In January 1918, after nearly four years of slaughter, the war that many Australians had believed would be over by Christmas 1914 was about to reach its climax. The Russians had made peace with the Germans, allowing the German armies on the eastern front to be turned against the mainly British and French forces in the west before the Allies could be reinforced with the fresh American Army. The five Australian divisions in France had been steadily depleting in numbers as reinforcements failed to keep pace with the heavy casualty rate. The situation became desperate after the Germans launched a massive offensive in March 1918 which quickly punched a hole in the Allied lines and sent much of the British Army scurrying to the rear. However, like a punch-drunk boxer landing a final savage flurry of blows, the desperate offensive cost the Germans dearly. Their armies would not be able to hold their hard-won territory when the Allied armies steadied, re-formed their lines and began to push the Germans back from whence they had come and beyond.
With conscription defeated in Australia for a second time, many in the labour movement began to consider ways in which they might bring the European carnage to an end. Some also began to consider ways in which the war could be turned to the advantage of the socialist cause, as the Bolsheviks had done in Russia. However, although the conscription debates had been a victory for the socialists, they had also forced compromises on the participants. The charges of disloyalty that were thrown so wantonly in the direction of the anti-conscriptionists had prompted many of them to declare their support for voluntary recruitment. Even Curtin had argued during the 1917 federal election campaign that the best way to end the war was to throw more men and shells at the German trenches. However, once the federal election and the conscription vote were behind them, and the Russians had shown that peace was possible, the attention of Australian Laborites also turned towards peace.
In January 1918, Curtin cautiously explored the topic while being careful to sidestep the War Precautions Act that had seen Adela Pankhurst, amongst others, thrown into gaol. He would also have been mindful of the local Labor decision that same month to defer peace propaganda until after the federal Labor Party conference to be held in Perth in June. Rather than himself calling for a negotiated peace, Curtin noted the ‘revolutionary ferment’ in Europe and the calls from European socialists for ‘peace by negotiation’. He was optimistic enough to believe that this working-class pressure would soon force the generals off the battlefield and that the postwar world would see the international labour movement ‘emerge as the supreme spiritual force in world politics’. At the same time, he predicted that ‘the present year was going to be a hard one for the workers’, who would need to be united if they were going to withstand the expected onslaught from employers acting in concert with conservative governments whose blood was up.1
Curtin’s invigorating presence in Perth helped to ensure that the workers there would be as united as he could make them. In pursuit of this aim, more of the familiar features of the Victorian Socialist Party began to appear in Perth and Fremantle. A Sunday afternoon demonstration was held in Fremantle against the rising cost of living brought on by the war, the protesters marching from the Trades Hall to the Prince’s Theatre where they listened to speeches by Collier, Curtin and others.2 In the wake of Adela Pankhurst’s tour, Curtin wanted ‘an army of educators and organisers ceaselessly traversing the State’ for the socialist cause. Until the labour movement could appoint such organisers, the Westralian Worker and the ALF combined to pay the expenses of approved speakers wanting to tour country towns.3 For the women, an organiser was appointed to encourage their membership of trade unions while an Organisation of Labor Women was established with an office in the Perth Trades Hall. Curtin addressed the group in March 1918, doubtless stressing the need for them to be integrated into the socialist struggle rather than fighting for a separate feminist agenda. In Curtin’s view, there was no basic conflict of interest between men and women, only between workers and the forces of capitalism.4
For the upcoming generation of workers, a Labor Sunday school was established at Fremantle Town Hall in January 1918 where the children gathered to be both entertained and educated, listening to ‘short talks and songs, jolly stories and descriptions of adventure, pictures, important phases of social history and so forth’.5 And there were the lectures and street corner meetings at which Curtin was a regular speaker. In early March 1918, he spoke at Perth’s open-air Olympia Theatre on the coal combine that was forcing up the price of domestic fuel. His lecture was part of the ALF’s Sunday night propaganda program, which was going to be moved to an enclosed hall when the weather turned cooler. The Westralian Worker offered to help with the costs of establishing an orchestra to open the meetings or to at least have a piano.6 When Curtin spoke later that month in Fremantle, again on the ‘Coal Barons’, an orchestra opened the proceedings before he ‘enthralled his large audience with a description of the operations of the financial brigands’.7
On street corners, the meetings in Perth were said by March 1918 to be ‘well established’ with attendances ‘on the improve’.8 However, as news of the German onslaught reached Australia, the empire loyalists fought back under the leadership of Perth’s mayor, and with the assistance of returned soldiers and other ‘War Winners’, taking over the Friday night street corner meetings. The ALF had to appeal to the forces of order for protection, which resulted in a constable attending future meetings. The physical disruption of the Labor meetings may have been responsible for making State Labor MPs reluctant to front such gatherings. By July 1918, there was not only a problem in getting speakers for the Sunday afternoon talks at the Esplanade but also for the Sunday night lectures at the Hibernian Hall.9 Part of it was due to the smaller size of Perth: it could not sustain the range of activities that had been possible in Melbourne.
