No one could agree as to just who did turn up. Those who were there remembered the spring sunshine that sparkled on Darling Harbour as they made their way through the waterside streets to their dingy meeting place. They recalled the ardour of the participants and the rancour of their disagreements. One who travelled up from Melbourne had keen memories of the incessant cough of his companion which had kept him from sleep the night before, as well as the prodigious Sydney cockroaches that swarmed over their hotel bedroom. But the men and women who gathered on this Saturday morning were too habituated to such assemblies to be able to distinguish the names and the faces at this meeting from those who had met before and would meet again.1
Some 60 invitations to participate in the creation of the Communist Party of Australia were issued:
In an endeavour to bring about the unified action of all who stand for the emancipation of the working class by revolutionary action, we have decided to arrange a conference to be held on Saturday, 30th October, 1920, in the ASP Hall, Liverpool Street, City. We have much pleasure in inviting you to appoint a delegate to attend same.2
Twenty-six persons answered the call. Afterwards, as memories grew vague and the role of the founders took on a hallowed significance, lists circulated in an effort to fix precisely who they were.3 The Investigation Branch of the Attorney-General’s Department had followed the preparations keenly but its zeal so far outran its intelligence as to associate almost every dissident in Australia with the occasion.4 Even the minutes secretary was deficient in historical foresight: he counted the heads but omitted to record the names of those present.
The invitations were issued in the name of the host organisation, the Australian Socialist Party, and six of its members were present. There was Arthur Reardon, ASP secretary. Originally from the English midlands, he worked at the Clyde Engineering Works as a skilled blacksmith in charge of the apprentices. Emphatic in opinion, a self-taught worker-intellectual with interests that ran from metallurgy to English literature, he was as definite and exacting in his socialist rectitude as he was in the practise of his craft. At his right hand on this Saturday, as always, was Ray Everitt, the theoretician of the party and editor of its weekly newspaper, the International Socialist. And making up the ‘Holy Trinity’ of the ASP was Arthur’s wife Marcia, a forceful speaker and writer, who popularised that theory with homilies on the miseries of capitalism and the great happiness that was to come. Then there was Bob Brodney, a more recent recruit. Born Arthur Tennyson Brodzky in 1896, the son of a muckraking Melbourne journalist, he had moved with his family to San Francisco, London and New York before working his way back to Australia in 1918. Brodney had no sooner joined the ASP in 1919 than he began working as an organiser. Gifted, restless, lean and saturnine, the young newcomer had a precocious capacity to divine new possibilities where more habituated dogmatists saw only confirmation of their established convictions. His enthusiasm for this meeting overcame the caution of his comrades.5
The Australian Socialist Party was one of many points in a constantly shifting constellation of agitation, education and revolutionary rhetoric on the fringes of the labour movement. Such organisations formed and collapsed, merged and split around their diagnoses of the present discontents and their schemes for building on the ruins of capitalism a new social order that would replace oppression and exploitation with freedom and equality. With memberships of a few hundred at most, they sustained a demanding round of activities: production and sale of a weekly newspaper; study of socialist texts; open-air meetings; dances and socials, usually on Saturday evening; lectures and classes on Sunday. Much of their energy was spent in fierce polemics against the futility of reform, the perfidy of Labor politicians, the inadequacy of existing trade unions that only served to gild the chains of wage slavery, and above all, the errors of their socialist rivals. Since each group distinguished itself from the others by marking out its own version of socialist doctrine and socialist strategy, the promulgation of which was both its primary purpose and ultimate consolation, heresy hunting was endemic. Ritual exhortations to unity broke on the unyielding rock of doctrinal rectitude. As the ASP executive explained after a previous effort to bring the various socialist organisations together proved fruitless, ‘The ASP stands for revolution. Nothing less. Revolutionists don’t compromise.’6
That the ASP was prepared to host a unity conference in October 1920 suggested some relaxation of this obduracy. The recent experience of common resistance to wartime repression was one new factor predisposing the socialist sects to suspend their differences. For while the Australian left was uncompromising on points of dogma, gladiatorial in style and vilificatory in tone, it was also capable of closing ranks against an external threat. The recent Great War had strengthened that capacity. Just as the Australian government drew no distinction between the anti-war actions of socialists, syndicalists and feminists, all of whom it subjected to censorship, surveillance, prosecution, deportation and imprisonment, so the committees that formed to assist the victims were able to set aside doctrinal differences in the defence of political freedom. Even as they met, the participants were working for the release of jailed comrades.
