By 1935 the Communist Party of Australia was committed to the cultivation of strategic alliances. Initially it sought a united front of all sections of the labour movement; subsequently it extended the boundaries to pursue a broader alliance still, a popular front of workers, farmers and the middle class. Both the united front and the popular front had defensive and offensive aspects. The fronts were to save freedom and world peace from fascist belligerence, a menace that imperilled all workers and all people, but a successful resistance to fascism and war required an aggressive resolve that only communists could provide. Following Dimitrov’s definition at the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in 1935, the party now understood fascism to be the most imperialist, reactionary and chauvinist wing of finance capital, and this provided the ‘objective basis’ for a coalition across class lines, yet it followed from the same characterisation that the final defeat of fascism would entail an abolition of the class order from which it emerged.
The word ‘front’ has various usages. One meaning is a line of battle which troops extend to face the enemy, and this was how communists presented the united and popular fronts. But the word can also suggest an outward appearance serving to conceal ulterior motives, and this was how opponents interpreted communist activity in the second half of the 1930s. For some participants these were years of common engagement in a life-and-death struggle to preserve liberty, a moment of truth when the choices became clear and idealists could act in concert. For others it was the time of falsity and pretence—of what W.H. Auden called ‘the necessary lie’—that led, in 1939, to the ultimate communist betrayal and war.
Ralph Gibson, who had joined the party in the depths of the Depression and experienced the full rigidities of Class Against Class, looked back on the mid-1930s as a time of transition, ‘a period when the Left was trying to break out of its narrow bounds’. Audrey Blake, another Depression communist, observed in her memoirs that the aim of the party’s ‘fronts’ (renamed ‘fraternal organisations’ now that the term front had to serve a larger purpose) was ‘to extend the space in which the Party could work’. Len Fox, who was drawn into the party in 1935 through activity in the Movement Against War and Fascism, quoted Gibson’s statement in his own memoirs, Broad Left, Narrow Left. Fox was exemplary of those drawn to communism in the period. A science graduate, a poet and a progressive educationalist, he travelled to Europe in the early 1930s and returned to Melbourne ‘feeling that the greatest service anyone could render Australia would be to carry it a warning of the dangers of fascism and of the world war which must come soon if fascism were not checked’. He was as selfless in that cause as Ralph and Dorothy Gibson, with whom he worked in the MAWF, and carried the same devotion into his party work. His memoirs chart a conflict between the broad and narrow forms of communism that he encountered, a difference suggested by two of the chapter titles, one recalling the ‘Warm, Human People’ engaged in its campaigns, another the narrow and dogmatic ‘Men at the Top’ who directed them.1
The 1930s began in mass unemployment and ended in mass destruction. They are sometimes described as the Devil’s Decade after the dictators who first extinguished freedom in their own countries and then embarked on wars of extermination that ended in Auschwitz and Hiroshima. The events of this Devil’s Decade can be recited chronologically as a succession of international crises brought on by the fascist regimes. In 1931 Japan began its assault on China with the annexation of Manchuria. In 1935 Italy invaded Abyssinia. In 1936 Hitler remilitarised the Rhineland and entered into an anti-Comintern pact with Japan; Italy joined them the following year. Also in 1936, the Spanish generals staged an uprising against the elected government, and were assisted by Italy and Germany to prosecute a civil war that ended in 1939 with fascist victory. In 1937 Japan invaded China. In 1938 Hitler seized both Austria and the German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia; the following year he annexed the remainder of Czechoslovakia, while Mussolini took Albania. In every one of these acts of aggression the League of Nations proved ineffective; at each moment of crisis the governments of the major non-fascist countries took refuge in appeasement or isolation, thereby clearing the way for the next outrage. Not until Germany invaded Poland in the autumn of 1939 did the Western powers make a stand, and by then it was too late. War began between the Allies and the German Reich in 1939. Mussolini’s declaration of war in 1940, Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union and Japan’s strike against American military bases in 1941 completed the descent into global war.
Noel Counihan frequently drew for the communist press during the 1930s. His depiction of the popular front shortly after its proclamation at the Seventh Congress of the Communist International takes the successful defence of French democracy in 1934 as a model that alarms Hitler. The idealised figure is again a giant male worker, but more controlled than the brutal representations that had appeared in the earlier period of Class Against Class. (Source: ‘Workers’ Weekly’, 21 February 1936)
Arising out of economic hardship and social discontent, channelling popular discontent with capitalist democracy into authoritarian nationalism, exalting the unity of the corporatist state and refusing class or any other form of disunity, fascism posed a fundamental challenge to communism. In adapting the methods of mass mobilisation, it unleashed revolutionary violence against the left. Alarmed by the strategic threat of fascism on both its western and eastern borders, the Soviet Union pursued collective security agreements with the capitalist powers. From its initial interpretation of fascism as a symptom of general capitalist crisis, after 1935 the Communist International recast the phenomenon as a new and distinct malignancy. In his speech to the Seventh Congress of the Communist International, Dimitrov insisted that:
The accession to power of fascism is not an ordinary succession of one bourgeois government by another, but a substitution of one state form of class domination of the bourgeoisie—bourgeois democracy—by another form—open terrorist dictatorship. It would be a serious mistake to ignore this distinction …2
The absolute opposition of communism to capitalism thus yielded to a tripartite configuration of capitalism, communism and fascism, and the search for common ground on which the first two might repulse the third. From condemnation of democratic illusions the Communist International turned to the defence of freedom; onto revolutionary internationalism it grafted progressive national traditions. For Len Fox, as for others engaged in such endeavours, these realignments allowed the left to shake free of its narrow confines and draw men and women of good will into a broader range of activities.
The threat of fascism rescued communism as an international movement. The attempt during the 1920s to extend the Soviet model of revolutionary socialism had failed. The Depression benefited the right rather than the left. The effect of fascism in the 1930s was to force communism and liberal capitalism into an alliance against a common enemy, an alliance that neither would have chosen but was forced upon both. The strategic importance of the Soviet Union and the organisational capacity of the Comintern made communism an indispensible component of this alliance and, as Eric Hobsbawm has observed, ‘The logic of this situation was so compelling that even the two years when Stalin reversed the anti-fascist policy could not weaken it’.3 It was thus during the Devil’s Decade that communism began the ascent that brought it to its highest point of support and influence. Such was the success of communism’s front activities, so pervasive was temper of engagement, that the 1930s are also remembered as the Red Decade.
The Red Decade was a product of the same world events as the Devil’s Decade, for the conservative appeasement of the fascists broke down the barriers between progressives and revolutionaries. But the imposition of the strategic interests of the Soviet Union, as determined by its ruthlessly pragmatic and deeply suspicious ruler, onto the policies of the Communist International produced fatal contradictions. The Communist International rallied to the defence of the Spanish Republic; it sent money and medical supplies, it enrolled volunteers into the International Brigade, many of whom died in battle. But it also turned on those Stalin deemed to be Trostkyists, and its commissars murdered their anti-fascist rivals. The Soviet Union appealed to the Western powers for sanctions against acts of international aggression and mutual defence pacts, but it also recruited spies to gather military and security information for use against them. Communists in Australia and other countries campaigned against their governments’ policy of appeasing the fascist regimes in their belligerent demands, until August 1939 when Hitler and Stalin divided Poland and the Baltic states between them.