Although Hughes formally resigned in accordance with his pre-plebiscite promise after losing the vote, he was just as quickly sworn in again by the Governor-General, Sir Ronald Munro-Ferguson, who then called the labour movement and other representative groups to a conference in April 1918 to obtain agreement on boosting voluntary recruiting. To the great annoyance of many in the labour movement, the federal Labor leader, Frank Tudor, and the Queensland Labor Premier, Tom Ryan, committed the party to supporting recruiting in return for various concessions from the Government, which included the convictions and fines against Curtin and Collier being set aside. By so doing, they hoped to acquit the party of the charge of being the lose-the-war party. However, while the conference ended with a unanimous agreement by the delegates to support recruiting, it was so hedged about with conditions imposed by the union delegates that it was not of much practical value.10
Philip Collier and Alex McCallum were part of the three-man delegation from the Western Australian labour movement at the Governor-General’s conference. They had travelled to Melbourne on the new transcontinental railway that took three and a half days, and several changes of train, to get them across the continent. Curtin followed them two days later to attend another Government-sponsored conference in Melbourne, this time of newspaper editors called together to discuss the Government’s heavy-handed administration of the censorship regulations. The conference was opened by a defiant Hughes who was nonetheless anxious to appease the annoyance of the editors with the military censors. Over the following four days, the editors agreed to protest at ‘the use of the censorship for political purposes’. Despite their protests, the censors continued to wield their power in ways that would have made the Kaiser proud. Curtin described the conference upon his return to Perth as ‘one of the most notable gatherings’ of the war.11
While in Melbourne, Curtin was invited to speak at the regular Sunday night lecture of the Socialist Party, alongside Adela Walsh (nee Pankhurst). After a playing of the ‘William Tell Overture’ by the Socialist orchestra, and a short speech by Walsh attacking the Labor Party for supporting recruiting, Curtin launched into a long lecture that was described as an ‘oratorical treat’. He reminded the audience that the primary struggle of the labour movement was not against war but against capitalism. As far as he was concerned, ‘he would take no part in this war’ because ‘no matter how the war ended from a military point of view, the issue of the war did not involve the social status of Organised Labor’. He was careful to point out that his opposition to conscription and the war was not due to pacifism, a doctrine that he dismissed as ‘inherently fallacious’ since force had, and always would ‘rule the world’. Moreover, the labour movement would need to use force ‘for the upheaval which should make for working class authority in the fields, factories and the workshops’.12
Curtin’s visit to Melbourne and his immersion back into the Socialist Party milieu seems to have stiffened his courage to confront the Government’s war policy head-on. From the time of his return to Perth at the beginning of May, he published a succession of editorials demanding that a negotiated peace be concluded with Germany. While Prime Minister Billy Hughes was determined to grab for Australia as much of the German Empire in the Pacific as he could, and was equally determined to impose a harsh peace on Germany, Curtin argued forcefully ‘against any sort of territorial annexation and against a punitive peace being imposed on Germany which he felt would only produce further conflict’.13 With events in Russia seeming to show that the ‘day of golden opportunity’ for socialism was about to dawn, Curtin linked his call for peace with a call for ‘“a United States of Civilization” that would do away with national borders’.14 On 2 June 1918, he presented the Sunday lecture at the Fremantle Town Hall, entitled ‘The People and Peace’, with the ‘startling directness of his facts and exposition [holding] the large audience from first to last’.15