The Great War of 1914–18—as it was known by contemporaries, who could not foresee the second round of hostilities to come within a quarter of a century—drew old adversaries into common causes. It also split the Labor Party, radicalised the unions and fostered a far greater international awareness in the Australian labour movement. More than this, the war strained the established world order to breaking point. None of the principal European combatants emerged from their prolonged ordeal without crippling losses. Monarchies were overthrown, boundaries redrawn, colonial possessions reallocated, but neither the victors nor the vanquished re-established the structures of authority that had provided security and prosperity over the past century. Institutions, habits and values that once ordered society lost their force. A nationalist uprising in Ireland against the imperial overlord, put down with brutal excess during the Easter of 1916, presaged the new disorder: ‘All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born’.
Above all, the war brought the Russian Revolution, an event that was at once specific in its causes and forms and universal in its impact. It is difficult now, in the aftermath of communism, to appreciate the enthusiasm with which onlookers responded to the news from Russia during 1917: the overthrow of the Tsar in March, the formation of ‘soviets’, or councils of workers, peasants and soldiers, to liberate the Russian people from a notoriously backward and despotic order, and then, in October, the Bolsheviks’ use of the soviets to seize power from the national assembly, followed by Russia’s unilateral withdrawal from the war. A series of aftershocks followed. There were shortlived communist republics in the former Austro–Hungarian empire, a failed uprising in Germany, further reverberations in Italy, France, Spain and beyond. New revolutionary movements emerged in China, India, Latin America. If few of the tobacco workers who formed their own soviets in Cuba knew even where Russia was, their adoption of the term demonstrated the reach of the Russian Revolution.
Before 1917 Marxism had provided just one strand of theory that informed the strategy of socialists, who in turn were but one of a constellation of oppositional movements—anarchism, syndicalism, populism, vitalism—that formed in response to the transition to capitalist modernity. After 1917 the methods of the Communist Party (the title adopted by the Bolsheviks after 1917) and the doctrines of communism (a term popularised by Marx and Engels in their Communist Manifesto of 1848) absorbed or displaced alternative traditions of social protest. Communism lit a beacon that beckoned to the oppressed and subject peoples around the world. It called on them to rise up in order to replace capitalism and imperialism by force. It constituted a party of a new type, a disciplined army of human emancipation. It created a new model of historical progress, universal in application, dogmatic in its certainty, that put knowledge at the service of power. Millions would die for communism, millions would die by it, and the reckoning of its effects would preoccupy the generations who lived under it. As the ideals of the French Revolution shaped history after 1789, so the ideas of the Russian Revolution have shaped the twentieth century.7
The call by the Russian communists for the working class of all countries to follow their lead and make their own revolutions was answered by the ASP at the end of 1919, when it declared allegiance to the new Communist International.8 Had that been all that was involved in the establishment of a communist party of Australia, it would hardly have been necessary to convene the gathering at the ASP hall ten months later. The additional socialists it gathered in were few enough—one from the small ASP branch in Brisbane, an official from the defunct Social Democratic League of New South Wales, a dissident branch of the rigidly impossibilist Socialist Labor Party, and some former members of the Victorian Socialist Party, which had recently rejected the Bolshevik model.