At least until that final betrayal, idealists such as Len Fox could not or would not see the subjugation of an international movement to partisan considerations. The broad left achieved its breadth partly by drawing Australians into world affairs and partly by connecting those affairs to a larger and more diverse domestic audience. The fascist aggressors cast a long shadow that extended over Australia. The Australian government cooperated with Mussolini’s officials to maintain surveillance over anti-fascist Italians in Australia; it accepted the request of the German government to prevent anti-Nazi agitation here and it set tight restrictions on the entry of Jewish refugees from Hitler’s pogrom. Boycotts of the shipment of strategic materials to Japan brought Australian trade unionists into direct conflict with the Commonwealth. From the Kisch affair onwards, the anti-communist and pro-appeasement policies of the conservative federal government provoked protests against censorship and repression, and attracted wider circles of church people, civil libertarians, intellectuals, men and women from outside the traditional confines of the labour movement. Paradoxically, the party’s industrial base became even more important. Since the Labor Party remained adamant in its rejection of the united front, the unions were the sites of communist activity for both international and domestic campaigns, the institutional bases from which the party was able to exert its influence. Yet the rapid progress of communist trade unionists in the second half of the 1930s was based above all on their ability to improve their members’ wages and working conditions, to soften the stringencies of capitalism and to make the institutions of capitalism serve their needs. The Red Decade consolidated Australian communism as a party of doctrinaire pragmatism.
The failure of the Communist Party’s renewed appeal to the Labor Party at the end of 1935 for a united front caused no surprise. Its campaign to unify the labour movement against fascism and war proceeded, therefore, through the trade unions and front organisations such as the Movement Against War and Fascism. Here it met with immediate setbacks. In October 1935 the party announced its support for international sanctions against Italy in response to the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. In this it followed the lead of the Soviet Union, and in doing so encountered sharp opposition both within and beyond its own ranks. Some party members found difficulty in aligning themselves with the imperialist powers, for at this time the British as well as the Australian government supported the League of Nations’ call for sanctions although the Australian government quickly backed away from this position in favour of appeasement. The central committee emphasised ‘the need to distinguish between the support of the capitalist class and that of the working class for sanctions’. Some non-party pacifists believed that such action increased the danger of war, but the party stressed that sanctions were the best chance of preserving peace.4
Many in the broader labour movement combined elements of both anti-imperialism and pacifism with a more general hostility to foreign entanglements that was rooted in memories of the conscription referendums during the First World War and the divisions those controversies had opened in the Labor Party. Others followed the lead of the Catholic church in support for Italy. Maurice Blackburn was the only member of the federal Labor Party who broke ranks to support the Lyons government’s Sanctions Act in November 1935. Furthermore, the ACTU Congress later in the same month rejected arguments in favour of sanctions put by Lloyd Ross, Bill Orr and Ernie Thornton. By 78 votes to 41 congress declared its ‘uncompromising opposition to the policy of applying sanctions’ on the grounds that ‘the delegating of powers or authority by organised Labor to the representatives of capitalistically controlled Governments … would amount to the betrayal of the cause of the workers’.5
Blackburn’s defiance of the Labor caucus and his prominence in the Movement Against War and Fascism brought immediate retribution. In September 1935 the State Executive of the ALP, which had established its own Labor Anti-War Committee, declared that no loyal member of the ALP could be associated with the MAWF. In October it gave its members until 15 November to sever the connection. On Armistice Day Blackburn spoke at the Yarra Bank for the Victorian Council Against War and Fascism (VCAWF), adamant of the need for ‘a wider anti-war, anti-militarist movement than can be got within the confines of any one party’.6 On 6 December the state executive expelled him and a number of other Labor activists. This was a serious blow. Before the rupture two leading members of the Communist Party in Melbourne had met privately with Percy Clarey, Albert Monk and Don Cameron, the principal officers of the Melbourne Trades Hall Council. They were encouraged to hear that the trade union officials agreed on the desirability of a united labour movement. But when they next met, the Trades Hall Council had determined that no affiliated body could remain a member of the VCAWF and any prospect of a united front vanished. The VCAWF responded with a proposal for a joint conference with the Labor Anti-War Committee, but this compromise was rejected. The national committee of the MAWF counselled submission, the Victorians argued for defiance and claimed that most of their union affiliates were not prepared to break the connection with the VCAWF. In April 1936 (conveniently before the Easter state conference of the ALP which the union delegates would otherwise have attended) the Melbourne Trades Hall Council suspended the affiliation of the ARU, the Wonthaggi miners, the FIA, the Locomotive Engine Drivers’ Union, the Teachers’ Industrial Union and the Ballarat Trades and Labor Council.7
With a number of other unions and a score of Labor Party branches affiliated to it until it was proscribed, the Victorian section of the MAWF had made the greatest progress, and the attack on it indicated the difficulties the party encountered as it sought a united front. There were particular opponents in Victoria. Dinny Lovegrove, the former communist who in 1935 became secretary of the Labor Anti-War Committee, was a bitter adversary. A group of Catholics who had formed around the Campion Society in 1931 and who espoused the corporate state as a bulwark against Godless communism, wielded increasing influence in the Victorian labour movement. The Labor Party expulsions and the Trades Hall Council disaffiliations were part of an intense factional struggle within the Victorian labour movement at this time, marked by sectarian divisions between the Catholic right and their moderate or left-inclined Protestant opponents. The cautious overtures of the THC officers to the communists were an episode in this contest, the subsequent rift an illustration of the handicap suffered by Labor activists who associated with communists. Rather than the industrial wing of the labour movement facilitating a united front of the Communist and Labor parties in the cause of peace, the communist bogey had damaged industrial unity and isolated the VCAWF. The party’s central committee recognised as much when it instructed left-wing unions to abandon their links with the VCAWF and the Victorian district to strengthen communist fractions in ALP branches.8
In New South Wales the circumstances were more propitious. There, Lang’s control of the Labor Party and Labor Council rested on a narrow base of trade union officials, the so-called inner group, who maintained control by ruthless manipulation of the party rules Lang had devised. During 1935 Lang came out in opposition to sanctions against Italy. He used the Labor Daily to damn the communists and insisted that Australia must remain resolutely free of all foreign entanglements. In 1936 he led his State Labor Party back into the federal ALP, and thereby buttressed its isolationist stance. But his attempts to wrest control of the radio station 2KY from the Labor Council and strengthen his grip on the Labor Daily brought him into conflict with the Miners’ Federation (which had put up money for the paper) and a growing number of other unions. Jock Garden, now a federal member of parliament, and his successor as Labor Council secretary, R. A. King, led a challenge to Lang that gathered momentum. To its surprise, the Communist Party found itself once more allied with Garden—‘a very shady gentleman’, as Richard Dixon described him, ‘as big a political crook as Lang’, insisted Sharkey—in a struggle that strengthened the left in the Labor Council and would ultimately clear a space for a united front with the New South Wales branch of the Labor Party.9
Not yet, however, and in the meantime Labor in that state remained as hostile to the united front against war and fascism as in Victoria. Elsewhere the efforts to win the Labor Party over to a more resolute anti-fascist foreign policy met with mixed results. South Australia was most amenable, but its labour movement was a negligible force.10 In Queensland and Western Australia, where Labor held office, communists were kept firmly at arm’s length. Nationally the MAWF languished. A united front of the Australian labour movement remained blocked by the organisational resistance of the Labor Party. Under these circumstances the communists turned their attention to a popular front. The popular front, conceived as a more general alliance of the working class with other classes, held out the attractive prospect of greatly widening the resistance to war and fascism, and held the tactical advantage that the additional components were not bound by the same disciplinary control as bound Labor Party members and affiliates.