Curtin’s strong editorials on peace appeared in the weeks leading up to the triennial conference of the federal Labor Party in Perth in June 1918, the first such conference to be held in the West. Not only would the new federal leader, Frank Tudor, be in attendance, but so too would be the much more inspirational figure of Tom Ryan, the Queensland Labor Premier. Ryan had won the hearts of Australia’s labour movement during the 1917 conscription plebiscite by publicly defying Billy Hughes and touring the country on behalf of the No campaign. He was widely believed to be destined for national leadership. One of the main issues facing the conference was the question of whether to readmit those members who had been expelled over the conscription issue. With Curtin appearing as a proxy delegate for the cash-strapped Tasmanian branch, the conference firmly decided that the conscriptionists ‘shall not at any time under any pretext be re-admitted to the Labor Party’.16 Having snubbed the dictates of the party, they were to be pariahs forever. The conference also passed a motion calling for peace in Europe but at the same time failed narrowly to support a motion against voluntary recruiting. Nevertheless, its support for such recruiting was severely circumscribed by conditions requiring the Allies to guarantee they would ‘enter into peace negotiations upon the basis of no annexations and no penal indemnities’. Labor Party support was also dependent upon non-European labour not being imported to man the country’s factories and farms.17
There was also a push at the conference to overturn the Labor Party’s historic support for compulsory military training. The motion was moved by the Labor Party president, E.J. Holloway, and supported by Curtin. But a number of delegates from the eastern States warned that such training was required to meet the mounting menace of Japan. Although Japanese naval ships were helping to protect Australian ports and Australian trade, racial antagonism and fears of dispossession were so ingrained that delegates declared that ‘immediate and effective steps should be taken for a more adequate defence of Australia against a probable invasion by Japan’. It was left to a conference in Sydney the following year to finally rescind the party’s support for compulsory military training.18
With the red flag flying over Russia, and being flourished by the labour movement across America and Europe, the Perth ALF decided in July 1918 to adopt the red flag in defiance of government regulations proscribing its use. Over the next two years, socialists around Australia would run foul of this law, with some being gaoled for their temerity. The bravado of the Perth ALF was tempered by it restricting the flag flying to days such as the Eight-Hour Day when the streets around the Trades Hall would be crowded with workers.19 Nevertheless, it represented a significant radicalisation of the ALF in the eighteen months since Curtin’s arrival in Perth. Of course, the marked change in mood cannot all be laid at his door. The mood of the labour movement throughout Australia had become more radical due to disenchantment with the war, anger at the oppressive actions of the Hughes Government and hope inspired by events in Russia. But the movement was more isolated than ever from the middle-class sympathisers whose electoral support was necessary to elect a Labor government.
When the war finally ended in the armistice of 11 November 1918, Curtin welcomed the end of ‘four terrible years’ when ‘the tumultuous flames of war have lit the sky with death’. He took heart from the ‘revolutionary activity’ in Germany which had forced the Kaiser to abdicate and which held out the prospect of socialism determining the shape of the new German regime.20 In Australia, though, the war’s end did not mark the end of the difficult political conditions for the Labor Party, with it now being accused of having Bolshevist sympathies. Moreover, Australia was beset by a new scare that diverted attention from the socialist struggle. The outbreak of a virulent influenza strain in Europe saw the returning troopships bringing it back to an unprotected and unprepared Australian population. Some twelve thousand Australians died as the disease raged across the continent despite quarantine efforts to contain its spread. Among the victims was one of the people who was most dear to Curtin.
