The Perth beachside suburb of Cottesloe is wedged between the broad reaches of the Swan River and the scrub-covered sand hills that look out over the Indian Ocean to distant Rottnest Island. By 1920, the suburb was still only partly built, with some well-to-do Perth citizens having sunk their fortunes into several grand houses that sprawled beneath the Norfolk Island pine trees that had become characteristic of Cottesloe. In between, an increasing number of bungalows were being built to house mainly middle-class occupants who were prepared to tolerate the distance from the city, some eight miles, for the sake of the suburb’s proximity to the sea. Through the centre of Cottesloe ran the railway line and road that linked Perth to Fremantle, and which on Sundays brought crowds of day-trippers to trek along the bituminised length of Jarrad Street to the ocean. A wide timber jetty, complete with a rotunda housing a band, was waiting to entice the strolling holiday-makers along its length while dressing-rooms along the beach provided for the bathers prepared to brave the invigorating surf and the eyes of the ogling onlookers. A range of tea rooms beckoned for the custom of the more sedate. On summer nights, open-air dance floors shuddered under the feet of couples trying out the latest steps while the expansive Indiana Tea Rooms became a nightly dance hall of dubious reputation where sly grog could be had.1 It was to this commuter suburb, cum holiday resort, that the Curtins had decided to move in 1918.
Cottesloe would have reminded Elsie of her family’s waterside home in Hobart while for Curtin it would have been a welcome contrast to the narrow spaces of the Brunswick cottages and laneways in which he had spent the last two decades. With their young daughter, the couple first set up house in rented accommodation at 3 Napier Street, midway between the river and the ocean. The house was within smell of the ocean but not within sight or sound of its crashing waves. It was close to Cottesloe station where the steam trains took workers into Perth, past the brothels of Roe Street where the names of the madams were painted gaudily on the doors. Whether it was a consideration in Curtin’s mind or not, Cottesloe was also roughly in the middle of the federal electorate of Fremantle, a seat that stretched along the coast from the working-class areas of Fremantle to the working-class fringe of Perth’s city centre and which was potentially winnable for the Labor Party. His immediate concern, though, was to recover from the breakdown suffered as a result of the rigours of the 1919 election campaign and the personal calamities of that year. Cottesloe was ideal for this.
In February 1920, Curtin attempted to travel to the East for a tour by journalists of an irrigation scheme but was forced to seek medical advice at Kalgoorlie while waiting to change trains. He returned to Cottesloe from where, after a few days’ rest, he tried again to travel but was once again prevailed upon by a doctor to turn back. He was advised ‘not to mingle with the multitude, read papers, or leave his happy home’ for a month.2 Curtin was still recuperating when local trade unions organised a conference in March 1920 on the cost of living and how workers might improve their position after the years of wartime inflation. There was still a sense of optimism about the prospects for socialism as workers across Australia demonstrated more militancy than they had since the strikes of the 1890s. However, just as the militancy of the 1890s disappeared into the depression of that decade, so too would the brief flurry of postwar militancy disappear into the recession that was about to envelop the Australian economy. This was not yet clear to the delegates at Perth’s Trades Hall who called for the labour movement to ‘organise itself into One Big Union for the purpose of overthrowing the capitalist class and bringing about the socialisation of the means of life’ which they said was the ‘only solution to the present problem’. It was decided to send a delegation to visit the various trade unions so that their officials could be persuaded to bring their separate organisations beneath the OBU umbrella. But nothing came of it.3 Perhaps Curtin could have persuaded at least some of them to do so had he been well enough. However, he had been knocked so flat that Needham took over much of his editorial duty during this period.
