right to propagate the faith on street corners, the VSP made much of its martyred members. Percy Jones had prison uniforms made up for the released members to wear as a badge of honour at a giant public meeting in the Melbourne Town Hall while some five thousand postcards of the ‘prisoners’ were sold to raise funds for their families.5
While Hyett defied the ban and continued to speak in Prahran, although without again being arrested, Curtin seems not to have invited arrest. Although he did speak with Jack Gunn and others at a public meeting chaired by Mrs Bruce, it was held safe within the confines of the Prahran Town Hall.6 It is not clear why Curtin, as a prominent party speaker, did not provoke his own arrest in furtherance of the cause. It may have been out of consideration for his family who would have again become destitute if Curtin, as was likely, had lost his three-year-old job at Titan because of a gaol sentence. Or it may have been due to the kindness of his party comrades in keeping him out of the front line because of his recent bereavement. It is possible that it may also have been due to apprehension by Curtin about the effect on him of the prison experience. The rigours of confinement certainly seemed to have hit him hard when he was finally imprisoned for a few days in 1916.
Despite the public support, expressed at public meetings throughout Melbourne and Geelong, the campaign failed in its objective. In late December 1906, the party beat a tactical retreat for fear of having all its speakers caught up in gaol with ever longer sentences.7 But the campaign succeeded admirably in adding to the socialist ranks. A Prahran branch of the party was established with 60 members while the party as a whole grew to a peak of 1808 members by March 1907.8 However, it proved to be the high-water mark of the party rather than being, as they confidently expected, just one of the initial waves of the incoming tide of socialism. The party would not enjoy such wide public support again until its principled stand against conscription in 1916. Once again, it would be a liberal issue of civil liberties, rather than support for socialism itself, that would evoke public sympathy.
The support that the party received, combined with the increasing vote enjoyed by the Labor Party, led Mann to declare in January 1907 that the collapse of capitalism was imminent and to warn the faithful that ‘the day draws near, comrades, be ready’. At the federal election in December 1906, two members of the VSP, E.J. Russell and Tom Tunnecliffe, had been accepted as Labor candidates for the Senate and Russell was subsequently elected. It seemed to be a sign of socialism’s coming success. But Mann more than anyone knew the limited reformist agenda of most Labor MPs. And these limits were confirmed to the dismay of Victorian socialists when the State Labor Party conference in March 1907 refused to reinforce the party’s socialisation objective or to remove its racial clause. The former comradely relations between the two parties became increasingly strained, with the Labor Party complaining in May 1907 about the VSP’s control of the annual May Day celebrations while, for their part, the socialists increasingly despaired at the political compromises of the Labor Party.9
In June 1907, a socialist conference was held in Melbourne under the presidency of Percy Jones and attended by representatives from interstate socialist organisations. The conference had high on its agenda the question of whether parliamentary or trade union politics was the best way to achieve socialism. Leading VSP members such as Mann, Curtin and Hyett still believed that a major part of their party’s role should be to stiffen the socialism of the Labor Party rather than to act as a rival party to it. But pressure at the conference, mainly from more radical Sydney socialists, saw a majority of the delegates decree that parliamentary activity was of ‘secondary importance’. The conference decided that those who ‘proclaim the class war’ should be ‘too dignified to seek election’ under the auspices of a party ‘whose members do not believe in the class war, and never declare in favour of Socialism’.10 It meant that VSP members should no longer seek Labor Party endorsement for either parliamentary or council positions.11 Although Mann interpreted the motion’s wording in a creative manner that allowed for continued contacts with the Labor Party, many VSP members felt impelled to relinquish their membership of the Labor Party or, alternatively, to leave the Socialist Party. For their part, Hyett and Curtin remained as members of both parties as did, for the time being, Percy Jones.12 Jones’s continued membership of the VSP was important as his contributions helped to keep the party afloat financially.13
The conference decision not only increased tension between the VSP and the Labor Party but also within the VSP itself as members emboldened by the conference majority began to challenge Mann and his supporters for control of the party. The same month as the conference, a VSP member stood as a candidate in the Port Melbourne council election. Although coming last in the poll, he won a sufficiently respectable vote to boost the arguments of those wanting the party to stand candidates of their own in all elections against the endorsed Labor Party candidates. Curtin was not among their number, arguing forcefully in the pages of the Socialist against such a strategy and acting as one of Frank Anstey’s campaign secretaries when Anstey successfully defended his seat in the Victorian Parliament at the 1907 election. The following year, when the Brunswick branch of the Labor Party began a monthly night of entertainment of a social and educational nature, Curtin, as the branch’s president, chaired the first meeting at which Anstey and others gave readings. Although he stepped down as president later that year in favour of Anstey, he became secretary instead. Apart from the close personal and political connection between young Jack and his older mentor, one supposes that Curtin justified his continued straddling of the political fence by arguing that Anstey was the radical exception in a mostly reformist party, providing a genuine socialist voice in parliament and therefore deserving of his support.14
