The outbreak of war in August 1914 caught Curtin, like the country, in the middle of a federal election campaign. With the Labor Party aching for office, it was constrained in its opposition to the distant conflict. Labor leader Andrew Fisher’s loyal pre-election pledge that Australia would stand by Britain to ‘the last man and the last shilling’ reflected the mood of a public whose blood was up and which elected the mild-mannered Fisher and his sabre-rattling colleague Billy Hughes to lead them into the fray. The Labor Party promised to ‘pursue with the utmost rigour every course necessary for the defence of the Commonwealth and Empire’, while protecting their working-class constituency against war profiteers.1
The war with Germany had been long anticipated and many Australian men were eager to test their mettle alongside British troops in the cause of empire. In Brunswick, there was even talk of changing the suburb’s name so as to remove any perceived German taint.2 When an appeal was made for twenty thousand men to join an Australian Imperial Force, some fifty thousand men queued their way into recruiting halls around Australia. Of course, as Eric Andrews has observed, the great majority of Australian men of military age did not rush to the recruiting halls but sensibly stayed on the sidelines.3 Nevertheless, many of those who did offer themselves for the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) were unionists, apparently deaf to the pre-war calls by Curtin and others to resist the stirring anthem of militarism.4
As editor of the Timber Worker and a leading union official, Curtin had tried to link the Australian labour movement into the worldwide movement against militarism and the spread of war. Now it was all in tatters. The trade union movement across Europe had been caught up by the patriotic frenzy of the war-makers. European workers rushed to enlist in their millions while others worked away at the machinery of war to ensure that the killing to come was done in the most efficient and profitable manner. In Melbourne, crowds had welcomed the announcement of war by attacking in the streets any people of Germanic appearance and later, under the cover of darkness, running amok through the city’s Chinese quarter. In Port Melbourne, stevedores refused to work with German-born overseers and hung a Union Jack over the entrance to their club, requiring everyone who entered to raise their hat and salute the British flag.5 When the VSP protested at this, the executive of the Trades Hall Council backed the stevedores, although Curtin later convinced the full council to deplore ‘union discrimination on the grounds of nationality’.6
Even stalwart socialists joined the ranks, with the Victorian Socialist Party farewelling a number of its erstwhile members. Radical Labor MP and sometime VSP official, Maurice Blackburn, later explained how his former comrades-in-arms allowed themselves to be swept into the European conflagration:
With few exceptions, Labour supporters, Left and Right, accepted the war as inevitable and believed an Allied victory to be necessary. The war was, it seemed, a war against Imperialism, a war to bring liberation to the subject nationalities and to the working class of the German and Austrian Empires, a war to avenge the rape of Belgium.7
Even Tom Mann, who was returning to Britain from South Africa at the time war was declared, did little more than express regret at the turn of events, observing that wars were ‘never in the truest interests of the workers’.8 The rush of patriotic workers to the front had trampled upon his vision of the workers’ internationalism being able to prevent war. Curtin was one of the few leaders in the labour movement, either in Australia or overseas, who remained true to his prewar principles. He blasted war as the ‘assassin’s trade’ and, like Lenin, blamed the ‘mad fever for armaments’ on the ‘competition for overseas markets, made necessary by the advent of monopoly at home’.9
The strength of Curtin’s anti-war rhetoric, and his later gaoling for opposing conscription, have misled some writers into concluding that Curtin was a pacifist.10 He was no such thing. While not prepared to countenance the violence of the state in pursuing what he saw as an imperialist war, he was prepared to support a war of self-defence. It was not violence that he had a problem with; it was the uses to which the violence was put. Curtin was quite prepared to countenance violence in the pursuit of socialism. He repeatedly referred in his writing to the notion of a class war and to the labour movement as an army of workers. And he justified an attack upon non-unionists at Beaufort in 1913, pointing out that ‘the class struggle was not a contest between a girls’ croquet club and a choir’ and workers were right to use violence to protect their hard-won rights.11 Of course, with the coming of the war, those gains were under more threat than ever before.