Curtin had recovered sufficiently by June 1920 to resume his attendance at committee meetings of the Australian Journalists’ Association, where he was elected president of the Western Australian District. Curtin had joined the AJA on taking up the editorship of the Westralian Worker and had been elected to its committee in August 1917 to represent the Kalgoorlie subdistrict. In June 1919, he had been made vice-president of the organisation.4 It was a mark of the respect in which he was held by his mainly non-political colleagues that they should turn to this avowedly ‘militant unionist’ as their president. However, despite his fire-breathing editorials and theoretical articles against capitalism in the Westralian Worker, Curtin was a force for moderation and compromise in practice. As secretary of the Timber Workers’ Union, he had eschewed using the strike weapon, preferring to improve the conditions of his members through mediation. Using the considerable debating skills that he had learned from the Victorian Socialist Party and in the study of Frank Anstey, he would wear down the employers with the logic and justice of his arguments rather than bludgeon them with the strike weapon. It was this mixture of his clear-eyed intelligence and patent integrity, combined with a willingness for hard work, that led the AJA committee to turn to Curtin. As a member of the committee, his advice had been ‘highly valued’ and he was elevated to the presidency ‘with the complete confidence of the committee, and of the rank and file’.5
Dianne Sholl has noted the almost schizophrenic nature of Curtin’s political life at this time, with his calls for revolution in the Worker seemingly at odds with his daily work for the Labor Party and, she might have added, the non-aligned AJA. Sholl has cited 114 editorials written by Curtin between 1919 and June 1922 which ‘contain militant denunciations of capitalism and imperialism’, with many calling for ‘workers to overthrow the system’.6 In April 1920, just before being elected president of the AJA, an editorial in the Westralian Worker observed how Labor everywhere was turning ‘to the revolutionary idea, knowing that all else is futile; that reformist methods cannot avail; that there must be a clean sweep of the dirty, contemptible, cruel and unjust system under which the working class has had to eke out a miserable existence’.7 Although some of these editorials were in fact written by Needham during the bouts of illness that Curtin suffered from 1920 to 1922, and particularly during the first half of 1920, Sholl’s point is well made.8 Even if Needham penned these comments, he wrote them while living under Curtin’s roof in Cottesloe and probably after having consulted Curtin to ensure that he concurred with their sentiments. Later editorials, when Curtin was back in the editor’s chair, continued with the revolutionary sentiments.
While Curtin never led a strike in his life, always preferring to take the path of moderation, an editorial in October 1920 rejoiced in the idea of strikes: ‘When the day comes that there are no strikes and revolts, no virile protest against the barbarity and injustice of a mad economic form of life, then shall we lose all hope for the progress and freedom of mankind, nay, more, we shall despair even of the survival of the race itself.’ 9 In Curtin’s view, instances of industrial unrest were signs of the workers testing their strength, in preparation for the greater struggle to come, the overthrow of capitalism. In May 1921, an editorial argued against the idea of incremental reform and in favour of revolution, that Labor was not fighting to make workers ‘better-paid slaves’ but was seeking their ‘emancipation in full from servitude’. He recalled the slogan of Karl Marx: ‘Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains; you have a world to win!’10 Four months later, he argued that capitalism was approaching a climactic crisis that would provide the long-awaited day of golden opportunity for socialism: ‘Unemployment, poverty, hatreds, wars, lying, hypocrisy, disease, paupers and millionaires, palaces and slums – these are ever growing and multiplying. The climax is approaching. What is the climax? Revolution! Revolution, the natural and inevitable result of preceding conditions’.11 This editorial was written shortly after Curtin’s return from attending the All Australian Trades Union Congress in Melbourne where he had been one of the Western Australian representatives.
The trade union congress, held in June 1921, had been called the previous October by the federal executive of the Labor Party, which had been reacting to a more militant postwar mood within the labour movement. The mood was seen that same month when the Australian Communist Party was formed, throwing down a radical challenge to the Labor Party. It was partly to meet this challenge that the ALP chairman, E.J. Holloway, claimed that the ‘changing psychology of the great mass of the people in this country, and all other countries’ necessitated ‘a clearly-defined industrial policy which would be abreast of the times and be acceptable to the majority of our members in the industrial as well as the political wings of the Movement’.12 By clearly defined, he meant a straight-out socialist policy. Which was what the trade union congress of more than three hundred delegates from across Australia delivered when they gathered in Melbourne on 21 June 1921.