As the former close fellowship of the VSP began to disintegrate, Curtin increasingly relied on his close friendship with Frank Hyett and Ethel Gunn. Indeed, Ethel is said to have once threatened, following an argument with Hyett, that she would marry Curtin instead.15 When not with Hyett and Ethel, he spent a lot of time with the Bruce girls, Yatala, Jennie and Beryl. Beryl recalls her childhood when she was ‘always dragging on the skirts of her mother in the socialist hall’ and her ‘greatest delight was sitting on the floor playing “jacks” . . . with all the future political labor luminaries’, including Jack Curtin.16 The Bruce girls were among the first members of the Young Comrades Contingent of the Socialist Army, a group established by the VSP for children under 16 years of age. Recruits to the contingent had to declare that they were ‘very sorry there is so much suffering through poverty’ and to profess a belief that ‘socialism will cure this evil, and that it is possible for all to be happy’.17 Curtin also turned for fellowship to Jessie Gunn, the younger sister of Ethel and the late and much-lamented Annie. Ever since Annie’s death, Curtin seems to have kept in check his yearnings for the affection and companionship that a romantic relationship can bring by developing innocent relationships instead with young girls and older women, females who were either too young or too old to take the place of Annie.
For her part, Jessie Gunn was just 14 years old and still lived with her mother at Rheola when the correspondence appears to have begun in October 1907. Over the next two and a half years, Curtin would write at least seventeen or eighteen letters to Jessie along with several postcards. The problem in assessing the correspondence is partly due to the fact that only Curtin’s side of it has survived and even that is only partially extant. Without a full set of Curtin’s letters, and with none of Jessie’s letters to him, it is not possible to determine with any certainty who initiated the letters. However, from the tone of Curtin’s early letters, it would seem that it was young Jessie who had begun the correspondence, perhaps with the simple intention of having Curtin as a penfriend. Then again, the correspondence may have been started at the suggestion of Jessie’s mother or elder sister Ethel, who may have been concerned to lift Curtin out of his depression. Some credence is given to the latter view by the correspondence appearing to begin around the time of the first anniversary of Annie’s death.
It was to Rheola that Curtin directed his correspondence, writing to a girl who he had not met. Historians have had difficulty assessing the correspondence and its meaning. None of them seems to have been aware of Annie’s existence. Lloyd Ross quotes extensively from the letters, noting how Curtin confided in the distant Jessie much more than he did to the close-at-hand Bruce girls. He suggested that Curtin used the letters simply as a sounding-board for his ideas and as a means to improve his literary skills. Geoffrey Serle endorsed this view, recording simply that Curtin was ‘confiding in her and struggling to improve his self-expression’.18 But there was more to it than that. In fact, his intentions seem to have been mixed. At times, the letters have the tone of a helpful ‘uncle’ concerned with the education and upbringing of a dutiful ‘niece’; at other times, it is Curtin the socialist propagandist who comes to the fore concerned to instil socialist ideology in Jessie; and at other times there is a teasing and flirtatious tone to the correspondence, with Curtin perhaps hoping that Jessie, when she came of age, might be able to replace Annie in his affections.
Many of Curtin’s letters are taken up with summaries of books that he had read, mostly romantic adventures, or descriptions of his political and social activities within the VSP, particularly focusing on the doings of the Bruce girls, who were cousins to Jessie. In what was probably his second letter,19 written at the end of October 1907, Curtin begins by apologising for being a tardy correspondent. Despite a promise to ‘never offend again’, this would be a familiar refrain in his letters over the next three years. In her letter, Jessie had told him of a visit to Rheola by Yatala Bruce, Aunty Wayman and Ethel Gunn who had all put on ‘Melbourne Airs’. She also told him of how she had read Lorna Doone. She closed her letter with lots of kisses. Curtin gently chided her for this, wondering what kind of girl would put ‘a lot of crosses . . . in a letter to a young man she has never seen’, but quickly backtracked and implored her to continue doing so. Curtin had not read Lorna Doone but he extolled the work of Sir Walter Scott, particularly his poetry which was ‘beautiful’, citing The Lady of the Lake and Marmion, the latter being the reading he had performed as a child at Charlton. Indeed, Curtin thought all the Scottish writers were ‘worth reading’, although Scott was the ‘easiest to understand because he uses English much as we use it’. He finished with a reference to Jessie’s flower garden at Rheola, promising that: ‘Someday I am going to see that garden, and the Gardener, meanwhile I must console myself with the reflection that it is the bounden duty of the Gardener to emulate the flowers that grow under her control, by blossoming like them, in the sunshine of happiness’. Signing off as ‘Your Dear Friend, Jack’, and asking to be remembered to ‘your Mother and all your brothers and sisters’, Curtin again warned her not to leave off the crosses from the end of her letters.20 The letters between them would take on an increasingly flirtatious tone.
