By 1925 the hopes of the founders of the Communist Party of Australia were dashed. The coalition of socialists, industrial activists and Trades Hall Reds who had gathered in 1920 under the banner of the Russian Revolution was in disarray. The subordination of older forms of industrial militancy to the new conception of the vanguard party had proved no more successful than the attempt of that party to infiltrate, white-ant and capture the chief organisations of the labour movement. Neither strategy worked because, apart from defects in their execution, both were pulling against an insistent tide. At the end of the war the government had embarked on an ambitious programme of economic development. Overseas borrowing financed rural settlement schemes and associated construction projects; exports of primary products increased; new secondary industries benefited from increased levels of protection to produce new products for domestic consumers; wage rates increased. Poverty, unemployment and chronic insecurity still blighted the lives of manual labourers and their dependants, for the economic change actually reduced the demand for the unskilled, itinerant worker who followed the seasonal patterns of the pick-up, yet the circumstances of such battlers seemed increasingly marginal to the suburban majority. Whereas the communists addressed their revolutionary rhetoric to this sharply delineated audience, the broader labour movement was drawing back from its recent experiments with direct action and anti-capitalist rhetoric into the familiar, safe forms of industrial arbitration and piecemeal reform by electoral politics. With the consequent closure of boundaries that just a few years earlier had been open and fluid, the communists were left as an ineffectual rump. Of the founders, Simonoff and Earsman had left the country, while Garden was drawn in the wake of his Trades Hall Reds towards a necessary accommodation with the state Labor government. Outside Sydney, the turnover of enthusiasts through small and unstable branches that formed and dissolved only emphasised the predicament of Australian communism.
The party was shaped by its beleaguered condition. From its formation it was subjected to the same official surveillance that had operated during the war to censor publications, intercept correspondence, monitor meetings, suborn informants, prosecute speakers, restrict overseas travel and expel aliens. Just as Simonoff had been imprisoned and Freeman deported, so Dora Montefiore was permitted to enter Australia in 1922 only after she surrendered her passport and promised not to engage in communist propaganda. Other communist emissaries during the early 1920s were deported as soon as they were detected.1 Tom Payne was prosecuted and fined for misuse of a borrowed passport upon his return to Australia from the Fourth Congress of the Communist International. The amended Commonwealth Crimes Act of 1920 codified a number of offences previously dealt with under the emergency War Precautions legislation; under its provisions it was a seditious offence to write, publish or utter words intended to bring the King into hatred or contempt, to excite disaffection against the government or the constitution, or even to promote ill will and hostility between different classes of His Majesty’s subjects so as to endanger the peace, order or good government of the Commonwealth. Amendments to the Immigration Act in the same year provided for the exclusion or deportation of any person who advocated the overthrow by force or violence the established government of the Commonwealth, or of any state, or of any other civilised country, with additional legislation to cover passports and registration of aliens. Customs regulations were widened in 1921 to impose the same rubric on the importation of literature; these allowed the Commonwealth to seize a wide variety of communist publications, and by 1926 over a hundred titles were listed. While complete prohibition was impossible to enforce, there was a distinct dearth of Marxist and Leninist texts.2
No prosecution for sedition was brought during this period; rather the Commonwealth government exploited the danger of communism to encourage a climate of repressive conservatism. Ironically, it was the notoriety of two non-communists that occasioned a far more intense offensive against the communist menace in Australia. The ex-communist president of the Seamen’s Union, Tom Walsh, and its secretary, Jacob Johnson, made easy scapegoats for the recurrent stoppages of maritime transport. Both were born outside Australia, both vehement in their revolutionary rhetoric. In 1925 the Commonwealth government amended the Immigration Act to provide for the deportation of persons not born in Australia who obstructed transport and whose presence was injurious to peace, order and good government. When Walsh and Johnson supported the British seamen’s strike in August, they were arrested, brought before a special board and sentenced to deportation. The hearing coincided with a federal election that the government turned into an anti-communist crusade. The prime minister, S. M. Bruce, led off with a warning of how the unions had been captured by ‘wreckers who would plunge us into the chaos and misery of class war’. Since the Labor Party was incapable of ridding itself of the extremists, ‘the canker of these men advocating Communistic doctrines must be cut out of our National life’. The National Party organisation furnished its candidates with a litany of Bolshevik evils garnished by long quotations of Garden’s boasts in Moscow. The government won a decisive victory at the polls, but it was rebuffed by the High Court which in December 1925 found that the deportations were unconstitutional. Bruce therefore turned to a new attorney-general, John Latham.3
Latham brought a formidable zeal to his office. A precise, cold man of stern rectitude (he had in his youth worked with Bob Ross in the Victorian Rationalist Society), his experience during the war as a naval intelligence officer and then a participant in the Paris peace conference had convinced him of the gravity of the communist danger to the rule of law in national and international affairs. He worked closely with the Investigation Branch of his department, which carried prime responsibility for political surveillance. He systematically read the files prepared by the head of that section, annotated them and despatched them to the solicitor-general for prosecution. Since the fomenters of unrest were ‘not open to intellectual conviction’, he reasoned, ‘they require criminal conviction’. His redrafting of the Crimes Act in 1926 broadened the definition of unlawful activity and unlawful association to an unprecedented degree. It imposed new penal sanctions on strikers and caused the Communist Party executive to prepare for underground activity. Latham toyed with more drastic measures: his friend Robert Garran, the solicitor-general, had to advise him that even the amended Crimes Act would not justify the closing down of the Communist Hall in Sussex Street.4
The increased vigilance of the Australian government coincided with an intensification by the British government of its security measures against Soviet intelligence activities in that country. This severed the lines of communication between the Australian party and the Communist International, and stopped the transfer of money through British banks. Richard Casey, a young protégé of S. M. Bruce who was serving as the Australian liaison officer in Whitehall, sent a regular flow of British intelligence information back to Latham, so that prospective migrants suspected of communist sympathies could be investigated and kept out of Australia.5 Meanwhile state police forces and municipal authorities imposed a variety of additional restrictions on communist activity, while right-wing movements combined quasi-military preparations with a public crusade against the red menace.6
Official repression was a lesser discouragement than the unofficial vilification and harassment, for the usual effect of constant surveillance, censorship and prosecution was to strengthen the conviction of communists that their class war was just and their sacrifices worthwhile. Did not the attention they attracted confirm the significance of this small group of beleaguered activists? More than this, the officers of the Investigation Branch of the Attorney-General’s Department echoed the charged imagery of the communists. The activists they described in their detailed files were potent, indefatigable, infinitely resourceful, limitless in their capacity to inflame and suborn loyalties. Noteworthy in the conspiratorial fantasies of the Investigation Branch was the Secret Seven, ‘the most silent, militant and dangerous of the forces now working in Australia’. Despite the name, its membership, according to the Investigation Branch, was elastic and omnipresent, it commanded silent assent by means of the password ‘kismet’ and used the ‘germ cell system’ invented in Moscow to worm its way into the unions and the Labor Party.7