It was Holloway again, Curtin’s old Trades Hall associate from his anti-conscription days in Melbourne, who chaired the congress and called on the political and industrial wings of the labour movement to unite around the socialisation objective so that they could make ‘the next decade the transition period from capitalism to socialism’. With Curtin taking a prominent part in the proceedings, the congress called for the ‘socialisation of industry, production, distribution and exchange’ to be made the objective of the Labor Party.13 Curtin’s mood at the congress was captured by his opposition to a resolution calling for Irish self-government. While he was against ‘British iniquities in Ireland . . . he believed that the mere creation of a new flag – a capitalistic flag, not a Red Flag – was not a step towards international communism, but a step towards the preservation of small and independent entities’.14 This was a development that he did not favour. On this and other issues, including that of socialisation, Curtin made such an impression on observers that the Bulletin remarked: ‘One of the outstanding figures at the Trades Union Conference was Jack Curtin, formerly the boy orator of Melbourne Trades Hall . . . Curtin is eloquent, studious and desperately in earnest, and if he doesn’t kill himself with overwork (a feat he nearly accomplished at the last Federal election . . .) he will go far.’15 Before ending with a singing of the ‘Red Flag’, it also established a Council of Action, with Curtin as a member, to oversee the forthcoming Labor Party conference that would consider the congress’s resolutions.16
In the event, Curtin could not attend the Labor Party conference in Brisbane. As usual, he had been doing the work of two or three people: editing the newspaper, political campaigning on street corners and elsewhere, presiding over the AJA and being a force within both the Perth and Fremantle Trades Halls. Among his various extra activities he had lectured in August on the results of the recent trade union congress, been part of a deputation to the premier in September to discuss unemployment and had been scheduled to lecture later that month on child welfare.17 The constant pressure had caught up with him again. He had wanted to go to Brisbane by boat instead of by train, presumably as a way of restoring his energy.18 Instead, he stayed home. The Bulletin reported that, due to ‘doctor’s orders he has eschewed politics for the present and reduced his literary output from 20 columns to 15 columns a week’.19 The death from pneumonia of the overworked Tom Ryan just a few weeks before may also have encouraged Curtin to slacken his pace for a time. Ignoring the advice of friends, Ryan had been campaigning in Queensland on behalf of a Labor candidate in a by-election when an existing bronchial infection worsened and the Labor Party lost a potentially great leader.20 In order to avoid Ryan’s fate, Curtin remained in Perth to recover his strength. It would have allowed him more time to spend with their new baby, a son, born on 31 January 1921 and named John Francis in memory of Frank Hyett. Henceforth, the names of Curtin and Hyett would be combined in his son as the two men had been combined in life. Now a family of six, counting the Needhams, the Curtins left their rented accommodation and bought a house further along the road, at 15 Napier Street, presumably for the extra space that it offered and with the financial assistance of his father-in-law.21
In place of Curtin, his old friend from Melbourne, Bob Ross, went to Brisbane as a delegate for Western Australia. All fired up with the postwar possibilities for socialism, Ross had just published the tract Revolution in Russia and Australia, in which he argued for an Australian road to socialism. According to Ross, Australia needed ‘neither violent revolution nor the Soviet system, but may march along on evolutionary lines until the hour of capitalism’s collapse’. In pursuit of this, Ross boldly predicted that the conference’s affirmation of the socialisation objective would ‘electrify the movement, obtain victory and conquer all things in Australia’. A delegate from New South Wales commented caustically that some delegates had been too affected by events in Russia and that adoption of the objective would cause Labor to ‘howl in the wilderness for half a century’.22 Seemingly undeterred by this warning, the conference supported the socialisation objective, although it circumscribed its effect by declaring, on the motion of Maurice Blackburn, that the party did not aim ‘to abolish private ownership’ where the owner was using it ‘in a socially useful manner and without exploitation’. The conference also declared that it would use only ‘constitutional methods of industrial and Parliamentary action’ in pursuing its socialisation objective.23 It marked the high-water mark for postwar radicalism within the Labor Party.