These were mere embellishments of a more ambitious alliance. For also present at the conference was the secretary of the New South Wales Labor Council, Jock Garden, along with a group of his lieutenants known as the ‘Trades Hall Reds’. Despite their name, they represented the very trade union officialdom that socialists denounced, and John Smith Garden himself was an unlikely revolutionary. From Lossiemouth, on the north-east coast of Scotland, he had come to Australia as a preacher in 1904 and only gravitated to Labor politics during the war, after he was dismissed for fraudulent conversion from a job in the Defence Department. Garden brought to socialism the same fiery enthusiasm he had applied to his other schemes of redemption by faith and by works, and like that other celebrated ‘Lossiemouth loon’, Ramsay MacDonald, he could carry sympathisers away on flights of rhetoric; the sceptics he sought to reassure with a broad wink. From his base in the Sydney Trades Hall he threw in his lot with the scheme for One Big Union in order to unify and strengthen the industrial wing of the labour movement in a crusade to overthrow capitalism. Simultaneously he worked with Albert Willis, the coalminers’ leader, to impose the same objectives on the Labor Party. Defeated at the 1919 state conference and expelled from the Labor Party, Garden and Willis had little success with their Industrial Socialist Labor Party. Courageous, generous, a born fixer and utterly shameless in his opportunism, Garden needed a new political base to continue the intense factional conflict that characterised the New South Wales labour movement; but if his intrigues threatened to enmesh the new Communist Party in some embarrassing alliances, he also offered invaluable institutional support. Among the Trades Hall Reds he brought with him were Jack Howie, the recent president of the Labor Council, Jack Kilburn of the Bricklayers, Arthur Rutherford of the Saddlers, Bob Webster of the Miscellaneous Workers and Chris Hook of the Municipal Workers.9
There was another unexpected face, that of Tom Glynn, still marked by the pallor of nearly four years in gaol. He was one of the twelve Sydney ‘martyrs’ of the Industrial Workers of the World convicted in 1916 of seditious conspiracy for their campaign of direct action against the war. More commonly known as the Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World had initiated the idea of One Big Union. Unlike Garden and the Trades Hall Reds, however, they scorned the constraints of trade union officialdom for organisation and action on the job in a heroic vision of participatory industrial democracy that knew no divisions of leader and led. And unlike the socialists, the Australian Wobblies, who took their lead from the Chicago-based IWW, were vehemently anti-political. Parliament was for the bosses. The workers should simply bypass it and create the structure of the new order within the shell of the old. In keeping with such an heroic project, the Wobblies were distinguished by their reckless effrontery as the guerillas of the class war in the years leading up to and into the Great War. They cultivated a style of reckless defiance of order and respectability, a style commonly described as ‘bummery’ after their iconoclastic boast, ‘Hallelujah! I’m a bum!’ In such effrontery no one exceeded Tom Glynn. An Irishman, who was a trooper in the Boer War and a Transvaal policeman after it, Glynn had plunged into industrial agitation in South Africa. As the secretary of the Sydney branch of the IWW and one of the most articulate strategists of its antiwar agitation, he was a prime target when the Australian government suppressed the organisation late in 1916. Released from prison in August 1920 by the new Labor government of New South Wales in response to a popular campaign, he quickly set about reviving the Wobbly cause. In September he contributed a foreword to the Communist International’s appeal to the IWW in which he accepted that ‘something more than the industrial weapon’ was needed to combat the ‘machinations of the capitalist class during the transition period towards a Communist social order’. Industrial unionism was still an urgent necessity, but so rapidly was capitalism approaching its collapse that the ‘old idea’ of building a new society within the shell of the old ‘can no longer be maintained’.10
Two other celebrated rebels were there, Tom Walsh and Adela Pankhurst Walsh. He was the secretary of the Seamen’s Union, an Irish rebel, who as ‘Sinbad the Sailor’ contributed broadsides to Wobbly publications. She was the daughter of the famous English suffragette, Emmeline Pankhurst, and younger sister of the equally formidable Christabel and Sylvia—the younger sister who came to Australia in 1914 in the hope that she might establish her own identity, only to play out her sisters’ roles. Emmeline and Christabel turned to feminist patriotism in the war against the bestial Hun; Adela and Sylvia, who saw womanhood degraded by capitalism and militarism, turned instead to revolutionary internationalism. Like her mother before the war and Sylvia during it, Adela became a martyr to her cause. On the platform of the Women’s Peace Army and later the Victorian Socialist Party, she courted notoriety. Imprisoned for antiwar activity, she averted deportation by her marriage, while on remand, to Walsh. She embraced imprisonment, only to write from Pentridge Prison to implore her husband, whom she had appointed as guardian of her political conscience, to let her come home: ‘I am afraid I can’t stand any more of it.’ He was put away himself in the following year for organising a seamen’s strike. Now reunited in Sydney, they took their infant daughter Sylvia to the foundation meeting of the Communist Party and Adela had to leave the hall when the baby started crying.11
The Walshes had resigned from the Victorian Socialist Party when they shifted up to Sydney for Tom to take up his union position. Another leading member of the VSP, Carl Baker, was expelled for his part in the formation of the Communist Party. He was an optometrist and a rationalist, an American—he had abandoned his Christian names, Clarence Wilbur, along with his Christianity—with the gift of the gab who spruiked his cause on the Yarra Bank.12 With him on the trip up from Melbourne was Guido Baracchi, the knight errant of Australian radicalism. The son of the Victorian government astronomer, educated at Melbourne Grammar and the University of Melbourne, he had spent some years in English socialist circles before he took up legal studies back in Melbourne in 1914. There his antiwar activities brought him a drenching in the university lake, expulsion from the university and a spell in Pentridge. A man of considerable wealth and emotional spontaneity, utterly without guile or worldly ambition, of luminous innocence and limitless self-centredness—his marital and romantic arrangements were in a constant muddle—he edited the Melbourne Wobbly paper, Industrial Solidarity, and was a founder of the Victorian Labor College.