Here also was a vindication of the party and the demands it imposed. When Guido Baracchi resigned in 1925 he said that the members of the Communist Party were the best comrades in the movement but the party itself a tragic farce. When Esmonde Higgins related the abject state of Australian communism at this juncture, he observed that the dispirited members clung all the more tightly to their identity. ‘All we can do is keep chattering the name ‘‘Communist Party’’.’8 That the name and the identity should have already assumed such talismanic significance is hardly surprising—after all, the competition to secure the title had occupied Australian communists for the best part of two years. Membership of the Communist International and association with its legendary heroes conferred a surrogate prestige on the Australian adherents, just as overseas successes compensated for unavailing local sacrifice. Long before the Australian party adopted the Bolshevik model of organisation, it was extolling the ‘marvellous power of discipline’ which gave ‘life and power’ to dormant energies.9
The earlier socialist sects had drawn their adherents into an enclosed world of cultural meaning marked out in language and ritual that offered them the reassurance of dogmatic certainty in return for the rigours of evangelical effort. The Communist Party took over that temper but tightened its effects with two additional twists. The first was foreshadowed in the original manifesto of the provisional executive: ‘The Communist Party is essentially a fighting organisation and not a debating club.’ The success of the Bolsheviks was taken to validate Lenin’s insistence on the need to seize the revolutionary opportunity; the split in the ranks of the pre-war socialist international was seen as distinguishing those who made revolution from those who merely talked of one. Earlier socialists had observed ineluctable laws of historical materialism that would in the fullness of social evolution exhaust capitalism and bring the working class to an appreciation of its mission, a process that the socialists might hasten through propaganda and education but could not anticipate until the time was ripe. Comrade History had been their mentor and their solace, as he was for some of the CPA founders—in 1923 a whole issue of the theoretical monthly, Proletarian, was given over to an unshakeably fatalist exposition of the materialist conception of history. Stolid Jack Howie was notorious for interrupting party discussion in deeply sorrowful tones with the reminder, ‘Ah, no, comrades, we will not decide, mater-r-r-ial conditions will decide’. Henceforth deeds displaced words as the revolutionary hallmark.10
If the working class had to be snatched from the grip of economist and reformist illusions and directed into action, it followed that the role of the guiding intelligence was crucial. From the vanguard conception of the revolutionary party came the insistence on a single-minded unity of purpose maintained by an ‘iron discipline’. As early as 1921 Australian communists distinguished the military principles of their organisation from the laxity of its predecessors: ‘An army is only a body of men before it goes into action’, wrote Carl Baker. ‘It then depends entirely on its training, its discipline …’11 Just as the new party superimposed the hammer and sickle onto the red flag, so it grafted a martial vocabulary onto classical Marxism. To the sociological categories of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat it added the organisational concepts of the vanguard and the masses, and these in turn generated a veritable litany of infractions that the rank and file must avoid: adventurism and tailism, opportunism and liquidationism. The arcane dialect reassured its users that they were marching to the drumbeat of destiny, even if others could not hear it. Sometimes the language of communism lent itself to unfortunate misunderstanding: thus Guido Baracchi’s story of the wife of a comrade who heard her husband described as a fine class-conscious proletarian and rose indignantly to retort, ‘I think you’re class conscious yourself ‘.12 Other phrases, ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ is an obvious example, had resonances that were exploited by those who wished to discredit communism as an alien tyranny.
This was the second novel feature of communism: its foreign provenance. In a period when Australia was retreating into monocultural fortifications, with economic and defence arrangements tied closely to the British Empire as a bulwark against postwar uncertainties, and population policies and cultural institutions designed to resist the menace of cosmopolitan modernity, the Russian Revolution embodied all the evils of the age. It was brutal, atavistic, levelling, irreligious, menacing, licentious. The persistent reports that the communists had abolished marriage and nationalised women in Russia exercised a particular fascination during the immediate postrevolutionary period, speaking to the fantasies of men who upheld monogamy as a bulwark of patriarchal order. The Bolshevik leaders were commonly portrayed as Jewish degenerates with brutal Cossacks at their command; their call for world revolution and colonial liberation threatened a lapse into barbarism. Thus the Nationalist government’s 1925 election poster of whiskered Bolsheviks firing into an Australian church and slaughtering the congregation tapped the fear of alien assaults on property, family, Christianity and national security. Such images drew their force partly from Australia’s historical location as a colonial nation and partly from racial fears unleashed by the recent war. Their potency was demonstrated in the red flag riots of 1919, when loyalist ex-servicemen attacked the Russian community of Brisbane; in the defence of the Union Jack at the Sydney Domain in May 1921; and in inflammatory confrontations of a similar nature conducted in other parts of the country during the postwar period. They are central to the clash of right and left depicted by D. H. Lawrence in his novel of a postwar Australia in which violence lies close to the surface of a brooding lethargy. The novel, Kangaroo, culminates in a pitched battle as ex-servicemen invade a communist meeting:
The red flag suddenly flashing like blood, and bellowing rage at the sight of it. A Union Jack torn to fragments stamped upon. A mob with many different centres, some fighting frenziedly around a red flag, some clutching fragments of the Union Jack, as if it were God incarnate.
Throughout the 1920s the Nationalist Party fanned the embers with its pamphlet Under Which Flag? Should it be the international banner of revolt or the emblem of King and Empire?13
Yet the nation that these anxious conservatives defended was only one of several variations on the identity of a country with an ethnic and social composition far more heterogeneous than the repressive monoculturalists acknowledged. The individual communists so far identified in this history attest to a diversity of origins and destinations, with a considerable range of attachments and a keen awareness of international events. The initial local interest in the Soviet experiment is indicated by the sales of left-wing literature in the township of Kurri Kurri on the northern New South Wales coalfield late in 1921. Alongside the sales of Marxist classics—ten copies of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, three copies of Marx’s Value, Price and Profit, one of his Wage Labour and Capital and eight of Engels’s Socialism, Utopian and Scientific—there were 22 copies of the report of the British Delegation in Red Petrograd, eleven of Australia and the World Revolution, five of Lenin’s State and Revolution, two of his Left-Wing Communism and 21 of Alexandra Kollontai’s Communism and the Family.14 Australian communists made no excuse for their decision to take the Moscow road. On the contrary, they rejoiced in the Russian communists’ conquest of power, celebrated the transformation of life in the Soviet Union, rebutted all suggestions of error or excess, defended its repression of dissent, and did what they could to collect aid for its reconstruction after famine and civil war.15
A common topic for debate during these early years while such orderly disputation between different sections of the left could still occur was ‘That the Australian workers to achieve their emancipation must follow the methods adopted by the Russian workers’.16 The proposition called for a different mode of argument from that which communists used in response to conservative denigration. Many in the labour movement concurred with Bob Ross in his sympathy for the Russian communists in their overthrow of Tsarist autocracy but denial of the relevance of such methods in Australia where civil liberties and democratic practices allowed for a peaceful transition. The usual response was to defend the general applicability of Lenin’s analysis of late capitalism while acknowledging that Australia’s particular circumstances would affect its implementation. Communists understood the political circumstances not as a refutation of the Leninist insistence on a revolutionary seizure of power—for Australian communists insisted that parliamentary government was a sham, the much-vaunted rule of law a cloak for capitalist dictatorship—but rather as a set of pernicious illusions that bamboozled Australian workers. In this reading of national differences, Russia led the way precisely because of the backwardness of its bourgeois democracy.