The transition from united front to popular front began in Melbourne on Armistice Day 1935 at the very anti-war rally that occasioned Blackburn’s expulsion from the Labor Party. At that rally the VCAWF joined with religious and other anti-war organisations to form a United Peace Council. This in turn became the World Peace Congress Committee, which sent delegates to a World Peace Congress in Brussels in September 1936. Following the congress, the International Peace Campaign (IPC) was established in Australia, which convened the national Peace Congress in Melbourne in 1937 attended by more than 800 delegates. The breadth of the World Peace Congress, which was chaired by the ageing British conservative politician, Lord Cecil, was matched by its Australian counterpart, which included representatives of the churches, the League of Nations Union, the United Association of Women and the Australian Natives’ Association among its office-bearers, and featured a string of judges, bishops, academics and businessmen as patrons. This International Peace Campaign was clearly much more than a communist front. The pacifists who attended its Melbourne congress were far more insistent in their opposition to war than the communists, and party members of the IPC state committees repeatedly complained of the difficulty of converting anti-war sentiment into anti-fascist action.11 Ralph Gibson had detected the same underlying differences at the founding congress in Brussels. There the IPC adopted a four-point programme: recognition of the sanctity of treaties, reduction of armaments, a strengthened League of Nations and collective security. But some argued that the sanctions imposed by a strengthened League of Nations would increase the danger of war, while others greeted the appearance of the Spanish communist delegate Dolores Ibarruri (who as La Pasionaria became the most celebrated champion of the Spanish Republic) with the bellicose chant, ‘Guns for Spain! Planes for Spain!’12
The Spanish Civil War, which had begun less than two months earlier and would continue until 1939, fractured the illusions of peace through collective security. It demonstrated the subservience of the League of Nations to the major powers and their policy of non-intervention that denied support to a lawfully elected government yet allowed Italy and Germany to send guns and planes to the fascist insurgents. While pacifists sought peaceful resolution, the Communist International raised volunteers to fight: ‘I fight against war—with war’, declared Sam Aarons, one of the Australian communists who joined the International Brigade.13 Spain thus became the testing ground for the larger conflict that would follow, the European cockpit in which fascists and communists did battle.
In 1936 the Spanish Republic was just five years old and still seeking to establish its legitimacy over deeply conservative opponents. The civil war began as a military uprising led by General Franco, who used Moorish troops and drew on Falangist (the Falange was the Spanish fascist movement) and clerical support against the electoral success of a popular front government. The popularity of the front was indisputable: it stretched from moderate republicanism to communism and well beyond to include Trotskyists and anarchists. Initially the war was marked by mass killing on both sides, as the stronger local force put down the weaker and settled old scores. This phase produced atrocities against the Catholic church, which was a powerful institution of the ancien régime, as well as clerical complicity in atrocities against the left, and the religious dimension inflamed the divided responses in Australia to news from Spain. Subsequently the rebels controlled the north and west of the country, the government the south and east, and the war was fought on shifting fronts as the military tightened its hold and began to push, slowly but inexorably, into government-controlled territory. The left strongholds of Catalonia and Aragon were gripped by a revolutionary euphoria which saw peasants seize estates from their landlords and workers turn the city of Barcelona into an anarchosyndicalist commune until the Communist Party imposed its own control. In 1937 German planes bombed the Basque capital of Guernica and the rebels won control of the industrial north. By 1938 the rebels had cut the country in two. At the beginning of 1939 Barcelona and Madrid fell and the war was over.
A poster produced by the Victorian Council Against War and Fascism in the early stage of the Spanish Civil War. (Source: J.N. Rawling collection, Noel Butlin Archives Centre, ANU N572271)
Australians made up a tiny fragment of the volunteers who enlisted in the International Brigade, some 40 out of a total close to 40 000. They provided about the same proportion of nurses, administrators, drivers, journalists; altogether perhaps a score of the 20 000 foreign non-combatants who assisted the Republic. Their Spanish Relief Committee raised about £17 000, probably a smaller proportion of total foreign aid though still a remarkable sum. Even when allowance is made for disparities of population, the Australian contribution was more modest than that of Britain, the United States or Canada, which raised its own Mackenzie-Papineau battalion, whereas the Australians were mostly scattered throughout the British battalion. There were particular reasons for the limited response. Most Australians knew little of Spain, and many of those who did supported the insurgents. The long distance from Spain and restrictions imposed by the Australian government made it necessary for volunteers to make their way to Britain—sometimes posing as tourists, more often working their passage or even bunking down as stowaways with the assistance of a ship’s crew—and then evade the blockade imposed on Spain.14
The heroism of Australian volunteers was repeatedly connected to national traditions. Jack (‘Blue’) Barry, who had been a militant in the Pastoral Workers’ Industrial Union, died in 1937 during the defence of Madrid. A New Zealand journalist remembered him as a ‘sturdy, sandy haired working man who grumbled cheerfully and blasphemously about the non-arrival of food as I have heard Australian and New Zealand shearers grumble hundreds of times, and then met his death covering a retreat alone, with all the gallantry of the Anzacs in 1915’. Ted Dickinson, a former Wobbly who had been gaoled in 1928 for his part in the maritime strike, was captured in the Jarama Valley near Madrid during the same campaign and faced his captors with defiance. ‘If we had ten thousand Australian bushmen here we’d have pushed you bastards into the sea’, he was said to have told them. They put him up against a tree and shot him. An RSL journal responded to the story with the tribute: ‘Whatever one may think of the merits of the cause in which they are serving, it is gratifying to learn that the old strain of Gallipoli and Poziers is running true to form’. Though Dickinson was in fact an Englishman and had returned there some years earlier, the line drawn here runs from the First World War to the opening phase of a second, and the Australian volunteers in Spain constitute an advance contingent in fight to defend freedom from fascism that would continue until 1945. ‘I wouldn’t mind dying for democracy’, was the explanation given by an unemployed Tasmanian volunteer, Charlie Walters, while Charlie Riley, a gold miner from Tennant Creek, said that ‘Adolph the Butcher had got right under our skins’. Some Australians, such as Ron Hurd, a tough communist seaman who had boxed professionally, were keen to fight. Other volunteers, such as Lloyd Edmonds, who had attended the Victorian Socialist Party’s Sunday School with Hurd and was expelled from the ALP in 1935 for membership of the VCAWF, were drawn more by a feeling of obligation. When Jack Stevens died fighting in 1938, Katharine Susannah Prichard remembered the earlier hardship he had experienced as party organiser in Western Australia. ‘Shabby and hungry, he struggled against tremendous difficulties’, including six months’ imprisonment, and throughout remained ‘honest, unobtrusive, loveable, sterling’. The emphasis here is on selfless dedication to a universal cause.15
