Curtin’s resignation as secretary of the Timber Workers’ Union came just as Australians were about to be mobilised for the war as never before. The moderate Labor Prime Minister, Andrew Fisher, had been shoved aside at the end of October by his ambitious deputy, the diminutive Welsh firebrand, Billy Hughes, who compensated for his age, size and physical frailty by sending the young and the fit off to war. He was just as cavalier about ditching Labor policies, even the prices policy that he had personally promoted and which had formed a central part of Labor’s election platform in 1914. Undeterred, on 28 October 1915, the day after being sworn in, Hughes dispensed with a planned referendum on prices that would have given the Government power to conscript wealth and prevent war profiteering at the expense of ordinary people.1 He was a win-the-war prime minister who would fight to the last Australian soldier to do it.
Just as social reform was set aside by the Labor Government for the duration of the war, so too did the socialist movement become distracted by the need to combat the militarist mood that was gripping Australian society. They were concerned in particular to head off government moves to introduce conscription to fill the dwindling ranks of the AIF as the post-Gallipoli rush to enlist began to wane. The labour movement began to mobilise its support behind the anti-conscription activities of Bob Ross and the Socialist Party. From being relatively isolated because of its critical stance towards the war, the party now began to enjoy levels of support that it had not known since the Free Speech fights of 1906–07.
Initially, Jack Curtin was in the thick of it. Just three days after Hughes’s accession to power, Curtin delivered a powerful speech at Melbourne’s Bijou Theatre entitled ‘Socialism versus the War’. Doubtless there would have been intelligence officers in the audience noting down his speech for possible hints of sedition and Curtin must have come close to exposing himself to charges under the draconian War Precautions Act. Speaking under the auspices of the Socialist Party’s Sunday night lecture series, Curtin warned his audience against being distracted by the war from the ‘fundamental principles of socialism’. Victory in the war, he argued, was of no account compared with the socialist struggle: ‘None of the things the workers were striving for – the abolition of unemployment, poverty, exploitation etc. – could be secured either by the triumph of the Allies or the Teutons in this war . . .’ And the workers would only achieve their aims when they ‘smashed down the capitalist system within their own borders’. This would entail ‘the overthrow of the Governments which buttressed the capitalist system’. In Curtin’s view, both the Kaiser and Billy Hughes deserved to be overthrown. However, the war was not just a distraction for the labour movement but a threat to the socialist struggle, undermining its internationalism. The only way to overcome the war, concluded Curtin, was through a ‘Social Revolution’, with the workers exerting their strength through the unions.2 Just two weeks later, he had resigned from the Timber Workers’ Union, disenchanted with his union role and determined to have a ‘loaf’.
Curtin’s resignation caused considerable dismay within the labour movement whose officials had not seen it coming. The president of the Trades Hall Council, Chris Bennett, sent the dispirited Curtin an encouraging letter telling him to
keep your pecker up and continue to fight and you will find that later on that you will be glad that you went away. You remember this and you will find it true. The field is large and your work is of the best. There are fine days ahead for you and those persons who do not value good work will be ashamed to think that they let you go.3
Other union officials and Labor politicians also sent encouraging messages to Curtin while his erstwhile colleagues at the Timber Workers’ Union did the decent thing by holding a meeting so that he could receive their ‘Best wishes, Gratitude for Services Rendered, and Fraternal Greetings’. As well, his ‘pal’, Bob Ross, ‘great soft heart and wonderful soul [that] he is’, offered to organise a ‘complimentary Dinner or Social or Something’. But Curtin declined the offer, explaining to Elsie in Hobart that it was because she ‘would not be there’ and he would therefore ‘not be Happy’. With all these expressions of friendship and support, he assured her that he was ‘not left desolate and besides you love me which is enough’.4 But what was he going to do with himself?
Curtin’s resignation had certainly been impulsive, as was seen by the lack of any clear plans for his future employment. This would have been of concern to his parents, who still relied upon his contributions to support them in their roomy Fallon Street residence. In fact, it may well have been the reason that the family had to shift once again, this time to another double-fronted, but smaller, timber house in busy Brunswick Road.5 Neither could he embark on marriage with Elsie in his unemployed state, although he was not without prospects and friends who could find him work. As he assured Elsie, he had
decided nothing and will probably loaf round for a week or so; it is likely I shall go to the Federal Capital costing and recording – I am quite a useful man in lots of directions you will [be] please[d] to understand, though I cannot hang up shelves or drive nails; of course I am really smart at drying dishes and helping little girls to issue their father’s monthly accounts.6
The job at the future site of Canberra never eventuated. Instead, Curtin was offered a position with the AWU, the union with which he had been trying for years to get the Timber Workers’ Union to amalgamate.