Such an estimate reversed the evolutionary perspective of earlier socialists who had assumed that the advanced capitalist countries were pioneering a route that more backward ones would follow. Australia, with its well-established unions and electorally successful Labor Party, had once been regarded as a social laboratory where workers could use their freedom to experiment with devices that would abolish hardship and insecurity. Now that reassuring self-image had to be revised. An early editorial in the party paper, Communist, gave this reformulation:
We in Australia are fortunate. From Australia we can survey the whole world. We can see the revolutionary struggle of the world’s proletariat as one standing on a hill and looking down into a valley. We have the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and all other Communist writers in our hands. We are able to profit by the experiences of the Russian workers, of the German workers, of the Italian workers, of the English workers, and last but not least, of our own experience.17
But perhaps last was least. The negligible size of the Communist Party of Australia, its remoteness from the crucibles of conflict and the laggardly course of the class struggle here troubled Australian adherents. Esmonde Higgins pondered the problem for the first time while in England as he considered whether to join the Communist Party of Great Britain. He took as his starting point the belief, so influential among earlier generations of Australian visionaries, that his was a land free of the old-world evils and accordingly able to invent its own future:
[The] Australia I once regarded as unequivocally lucky in starting free of so many shackles of tradition and free to exploit an infinitely rich and varied land, now seems to me less happy. Some day she will have to shake off capitalism but at present it seems she has to look on while others get their due.
This was an unfortunate good fortune, a land of plenty and opportunity basking in illusory content. Australia had yet to ‘go through the capitalist mill’. ‘She’ (the feminine personification signalled Higgins emotional attachment) was ‘too young, lazy, cheerful and smug’. He concluded that he was unable to ‘call myself a Communist because I feel myself an Australian’.18 A trip to Russia resolved his doubts.
Yet as a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain Higgins merely shelved the problem of Australian communism. When he decided to return, for a mixture of personal and patriotic reasons, his friend Rajani Palme Dutt, the future pontiff of British communism, was scornful: ‘Australia is an artificial closed-in box where nothing ever happens or will happen’. Higgins occupied himself on the voyage out in self-scrutiny and study. He re-read his former associate Bob Ross’s Revolution in Russia and Australia and found it riddled with holes, yet there was still the persistent worry about the basis of Australian communism. ‘In England it was easy to feel that there was an obvious necessity for Party work’; in Australia, where conditions were less stringent, it was ‘still possible for workers to get something out of capitalism’.19 Upon his arrival he was struck by the way the Australian labour movement took refuge in nationalism, trade protection and immigration restriction, fostered alliances with local manufacturers and encouraged the illusion that the country could ‘reach social salvation’ by isolating itself from the rest of the world. Thus the common belief of workers that they could ‘purchase paradise on the instalment plan’.20 Soon he was experiencing at first hand their unresponsiveness to the communist message, and characteristically directed his criticisms inward, to the weakness of the party and its members. It took another newcomer, unencumbered by past Australian associations, Jack Kavanagh, to propose the remedy. Kavanagh, born in Ireland, raised in England, schooled in militancy in Canada, found the Australian working class mired in the past. ‘Tradition more than weighs upon them. It smothers, shackles, binds and emasculates them, and one of the first tasks of the militant worker is iconoclastic—to become a wrecker of traditions.’21
Kavanagh landed in Sydney on May Day of 1925 and stepped immediately into the vacuum left by the failure of Garden’s united front strategy. He appears in Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney as Whiteaway, a man just come over from Canada who follows Fulke Folliot on the platform of the Communist Hall with the opening words, ‘Let’s talk about practical things’, and within ten minutes has his audience mad with enthusiasm.22 Kavanagh had been a leading member of the Socialist Party of Canada, which had schooled him in an amalgam of Marx, Engels, Joseph Dietzgen and Jack London, and a founder of the Canadian Communist Party: marital difficulties were the reason for his shift to Australia and he operated at first under an assumed name. Service in the British Army during the Boer War had left a deep antagonism to imperialism, militarism and racism, and as an industrial militant in Vancouver he had strenuously combated anti-Chinese agitation. His extensive experience of the three British Dominions gave him a sharp appreciation of the dynamics of settler capitalism: he quickly dismissed Australia’s much-vaunted reputation as a workers’ paradise, was scathing in his criticism of the stifling effects on the unions of industrial arbitration—‘one is shocked by the docility manifested by the workers’ organisations’—and utterly contemptuous of all dealings with the Labor Party. Just as Kavanagh’s intractability provided an antidote for Garden’s opportunism, so his bearing and conduct offered welcome relief from the disreputable fixer. The pince-nez, round, cherubic face, and care for his personal appearance, the assuredness and directness, all inspired confidence. There was also a flinty self-sufficiency. Kavanagh deferred to no one. In August he was coopted onto the executive; at the end of the year he chaired the party conference.23
The 1925 conference picked over the wreckage of the recent election results and the now complete failure to gain entry into the Labor Party. After lengthy discussion it resolved that:
The action of the ALP in rigidly excluding the Communists from membership in that party has for the time being closed that avenue for our work and the trade union movement will be our most important field for gaining contact with the working masses to expose their reformist illusions, to unmask the reactionary leaders and to influence the workers to the conscious struggle against capitalism.