First, though, came news of his father’s death on 25 March 1919,21 finally succumbing to syphilis just over two years after Curtin had left the family home to establish himself on the other side of the continent. The relationship between Curtin and his father had been a vexed one. Curtin had never known his father free of the rheumatoid arthritis that plagued him, aggravating his father’s temper and destroying the family’s fortunes just as it constricted his father’s movements. Later, the underlying syphilis returned to attack his internal organs and may have sent him mad by the end, as it did with so many of its victims. He died in Melbourne Hospital and was buried the next day in Coburg Cemetery. For 32 years, Curtin had lived under his father’s roof, although for half of that time Curtin had been more responsible than his father for ensuring that the rent was paid. He rebelled by rejecting the religion and the Irishness of his parents. But as the eldest son he continued to support them until he could stay there no longer. Then the suppressed feelings of resentment at his situation came to be mixed with feelings of guilt for finally having abandoned his parents for Perth and the prospect of marriage with Elsie. Now his father was dead and distance prevented Curtin from attending the funeral or engaging in mourning appropriate to the occasion. His father’s cutthroat razor was passed on to Curtin. He was still making a point of using it occasionally, twenty years after his father’s death.
Just four weeks later, as Curtin was absorbing the news of his father’s demise, came the shocking news of Frank Hyett’s death from influenza. Hyett was probably the closest male friend that Curtin ever had. He had been touring with the Victorian cricket team in Sydney in April 1919 when he had been taken sick. Apparently recovered, he collapsed again soon after his return to Melbourne and died a day later, on 24 April 1919. He was buried in one of the biggest funerals the labour movement had ever seen. Curtin learnt of Hyett’s death by telegram, which was handed to him in the middle of a union meeting. He was distraught, writing later that he would ‘not forget that day if I live to be 90’. As he tried without success to write a letter of condolence to the widowed Ethel, all the experiences they had shared went round and round in his tortured mind: ‘meetings here, there and everywhere; football and cricket matches; card games we played and all the little things and the big things that have made up fifteen years of intimacies almost about everything’. The night of the news, he paced the verandah of their Cottesloe home, as Elsie listened to him repeat over and over in disbelief, ‘Frank Hyett is dead’.22
There were also deaths aplenty in Perth. Curtin was concerned for a time by the illness in August 1919 of the prominent anti-conscriptionist, J.J. Simons, to whom he had become quite close during the 1917 campaign. In a letter to Simons, Curtin claimed that it had been his ‘prompt intention to call and personally proffer’ his sympathy but the pressure of work, ‘when every second man is in bed’, had forced him to write instead. Prudence would also have advised against a personal visit to Simons’s sickbed. After all, as Curtin himself confided to Simons, he was ‘worried’ when he heard of Labor men getting sick as there were ‘not many of us, old chap’. Recalling the recent death of Hyett, and probably the more distant Annie as well, Curtin observed how it was ‘all very well to say the world goes on without the services of those whom death has gripped’ but he did ‘not think it goes on as well as it would have had they lived longer’. He urged Simons to ‘stand up and fight this shindy you are in now’, hoping that a knowledge of his concern ‘would be a stimulant’ in helping him recover.23 Simons did recover and, with Curtin’s help, went on to win a seat in the State Parliament at the 1921 election.