Despite this, Curtin tried to put a brave face on the events in Europe, the awful course of which was still unclear, professing to see an opportunity for the labour movement to use the social and economic upheaval of the war to force through fundamental political change. According to Curtin, ‘Progress makes headway most rapidly in the periods when the world is torrent-tossed and thunder-stricken. All the great historic epochs are marked by blood and battle.’ He told the readers of the Timber Worker that they were not witnessing the triumph of militarism and imperialism but their death throes, that they were ‘making their last stand in their last ditch. The official cut-throats of the universe are rending each other in one final orgy of disaster.’ Once this conflict between the rival empires was over, Curtin predicted that capitalism would collapse and socialism would have its day. In the meantime, the onus was upon the movement to maintain its ‘faith and loyalty’ in ‘the power of industrial solidarity’ so that it would be prepared for its historic task, when the workers of the world would finally have the chance ‘to set society in order’.12 But the war soon would shake the foundations even of Curtin’s faith.
The results of the federal election seemed to give credence to Curtin’s optimism. The number of Labor voters had increased since 1910 by over fifty per cent to more than one million. That was more than one million soldiers in the socialist army, as Curtin was wont to put it, and proved that the movement was not ‘something ephemeral’.13 But the movement was divided by the war, with national and imperial loyalties competing with the socialist faith for the allegiance of the labour movement. As an internationalist, Curtin could not conceive of fighting his fellow workers. However, many of his comrades in the union movement, the Victorian Socialist Party and the Labor Party either abandoned their faith in the socialist creed and joined the colours of the King, or saw no essential conflict between the two. Curtin, though, kept the pages of the Timber Worker staunchly socialist and as anti-war as he dared. There were strict limits to dissent, though, as military censorship imposed a straitjacket on free speech, leading to the September issue of the Socialist having large parts blacked out.14 Also true to the faith was Curtin’s mentor, Labor MP Frank Anstey, who vainly urged his party to dampen the loyalist frenzy by pointing out to the people ‘that this war is the product and the outcome of the domination of trade and commerce, and the greed of wealth’.15 The future Labor premier of Victoria, Jack Cain, also spoke up against the madness and was arrested three times during August 1914 for speaking in Port Melbourne streets against the war. They were lonely and discordant voices in a popular chorus of imperial patriotism.
In October 1914, as tens of thousands of Australian recruits were kitted out in the uniform of the AIF, the Timber Worker suggested that the war was a reaction to the growing success of socialist parties across the world. It claimed that the capitalists had unleashed this ‘vast human fratricide’ so that they could ‘drive the populace back to its hole’. The war would divert the workers from the march towards socialism, making them turn instead to ‘slash and rend each other, revive the old national enmities, resurrect from the grave the racial hatreds, the beastly hunger for murder, the intoxication for blood, and the frightful horror of the shambles’. And the revival of national enmities would cause feelings of internationalism to retreat.16 Announcing the cancellation of the international woodworkers congress in Vienna, a German official of the union, writing from Berlin, claimed that woodworkers had done their best to stop the war but had been unable to do so. He acknowledged that workers ‘must at present do their duty in defending their country’.17 Unlike his European counterparts, Curtin was determined to resist the patriotic clamouring of the mob and the militaristic machinations of the state. He explained away the enthusiasm of European workers for the war by arguing that the international labour movement had been caught by surprise and had insufficient time to prevent the conflict. According to Curtin, the war had made internationalism, regardless of ‘sex, creed or color . . . even more appealing’.18
Curtin did what he could to support internationalism. Along with the Socialist Party, the union agreed to affiliate with the Australian Peace Alliance, which Curtin had helped to form and which was dedicated to keeping the sputtering flame of internationalism alight in the face of the gale of war. Curtin served on the alliance’s executive while Ross was elected its treasurer.19 Carefully keeping within the limits of the military censors, Curtin also printed in the Timber Worker a list of historical quotations from famous people, all deploring the business of war.20 It was part of a vain appeal by Curtin to the intellect of the workers at a time when reason had given way to blind emotion. On a practical level, Curtin sought to promote the socialist cause by protecting his vulnerable constituency from the excesses of the war profiteers. As part of a union delegation, Curtin waited upon the new Labor Prime Minister, Andrew Fisher, appealing for the federal Government to protect workers from having their homes taken by the banks if they could not maintain their payments because of war-induced unemployment. Fisher fobbed him off, arguing that it was a matter for the State governments. When Curtin then pointed to the case of a bank which had been assisted by the federal Government and which had at the same time extended an overdraft to a speculator in wheat, Fisher was quick to express his abhorrence of such profiteering. However, although declaring that the ‘toiling masses should be protected in every possible way’, Fisher did not suggest any imaginative ways in which the Labor Government could use its power for the protection of its working-class supporters.21 It would be two more years before it would peg the price of bread.