To this end the conference endorsed the industrial program of a recent conference of left-wing unionists, a £6 minimum wage ‘irrespective of sex’, a six-hour day, union preference, child maintenance and motherhood endowment. It confirmed the recent appointment of an industrial leader in Sydney to direct the recently formed party groups in key industries.24
This seemed to bring Garden’s scheming within the Labor Party to an end but almost immediately he was back with a new proposal in response to a threat that the ALP disaffiliate those unions that belonged to the New South Wales Labor Council. This move by the parliamentary wing of the Labor Party against the industrial wing prompted talk of a breakaway industrial labour party, which Garden urged the Communist Party to support. The new executive with Kavanagh as its leading member condemned the proposal.25 Then the waters were further muddied as the AWU switched its support from Jack Lang to Lang’s opponents in the New South Wales parliamentary wing of the Labor Party, and Lang joined forces with Willis and Garden to shore up his position; this unlikely alliance proposed to alter the rules of the Labor Party in order to increase industrial representation. That prospect did interest the communist executive since the new rules would allow unions a free choice of delegates to ALP conferences and thus reopen the door to communists. So Garden secured the backing of the Communist Party, only to drop the vital rule change at a special conference of the New South Wales branch of the Labor Party in November 1926. On 7 December Garden was required by the Communist Party Executive to explain a reported statement in the Labor Daily that he was not a member of the Communist Party. On the following day he announced his resignation. Two days later in the Workers’ Weekly the party announced his expulsion.26
So ended the communist career of the last of the party’s founders. As secretary of the Labor Council he went on to become Lang’s lieutenant, and continued to tap the stream of popular working-class radicalism by promoting Lang’s 1930 election campaign with the slogan, ‘Lang is Greater than Lenin’. Subsequently he was elected to federal parliament, fell out with Lang, lost his preselection, worked for Eddie Ward in the Curtin and Chifley ministries, was found guilty and then acquitted of corrupt business dealings, ran racehorses as well as an astrology publication, and remained a plausible rogue to the last. His service to the party had hardly been more consistent. But the Communist Party of Australia was not yet rid of Garden. In its radical enthusiasm for peace and an end to imperialist warmongering, the All-Australian Trade Union Conference of 1921 had proposed a Pan-Pacific Trade Union movement. Garden and Earsman had taken up the idea and interested the Communist International in it while in Moscow in 1922. It was scarcely high on Garden’s list of priorities though it attracted considerable notoriety in 1925. The Nationalist Party made great play of the threat to White Australia during federal elections in that year with a photograph of Garden, Earsman and Tom Payne alongside Ho Chi Minh and other delegates from India, Vietnam, China and Japan at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern. The Labor Daily brazenly denounced the photograph as a forgery and published its own version that cropped Garden and Payne, and disguised Earsman with extra hair and a moustache. Despite pressure from party comrades to affirm the genuine record of revolutionary internationalism, Jock remained silent.27
In 1926 the New South Wales Labor Council did persuade another Australian trade union conference to support the formation of the Pan-Pacific Trade Union organisation. A conference of the PPTU followed in China in 1927, and the newly formed Australian Council of Trade Unions agreed to affiliate to it.28 As the chief Australian figure in the PPTU and editor of its newspaper, the Pan-Pacific Worker, Garden was a far more important ally of the Communist International than the tiny Communist Party of Australia was and accordingly he remained a member of the RILU executive despite his expulsion from the party. Furthermore, he arranged for the ACTU to employ an able young communist, Jack Ryan, as its representative on the PPTU secretariat. For that matter, Jack Kavanagh owed his job as an organiser for the Labor Council to Garden.29 So while Jock was denounced for his vanity, careerism and opportunism, the party gave former comrade Garden considerable organisational latitude. He was allowed to debate his expulsion with Kavanagh (proposition: ‘That the present central executive has deviated from the Leninist policy’) and the Workers’ Weekly published several articles from him during 1927 arguing that Australian communists had lapsed into a ‘pure infantile sickness’. He was permitted to claim—and it says much for the freedom of discussion at this time that he enjoyed such licence—that the Communist Party was ‘suspended in the air’ and ‘absolutely isolated from the masses’.30
It was certainly an attenuated group of delegates that assembled in December 1925. Few of the familiar Sydney members were present after the exodus of the Trades Hall Reds, though a Balmain group of fifteen still operated and Pat Drew had established a new group of eight at Hurstville. There were also two additional groups of Russian and Greek communists, a cricket team of each.31 From Perth came Christian Jollie Smith’s old Melbourne friend, Katharine Susannah Prichard, who had moved west with her husband Hugo Throssell in 1919 and joined the party on its formation, but she and her friend George Ryce were at loggerheads with the other two Perth members who scorned the united front.32 Melbourne also suffered from chronic factionalism. The branch had re-formed late in 1924 against the opposition of Percy Laidler and other former communists who operated as a Labor Propaganda Group in the unions and ran the Trades Hall’s Labor College. Efforts to establish an effective party presence in Melbourne were hindered by conflict between Bob Brodney, now married to May Francis, and Joe Shelley, a German firebrand who had arrived from the west. The Brodneys competed with Laidler to cultivate the united front through educational work (and were assisted by their friendship with the popular Labor leftist Maurice Blackburn), while Shelley, who had been interned during the war for IWW activity, engaged in more forthright agitation among the unemployed. After the Brodneys and their supporters resigned from the new party in April 1925, the rump of some 30 members was completely isolated from the ALP and Trades Hall Council.33
There was no delegate from Adelaide to the 1925 conference, that branch having collapsed the previous year. Brisbane again sent J. B. Miles (the observer of Sussex Street and Liverpool Street operations), who, with the recently arrived Bert Moxon, was the driving force in a branch of 35, the largest after Sydney. Queensland presented more favourable opportunities than existed down south since its Labor government, in office for a decade and increasingly dominated by the right-wing AWU, had estranged left-wing unions. In accordance with the united front, Brisbane communists pursued entry to the ALP though the unions, but were repulsed along with their allies at the ALP state conference in 1925. The subsequent disaffiliation of the Australian Railways Union consolidated right-wing control of the ALP in that state and of the Brisbane Trades and Labor Council, which expelled the communists from their office in the Trades Hall.34 A smaller Ipswich branch of fifteen was formed in 1925 and a tour of northern Queensland by Norm Jeffery as the party organiser resulted in the revival of the Cairns branch (of seventeen) and the formation of a new one in the inland pastoral centre of Blackall (with seven members).35
On the New South Wales coalfields small branches had formed at West Maitland, Kurri Kurri and Cessnock but they languished after the communist intervention in the 1923 lockout; there were just six Communist Party members in all three towns by the end of 1925. The arrival of Hetty and Hector Ross brought a few recruits in the Hunter Valley. Hetty was a spirited young schoolteacher, originally from New Zealand where, as Hedwig Weitzel, she had been expelled from the Wellington teachers’ college for communist activity; she was posted as a teacher in 1924 from Sydney to Newcastle. Fair-haired and diminutive, a ‘Jenny Wren with sparkling eyes’, she was indomitable. Hector was a former dancing champion, graceful and idealistic (‘the noble Hector’, she dubbed him) who followed her from Sydney to Newcastle, until they both returned to Sydney in the second half of 1925 to edit the party newspaper and revive the Young Comrades Club.36 The Newcastle branch (ten members) was represented at the 1925 conference, as was a Wollongong branch of six.