It was in the wake of the Brisbane conference that the Curtins sent out personalised Christmas cards that year, presumably printed on the Worker’s press, wishing their friends ‘Happiness and Good Luck’. The card also reproduced an inspirational verse from one of Elsie’s books, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám:
Be of Good Cheer – the sullen Month will die,
And a young Moon require us by and by;
Look how the Old one meagre, bent and wan
With Age and Fast, is fainting from the sky!24
This would have had both personal and political meaning for Curtin. It would have reminded him that, no matter how deep his depressive episodes, they would end and be followed by bright optimism. But it was also an expression of his socialist faith, with the ‘sullen Month’ of capitalism supposedly ‘fainting from the sky’ while the ‘young Moon’ of socialism was about to ‘require us by and by’. Or so he desperately hoped. Despite the apparent success of the radicals at the Brisbane conference, there was less and less reason for harbouring such hopes, as he would soon come to acknowledge.
Just as the Labor Party had been able at Brisbane to reconcile the revolutionary rhetoric of the radicals with the reformist activities of the party, so too could Curtin reconcile the apparent contradiction between his revolutionary editorials and his reformist activities within the Labor Party and the AJA. As Tom Mann had taught him, it was Curtin’s task as a socialist to propagandise among all those groups that had the potential of joining the workers’ cause, whether it was the Labor Party or the AJA. However, in the process of doing this, he would find that his own beliefs and attitudes would gradually be transformed, particularly in the relatively relaxed political atmosphere of Perth. As editor of the Westralian Worker, he was confronted on an almost daily basis with the former faceless men of capitalism that he was seeking to overthrow.
Perth had more the character of a large town than a capital city, and both Labor and conservative political parties had similar policies in support of government enterprises and government-sponsored development of land for agriculture.25 As president of the AJA, Curtin also negotiated with the controllers of the local capitalist press and found that they were not the ogres he had supposed them to be. While Frank Anstey was scribbling furious notes to Curtin on the back of discarded Hansard proofs, suggesting that they ‘conduct a campaign against the Daily Press’ which was the ‘source of its (Capitalism’s) influence’, Curtin was being gradually disarmed by his personal association with the local owners of the daily press.26 The owner of Perth’s Daily News, Arthur Lovekin, referred to in the ribald pages of the Sunday Times as ‘Loveskin’, had been a journalist himself. Although often placing himself at odds with the AJA, Lovekin paid his journalists above the standard AJA rates and once put on a celebratory meal for his staff when they won an industrial dispute against him. As one journalist recalled, Lovekin would ‘make an argument over a penny and allow you a shilling’.27 Curtin also hosted a number of functions at Perth’s Palace Hotel for visiting journalists and newspaper managers from interstate.
Curtin’s position with the AJA also brought him into contact with various academics at the University of Western Australia. As president of the AJA, Curtin took a leading part in organising educational courses for journalists with professors from the university, and made a point of attending the Monday evening and Saturday morning classes. In 1920, the historian E.O.G. Shann28 lectured on British colonial policy and on economics while the essayist Walter Murdoch lectured on ‘elements of English prose’ to the ten or so journalists in attendance while later turning to ‘the prose writers of the 19th century’ and concluding with ‘brief studies of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Carlyle’s Past and Present, Tennyson’s In Memoriam, and Browning’s Men and Women.29 The lectures were presented free of fees and without examinations despite the federal executive of the AJA pushing for proper diploma courses to be established. According to Shann, the experience in Perth had shown that ‘a conversational survey of the leading principles of each subject, enlivened, where possible, by the colour of personal anecdote or dramatic episode . . . is about as much as the average A.J.A. member can undertake’. The aim was not to provide courses in journalism ‘but to bring University teachers and journalists, who are all engaged in forming and informing public opinion, into personal touch with one another’.30
The lectures were supplemented by informal discussions in between the Monday night lectures when Shann and Murdoch would join the journalists at a nearby cafe ‘where a large table is reserved’ around which only journalism and university work were discussed.31 At the end of 1920, Curtin hosted a function at the Palace Hotel to express the appreciation of the AJA for their lectures and to propose their healths, noting that ‘nothing but good could come from the closer association between journalists and the highest educational institution in the State, the work of both being to educate the public’.32 He remained a keen supporter of the courses and urged that younger journalists in particular should regard their attendance at the lectures as an obligation of their membership of the AJA, arguing that: ‘To associate for education is not less splendid, and is no less profitable than to associate for wages’.33 A future governor-general, Paul Hasluck, was a cadet journalist in Perth and joined the classes, later claiming that Curtin took a ‘great part’ in the lectures and that Shann had a ‘strong educational and inspirational effect’ on Curtin.34