While Curtin was still recovering from the shock of Hyett’s death, Fremantle erupted in violence as police confronted waterside workers who had placed a black ban on unloading a ship bringing supplies from the East until non-union labour was removed. The ‘volunteer’ labourers had been brought in to break a strike two years before. With Western Australia suffering shortages because of quarantine restrictions imposed on shipping to stop the entry of the deadly influenza, the conservative Government under its new premier, Hal Colebatch, was determined to break the picket. In a secret move to outwit the strikers, Colebatch took over the wharf and ordered barricades to be erected while he sailed down-river with a boatload of police and volunteers to evict the strikers. The workers were waiting on bridges over the river and rained rocks and metal down upon the boat while thousands of enraged waterside workers and their supporters confronted the outnumbered police. In the melee that followed, a waterside worker was fatally wounded by bayonet-wielding police and many on both sides were injured. The crowds of enraged workers were calmed by Alex McCallum but the strikers won the day. The non-union labour was forced off the wharf and the premier was forced to resign. Fremantle closed for the funeral of the slain worker while trains throughout the State stopped for three minutes as a mark of respect.24
The tragic deaths of political activists came as radical socialists fought to have the Labor Party declare itself as a straight-out socialist party and join the wave of socialism that seemed on the verge of sweeping the world. At the party’s federal conference in Sydney in June 1919, there was a move to have the party’s objective come out in favour of socialisation, calling for the ‘collective ownership and democratic control of the means of production, distribution, and exchange’. The motion was backed by Curtin’s old friend, and brother of Annie, Jack Gunn, who declared rather optimistically that: ‘We are all heading for collective ownership, and the Labor Movement is entirely Socialist, so we should not be afraid to say what we desire to attain’.25 But afraid they were. The objective was too radical for some delegates while others feared the electoral repercussions. So it was watered down to the usual mix of racism and nationalism that had marked the party’s early years while calling for the ‘democratic control of all agencies of production, distribution, and exchange’.26 Despite the setback, the pressure for radical change only increased amidst the postwar revolutionary fervour, when all things seemed possible.
Curtin certainly believed that radical changes were possible although his hopes should have been dashed that same year when the New South Wales Labor Party and the Australian Workers’ Union both came down against his cherished aim of creating a single industrial union, known as the One Big Union. It was the vision that Mann had pushed before leaving for England and it had been supported by Curtin, Ross and the rest of the Victorian Socialist Party. Since coming to Perth, Curtin had done what he could to win support for the One Big Union in Western Australia.27 In December 1918, he had pressed the case for the OBU at a meeting of the ALF State executive after the New South Wales Trade Union Congress had established a Workers’ Industrial Union of Australia (WIUA), which all sympathetic unions were invited to join. However, the AWU had aspirations of its own to become the dominant Australian union, although not with the aim of ushering in socialism.
In January 1919, the AWU took effective control of the Westralian Worker, curbing Curtin’s ability to speak out on this issue. Although he printed pro-WIUA articles in February 1919, by May he was ‘writing articles sharply criticizing the Workers’ Industrial Union of Australia and supporting the Australian Workers’ Union as the only possible O.B.U. for Australian conditions’.28 When Curtin came to open a Sunday afternoon conference on the OBU in Perth’s Trades Hall in August 1919, he went through the motions of arguing the case for industrial unionism that he had been arguing for a decade but clearly was not optimistic about achieving any sudden change.29 He was now firmly opposed to the WIUA, and glowingly described the AWU as ‘the greatest organisation of labor that our country has known’.30
The mixed response of the labour movement to the OBU may have made Curtin more amenable to the notion of standing once more for federal Parliament when elections were called for late 1919 following Billy Hughes’s triumphant return from the Versailles peace conference. When no one nominated in August to be Labor candidate for the conservative seat of Perth, Curtin put himself forward while claiming that he ‘preferred to stay with the paper’.31 Two months earlier, he had dismissed the idea of achieving reform through parliamentary means, arguing that even a Labor government was just ‘an administrative body forced to do the bidding and to function for the owners of industry’.32 However, Curtin’s candidature would give him a platform to argue the case for socialism and, if he won, to resume regular contact with his friends and family in Melbourne, where the federal Parliament sat until shifting to Canberra in 1927. It would also allow him to pursue that grander destiny that Curtin apparently believed awaited him and which he had not been able to achieve in Melbourne.