In his next letter, on 24 November 1907, Curtin apologises for not having had the time ‘to settle down to the writing of a letter to a little country girl that will contain some items at any rate that will be of interest to her’. His mind, he said, had been too full of facts and arguments during the previous two weeks that he had been using in speeches and articles. He then goes on to tell her of the Socialist Picnic which was a ‘huge success’ and an event that Curtin clearly revelled in. As he explained to Jessie, ‘The Picnics of the Socialists are the most enjoyable you could imagine – there is no stiffness[,] you can do just as you like, and to us fatheads who never know one minute what we would like to do the next, that is a powerful factor in occasioning pleasure’. He praised Jessie for doing likewise at a picnic she had attended, when she had defied the ‘arrangements, or the disarrangements . . . and ascended the Granites to prove they had told lies about the water’. ‘Bravo’, commented Curtin, advising Jessie to ‘never do as they would have you do, and never believe what others tell you; Ask for the evidence and on its production then say: Yes it is so.’21 He had clearly imbibed the educational strictures of Frank Tate and Charles Phillips during his Charlton schooldays.
On 9 December 1907,22 and writing in the darkness of his impoverished circumstances in their single-fronted terrace in Barry Street Brunswick, Curtin confessed that he did not even know how old Jessie was, although he guessed he was writing to
a Jessie who is, say fourteen years, and not yet awakened to the wonderful possibilities of many things, including kiss-in-the-ring, which I beg to assure you my dear Miss Disdain is a game, you will not only engage in very frequently, but will regard as infinitely superior to the inserting of crosses in the postscript of a letter.
Continuing with this teasing tone, Curtin predicted, despite her stating ‘a thousand times that you will never, never, never play such “silly” games’, that ‘when I go to Rheola I take leave to prophesy that there will be no Miss Proper, (with a capital P), to greet me’. With the wisdom of his years, Curtin told Jessie of her cousin Yatala who also ‘professes a haughty contempt for “boys”’ but, wrote Curtin,
it is all ‘make-believe’; Yat is like all girls, yourself included, continually running down ‘boys’, simply to disguise your liking for a particular one, or as is often the case, a half-dozen. Girls [are] flirts, young girls especially so. What do they read poetry for, and go to picnics, and yes – look for flowers, and chase butterflies. You cannot tell me that it is only fun, because they go there in dead earnest.23
Two weeks later, Curtin informed her that he was going to attend a Boxing Day picnic at Heidelberg and was determined ‘to play kiss-in-the-ring with every member of the Ruskin Class who has been so defiantly proclaiming her contempt for such foolishness’. Christmas, he wrote, was ‘the only time during the year when I wish I could don a frock and wear a blouse with shimmering colours . . .’ What Curtin meant by this is unclear as the following page is missing.24 As it turned out, Curtin did not get the chance to kiss any of the girls of the Ruskin class. Or so he assured Jessie when next he wrote.
Curtin confessed that he had been defeated by the weather. The day had started with hot northerly winds, that had swirled dust among the crowd, followed later by heavy rain. This meant that ‘our faces were dirty through the dust, and people do not, I don’t at any rate, like kissing dirty faces. Do you Jessie? I am sure you do not.’ Earlier, Curtin had attended ‘a great festival’ put on for the scholars of the Socialist Sunday school on Christmas Eve complete with ‘a Christmas tree loaded with gifts’. He teased her again about the predilection of Australian children for picnics, asking why was ‘kissin-the-ring, not only played, but always and frequently played?’ Then his tone changed to the solicitous ‘uncle’, urging that she resolve for her New Year’s resolution to read a paragraph every day and then ‘think over it, ask yourself what it means’ and never ‘cease to learn’. Although she was now of an age to leave school, Curtin warned that her school knowledge ‘will be valueless unless you retain it, and strengthen it, and increase it’. He signed off as ‘Your Affectionate Friend Jack’.25 His strictures to Jessie were like ones that he might have given to a class of the Young Comrades Contingent as they were being readied for their historic role in the socialist ‘army’. And it seemed to Curtin and his fellow socialists that the army’s time might not be far off if only they could agree on a common strategy. But such agreement would prove frustratingly elusive.