Ted Dickinson’s execution by Franco’s troops at Jarama was often recalled, as was his fearless defiance of the executioners. This cartoon misspells his name and extends his martyrdom into a refusal to submit to fascist militarism. (Source: ‘Workers’ Weekly’, 27 August 1938)
La Pasionaria’s slogan, ‘No Parasan—They Shall Not Pass’, became the catchcry of the defenders of the Spanish Republic. Neither the volunteers nor their Australian supporters admitted to any reservations, not even when the Spanish communists turned on the other parties of the left, or the political commissars of the International Brigade began to weed out unreliable elements. ‘Barcelona Crushes Trotsky Fascists’, was the headline over the Workers’ Weekly’s account of the repression of the anti-Stalinist Partido Obrero de Unificacion (POUM) in May 1937. The article described a foul gang of fifth columnists under the control of Trotsky’s agents who were in secret communication with Franco; in fact the POUM were so resolutely independent in their fight against Franco that they had fallen out even with Trotsky. This ruthless and mendacious surveillance affected a party of four Australian nurses who were given a ‘rousing Red Flag farewell’ from Sydney in October 1936. They were under the leadership of Mary Lowson, a party member, and they included the forthright Agnes Hodgson, who had no prior contact with the left and was motivated simply by liberal humanitarianism. Her fluency in Italian and distaste for bombastic political ceremony soon brought her under suspicion from zealous communists. When the group arrived in Spain, her three colleagues were posted to the International Brigade hospital at the front but Hodgson was left behind in Barcelona. Lowson made no reference to this contretemps when she returned to Australia in 1937 to publicise the cause. Nor did Australians learn of Bill Belcher, who had the misfortune to enrol in an anarchist militia, was arrested by the communist security and eventually released only through the intervention of the British consul. While Aileen Palmer admitted privately that there were ‘many shades of grey in the Spanish war’, she condemned the ‘dirty work’ of the POUM and accepted the need for ‘strict discipline’.16
Australians did not lack their own sources of information about Spain. In the Queensland sugar districts there were Spaniards who received Spanish newspapers, and several of whom returned to fight against Franco. There were journalists such as Alan Moorehead (correspondent for the pro-republican London Daily Express), John Fisher (his father Andrew was the prime minister at the outbreak of the First World War who had promised Australia would send its last man and last shilling) and Rupert Lockwood. All three young men had been drawn to the anti-fascist cause by Egon Kisch, and their reports from Spain were informed by the same commitment.17 Fisher was not the only example of a generational shift: Portia Holman, the daughter of the former Labor premier of New South Wales who had ratted with Hughes during the First World War, was a medical worker in Spain; Richard Latham, on whom his vehemently anti-communist father John doted, drove a truck for a humanitarian relief organisation. Then there were Vance and Nettie Palmer, who at the outbreak of the civil war were living in Catalonia with their daughter Aileen; she remained in Spain with a British medical unit while they returned to Melbourne to organise support through the Spanish Relief Committee. There were films, brought from Spain and taken around Australia by the University of Melbourne Labour Club communist, Ken Coldicutt, as national film organiser of the Spanish Relief Committee. There were scholars, such as Max Crawford, who had begun an intensive study of Spain’s quest for freedom before he took up the chair of history at the University of Melbourne at the beginning of 1937, and who joined other academics in public support of the Republic.18
Throughout the conflict, the Australian government maintained a policy of ‘strict neutrality and non-interference in the internal affairs of a foreign country’. Public opinion divided sharply at the edges between champions of the Republic and supporters of Franco, with a large and generally inert middle ground. Like the Communist Party, the Catholic church saw Spain as a battleground in a larger struggle, and even before the outbreak of the civil war it had condemned the secular policies of the Republic. The Australian hierarchy responded to an appeal from the Spanish bishops in July 1936 with unqualified support for the rebellion. A stream of publications described communist atrocities, the execution of priests and violation of nuns, with lascivious outrage. The papal encyclical Divini Redemptoris issued in March 1937 (it sold 87 000 copies in Australia) linked ‘the fury of Communism’ in Spain, the destruction of churches and the ‘indiscriminate slaughter’ of clergy, to the urgent struggle between the promise of the Redeemer and the satanic scourge of atheistic communism. In the eyes of Bishop Gilroy, who would become Australia’s first native-born cardinal, General Franco was ‘a man who seemed to be raised up by Almighty God’.19
The most celebrated confrontation between the two sides—it has been recalled by Manning Clark, among others, as a formative moment of political awakening—occurred in the public lecture theatre at the University of Melbourne in March 1937. Three members of the Campion Society, including the young B. A. Santamaria, affirmed the proposition ‘That the Spanish Government is the ruin of Spain’ in a debate with Nettie Palmer and two communists, Gerald O’Day and Jack Legge, an undergraduate science student. The theatre was packed by members of the Catholic Young Men’s Society, who joined their champions in the cry, ‘Vivo Cristo Rey’ at its conclusion. Similar debates followed elsewhere but it was more common for Catholic supporters of Franco to break up meetings of the Spanish Relief Committee. Thus two months later they descended on the Adelaide Town Hall, where a dozen speakers were billed in an appeal to assist the Spanish people. The first speaker was my grandfather, the Reverend Aubrey Stevens of the Congregational Church. He was heard in silence, but after him the president of the the South Australian branch of the ALP was drowned out by booing and cat-calls.20