As Curtin was preparing for his first electoral contest in the West, Elsie’s parents, Abraham and Annie Needham, came from Hobart to live with the Curtins. Her mother could help with the domestic chores while her father could provide a steadying influence for Curtin, perhaps preventing him from plunging into his black moods. Needham’s experience as a writer and agitator could also alleviate the load that was falling on Curtin’s shoulders, a load that would increase with the election campaign. Curtin seems to have been behind a move in October 1919 to have the Perth ALF host a reception for Needham, who he claimed was ‘known throughout Australia as a writer and a Labor Propagandist’. However, the council decided simply to send him a letter of welcome together with an invitation to the Labor Women’s social.33
As Curtin concentrated on the election campaign, Needham was able to take over much of the writing for the Westralian Worker. There was much for Curtin to do. In mid-October, the Perth ALF put £10 into the campaign while Curtin appealed to his party colleagues to ‘actively take up the fight and assist in the preliminary work of establishing committees’ to support his campaign.‘Having selected him,’ argued Curtin, ‘they were obliged to do their utmost to secure his return.’ But it seems they did not. Curtin blurted out his frustration to a colleague as they walked around Perth’s riverside Esplanade: ‘What futility going for an election! There’s no organization. Nothing. Ask the League members to help and nothing happens. You’ve got to do everything for yourself.’34 The fault seems also to have lain partly with Curtin. At the end of October, the ALF minutes record the concern of the committee at not being informed of Curtin’s plans for the Perth campaign and asked him to ‘present a report and make suggestions on carrying on the Campaign’.35
In the middle of the stressful election campaign, where he came under sustained and personal attack, Curtin was diverted from the hustings by a strike on the goldfields that seemed set to explode into violence. The AWU had taken over a miners’ union, leading the mine owners to create a tame union of their own. When the miners went on strike to force a closed shop, the Government sent trainloads of police while the magistrate who had fined Collier now swore in hundreds of volunteers, mainly ex-servicemen, who were armed and sent out to intimidate the strikers. One of the union representatives recalls how Curtin travelled to the goldfields where he ‘stood up and defended the miners although the meetings were composed of many intimidating police and their lackeys’.36 The scenes of disorder probably helped to swing the campaign in Western Australia against the Labor Party, although it suffered strong swings against it across Australia.
Curtin barely managed to attract a third of the vote in his Perth electorate.37 A Labor report of the campaign complained of how the ‘prejudices and passions of the people were played upon and the war flame was fanned and misrepresentation and abuse heaped upon the Labor organisations and candidates’. Curtin was vulnerable to such abuse after having been such a prominent opponent of conscription.38 The disastrous campaign, coming on top of the tumultuous political events of that year and the deaths of his father and close friends, caused Curtin to suffer another breakdown from which he was slow to recover. Even with a fortnight’s rest in the country town of Narrogin, he was still not right. Several months’ rest was required before he gradually resumed his former hectic schedule.39
Curtin’s breakdown put a strain on his relationship with Elsie. It was only now that she discovered the gravity of his despair. She recalled how he
veered between moods of high optimism and deep melancholy, as inexplicable as they were irregular. He would wake up in the morning at peace with the world and I’d start my household chores with a light heart. By lunchtime I would be treating him with the blend of sympathy and ‘Come, now, things aren’t as black as that’, which I learnt through the long months was the best mixture.40
Curtin’s move to Perth had rescued him from alcoholic oblivion in Melbourne but distance could not make him immune to episodes of deep depression. In his dark moods, not even Elsie’s comic humour or Abraham Needham’s inspirational sermonising on socialism could divert him for long.
Following Labor’s electoral defeat, the achievement of socialism must have seemed further away than ever to Curtin and the local Labor scene was just as replete with weak-kneed reformists, time-servers and office seekers as the one he had left behind in Melbourne. Moreover, as the editor of Labor’s official newspaper, Curtin was now under pressure to trim his politics to suit his constrained, but comfortable, circumstances. During long walks across the sand hills, the beach at Cottesloe provided some release for Curtin, with the crashing of the breakers that rolled in from the Indian Ocean washing the cares from his mind, at least for a time. But the deaths of his father and Frank Hyett, followed by the pressures of political campaigning, had worn him down just as the ‘day of golden opportunity’ for the labour movement had seemed imminent.