The most successful of these non-metropolitan outposts was Lithgow. With its coalmines, pottery works, meatworks, coke ovens, blast furnaces, steelworks and small-arms factory, this isolated town of less than 10 000 inhabitants was a crucible of interwar industrial expansion. In the miners’ lodge Charlie Nelson was the catalyst. He was a Scots hewer steeped in the socialist knowledge of the Plebs League, an organisation formed in Britain to promote independent working-class education which had been brought with its practitioners to the New South Wales coalfields.37 Tall, spare, with a jutting chin, Nelson was a fluent speaker and patient proselytiser of the younger men, among them three who would rise to leading positions in the Communist Party. Two were workmates, drawn like Nelson from the British coalfields. Fred Airey, a lanky Geordie who later changed his name to Jack Blake, was just sixteen when Nelson approached him at the pit-cage with a brown-paper parcel and the instructions, ‘Don’t turn the page corners down’. Inside was a copy of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, and as soon as Airey finished it, he was given another book to read, and another as Nelson opened a whole realm of ideas to him.38 Bill Orr, from Lanarkshire in Scotland, was already in his mid-twenties, and more practically inclined than Nelson, but he too had the itch to understand.39 Orr boarded in the home of Clifton Walker, a railway clerk who later changed his name to Richard Dixon, and was at first inclined to scoff at these earnest young men who gave up their leisure to study in the Plebs League class, but he too was drawn into the party branch and eventually became the most rigidly orthodox of the three.40
Other Lithgow members included Jock Lindop and Jock Jamieson, also Scots, and Harry den Hartog, a young Dutchman who had jumped ship in Fremantle in 1923. He came to Lithgow with Jock Jamieson and found work in Hoskins’ steel furnace; later he would move to Melbourne, buttle and achieve modest success as an artist.41 Though den Hartog was a union delegate in Lithgow, the steelworks were less fertile territory for the party, the Ironworkers’ Association subject to high turnover and victimisation as its owners sought to compete with the larger and more efficient BHP plant in Newcastle. The party branch was not large, numbering just ten in early 1926, but it benefited from the closeness and intimacy of this working-class locality to build a broader united front. It sustained a breadth of activities beyond most others, and its members showed an imaginative vitality, captured in a contribution to Workers’ Weekly that imagined a future May Day: Ike the Red returned with his swag to Lithgow to find red bunting sprinkling the main street. When he made his way to the steelworks in search of a job, he discovered the tyrannical foreman was wielding a pick in the pit and Hoskins, the owner, was pushing a broom. His old mate Jock, once a red ragger, now ran the plant on a six-hour shift. It was a scene of happy faces and purposeful labour, until Ike’s alarm wakened him for the 11 p.m. shift. ‘Comrades’, he concluded, ‘when will you help to make my dream come true? Join the Communist Party—NOW’.42
Some did in other localities as well as Lithgow during 1926, and a few more in the following year as the national party began to make way. It was a slow, faltering progress with more opportunities lost than taken, and many of the initiatives that the party advertised were scarcely more than pious declarations. The basis of activity, as foreshadowed in the resolution of the 1925 conference, was in the trade unions. The emphasis was on rank-and-file agitation on the worksite, in contrast to Garden’s previous practice of cultivating the full-time officials who hung about Trades Hall. This change of approach was in accordance with the Comintern’s call to detach the workers from the deadening control of their treacherous leaders. The lesson the party drew from Garden’s adventurism was that ‘certain comrades … in their anxiety to gain small successes in the trade union movement’ had so neglected the task of militant leadership that they had ‘apparently isolated us from the rank and file’. So determined was Kavanagh to guard against this opportunistic tendency that he persuaded the executive in June 1926 to actively discourage members from seeking union office unless there was a clear demand to elect them. ‘While little militancy existed the task of Party members was to function as a centre of militancy opposed to the reactionary officials.’43 The function was to be performed by party members working as ‘nuclei’ within their workplaces and as ‘fractions’ within their unions, under the supervision of the executive’s trade union organiser. Eight such nuclei were formed in Sydney to cover transport, metal, clerical, clothing, printing and miscellaneous workers, the building trades and the AWU. Only the last two actually functioned. There was also a Trade Union Educational League, established in January 1926 (‘Objective: To unite all militant workers in the every day struggle against capitalism’), but beyond Sydney and the coalfields it hardly got off the ground.44
An alternative approach to the task of building a broader left-wing industrial movement came from the Lithgow branch, which initiated a Miners’ Minority Movement on the British model with which recent immigrants were familiar, a model that emphasised the particular industrial interests of a single occupational grouping. The movement was established in October 1926 with representatives of the three New South Wales coalfields under the leadership of Bill Orr and quickly exerted an influence within the union.45 The differences in organisation and approach between the communist miners and communist unionists in Sydney were marked and of considerable significance. The miners could contest for control of their union, the party unionists in Sydney could not because Garden’s Labor Council was still affiliated to the RILU and thus immune from communist challenge. Kavanagh’s rhetoric merely embellished the fact that Garden remained more important to Moscow than the Communist Party of Australia.
The party renovated its own organisation. Members of the executive assumed responsibility for particular areas of activity, training, industrial work, the press, women and internal administration. Norm Jeffery was employed as a national organiser and sent first to Queensland and later New Zealand until lack of money forced his resignation in August 1926. Jeffery was a former Wobbly and founder-member of the party, notable for his bow tie, capable on the soapbox, courageous, a willing workhorse. Tom Wright maintained the executive minutes and correspondence more systematically than they had been, despite his repeated complaints of delinquent correspondents and inactive branches. He was yet another of the Scots who were so prominent in the party’s early history: methodical, conscientious and loyal to a fault. The party finally bought its own printing press in 1927. Jack Kavanagh established three classes in Marxist theory early in 1926 and began the preparation of a syllabus that was serialised in the newspaper in early 1927, then revised and published as the Party Training Manual. The Young Communist League and Young Communist Children groups, which had lapsed after early activity, were revived.