Catholic opposition to communism was not new but anti-communism in Australia had not previously achieved such popular and systematic character. During the 1920s conservative politicians had exploited the red scare with material provided by the security service and encouragement from employers’ groups and the press, but the influence of such professional publicists as Tom Walsh and Adela Pankhurst Walsh was restricted. Their apostasy and extreme conservatism had discredited them in the eyes of the labour movement, and the anti-communism preached by Adela’s Women’s Guild of Empire was as fanciful as Millicent Preston Stanley’s similar work for the Sane Democracy League. The New Guard and other secret armies had assumed mass proportions in their anti-communist drive during the political instability of the early 1930s, but these again were external and antagonistic to the labour movement. Spain altered these alignments, for adherents of Catholicism comprised a substantial proportion of the labour movement and, as the principal Catholic anti-communist, B. A. Santamaria, has observed, ‘it was the conflict of ideas generated by the Spanish Civil War which in Australia transformed the Catholic attitude to Communism from generalised opposition to passionate resistance’.21
The appearance in 1936 of the newspaper he edited, Catholic Worker, and the establishment in 1937 of a National Secretariat of Catholic Action to be conducted by another layman and himself, signalled a new emphasis on anti-communist agitation and organisation within the labour movement, as critical of the injuries of capitalism as it was of communist false remedies. Very quickly these Catholic activists, distinguished by their black-and-white badges with the holy cross, became prominent as anti-communist shock-troops at public meetings in Melbourne. Ernie Thornton warned the central committee as early as April 1936 that the Catholic Worker was exercising ‘a big influence on the situation in Victoria. There is quite a big proportion of Catholic workers in the trade unions and they have been aroused by the Catholic Worker.’ From outside Victoria, as well, communist organisers reported that Catholic Action was mobilising support in trade unions (the state mine lodge at Lithgow was an early example) to defeat communist delegates and officials.22
There was an additional dimension to this Catholic activism. During the 1930s a number of Protestants were drawn to the peace movement. In New South Wales the Anglican warden of St Paul’s College at Sydney University, Arthur Garnsey, was president of the International Peace Council; in Victoria the Methodist minister Palmer Phillips occupied the same position, and representatives of the Student Christian Movement, the YMCA and the YWCA attended its meetings. While the bulk of the Protestant laity remained anti-communist, those clergy who were most engaged in the churches’ social mission often entered into dialogue with communists and communism. The Irish-born Harry Gould, who became a full-time party worker at this time with special responsibility for theoretical work, likened these progressive Protestants to eighteenth-century deists, who treated Christianity as an ethical code stripped of its supernatural trappings. He had in mind such figures as Ernest Burgmann, who in 1934 became Bishop of Goulburn. Burgmann’s earlier experience in the Newcastle diocese during the Depression had not faded and in 1936 he declared that capitalism was ‘warfare, naked and unashamed’. His outspoken radicalism and sympathy for the Soviet Union earned him the reputation of the ‘Red Bishop’—an Australian equivalent of the notorious ‘Red Dean’ of Canterbury and naive apologist for Stalin, the Reverend Hewlett Johnson—but Burgmann’s purpose is more accurately captured in his own formulation as ‘the Christianising of Communism’. Similarly, Farnard Maynham, the Vicar of St Peter’s, led members of that church in East Melbourne in a quest for Christian socialism that was intensely sacramental in liturgy and theology. While a few of the Protestant clergy joined the party, the great majority associated with its campaigns were following their own stars.23
More striking is the growing prominence of ex-Catholic communists. Initially, the Communist Party had inherited the rationalist temper of the socialist and radical left. Its founders were thoroughgoing materialists who dismissed the Christian dogma of salvation by faith—derided by the Wobblies as ‘pie in the sky’—for its quietism. Irish adherents such as Jack Loughran, who ran the party bookshop in Sydney, and Mick Healy, who took on the same task in Brisbane, were militant atheists. There were members from a strong religious background, but typically evangelical Protestantism: Jock Garden and Bill Orr had preached for nonconformist sects; Bill Gollan and Jack Hughes, notable recruits of the 1930s, were brought up in the Salvation Army. The sprinkling of Jewish communists had little to do with religious observance. Former Catholics, on the other hand, were trained in a confessional faith that was not so easily set aside. In a number of cases, youthful piety as an altar boy preceded a prolonged crisis of faith; typically, their turn to communism caused lasting family tension, especially as communism and Catholicism became sharply polarised.
To Catholics, who felt keenly their own minority position in Australia, the alignment of Protestants against Catholic Spain hardened sectarian divisions. During his national tour after the party’s Eleventh Congress, J. B. Miles encountered this phenomenon, particularly in Queensland where the Labor Party was close to the Catholic church. In response to Archbishop Duhig’s repeated attacks on Godless communism, he sought to play down the question of religious belief:
We are not concerned at the moment with the question of how the world came into existence or what will happen when we pass away. We are concerned with the things that happen here and now—in decent wages, living conditions, in defence of our democratic rights, with the preservation of peace.
The central committee also advised its districts that they should be careful in responding to the Catholic campaign. Catholics made up ‘a considerable proportion of the working class’, and it was important to concentrate on the church’s alliance with fascists, ‘making it clear that we are not specifically attacking the faith and doctrines of the Catholics as a religion’. Lance Sharkey’s pamphlet, An Appeal to Catholics, sought to reassure Catholics that there was freedom of worship in Spain as well as the Soviet Union, and that there were many Catholic republicans. He also countered the ethnic division that underlay religious sectarianism in Australia with an appeal to his fellow Irish-Australians’ love of freedom and rebel spirit.24
This was a far cry from the militant atheism that communists had proclaimed in the 1920s, and some party members found it hard to practise. Dr Gerald O’Day, a former Catholic, had inflamed the Melbourne debate on Spain with his anticlerical jibes. In response to the pro-Franco speakers’ allegations of republican attacks on the church, he asked ‘What harm ever came to anyone through persecuting the Catholic Church?’ O’Day wrote afterwards that Catholic supremacy ‘resulted invariably in stagnation and illiteracy’. He joined a materialist refutation of religious belief to a trenchant class analysis of religious practice.
The Communists reveal the historical and economic roots of religion. Religion (i.e. the religious ideas, institutions and practices) is regarded by them as a man-made thing, a portion of the superstructure built by man on the basis of the productive forces.