Despite these conservative influences, Curtin made some attempt to convert the AJA from a non-political association into an industrial union that would acknowledge its affinity of interest with the working class as a whole. Indeed, an anonymous contribution to the Australasian Journalist just after Curtin was elected president may well have been penned by him. It certainly represented his sentiments. The article called for the AJA to ‘make common cause with the working class’ by aligning with trades halls and becoming a section of the printing industry union.35 Curtin did what he could to further such sentiments by establishing in Perth a Metropolitan Journalists’ Industrial Union of Workers of Western Australia, which was ostensibly established to police the industrial agreement between the AJA and the owners of three weekly newspapers in Perth, the Westralian Worker being one of them. The union had a token membership fee of one shilling a year, compared to three pounds for the AJA, and most of the journalists joined it. But it seems to have had little life separate from the AJA and its brief annual report was printed as a page of the AJA’s much longer report.36
Curtin’s involvement with the AJA and the ALP, combined with the nature of Perth and the worldwide retreat of socialism at this time, finally caused him in mid-1922 to resolve the apparent contradiction between his revolutionary rhetoric and his reformist activity in favour of the latter. As Dianne Sholl has shown, Curtin seems to have gone through a political sea change as he came to realise that his postwar hopes of socialism sweeping the world were not going to be realised in a sudden cataclysm. Germany had seemed set in 1919 to follow the example of Russia but the uprising of its workers had been brutally suppressed. Elsewhere, the forces of capitalism had also reasserted themselves while even in Russia there was a partial turning back towards capitalism. In Australia, the Labor Party remained in the wilderness and seemed set to stay there as Hughes continued to pound the loyalist drum, now portraying Labor as being pro-Bolshevik. Instead of Curtin’s hoped-for ‘day of golden opportunity’, there was, as Ross McMullin has observed, ‘a pessimistic, inward-turning greyness of spirit’ that left political reformers disarmed and made Australians so apathetic towards politics that they stayed away in droves from even voting.37
Despite the bellicosity of some of its officials, the trade union movement was in retreat as it tried to defend workers’ wages and conditions in the context of rising unemployment and recession. It was a hopeless task. The workers were in no mood to resist when they knew that thousands of others were waiting to take their place if they walked out. Whereas more than six million working days were lost to strikes in 1919, the figure was less than a million in 1921. Employers, some of whom had feared revolution after the war, now sensed an opportunity to reduce wages and restore their profits in the difficult business conditions. A royal commission had recommended that workers’ wages be reduced in return for welfare payments based on the number of their children.38 Curtin did what he could to resist the onslaught. At the beginning of 1922, he wrote a leaflet for the Perth ALF against a proposal by Hughes to reduce wages and was one of the speakers enlisted to address protest meetings on the issue. He also was one of the judges appointed by the ALF to assess an essay competition for children with the issue of wage reduction as their topic and a prize of £2 offered to the winner. However, his involvement in the campaign was restricted as the combination of heavy smoking and prolonged speeches took their toll on his throat. In mid-February 1922, he informed the ALF that he was unable to speak at propaganda meetings as he had been ‘strictly enjoined by his medical advisor to abstain from public speaking for at least another month’. He stood ready to ‘do everything else possible to help the work’ but suggested that the council let ‘new blood’ have their turn on the soapbox.39
Roughly four and a half years after taking up the socialist cudgels with the Timber Workers’ Union, Curtin had left in 1915 disgusted and dismayed by the members’ failure to respond to his crusade. Now, nearly four and a half years after stepping ashore in Perth as a disciple of socialism who had come to prepare the ground for revolution, he was ready to concede that a revolution, which Mann had convinced him to be inevitable, was neither inevitable nor any longer even likely. In the absence of fundamental change, and with his days and nights taken up with the reformist politics of the Labor Party and its trade unions,40 Curtin finally resolved his schizophrenic political existence by throwing in his lot with the Labor Party while some of his erstwhile colleagues opted instead to throw in theirs with the newly formed Australian Communist Party. Unlike the days of the Victorian Socialist Party when radicals could straddle both parties, they now had to make a choice. Curtin’s choice was clear.