A women’s group was re-established in Sydney in 1926, and in 1927 a women’s department of the executive began to organise women’s study circles, train speakers, maintain a column in the newspaper and recruit ‘working class women’ into a Militant Women’s Group on the same united front principles as the industrial fronts. Since potential recruits were ‘afraid of the Communist movement’, it met in Trades Hall.46 International Women’s Day became part of the left calendar along with May Day, the anniversary of the Russian Revolution in October, Lenin Enrolment Week in January and various other moveable feasts—Hands Off China, rallies against the sentence of death imposed on the American anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti (until those victims of the class war were executed in August 1927), protests against fascist atrocities in Italy and Latvia, prison horrors in Poland, the British government’s repression of the General Strike, and corresponding campaigns for the various international appeals of the Workers’ International Relief and International Red Aid organisations. The Australians received additional subventions from these auxiliaries of the Communist International, though such payments were often swallowed up in the running expenses of a party that remained chronically short of funds.47
The Young Comrades’ Club was formed in 1927, reviving earlier initiatives to establish a children’s group. The children’s corner in the party press regularly used this illustration. In contrast to the adult imagery of a world bound in capitalist chains, here the children from various countries form a circle of friendship around it. (Source: ‘Workers’ Weekly’, 9 September 1927)
From 1927, on the instruction of the Communist International, these activities were coordinated by formal departments of the executive, a political bureau, an organisational bureau, and an agitation and propaganda department, abbreviated to the politbureau, the orgbureau and agitprop. A Control Commission was also created late in 1927 to safeguard the party from splitters and dissidents. Agitprop, signifying agitation and propaganda, was a new name for the familiar steps whereby the left endeavoured to mobilise support: the initiative with its appropriate ‘line’ determined within the party and members assigned to its implementation; an organising committee, with a leavening of credible union or Labor Party sympathisers; a rally, with communist and non-communist speakers, leaflets and press articles, leading to the endorsement of predetermined resolutions and demands, all recycling a familiar language of solidarity in the class struggle among greater or lesser audiences. This form of united front activity suffered from an inherent dilemma: for the united front to flourish, it had to allow for diverse views that might well give it a life of its own. That was hardly a danger in these early ventures, since the tight control meant a repetitive, flat sameness. Higgins noted new faces and an increased level of activity when he returned to Sydney in July 1926, but he also observed the mechanical, unthinking nature of the ceaseless tasks, the ‘reliance on generalities and jargon learned from Inprecorr, that is applicable to European parties but is cant here’. An organiser scarcely exaggerated when he observed that the slogan ‘Hands Off—’ could be completed by almost any object. The constant round of activity imposed a heavy toll on the desperately small numbers who reassembled so often under different roles.48
Still, as older comrades dropped away, recruits took their place. The precise numbers are difficult to establish since (in the absence of financial statements after 1925) branch reports to Sydney and Sydney reports to Moscow are the only available sources, and these always erred on the side of optimism. For what they are worth, the party claimed 300 members by late 1927 and 500 early in the following year, figures which were too optimistic by more than half but indicated the upward trend. Existing branches consolidated, Sydney at 100, Lithgow at 21, Brisbane 30 and Melbourne 36, while there was remarkable growth in north Queensland.49 Reports of the increased activity in Melbourne can be supplemented by the atmospheric account given 50 years later by Judah Waten in his novel Scenes of Revolutionary Life. Waten was a young firebrand and aspirant writer who moved from Western Australia to Melbourne in 1926 and was taken up by Joe Shelley. In contrast with Shelley’s report as group leader to the 1927 party conference of trade union work, propaganda activities, regular classes, literature sales, a new headquarters in Russell Street and even a workers’ club library, Waten’s novel describes a group of beleaguered enthusiasts. He composed his scenes both retrospectively and fictively, in the socialrealist mode, through the recollections of an aged communist in an era of yuppie excess who looks back on his youthful dreams. The great majority of the inhabitants of ‘dour, hushed Melbourne’ during 1927 go about their business, either heedless or hostile; but on the northern fringe of the city centre there is a bohemian quarter of Chinese restaurants, brothels, a temperance hall and evangelical chapels, pawnbrokers and the Salvation Army, and here the communists operate. They declaim and flog the Workers’ Weekly, argue with the police and hold a concert to mark the hundredth anniversary of Beethoven’s death, in a way of life that is quite autonomous and makes no reference to Trades Hall or the Labor Party. They are a disparate group, a frail returned digger, a muscular Scottish blacksmith, an unemployed wharfie, a stern old German woman, a larrikin, and the principal character, a spoiled young man with literary ambitions, all joined by a shared faith in the future.50
They were not entirely alone. In 1927 Waten wrote on behalf of the Melbourne branch to Arthur Calwell, then a leading member of the ALP in Victoria, and invited him to lecture on the topic, ‘Can a Labor government abolish the capitalist system?’. Calwell made no reply. Yet a year later, when Waten—identified in the press as ‘a young curly-headed Russian’ with a red handkerchief in his breast pocket—appeared in court on a charge of having distributed communist pamphlets during the Anzac Day procession, he was defended by the then president of ALP state executive, who also paid his fine. Waten’s political and literary aspirations were nourished by his discovery of a revolutionary tradition. In Melbourne he knew a chemist whose French father had been a Communard exiled to New Caledonia. He found old English socialists who had known Frederick Engels and William Morris, and sought out former associates of the VSP organiser Tom Mann, and Monty Miller of Eureka fame. Just as the Beethoven centenary that Waten organised sought to ground revolutionary politics in artistic creativity, so his historical interests joined a lineage of heroic struggle to the promised future.51
Who were these communists? The evidence is incomplete, the patterns subject to local variation as Waten’s sketch suggests. Yet in the shifting mosaic of argument and activity it is possible to discern some recurrent characteristics. The party defined itself by class, sex and race as a movement of Australian male workers, and each of these designations raised issues of political substance in the later 1920s.
What is the social composition of your party, the Australian delegate to the Comintern was asked in 1926? ‘The social composition is entirely proletarian’, Hector Ross replied. ‘There was a bourgeois element but they have entirely left us now.’52 This characterisation was inherent in the turn to the masses announced at the end of 1925, which heralded a cult of proletarian virtue. It was not altogether new. Communism, after all, rested on a class analysis of politics that contrasted the clear unity of interest of those who lived by the sale of their labour with the weak and vacillating tendency of sympathisers who attached themselves to that cause. A doctrine that placed such emphasis on the extraction of surplus value as the dynamic of history and determinant of class identity caused considerable difficulties for those outside the ranks of the wageearners: witness Tom Payne, a cobbler, who had to be convinced by Guido Baracchi that he too was exploited by his leather supplier and landlord. In one of his recurrent bouts of self-recrimination, a year earlier Esmonde Higgins, that prisoner of the middle-class conscience, compared his personal frailties with the sterling qualities of the British boilermaker Harry Pollitt. He was lazy, bookish, feckless, untrained in useful skills and susceptible to ‘fags, bed, booze’; Harry was confident, shrewd, resourceful and full of ‘physical well-being’.53
In its literature and iconography the party systematised these attributes ever more insistently into essential differences: the bonehead worker became the instinctive rebel, and Mr Fat the Capitalist was joined in the communist demonology by the timorous, doubting intellectual. The three departed representatives of the bourgeoisie Ross identified in 1926 were Baker, Baracchi and Higgins. Baker, an optometrist, had taken money from customers and done a bunk, ‘just when we needed him most’. Baracchi, a man of considerable inherited wealth, stood condemned as a liquidationist, while Higgins had resigned the editorship of Workers’ Weekly to look for work interstate. This exemplification of the logic of capitalism might seem to exonerate its victim, but Ross was adamant: ‘We do not condone his action because he left us at a time when we were fighting very bitterly’. That middle-class communists were unreliable was the chief lesson of the party’s early history, an attitude reinforced by Jack Kavanagh’s insistence on the necessity of working-class knowledge.