The church was supported by the ruling class because it ‘helps to keep the oppressed masses from the struggle for a heaven on this earth’. It flourished amidst poverty, unemployment and superstition; hence ‘with the end of capitalism the end of religion begins’. Miles might have had O’Day in mind when he cautioned against communist use of such aphorisms. Rationalism was but another strand of religious sectarianism, he declared, and ‘we are not going to succeed in the course of mass work … if we come out under the slogan ‘‘Religion is the opium of the people” ‘. Comrade Marx, the author of this slogan, was not available to be set straight by the Australian party secretary, and neither was Comrade O’Day prepared to desist. On another occasion, asked what he would do if Stalin invaded Australia, he returned the question: ‘What would you do if the Pope raped your mother?’25
Neither the conciliatory nor the aggressive presentation of communist religious policy mollified those Catholics in the labour movement who shared their church’s opposition to the Spanish Republic. Amid heated argument in the state branches of the ALP, the federal leader, John Curtin, maintained a policy of non-intervention. A special congress of the ACTU in July 1937, on the other hand, adopted a resolution moved by Lloyd Ross of support for the Spanish government, and by 79 votes to 48 congress also reversed the ACTU’s previous opposition to collective security. This resolution, which was proposed by the secretary of the New South Wales Labor Council with the support of Orr, Ross, Thornton and Garden, coupled ‘German and Italian aggression in Spain’ with German aggression in Central Europe, ‘directed finally towards Russia’, and Japanese aggression in China, which threatened both the Soviet Union and Australia. It supported the principles of the Brussels Peace Congress, and urged a ‘united effort of all working-class bodies’. It was by far the most encouraging advance to date in the Australian campaign for a united front.26
Japan’s invasion of China in July 1937 brought a significant extension of the campaign against fascism and war. The pretext for this belligerence was the Chinese Nationalist government’s failure to suppress communism, and it was accompanied by mass executions by the Japanese military of Chinese civilians in the coastal cities. The rape of Nanking at the end of the year joined Guernica as a symbol of militarist brutality. The party revived its Hands Off China Committee, which worked along similar lines to the Spanish Relief Committee, and raised funds to send an ambulance and other medical assistance to the victims. The substantial trade links between Australia and Japan also allowed the communists to push for economic sanctions. In October 1937 the ACTU called on Australian consumers to boycott Japanese goods. From January 1938 members of the Waterside Workers’ Federation (WWF) began to refuse to load shipments of scrap iron for export to Japan. They secured the endorsement of the New South Wales Labor Council and ACTU executive, but were forced to lift the ban in May when the Commonwealth government threatened to apply the provisions of the Transport Workers Act and de-license the WWF.27
There was an encouraging success at the end of 1937. A British cargo vessel, the SS Silksworth, under charter to a Japanese company and with a predominantly Chinese crew, docked in Newcastle to take on coal. When members of the crew approached local communists with allegations of mistreatment, the maritime unions and Newcastle Trades and Labor Council declared the ship black. The ship’s captain initiated court action against the crew and had 30 of them arrested, but another six had been taken by the communists into hiding in Sydney. Their plight occasioned large protest meetings in both Newcastle and Sydney, and highlighted the fact that the ship was bound for Japanese-occupied China with a cargo of wheat. The Chinese consul and many Chinese-Australians supported the campaign for the crew’s release. After blaming their plight on ‘the extreme element’, the Australian government eventually arranged for the prosecutions to be withdrawn and paid the crew’s passage to the Philippines. The crucial factors in this successful campaign were the solidarity across racial lines, so often a point of division, and the determination of the unions to maintain their industrial action. There was an attempt to ‘sneer at the trade union movement’, said the communist district secretary ‘with the inference that the Chinese were people lower than Australians’, but ‘here was collective international action, an example of the way the masses could unite against aggression’.28
A year later the Port Kembla branch of the WWF refused to load pig-iron on another ship bound for Japan, the SS Dalfram. The decision was a local one, taken on the initiative of the communist secretary of the WWF branch, Ted Roach, against the policy of the National Executive, which feared that the combination of the Transport Workers Act and BHP (the company that produced the iron) was too powerful. But the Port Kembla wharfies were backed by the local labour movement and held firm—even when BHP shut down its steelworks, the members of the Federated Ironworkers’ Association and other unions maintained support for the ban. Robert Menzies, as Commonwealth attorney-general, proceeded to Wollongong under heavy police escort to rebuke the strikers, and Roach told him that ‘This pig iron will be used to slaughter our own women and children, and raze our own cities to the ground in Australia, in the same way as in China today’.29
Menzies already bore the reputation of an appeaser of the fascist regimes, if not a sympathiser, because of his complimentary comments about Hitler’s Germany, and it was a communist orator working on the Sydney wharves, Stan Moran, who now dubbed him ‘Pig Iron Bob’. His declaration of the licensing provisions of the Transport Workers Act brought wide criticism, including from Isaac Isaacs, the former governor-general, who said that the coercion of the waterside workers was ‘dictator’s rule’. The ACTU affirmed its support for the principle that ‘there should be no export of war materials to countries engaged in a war of aggression’, and the government’s insistence that the trade should continue undoubtedly increased union mistrust of its domestic and external intentions. In the end, the nine-week strike ended in a truce: the government lifted the provisions of the Transport Workers Act and agreed to reconsider an embargo on the export of war material, while the Port Kembla waterside workers loaded the ship.30
Apart from its exploitation of the draconian powers of the Transport Workers Act to bar workers from their industry, the government also resorted to censorship during the Port Kembla dispute. The Sydney radio station 2KY (by that time under left-wing control) broadcast allegations of government interference with union telegrams and telephone calls. In retaliation, the postmaster-general ordered engineers to cut the connection between the studios and the transmitter, and refused to re-establish the connection until the station apologised. This was not the first case of censorship of radio broadcasts. Earlier in 1937 a state manager of the ABC had ordered the deletion of passages critical of Hitler and Mussolini from an educator’s address on Machiavelli and modern dictators; in the following year a member of the Spanish Relief Committee was told to omit the word ‘German’ from a reference to the bombing of Guernica, and Alf Foster, a Victorian county court judge and member of the International Peace Campaign, was prevented from speaking on censorship. There was also the refusal, at the request of the German government, to allow public performances of the anti-Nazi play Till the Day I Die, by Clifford Odets. These prohibitions brought protests from the Australian Council for Civil Liberties, which had evolved from the Book Censorship League, and affronted a growing body of progressive middle-class opinion. Indeed, by joining the infringement of civil liberties to appeasement of the dictators the Lyons government seemed almost deliberately to foster the politics of the broad left.31
The Axis powers certainly showed a remarkable blindness to Australian sensitivities. At the end of 1937 the Italian government sent a battle cruiser, the Remo, on a good-will voyage to New Zealand and Australia. Local Italian anti-fascists had previously distributed leaflets to passengers and crew on visiting Italian liners, and this warship’s recent involvement in the blockade of republican Spain and bombardment of Barcelona made it a natural target for protest. When similar literature was smuggled on board Remo after it berthed in Melbourne in February 1938, a ship’s officer ordered ratings to seize a local Italian taxi-driver, Ottavio Orlando, in the mistaken belief that he was the leader of Melbourne’s Gruppo Italiano against war and fascism, Frank Carmagnola. Other members of the Italian navy drew knives in an Italian club in Carlton and smashed the club’s picture of Italian volunteers in the International Brigade. Orlando was beaten and interrogated on board the Remo in the presence of an officer of the Commonwealth Investigation Branch, and Attorney-General Menzies’s insistence that the branch had given no names or descriptions to the Italian officers failed to placate indignation. Several thousand people demonstrated at Station Pier against the warship. Similarly, the MAWF organised protests and pickets against the Nazi representative Count von Luckner, who was another guest of the Australian government in 1938.32