The position with the AWU was in the nature of a consultancy, rather than as a simple organiser as Lloyd Ross suggested.7 Curtin would use his experience with the Timber Workers’, and his vision for industrial unionism in the bush, to advise the AWU how to manage the great growth that it was experiencing, mainly through amalgamations with smaller unions. He told Elsie on 6 December that the union’s ‘operations are now so vast that unless something is done the whole thing will break down from overweight at the centre’. His task was to ‘suggest the general outlines of a rearrangement of the work they are doing so as to properly departmentalise the One Big Union [the AWU] along the lines of industrial affinity’. That afternoon he was off by train to New South Wales to begin a two-week tour by bike of towns in the Riverina district so that he could obtain ‘a first-hand knowledge of the practical everyday-outside-work which the Organisers are called on to do before sitting down to arm-chair philosophising’. For Curtin, it was not just a job. He was convinced that the AWU could be transformed into the One Big Union that would unify the working class and perhaps be strong enough to usher in socialism. As he informed Elsie: ‘I would rather leave the job to someone else as I am due for a loaf but it is clear the thing must be done as an essential preliminary for the successful prosecution of the Campaign for real Industrial Consolidation.’8 For its part, the AWU might have hoped in offering him the job that Curtin’s influence with the Timber Workers’ might yet see it agree to amalgamate with the bush union. But Curtin had not committed himself to working for the AWU beyond April 1916. He hoped to visit Elsie in Hobart at Christmas, depending upon his commitments with the union.9
While Curtin was touring the country towns of New South Wales, the British government finally acknowledged defeat at Gallipoli and began the difficult task of extricating the men of the AIF, along with other Allied forces, from their blood-soaked battleground. At the same time, it suggested just before Christmas that the British trenches in France could only be kept filled by conscripting those men who had been disinclined to volunteer. In Australia, the divisions over the war deepened as Hughes took his cue from London and increased the pressure on young men to volunteer. The War Census had identified some 600 000 Australian men of military age who were not in the army. Had he filled in his war census form,10 Curtin would have returned from the Riverina to find a letter from Hughes which had been sent to all eligible men in mid-December 1915. It called on them to offer up their lives so that ‘Prussian military despotism’ could be ‘crushed once and for all’ and the rights and privileges of Australian democracy preserved. Hughes did not want just sixteen thousand reinforcements a month to keep the present number of units at the front. He also wanted an additional fifty thousand men so that more Australian divisions could be sent.11
With Hughes in charge, the language of the conscription debate became more emotionally charged. Those refusing their country’s call were said to be disloyal, not just to Britain and the empire but to Australia and their mates in the trenches. Those actually speaking against the war now faced both legal prosecution and physical assault. For the second time, the Socialist faced the heavy hand of the censor as offending articles were blacked out during December 1915 and January 1916.12 A socialist speaker, Joseph Skurrie, was charged with ‘prejudicing recruiting’, the prosecution relying upon a newspaper report of a speech he made on the Yarra Bank in December 1915.13 Soldiers were out in force that same month when Adela Pankhurst, the daughter of the British suffragette, Emmeline Pankhurst, was due to give the socialist lecture at the Bijou Theatre on 19 December provocatively entitled ‘Shall Men Enlist? – The Women’s Answer’. Initially, the soldiers simply tried to drown out the speakers by singing patriotic songs but the overcrowded meeting soon degenerated into a free-for-all as socialists and soldiers traded punches while the military and other police looked on. Subsequently, the Government banned such Sunday meetings on licensed premises.14 Losing the use of the Bijou Theatre was a terrible setback for the Socialist Party. Its problems were compounded soon after when the Trades Hall Council refused it permission to shift the lectures to the old Trades Hall.15
A few days after the melee in the Bijou, some fifty soldiers stormed into the office of Fred Katz, a former member of the Socialist Party and now secretary of the Federated Clerks’ Union. Katz had incurred their wrath for convincing the Trades Hall Council not to comply with the War Census Act. For his temerity, he was tarred and feathered and kicked down stairs into Little Collins Street.16 Ross tried to make a stand against this violent intimidation by forming a United Peace and Free Speech Committee in early January 1916. But what was meant to be a huge demonstration on the Yarra Bank on 30 January to protest against ‘recent flagrant and illegal attacks upon the rights of popular assemblage and of free speech’ was rained out. Less than a thousand people braved the elements and the hostility of the hundred or so jeering soldiers who turned out to oppose them.17
Despite this disappointing turnout, the mood of the labour movement, and of the nation as a whole, was turning against conscription. Had Billy Hughes introduced conscription at the same time as Britain in early 1916, he might have secured its passage through the Australian parliament. But Hughes was sailing off to England at the invitation of the British government and was unable to take advantage of the moment. While his time in London steeled his resolve to introduce conscription, his opponents in the labour movement were similarly fortified in their determination to resist it and now had many Billy-free months to change the climate of public opinion. As well, the moral authority of Hughes to present such a measure had been sapped by his refusal in October 1915 to put the prices referendum to the people.18