His partner in that educational enterprise, Bill Earsman, differed from Baracchi in almost every respect. William Paisley Earsman was a canny Scot who outlayed his emotions as shrewdly as his bawbees. He had arrived in Melbourne in 1910, become active in his craft union—the Amalgamated Society of Engineers—and an executive member of the Victorian Socialist Party. A keen enthusiast for independent working-class education, despite his own erratic spelling and shaky syntax, with a sharp instinctive intelligence and a good conceit of himself, he persuaded some trade unions to support the formation of a labour college in 1917: Baracchi taught Marxist economics while Earsman took classes in industrial strategy with a strong syndicalist emphasis.13 In 1919 he moved to Sydney, leaving his wife and family in Melbourne. With him went Christian Jollie Smith, a lawyer, daughter of a Presbyterian minister and close university friend of Baracchi—she had left the Commonwealth Solicitor’s office under suspicion of having passed information about deportation proceedings to Adela Pankhurst Walsh’s lawyer.14 In Sydney they enlisted the support of Garden and the Trades Hall Reds for a New South Wales Labor College. Earsman was its secretary, Jollie Smith his assistant; she taught English literature and grammar, he offered his lessons in industrial strategy. The epigones of the socialist sects were scornful of this self-appointed dominie, with his two-tone shoes and Baden-Powell hat, his syndicalist sympathies and ‘colossal ignorance’ of the Marxist texts; but with trade union backing Earsman was difficult to ignore.15
He had another vital ally in Petr Simonov, the self-styled Soviet consul-general. Peter Simonoff, as his name was usually spelt, was among the substantial community of Russian exiles who had made their way to Australia via the Pacific in the early years of this century. There were Russian groups in both the ASP and the VSP, while their own Union of Russian Workers had branches in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and elsewhere that spanned the spectrum of the left. When many of the notables left for home upon the fall of the Tsarist regime in March 1917, Simonoff assumed leadership. With the Bolshevik seizure of power at the end of the year, he moved to Melbourne to establish a consulate. That the Australian government refused it recognition and then gaoled him for six months for defying a prohibition on public appearances only augmented his prestige in radical circles. Impatient to establish an Australian communist party, he shifted his base of operations to Sydney and opened an impressive office in Rawson Place, by the Central Railway Station. Those who had known him when he was always down on his uppers found him suspiciously flush with funds: one compatriot remarked with astonishment that he now drank in saloon bars.16 His self-importance grew also as he scouted the alternative socialist groups he might back. The ASP might seem to have best claims, given its declaration of adherence to the Communist International, but writing under the pseudonym P. Finn in August 1920, Simonoff declared it inflexible, too dogmatic, too remote from the masses. He had decided to support an alternative political enterprise whose broker was to be Earsman.17
Their scheme was hatched in secrecy, though rumours abounded at the time and some details emerged afterwards in unguarded boast and angry recrimination. The account that Earsman constructed for the Communist International in the following year invested the sequential steps with the precision of a meticulously planned clandestine operation.