The party inherited a well-established tradition of intellectual improvement, one that combined fiction, verse, philosophy, history and economics as sources of inspiration and understanding. Any serious pre-war socialist assembled a library, read widely and studied the classic texts closely, for knowledge was the key to a new order. Paine, Carlyle, Ruskin, Darwin and Huxley were as influential as Marx and Engels in the project to emancipate humanity from the tyranny of superstition; Shelley, Dickens, Hugo, Zola, Morris, and later, Robert Tressall, Jack London and Upton Sinclair fed the imagination of activists along with William Lane, Henry Lawson and Bernard O’Dowd. The founders of the CPA were steeped in this tradition, and a number had helped to initiate the labour college movement as a vehicle for working-class education. These labour colleges in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, along with the associated Plebs League on the coalfields, fostered an autonomous and politically pointed curriculum in opposition to the reformist Workers’ Educational Association and other university extension initatives: thus in 1924 a party member who conducted a Plebs League class at Kurri Kurri reported to the Workers’ Weekly that his best student had been presented with two volumes of Joseph Dietzgen, the German working-class writer who enjoyed a particular following for his extension of Marxist dialectics into an all-encompassing working-class philosophy.54
Even when the labour colleges slipped out of its control in the 1920s, the party continued to employ a similar syllabus in its own classes. Onto a curriculum of the standard editions of the American publishing house Charles H. Kerr, and the textbooks and magazines of the British labour college movement, it simply added Lenin’s polemical pamphlets. There was disagreement over the importance of such education. Some objected that ‘hair splitting discussions on Marxian Economics’ distracted from practical revolutionary activity; others regretted that ‘the theoretical side has gone to blazes’. Under the leadership of Jack Kavanagh there was an effort to remedy any theoretical weakness. The party newspaper commenced a monthly ‘Theory Page’ in 1926; in 1927 it serialised Stalin’s codification of The Theory and Practice of Leninism; in 1928 the party published its Training Manual, adapted by Esmonde Higgins from that of the Communist Party of Great Britain. The change in terminology, from ‘education’ to ‘training’, was telling. Classes were now conducted by an ‘instructor’ and the instructor was himself instructed that he ‘must at all times be clear where he is leading the discussion and see that it reaches the right conclusion’. There was still some toleration of diversity. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, G. D. H. Cole and the British ex-communists Mark Starr and Raymond Postgate were listed in class bibliographies along with Lenin, Bukharin and Bogdanov. Vere Gordon Childe, J. T. Sutcliffe and even the Labor renegade W. G. Spence were cited as sources for Australian labour history. But training was single-minded in its emphasis on party needs. The earlier quest for understanding narrowed into a self-sufficient repertoire of the knowledge necessary to be an effective communist.55
The simplified and didactic Party Training Manual is, however, an unreliable guide to the rich and diverse intellectual culture of Australian communism. Behind it lay a variety of oral and literary practices, allusions and points of reference that sustained the mental world of working-class radicalism in which party members were formed. At a time when few working-class children stayed on at school past their early teens, the inquisitive satisfied their hunger for knowledge with their own reading. Newspapers, magazines, pamphlets and books circulated on worksites; enthusiasms were shared and ideas debated in a community of print. The intense effort to sustain a labour press, the recurrent battles over censorship, the literary endeavours of middle-class reformers and even the arguments over the extent and purpose of public education during the early decades of the twentieth century marked out a cultural contest between the received authority of higher learning and a separately constituted, jealously defended repertoire of knowledge that gave meaning and direction to radical activity.
The communist was also manly. The cult of the resolute proletarian defending his manhood was counterpointed by the persistent difficulty of the party in attracting female comrades and defining their role. ‘The conditions under which the working class lived in Australia are relative to the rest of the world so good that Communist work is in general very difficult’, explained Hetty Ross in her report as women’s organiser to the Communist International in 1927, and added: ‘This is specially so among women’. The only evidence she adduced for this assertion was Australian women’s enjoyment of the suffrage and the institution of the family wage, which freed most women from wage labour.56 Communist appeals to women took up their concerns as wives and mothers, about housing, children, prices, in the expectation that ‘in this way they will gradually come to take more interest in their own problems and also in those of the working class—of their class—which cannot move forward to emancipation without them’. This final flourish gestured towards the communist doctrine that sexual oppression and class oppression were inextricably linked consequences of capitalism and the resolution of both mutually interdependent, without offering any explanation of what that sexual oppression might be or how emancipation might alter sexual relations. While the party’s classes studied Engels on the origin of the family as a means of ensuring patriarchal control over property, the women’s group displayed a positive aversion to the distractions of feminism. The role of the working-class woman was to sustain and support the male breadwinner. ‘We must make them understand that the woman of the working class has no interest apart from the man worker.’57 There was even resistance from party members’ wives who turned this argument against the activists in the women’s group. ‘Why should I neglect my family in order to sit at meetings or spout on soap boxes?’ asked one. ‘I do my duty as a rebel by sympathising in my husband’s activity.’58
The female activist was a disturbing, transgressive presence in a men’s party. Older women performed necessary, unglamorous tasks such as housekeeping and literature sales. Certain allowance was made for women publicists with platform skills: Adela Pankhurst Walsh had played this part in the early years and Nelle Rickie, an actress, former member of the VSP and representative of the theatrical employees on the Melbourne Trades Hall Council, took on a similar role when she came to Sydney in 1924. Her dramatic lecture-recitals and short political sketches were popular drawcards in the Communist Hall.59 Christian Jollie Smith remained an important member, not least because her solicitor’s practice provided the party with the legal services it needed so often. Yet she was no longer on the executive and her romantic misfortunes, deserted first by Earsman and subsequently by Carl Baker, are instructive. In both cases the male had a wife and family, and the liaison was a semiclandestine affair conducted within the shifting, impermanent round of political engagements. While the attitude to such episodes was not restrictive, there was a marked contrast between bohemian mores that flourished within the left and the highly conventional expectations of male comrades in their domestic lives. Communist Party men seldom encouraged their wives to play an active role and were inclined to regard the female comrades as either fair game or dangerous temptresses. Esmonde Higgins’s partner, the formidable Joy Barrington, crystallised these fears with her explanation of why she was unfaithful to Hig—‘He doesn’t satisfy me’. The same theme recurs in the novel Sugar Heaven written by that notorious victim of the double standard, Jean Devanny, and it lies close to the surface of Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Intimate Strangers.60