While Curtin was pedalling his bike through the Riverina, a popular recruitment drive saw more than two hundred men, under the name of the Kangaroos, march from Wagga Wagga to Sydney in order to join up. Other marches also brought more men in from the bush, as they responded to the Government’s plea for voluntary enlistments.19 Despite his view of the war, Curtin would not have been immune to these pressures. It is possible that some time in early 1916, Curtin actually offered himself for enlistment. He later allowed it to be said that he had done so but was vague about the details.20 In his biography of Curtin, Lloyd Ross claimed that most of Curtin’s close friends in Melbourne dismissed the story.21 In any event, the cast in his eye would have disqualified him. Moreover, there is no evidence in the army records of Curtin having offered himself for recruitment and having been refused on medical grounds. However, while not including it in his published biography, Ross did include in a draft of the book a claim that Curtin and a friend had presented themselves in a drunken state to a recruitment office and been sent away because of their condition. The friend had confirmed the story to Ross, claiming that ‘One night – or day – Jack said to me, “The world’s gone mad. There’s no bloody hope being alive. Let’s go and enlist.”’22 It is possible that Curtin, in a depressed and drunken state, might have staggered into a recruiting hall with a friend to support him and been turned away. He may even have done it with Billy Hughes’s letter in his hand. It is certainly difficult to believe, given his views on the war, that he would walk into a recruitment office sober. It is a sign, though, of how attitudes changed towards the end of the war, and thereafter, that Curtin would allow such a story to gain currency.
The failure of the Yarra Bank meeting in January and the ban on Sunday theatre meetings, did not stop the movement against conscription from gaining strength. When the Brunswick Town Hall was denied to the local chapter of the No-Conscription Fellowship it simply shifted to St Ambrose’s Hall nearby. When bullies in military uniforms threatened violence against socialist speakers, the party organised defensive measures. A stock of blue metal was kept on hand in the Socialist Hall in Elizabeth Street to guard against any attempted invasion and assault upon its members. Rocks were also taken to the street corner meetings in case of trouble. Speakers on the Yarra Bank were protected by a ring of party members around the platform and, as the campaign gathered momentum, a gang of burly wharf labourers regularly provided additional protection. Still, it became commonplace for socialist speakers to untie their shoelaces before they spoke in case they were thrown into the Yarra River and had to swim to save themselves.23
With the Bijou Theatre unavailable, the Yarra Bank became the venue on Sundays for a succession of increasingly rowdy and well-attended meetings, not just by the Socialist Party and its offshoot organisations but by groups such as Vida Goldstein’s Women’s Peace Army. On 26 March 1916, four thousand people turned up on the Yarra Bank to hear the women speak against the war. A large group of soldiers were also there spoiling for a fight after comments by a woman speaker the previous week describing soldiers as ‘murderers’. There was much jeering and shoving, with a strong force of police looking on. The only arrest came when a Socialist Party member was charged with riotous behaviour for trying to protect the women speakers from assault. Meanwhile, that same month, Joseph Skurrie’s trial for uttering words prejudicial to recruiting the previous December saw him being gaoled for three months.24 At the end of March, Ross gave a speech entitled ‘Perils of Conscription’ to a crowd at the cramped Socialist Hall. Curtin concluded the meeting with a resolution asking the Trades Hall Council to inform ‘the Prime Minister of Australia and the Premier of Victoria that their failure to safeguard civilian rights left the council no alternative but to organise to protect the “blood-won liberties of the citizens”’.25 The council was already accepting the challenge of leading the charge against conscription.
While these public meetings were important for building opposition to conscription, activists were also working through the trade unions and Labor Party branches and State conferences to construct a solid wall against its introduction. In January, the influential AWU had passed a special resolution against conscription, following in the wake of other unions who had done likewise in late 1915.26 In March 1916, Hyett convinced the Trades Hall Council to call a conference of trade unions to decide on a unified attitude towards conscription, while he and six others were appointed to a propaganda committee ‘to bring the matter of conscription and the forthcoming congress before the Australian trade unions’.27 Meanwhile, in Hughes’s absence, the Labor Party was stiffening its opposition to conscription. In March, the Queensland State conference of the party voted against conscription, although at the same time it rejected a proposal that ‘the advocacy of Conscription meant opposition to the principles of the Labour Movement’. Had it been carried, it would have meant expulsion from the party for any MP supporting conscription. The following month, the Victorian and New South Wales State conferences also came out strongly against conscription, with the Victorian State executive seeking a pledge from all Labor MPs to oppose its introduction. Most complied.28
The first anniversary of the Gallipoli landings was observed quietly in Melbourne on Tuesday 25 April 1916 when bitter winds and rain kept crowds out of the city. Services of commemoration were held in the main Protestant churches while a public meeting in the Melbourne Town Hall was addressed by the acting Prime Minister, George Pearce, who told the loyal audience that their soldiers’ feats at Gallipoli provided ‘magnificent material for the moulding of the youthful Australian character’. The occasion was complicated by coinciding with Easter and by competition from Sydney where the main commemoration of the landings was held. Instead of going to Sydney, the Victorian Premier, Alexander Peacock, joined a recruiting train that toured the towns of western Victoria in a vain attempt to ‘stir up the manhood of the State to come forward voluntarily for active service’. However, a week’s work in the bush by the trainload of politicians and soldiers resulted in just 125 men coming forward. It was a ‘ghastly failure’, observed the Age, seeing it as further confirmation of the need for conscription.29 That was something the labour movement now was determined to defeat.