In 1920 a small group of revolutionaries decided to establish the Communist Party of Australia, which they did as a secret organisation. We got to work among the trade unions and formed a number of groups, whose main object was the spreading of Communist principles and the white-anting of these unions. From time to time we issued leaflets to the workers advising and instructing them in their every-day struggles with the master class. Then we sent out a manifesto and programme in keeping with the principles of the Third Communist International, and a call to form a legal Communist Party.18
This melodramatic account was calculated to impress Earsman’s Russian audience, and certainly confirmed the Australian Investigation Branch’s conviction that there was a controlling intelligence behind the formation of the Communist Party, constituting ‘the most silent, militant and dangerous’ of malign infestations, one that ‘plants its own members in places where they in turn become ‘‘germ cells’’, thus multiplying itself fission fashion—retaining its own virility while ever extending the sphere of its cankerous inoculation’.19 Both versions suppress the improvisation, the blunders and sheer messiness of the process.
The first step was to establish communist groups in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney. Earsman’s associates in the Melbourne labour college, Baracchi and the socialist bookseller Percy Laidler, launched a new journal, Proletarian Review, in June 1920 to publicise communist principles, while Carl Baker and the Russian activist John Maruschak tried and ultimately failed to win over the VSP. In Brisbane, where the Russian presence was stronger, the ASP branch declared itself a communist group in August 1920 with the publication of their journal, Communist. Meanwhile in Sydney, Earsman, Simonoff and Jollie Smith drew Jock Garden into their meetings as they prepared the manifesto and programme of the proposed party. At this point Reardon and Everitt of the ASP launched a preemptive strike. They obtained a copy of the draft manifesto and published it early in October with this introduction:
It was discovered blowing around the city, and the only clue as to its origin was ‘The Central Executive of the Australian Communist Party’. After quoting the closing paragraph of the ‘Communist Manifesto’ by Marx and Engels, wherein it is stated that ‘The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims’, the author, or authors, evidently took fright at their own audacity and ran for the hollow log, before giving their name and address to the printer.20
As Reardon and Everitt anticipated, this shrewd thrust drew the authors of the document into the open. Discussions opened that led almost immediately to the calling of the conference for 30 October. While the ASP issued the invitations, Garden and Earsman provided Reardon with the names and addresses of the bulk of the invitees. It was an uneasy arrangement since neither party trusted the other while each depended on mutual cooperation. As the most significant of the socialist groups, the ASP had the assets—most importantly, premises and a printing press—and the putative claim to be an affiliate of the Communist International. The others had the wider contacts, the intangible authority of the Soviet representative in Australia, and the initiative.
The conference passed without open breach, though the points of tension were readily apparent. Garden was elected to the chair, Earsman kept the minutes. Everitt moved that the conference accept the principles of the Communist International and pledge itself to establish ‘a well disciplined centralised party’; a Trades Hall Red moved the amendment ‘That this conference now form a Communist Party’, and the amendment was carried. Or so the minutes recorded—Reardon’s version was that the conference agreed to take immediate steps to form a communist party. Earsman defeated Reardon as secretary in the ballot for a provisional secretary; there were just three ASP members elected to a provisional executive of twelve. Brodney and Glynn wanted to thrash out the programme and principles there and then; Earsman and Garden prevailed with their suggestion that the task be entrusted to a drafting committee. The group charged with the task—Earsman, Jollie Smith, Tom Glynn, Bob Brodney, Ray Everitt—quickly adopted a slightly modified version of the documents the International Socialist had so recently derided.21 On the Sunday evening they celebrated the successful formation of the new party with a rally in the Liverpool Street Hall, where Glynn, Baker, Baracchi and Reardon were the speakers. Glynn expressed his appreciation of the ASP’s magnanimity: ‘contrary to all expectations, the ASP had sunk everything in the interests of that unity for which they had called the conference’. Reardon thanked Glynn for his words of praise, noting ‘it was altogether a new sensation to receive anything but bitter criticism’. The conference, he said, had met in ‘a peculiar atmosphere. Many delegates had gathered, each with the idea that the ASP sought only to reinforce itself and to sail along with little more than perhaps a change of name.’ Indeed they had, but most present had something more in mind.22