In contrast to the welcome given these fascist emissaries, the Commonwealth government showed scant sympathy for their victims. It maintained strict controls over the entry into Australia of Jewish refugees. Even after Kristallnacht on 9–10 November 1938, when the Nazis unleashed mass destruction of Jewish property, Prime Minister Lyons insisted on a limit of 5000 Jewish immigrants a year, subject to special landing fees. In this he was supported by some in the Labor Party who regarded the refugees as a threat to Australian workers, and some Catholic publicists who dwelt on the communist proclivities of ‘world Jewry’. It was the conservative president of the Victoria Legislative Council who went furthest in his warning of ‘slinking, rat-faced men’ who were turning Carlton into a ghetto of sweated industry. Against all of them the Communist Party waged a campaign to discredit anti-semitism and pressure the government to liberalise its immigration procedures. Previously there had been a limited Jewish membership of the Communist Party of Australia—Sam Aarons and his mother Jane, Judah Waten, Nattie Seeligson, and Itzhak and Manka Gust in Melbourne, Annie Isaacs, Sam Lewis, Bella Weiner and Harry Gould in Sydney, were perhaps the most prominent—but by 1937 Jewish groups of the party were established in Sydney and Melbourne with fruitful connections to Jewish cultural bodies and community organisations.33
Even the communists eventually faltered in their campaign for the Spanish refugees. By 1939 there were several hundred thousand of them, mostly held in camps in southern France, early victims of the plight that would afflict so many millions more men, women and children rendered stateless by the enforcement of political conformity by so many regimes in the latter part of the century. The Australian government provided the shamefully small sum of £3000 for their assistance. The Spanish Relief Committee, which was still collecting donations, also pressed for admission of Spanish refugees to Australia but some of its state branches worried that this might antagonise Australian unionists. The campaign languished, the donations declined and activity fell away. The outbreak of the Second World War effectively ended the work of the Spanish Relief Committee.34
Just as the ALP’s refusal of a united front encouraged the communists to make a popular front the basis of their campaign against fascism and war, so in its domestic campaigns the Communist Party increasingly emphasised a popular alliance. This was a gradual and partial reorientation on the part of an organisation that remained overwhelmingly proletarian in its membership, leadership and outlook, and by its rapid progress in the trade unions was still hoping to win over the Labor Party. Both the fronts, the united front and the popular, were foreshadowed at the Seventh Congress of the Communist International. They were not seen as mutually exclusive, and the formal distinction between them was probably lost on many members: Guido Baracchi found when he took over party classes in Sydney in the second half of 1938 that most did not know the difference between the united front and the popular front.35 The difference in composition—a united front of the working class, a popular front of the working and other classes—was qualified in both cases by the historically ordained mission of the working class in the final overthrow of capitalism and the leading role allocated to the party in that necessary outcome. More significant was the alteration of emphasis and tone, from the stress on a separate and self-sufficient working class in conflict with the capitalist ruling class to the common endeavours of men and women, workers by hand and brain, wage-earners and farmers, artists and intellectuals, all striving for a more harmonious, richer and fuller life.
It was a member of the Anglo–American Bureau of the Communist International who first drew the Australian party’s attention to the full implications of the popular front. Writing as S. Mason in the Comintern bulletin Inprecorr in July 1936 on ‘The Next Task of the Australian Communists’, he stressed that the imminent danger of war required ‘a real popular people’s front programme’. This in turn entailed a different orientation than that pursued by the Australian party: ‘The question for us at the present moment is not proletarian revolution versus war, but peace or war; not Soviet power versus bourgeois democracy but … the extension of bourgeois democracy’. Some have supposed that Mason was J.B. Miles (since he later used that psuedonym as a play on his former occupation of stonemason) but in fact it was written by Steve Purdey, the representative of the Australian party in Moscow. That this Mason was not Miles quickly became evident during the recriminations his article caused once it was put before the party in the Communist Review. Lance Sharkey used Mason’s article to criticise Dixon’s tardiness to embrace the popular front, and though the diligent assistant secretary took the blame, Sharkey was for the first time challenging the party secretary, Miles. Mason’s strictures were so pointed that Miles offered abject self-criticism at the next meeting of the enlarged central committee, which resolved on a substantial alteration of the party’s electoral activity. Paradoxically, the insistence that the Australian party reorient its politics to the popular front meant working for a Labor government. To assuage the fears of the Labor Party and improve the prospects of Labor defeating the Lyons government, the party withdrew all but two of its candidates from the 1937 federal elections and campaigned for a ‘common front of the workers, farmers and middle class against reaction’.36
Not all accepted the abrupt change of tack. A Queenslander suggested it would dismay the workers in that state who had lost patience with its reactionary Labor government. Ernie Thornton told the central committee in the immediate aftermath of that election, which Labor lost, that ‘it would be a very big mistake if we ever allowed ourselves to forget that we are a class party and a revolutionary party, as seems to be the case in a lot of our propaganda’. Guido Baracchi, readmitted to the party in 1935, harboured misgivings about the persistent tendency to ‘dissolve the proletariat in the people’. Mason’s instructions were in any case soon countermanded by his successor as secretary of the Anglo–American Bureau, Andre Marty, the ruthless French commissar of the International Brigade. At a meeting of the committee in September 1937 he taxed the Australian representatives, Dixon and Orr, with the Australian party’s failure to take a more independent electoral position and brushed aside their explanation that it had been determined for them by Mason. ‘The article by Mason was bad. I don’t know why Mason had the idea of writing such an article. The comrade who is responsible is removed from our apparatus.’ In any case, he continued, ‘The responsibility for this line is only the responsibility of the Central Committee of the Australian Party. An article by Mason is not sufficient. The leadership of the parties are not babies.’ Dixon’s chagrin is easily imagined.37
In any case, Australian communists were now fully committed to the Popular Front, and its urgent necessity was the dominant theme of the Twelfth Party Congress in 1938:
A People’s Front against poverty and sorrow, for prosperity and happiness; against reaction and fascism, for progress and democracy; against the instigators of war and their friends in this country, for a lasting peace and security.
These polarities provided the coordinates of a popular alliance that would incorporate ‘workers, farmers, teachers, civil servants, doctors, other professional workers and small businessmen, Catholics and Protestants’. Dixon was even able to quantify ‘the progressive and democratic people’ as constituting 90 per cent of all Australians. In this vein the preamble of the new constitution adopted at the Twelfth Congress defined the Communist Party as:
... a working-class party carrying forward the best traditions of Australian democracy, the struggle against convictism, for selfgovernment, at Eureka the fight for social reforms, against military conscription and peace. Upholding the achievements of democracy and standing for the right of the majority to direct the destinies of our country, the Communist Party fights with all its strength to unite the masses to resist any and every effort, whether it comes from abroad or within, to impose upon the Australian people the arbitrary will of any selfish minority group, or party, or clique. It is devoted to the defence of the immediate interests of the workers, farmers and middle class against capitalist exploitation.