Curtin also chaired a Trades Hall committee on unemployment, which proposed solutions to the economic dislocation caused by the war. The committee called for a central register of the unemployed so that the scale of the problem could be ascertained and programs directed to those in need. More than ten thousand unionists were unemployed in Melbourne by January 1915.22 Some solved their problem, at least in the short term, by joining the AIF. Curtin was seeking less drastic solutions, arguing that the Government should institute a program of public works, principally by building roads and railways in rural areas and embarking on a program of land clearing and government cultivation of hitherto untilled soil. There should also be a ‘compulsory cultivation law’ to help reverse the decline of the rural population. In the context of the war-induced shipping shortage, it was hardly a viable option. There was no point in growing more wheat or raising more sheep when the ships were not available to transport the resulting wheat and wool to overseas markets. Among other public works suggested, Curtin urged the ‘wood blocking of all main approaches to the city’, a proposal that would provide work for his union members.23 But government funding was already being stretched by the growing demands of the war. In the event, the war would provide its own solution to the problem of unemployment, transferring men from city streets to far-off trenches.
In accord with his view of the war, and in the absence yet of any desperate battles involving Australian troops, Curtin tried to prepare the labour movement for the struggle that he anticipated would occur at home with the ending of the war. Rather than directly agitating against the war, much of his work was in the nature of propaganda for socialism and supporting specialised education for workers. As an example of the struggle to come, Curtin addressed a meeting of his members at the Trades Hall Council in January 1915 on Robert Ross’s ‘notable story of the Eureka Stockade’.24 Every two or three weeks, the union faithful would assemble to discuss social and political questions as a way of equipping them for their own historic role. At the same time, Curtin was on the central council of the Workers’ Educational Association,25 which organised lecturers from Melbourne University to speak to classes of workers, mainly on history and economics. The association urged groups of workers to meet at their houses to ‘collectively study’ while Curtin advertised books that he offered to send out for discussion. They ranged from treatises on the ‘Industrial Revolution’ and the ‘Principles of Political Economy’ to works on ‘Heredity’ and ‘Evolution’ and even a ‘Dictionary of Synonyms’.26 It conjures up an interesting picture: the vanguard of the Australian working class brandishing their dictionaries of synonyms as they stormed the citadels of capitalist power. Of course, there was a serious intent behind the choice of books. Curtin wanted an educated working class that would be immune to the propaganda appeals of the conservative press. With or without their dictionaries, Australian workers were never called upon to fulfil the historic role that Curtin had foreseen for them. Neither did the war go according to Curtin’s hopeful prediction.
The events at Gallipoli in April 1915 changed the nature of the war for Australians. The initial surge of patriotism at the outbreak of war now increased in its volume, drowning out the voices of those men and women of principle who tried to stand in its way. Just days before the Australian landing at Gallipoli, Curtin’s optimism and sense of purpose seemed undimmed. At the Socialist Party’s Sunday night lecture in the Bijou Theatre on 4 April, after performances by the Socialist choir, the orchestra and a number of soloists, Curtin explained to the packed audience the government action that was required to deal with unemployment and the effects of the drought. Later that week, the Timber Worker carried an account of the increasing union membership in Australia and the tentative moves towards union amalgamations. Together, they suggested to Curtin that the workers were ‘realising that the class war . . . is a vital truth’ and that the hoped-for One Big Union would ultimately be ‘an accomplished fact’. A small sign of Curtin’s confidence was seen in an advertisement by the New South Wales branch of the union for two organisers to recruit country members to the cause. They were offered a salary of six pounds a week and a motor bicycle, although they had to provide their own petrol.27 While the sight of two union organisers puttering along a dusty rural road might not presage the imminence of capitalism’s collapse, it held out the prospect of continuing recruitment for the labour cause. However, within weeks of this advertisement, and of Curtin’s overly optimistic prognosis, recruitment for the distant military cause would come to dominate Australian politics and to split the labour movement for a generation.