The manifesto and programme released in the following month suggests the nature of their enterprise. While appealing to the authority of the new Communist International, it still took as its starting point the evolutionary outlook of the old Socialist International. Capitalism was a system that had ‘done great service to humanity’, but had now outlived its usefulness and must give way. It had created the seeds of its own destruction in the augmentation of productive capacity, choking the owning class with wealth while denying the producing class the fruits of their labour. Meanwhile the capitalists controlled the state and used it to coerce or trick the workers into submission. Onto this familiar historical diagnosis and gloomy political prognosis the manifesto grafted the idea of the communist party as the educator, the organiser and the leader of the working class. The distinctive character of Lenin’s conception of the party was barely glimpsed (‘The Communist Party is essentially a fighting organisation and not a debating club’), though the need for a dictatorship of the proletariat ‘for the complete annihilation of the bourgeoise as a class’ was stated. Nor was there any consideration of the provenance of this device, or how it might be applied in Australia. The programme of the party invoked the Bolshevik method—
Forming groups of its members in every mill, factory, workshop and field, so that it is always in a position to direct and control through its members every industrial dispute and disturbance of the workers, keeping always in mind the same end—social revolution—and trying to utilise every spontaneous action of the workers for that one end;
—without further thought as to how such direction and control might be achieved and exercised. Instead, the manifesto was concerned to strike a balance between those old bugbears of Australian socialism and syndicalism, the ‘industrial question’ and the ‘political question’. On the industrial question, it conceded to the syndicalists the desirability of industrial over craft unions since ‘up-to-date efficient industrial unions’ would have greater revolutionary potential and assist in the future communist reconstruction. At the same time it insisted against the syndicalists that communists should participate in all existing unions and seek to win office within them. On the political question it called on communists to participate in parliamentary elections in order to demonstrate the bankruptcy of capitalist institutions to the ‘toiling masses’. But in a concession to the anti-parliamentarians, it allowed membership to those holding contrary views ‘providing that they submit to party discipline’.23
Such equivocations were hardly surprising. The success of the Bolsheviks was undoubtedly the catalyst for the formation of the new party. Its choice of name, declaration of allegiance and intent are quite clear. Australian radicals had always borrowed freely from other countries. The first wave of Australian socialism was discernibly British in its doctrine, language and temper, with a continental European leavening. In the first decade of the twentieth century, North America became the salient influence, both through De Leonite socialism and Wobbly doctrines. Now a third wave was building.
Into old rhyme
The new words come but shyly.
Here’s a brave man
Who sings of commerce dryly.
Swift-gliding cars
Through town and country winging,
Like cigarettes
Are deemed unfit for singing.
Into old rhyme
New words come tripping slowly.
Hail to the time
When they possess it wholly.
The new words never did wholly possess the author of this poem, Lesbia Keogh, who wrote it in 1917 when she was the lover of Guido Baracchi and made a Wobbly of him. A friend of Christian Jollie Smith at the University of Melbourne, she moved to Sydney in 1918 and boarded with the wife of Tom Glynn. She bore the reputation of a ‘Rebel Girl’ who sought to combine women’s freedom and class emancipation. Just three weeks after the foundation of the Communist Party she married Pat Harford, a Wobbly artist, and withdrew from politics. Following her death in early middle age, Baracchi would claim that she was a romantic revolutionary unsuited to a strictly disciplined organisation like the Communist Party.24
A range of experience and temperament can be seen in those who gathered in Sydney to form the Communist Party. Of the score who can be positively identified, a little more than half were Australianborn; the others hailed from England, Scotland, Ireland, the United States and one from Russia. Only three came from outside New South Wales for the occasion but at least half had lived for extensive periods in one or more of the other states. Most had only a few years of formal schooling, and the two with degrees were quite exceptional, but all of them, even the most rough-tongued, cultivated a particular style of intellectual self-improvement. Their work experience covered construction, bush labouring and skilled crafts. Christian Jollie Smith, a solicitor, and Carl Baker, the optometrist, were the only professionals, though a narrow majority held full-time organisational or agitational positions in 1920. Nearly all had had brushes with the law since 1914, and at least half a dozen had served time. They were young: Tom Walsh, born in 1871, was easily the oldest; Bob Brodney, at 24, probably the youngest. Most were still in their thirties. And they were largely masculine. Only three women are known to have been present: Christian Jollie Smith, Adela Pankhurst Walsh and Marcia Reardon, and all three had partners there as well.