When the Congress of Australian Trade Unions assembled in Melbourne from 10 to 11 May 1916, it was mainly Victorian unionists in attendance. And they were fortified in their opposition to conscription by the news of the failed Easter Rising in Dublin and the execution of Irish prisoners by British troops. How could Britain be fighting to defend Belgium on the one hand and continuing to oppress Ireland on the other? As expected, the congress steadfastly opposed both military and industrial conscription, describing it as ‘a bludgeon to break down the standard of the industrial classes’ and calling on workers ‘to speak and act before the clock of trickery is permitted to strike the hour of doom’. However the congress declined to call for a general strike in the event of conscription being imposed. E.J. Holloway was made secretary of the executive committee set up by the congress to carry the campaign forward, while Curtin was appointed its organiser. Hyett, Ross and Anstey all sat on the executive.30 Labor Call welcomed the news of Curtin’s appointment, claiming that he was ‘operating with the energy of a tornado and is likely to do great things for the anti-conscription movement – the one movement nowadays that matters’.31 It was Hyett, though, who had moved the important resolutions at the congress.32
Curtin could not keep up the pace of a tornado for long. He had wanted a ‘loaf’ when he left the Timber Workers’ Union and it had been denied him when he went to work almost immediately for the AWU. Now he was throwing himself into arduous and dangerous work against the determined war policy of Prime Minister Billy Hughes, still absent in London. Curtin was drinking heavier than ever and it finally knocked him flat. At one point, when he was meant to be talking to the Socialist Party Sunday school, he was found in Brunswick laid low by his addiction.33 Finally, he sought help and was admitted to a convalescent home in Lara, near Geelong.
It was to Lara that Anstey wrote on 2 July 1916, encouraging Curtin to ‘stick it to the limit’ and assuring him of the good wishes of many in the labour movement who would be
delighted to see you climb out reborn. The theory of Redemption is a living gospel and the man who has carried his crucifix and climbed his Calvary is a better man than he who never touched the stony road of suffering; sometimes it comes to us in spite of all we do. Sometimes we are the producers of our own sorrows . . . Well what of it. We would not be sinful erring ones if it were not so.
He counselled Curtin not to ‘hate yourself, despise yourself, or be ashamed of yourself or ashamed to face others. There is no redemption that way.’ While conceding that Curtin had been ‘a damn nuisance’ when drunk, Anstey declared that even then Curtin was ‘a better man than thousands sober, and John sober is the Nestor of them all’. His faith in Curtin undimmed, Anstey told him to ‘Stand upright, proud of yourself, proud of the conquest that you are going to achieve and the good that you yet will do’. However, he also advised that Curtin should use the experience to reinvent himself, to leave the beer-shouting and backslapping camaraderie of the pub behind him and become a serious and sober worker for the cause. As testimony to the proposed change, Anstey suggested to Curtin that he henceforth be known to the world as ‘John’, and that he should ‘let “Jack” go with the booze. John will speak or write or lecture to the future.’34
Across the world, the Australian soldiers who had survived their ordeal at Gallipoli, together with tens of thousands of reinforcements, had taken up positions facing their German adversaries on the Western Front in northern France. On the day of Anstey’s letter to Curtin, the shelling had already begun, signalling the start of a massive Allied offensive along the Somme. Sixty thousand British casualties were suffered that first day.35 The Australians would soon be caught up in it, experiencing a horror that would make Gallipoli seem like a beach picnic. As each rush of Australian soldiers fell, there were fewer men prepared to take their place. The gnarled figure of Billy Hughes, who had been lauded in London as a lion-hearted warrior, was already sailing home determined to augment their numbers by compulsion. As a result, the most bitter political battles that Australia had ever experienced would spill from the parliament into the workplaces, homes and streets of its towns and cities. Curtin, sworn off his addiction and rejuvenated by his rest, would take his place at the front of the campaign in which his courage would be tested anew.