An exhortation to the women—described as workers, but inscribed as wives and mothers in this depiction of a communist family group marching resolutely from home. The father ‘s working clothes contrast with the mother’s frock. (Source: ‘Workers’ Weekly’, 20 May 1927)
In both those novels it was the virile Latin who was more attractive than the Australian man. The concern for the purity of the race was a persistent theme of the Australian labour movement, which had made the White Australia policy a central plank of its political platform and treated racial purity as inseparable from the protection of domestic living standards. The Communist Party, as a by-product of that movement and member of an international organisation committed to the unity of the workers of the world, found itself torn between old habits and new loyalties, its difficulties compounded by the fact that it drew support from those manual workers who competed for jobs with the postwar settlers from southern Europe. The numbers of Italian, Greek and Yugoslav immigrants rose sharply from 1924 following restrictions imposed by the United States, and the Ironworkers’ Association as well as the AWU (which covered the Queensland sugar industry) were prominent in opposition to them. Thus a communist organiser on the central Queensland coast reported that the locally born canecutters were heavily outnumbered by Italians, Greek and Spanish immigrants; a proportion of the newcomers were communists ‘but it is necessary for us to control the foreign element as much as possible, for otherwise there may be trouble’. Some early communists denounced all racial discrimination, while others presented immigration as a capitalist plot ‘to reduce the workers to a level lower than that of a plantation nigger’. Even a plea for underpaid Aboriginal pastoral workers was coupled with a warning that the employers wished to use the ‘backward’ and ‘primitive coolie races’ to drive down the wages of the ‘whites’.61
By the mid-1920s the party achieved general consistency in its opposition to imperialism and sympathy for native peoples, but its position on immigration remained tortuously qualified because of the fear of Garden and the Trades Hall Reds that their opponents would use the issue against them. Thus while the party denounced the White Australia policy as a cause of working-class disunity, it also rejected ‘the importation to Australia of large numbers of coloured workers’ and then added the qualification that the threat to employment and wages from cheap labour was colour blind.62 The result was predictable: allegations from the AWU, Lang and others that the communists were at one with the Nationalist government in encouraging a deluge of aliens, and allegations from the Nationalists, backed by that photo of the eastern delegates at the Fourth Comintern Congress, that the communists were racial traitors. At its 1925 conference the party persevered with equivocation: it condemned foreign immigration as a capitalist attempt to flood the country with cheap labour, described the immigrants as ‘an easy prey of the capitalist class’, suggested that the RILU could serve as a counter-immigration bureau to dissuade more, and observed that the danger would remain until capitalism was overthrown.63
From 1925 the party began to work more systematically among these non-British immigrants. It published appeals in Italian and Greek that warned the recipients of the uses to which they were being put by international capitalism, urged them to insist on full union rates and begged them ‘to bear as patiently as possible the racial jibes which are thrown by the stupid elements among the Australian workers’.64 The formation of Greek and Russian party branches in the same year pursued such a strategy. The results were disappointing. The Russian branch in Sydney broke up within a year, as did the largely Russian branch in Ipswich; the Greek branch in Sydney, based mainly among restaurant workers, survived.65 Lithgow experienced difficulties also as the steelworks there brought in southern European contract workers. The branch grew to encompass roughly equal numbers of English-speaking and Italian members, a dozen of each, who met as separate groups and were often at loggerheads. ‘A definite line of policy must be given to Italians’, insisted Kavanagh, who judged the newsheet of the group at Lithgow to display an anarchist tendency and thought its members ‘very weak ideologically’. The delegate of that Italian group who attended the 1927 party conference, Comrade Antico, confessed that his compatriots were prone to weakness, in part because they were denied union membership and in part because of the surveillance by the Italian consulate which brought punishment to families back home. ‘It is a very unlucky fact that most good members are married’, he explained. Antico put the number of Italians associated with the left-wing Trade Union Education League at around 200: 55 in Lithgow, another 55 in Sydney, 35 in Broken Hill, 28 in Wonthaggi, 28 in Corrimal and 15 elsewhere.66
The stumblings over race are hardly surprising. The Communist Party was not the first radical movement in Australia to challenge the White Australia policy—the Wobblies were unequivocal in their denunciation of all forms of particularism—but it did so at a time when racial anxieties were increasing. The Great War exacerbated Australian fears of the alien, so that many European nationalities were subjected to new immigration restrictions in the 1920s. Opposition to all forms of racial prejudice, including discrimination against Aborigines, became a consistent feature of Australian communism and one that marked it off from the Labor Party for more than 40 years. The communist insistence on the unity of all workers, regardless of nationality, extended to an affirmation of the inherent worth of all people regardless of race. In Lawrence’s novel Kangaroo, the communist leader Willie Struthers puts it this way, just as the angry diggers break into the party hall:
Join hands with the workers of the world; just a fist-grip as a token and a pledge. Take nobody to your bosom—a worker hasn’t got a bosom. He’s got a fist, to work with, to hit with, and lastly, to give the tight grip of fellowship to his fellow-workers and fellow-mates, no matter what colour or country he belongs to … I don’t know whether you prefer working in the same imperial slave-gang with Brother Brown of India, or whether you’d prefer to shake hands with him as a free worker, one of the world’s workers, but—
This affirmation of comradeship had to be maintained against violent opposition.67
Yet in the very way the party discussed ‘the Greek problem’ and ‘the Italian problem’ during the 1920s, it signalled its own Australian identity. To be sure it absorbed some immigrants, mainly British but with a striking number of New Zealanders (Hetty Ross, her brother-in-law Jack Loughran, George Winter who worked in the Labour Research Bureau, Andy Barras, a plumber, several other prominent union activists, and by the end of the decade Jean and Hal Devanny), yet this merely emphasised its white Anglophone character. Also evident was a spirited resentment of any suggestion of tutelage. Officials of the CPA were prickly in their dealings with the Anglo–American Bureau of the Comintern, and inclined to bridle at assumptions of superior wisdom, particularly from representatives of the CPGB. ‘We quite realise that the revolutionary developments of Australia will follow that of Europe and the East’, Jack Howie wrote to the Englishman J. T. Murphy in Moscow, ‘and that the main attention of the Comintern must be directed to the imperialist and strictly colonial countries. But are our efforts here ever to meet with anything but complete indifference?’68 That a movement so cosmopolitan in its origins should have so quickly gone bush was a cause of growing concern to the Communist International.