On 26 April 1915, outside the stately pile of Melbourne’s Trades Hall, a building that vied in size and sense of self-importance with the Victorian Parliament, the depleted ranks of the organised labour movement formed behind the painted and finely embroidered banners of their respective trade unions. Marching determinedly through the streets of Melbourne to their meeting place at the Exhibition Building, they were there to commemorate the historic achievement of the eight-hour day, won by Victorian stonemasons in 1856. Just a day earlier, but on the other side of the world, the ranks of the Australian Imperial Force had formed up for a different purpose, storming ashore at a small indentation on the coast of the Gallipoli peninsula. The feats of the Australian soldiers, and the terrible casualties they suffered, would not reach Australia for several weeks. When it did so, it would dramatically change the course of Australian history and of Curtin’s life. Instead of the working class enjoying its historic moment in postwar Australia, as Curtin was hoping for, the forces of conservatism and imperial patriotism would emerge triumphant from the battlefield.
In ignorance of these distant events, but mindful of the distractions of war, Curtin called on timber workers to ‘prove loyal to the traditions and the principles of the cause’ by turning out in force for the Eight-Hour Day march. Perhaps to assuage any guilt they might feel about engaging in such a peacetime procession while their fellow Australians were girding for war, Curtin cloaked the union marchers in the garb of an army. He likened the labour movement to a ‘marching army of the proletariat’ that was ‘marching for the Cause that has come down the ages like a great river widening to the sea – marching forward valiantly, hopefully, powerfully to justice and freedom and peace and culture and love and honor’. It was the ‘army of Progress’, the ‘army of the Brave’, with Curtin imploring his members to ‘be on hand as the band strikes up, with left foot forward, and heart aflame, evidencing that in the Unity of Labor is the hope of the world’.28 As with the religious overtones evident in his writing, these martial metaphors served a double purpose. On the one hand, they helped to build morale among the rank and file by investing them with the sense of being part of a growing army that would inexorably win through to victory in the long campaign against capitalism. On the other hand, and in the context of the war, it doubtless helped to assuage the guilt and the doubts about their manliness that were raised by them not enlisting in the regular army.
It was not until the June issue of the Timber Worker that the events at Gallipoli were finally acknowledged. Military censorship had kept the news of the full extent of those awful events from the Australian public. The first news of the landing was not published in Australian newspapers until 8 May, two weeks after the events they described, while the long casualty list was released weeks later and piecemeal so as to minimise the shock to an Australian public relatively unused to the toll of war. This careful management of the news allowed Australians to take pride in the courage of their soldiers before having slowly to count the cost of their commitment to empire. Few shrank from the commitment. They believed the words of the imperial proponents, that Australian menfolk had proved the virility of the young commonwealth on the cliffs of Gallipoli, and they revelled in the sense of nationalism that resulted from the reports of the fighting. Although Gallipoli was crucial in creating a sense of Australian nationalism in the former colonies, it was also, as Bill Gammage has pointed out, ‘a dividing rather than a unifying experience. It separated those who had fought in the war from those who had not.’29 Curtin, who had likened soldiering to state-sanctioned mass murder,30 would be forever on the opposite side of that divide.
Curtin also found himself diverging from the view of Tom Mann who, while deploring the war, now argued from London that it had to be fought to a British victory. Writing to Robert Ross in April 1915, Mann claimed that ‘it would be most seriously harmful if the ruling class of Germany should gain the ascendancy in other countries’ and that he therefore believed ‘that it ought and must be fought out’.31 The awful carnage on the Western Front, along with the defeat at Gallipoli, had yet to occur when Mann wrote these lines. Moreover, Mann was convinced, as he wrote to Percy Jones in Melbourne, that the war would be over by August or September 1915 and that talk of it lasting for four years was wrong since ‘it cannot [last four years] on the scale they are now preparing. 1915 will see an end of it.’32 Whether Curtin heard of these opinions is not known. Anyway, the letters were received in Melbourne after the battles at Gallipoli had begun and the war had taken its turn for the worse.
Although he joined the public mourning at Australia’s collective loss, Curtin tried to focus the attention of his working-class readers on the greater battle to come, that against capitalism. In a black-bordered article, Curtin bemoaned
This horrible business of war! Our brothers displayed magnificent courage. This was to be expected, and it is a heritage that in years to come may help us to win to social emancipation. We mourn with those whose homes are desolate, whose hearts are anguished. Let the death of those who are of our blood move us to confront this mockery called civilisation and consecrate ourselves anew to the movement which builds for social justice and the world’s peace.33
The problem was that Gallipoli led to a public outpouring of imperial fervour, a vigorous recruitment drive to fill the depleted ranks of the AIF and a move against those like Curtin perceived to be disloyalists because of their anti-war stands. His courage and his character would be tested as never before.