The composite portrait that emerges is of a particular generational segment fired by 1917. They were restless, cosmopolitan, resourceful, impatient, tested in the crucible of combat and still keen for more. They were an insistently political assembly, defining themselves by word and gesture in vehement rejection of the existing order, and they practised a gladiatorial style whose highest form was the challenge to formal combat by debate, issued by the champion of one group to another. Yet the political culture they created and inhabited was by no means as narrowly oppositional as might be supposed. Russian musical evenings were a great drawcard at this time when the audience would thrill to the strains of ‘The Peasants’ Song’, ‘The Fairy Song’ and ‘The Revolutionary Fighting Song’.25 Just as the Reardons performed theatrical readings for the members of the ASP, so Brodney lectured on classical music at the Trades Hall to the piano accompaniment of Jollie Smith.
Perhaps that type of artistic performance offers a clue to the gendered pattern of revolutionary politics. Within the socialist ranks there was a sexual division of labour. The men were the activists, speaking and practising a distinctively masculine language of virile defiance, and women who could engage in that arena earned an enhanced reputation as Amazons. Typically, however, the women were cast in a supportive, nurturing role, sustaining the socialist fellowship and prefiguring the higher life that was to be. When the ASP lost patience with the reformist VSP, it pronounced that it consisted of ‘dear old ladies of both sexes’.26 Among the industrialists this division was even more pronounced. The Trades Hall Reds organised their members on inner-city sites where men sweated and toiled, and they did their deals in the pubs around the Trades Hall. The Wobblies drew their strength from the bush workers, the isolated mining communities, the waterfront and transport industries, and the fraternity of unattached men constantly on the move.
Militant activism offered a particular kind of critique and affirmed a particular kind of alternative. It valorised a single-minded dedication to the cause unencumbered by sentimental ties. When it identified the evils of capitalism, inequality, poverty, exploitation and corruption, this activism returned insistently to capitalism’s destructive effects on family life. Wage slavery was an affront to masculine capacity, and such palliative devices as arbitration emasculated the working man. The very first issue of the communist newspaper featured an article by Adela Pankhurst Walsh on ‘Communism and Social Purity’, which explained how capitalism degraded sexuality and forced women into prostitution.27 This was a longestablished theme in Australian socialism: in perhaps its formative text, Workingman’s Paradise (1892), William Lane explained the impossibility of true marriage and healthy procreation until the serpent was expelled from the garden and the safety of the race secured.28 But it assumed particular salience in wartime circumstances when the existing gender order was disturbed by the departure of the young men. The ‘Red Plague’ was the term commonly used to denote the consequent danger of venereal disease, and a congruence may be noted between this image of rampant infection and the language used by the Investigation Branch about communists. These communists were the men of military age who had not gone overseas to fight but stayed home to wage the class war. Male as well as female socialists advertised the insidious spread of venereal disease for which socialism and secure, companionate sexual partnership were the only reliable antidotes. Bill Thomas, one of the ASP representatives at the founding conference, was celebrated for his lantern-slide lectures on the subject.29
The Communist Party of Australia was formed on the ebb tide of labour unrest. Within a year the Communist International would declare that the period of revolutionary crisis was spent and a new phase of temporary capitalist stability had begun. Its signs were already apparent. The great general strike of 1917 had paralysed industry for three months, the maritime strike of 1919 tied up the ports for three months more; by 1920 only the Broken Hill miners were engaged in that form of industrial seige. Wartime hardships were easing as economic growth resumed. The strains that had split the Labor Party so recently had weakened, but not dislodged, its attachment to parliamentary reform. Above all, the iron heel of the militarised state had crushed the most dangerous rebels and with the return of the soldiers, whose blood sacrifice provided conservatives with a symbol of sacral nationalism, the country turned inwards, eschewing the exotic, the alien and the dissident. The period of capitalist stability was indeed temporary. Unemployment, deprivation, dissatisfaction did not disappear. Yet the Communist Party could no longer assume a ready response to its message of class war.