To further emphasise the democratic basis of the popular front, Jack Blake declared that the party had no intention forcing socialism on Australia. That would require majority support and Australians were not ready for it. ‘Let it be known definitely once and for all that the Communist Party is not and never has been an advocate of force and violence.’38
The new emphases of the popular front were served by material that contrasted the economic interests of the masses against the greed of a parasitic minority. In 1936 the party demonstrated the feasibility of its demands for increased wages and shorter hours by detailed analysis of business profits. For the 1937 federal election, James Rawling produced the leaflet Make the Rich Pay, which publicised the twenty families who controlled so much of the country’s industry along similar lines as the French party’s exploitation of their country’s 200 richest families. Rawling also wrote Who Owns Australia?, which showed the the narrow concentration of national wealth in the hands of a ‘modern feudal aristocracy’ who lived in palaces alongside ‘horrible and soul-destroying slums’. From an earlier political economy that used the labour theory of value to show how all profit derived from the exploitation of wage-labour and argued that the logic of capitalist accumulation would necessarily reduce the middle strata to the ranks of the proletariat, the party now championed farmers, shopkeepers and small business against an oligopoly of large Australian companies characterised by interlocking directorates and links into conservative politics.39 The change was at once a move towards careful empirical research into company registers conducted by experts who invoked the authority of massed facts, and an adaptation of the techniques of public relations. As Lloyd Ross told the central committee, ‘Simplification, illustration, reiteration—the methods of the successful advertiser—must be applied to our propaganda’.40
A further extension of this popular front literature was the practical blueprint. Ralph Gibson’s Socialist Melbourne (1939) is a striking example of the genre in its description of how his city would appear to a future visitor: the modernised public transport system, the new schools, the People’s Bank and the new People’s University, the Richmond slums replaced by housing estates, the Pelaco factory on the hill now a community centre, the Toorak mansions across the river made into rest homes for the workers, the red flag flying over Parliament House. To go inside a factory was ‘a new and wonderful experience. One felt as if one had walked into a club rather than a factory.’ Gibson reported both changes and continuities. Pentridge Prison was no more, crowds at the Melbourne Cricket Ground were down because new sporting facilities allowed much greater popular participation, but the churches in Collins Street were still free to operate. It was a ‘new Melbourne, very different from the Melbourne that we know’, and yet ‘eminently realisable’ and even likely to be realised in the immediate future. This is not so much a utopian work in the pre-communist millenarian tradition of William Morris, or like an earlier Melbourne utopia imagined by the anarchist bookseller David Andrade, a genre that heightened the contrast between what was and what could be, as rather a readily recognisable account of a familiar place enhanced by an expanded range of communal amenities.41
The most striking feature of popular front communism was its cultivation of national traditions. This strategy was equally true of other communist parties. The American communist party at this time constructed a progressive lineage that ran from Jefferson and Paine to Jackson and Lincoln: ‘Communism is the Americanism of the twentieth century’, declared its party secretary, Earl Browder. In Britain communist writers including the expatriate Australian Jack Lindsay turned, as earlier radical movements had done, to the past in order to connect Wat Tyler, the Levellers and the Chartists to the contemporary defence of liberty: ‘Whatever was good in British traditions’, Harry Pollitt told the CPGB Congress in 1937, ‘the National Government had abandoned and betrayed’. In France the Communist Party revived the rich revolutionary heritage of the Republic to declare itself ‘the heir of the Jacobins’.42 The difficulty for Australian communists was that their own popular memory was so exiguous. The radical nationalists associated with the Bulletin in the closing years of the last century had celebrated convict martyrs and defiant diggers. Bob Ross of the VSP had commemorated the Eureka rebellion with his study published in 1914, and the epic event was recalled intermittently during the 1920s.43 Little remained of such history by the 1930s, not least because early Australian communists regarded it with suspicion for perpetuating romantic national illusions, though Bob Ross’s son Lloyd would publish his study of the utopian socialist William Lane and the Australian Labour Movement in 1937 and the first instalment of Brian Fitzpatrick’s radical interpretation of Australian history would appear in 1939.44 The key figure in the Australian party’s construction of a popular national tradition was James Rawling, who worked in Sydney as the party’s researcher and the national secretary of the MAWF. An interest in Australian history, stimulated by the teaching of Professor Arnold Wood at the University of Sydney in the 1920s, found expression in a miscellany of articles on popular resistance in the colonial era published from the early 1930s in the Workers’ Weekly, the Red Leader and the Communist Review. His incomplete Story of the Australian People, issued by the Modern Press in irregular instalments from 1937, shows the clear influence of Wood in its emphasis on the convicts as wronged victims of a bloody penal code and the emancipists’ struggle for freedom against autocracy and squattocracy.45
Until communists became interested in the popular front, these enthusiasts evoked little response. In 1934 Lloyd Ross tried to interest the labour movement in the centenary of the transportation of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, with limited success. Later in the same year Rawling drew attention to the eightieth anniversary of the Eureka Stockade, but the party did nothing to commemorate it. Two years later, however, J. B. Miles reported to the central committee that he had recently been in Ballarat and visited the site of the stockade as well as the museum that held the flag and other relics of the diggers’ rebellion. He was ‘compelled to realise … the need to study Australian history’. Almost immediately the Workers’ Weekly responded by hailing the Eureka rebellion and the anti-conscription struggles of the First World War as ‘true expressions’ of ‘real Australian traditions’. The ‘self-styled patrons of the rich families who at present control Australia’ had claimed a monopoly of patriotism but a suitably nurtured appreciation of the past showed that ‘the Communists today are the real inheritors of the true Australia, of the fathers of democracy, of the Dunmore Langs, Parkeses and Wentworths’. The pen of Rawling was clearly apparent in the claim that:
True Australianism has always been a dominant mode in the history of this country; in the early struggle against the oppressions of the governors, against convictism, for the extending of democratic rights and in countless battles of the worker for betterment in their working and living standards.
Hence in late 1936 the party organised a procession through the streets of Sydney to mark the twentieth anniversary of the first conscription referendum, with six of the twelve ‘martyred’ Wobblies present along with a selection of other celebrities in the battle against conscription. At the same time as they celebrated ‘the heroism of the men who were brave enough not to fight’, communists reclaimed the Anzacs for their enlarged radical nationalist pantheon. These volunteers had been manipulated and misled, but they ‘thought they were dying for liberty’ and it was anti-militarism rather than militarism that was true heir to the Anzac tradition.46
Sharkey clarified the object of this patriotic initiative. It was Dimitrov, he told the central committee in November 1936, who had pointed out the great success of fascism in ‘playing upon national feelings and grievances’, deep-rooted emotions that communists had neglected. Henceforth all parties must therefore develop ‘the national traditions of the people’. ‘We are the real Australians’, Dixon responded the following year, ‘the inheritors of everything that is good and decent in the history of Australia’.47 In this spirit the party contested the celebrations in 1938 to mark the sesquicentenary of British settlement, which it justifiably feared would foster ‘an incorrect view, an anti-working-class view, of Australian history’. The official re-enactment of the landing of Governor Phillip affirmed the imperial purpose of colonisation and eliminated the convicts while it brushed lightly over the original inhabitants. In contrast, communists assisted the Aboriginal Day of Mourning and Protest, and took a leading role in the countercelebrations organised by the New South Wales Labor Council. This ‘Pageant of Labor’ showed a convict flogging, persecution of Aborigines, the Eureka rebels, alongside other tableaux emphasising the achievements of the toilers. Mourning and protest had their place but the popular front required an affirmative note; as the party organisers put it, ‘because of mass participation we must have a positive attitude’. Thus the party’s own float contrasted a ‘Gallery of Honour’ (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Harry Pollitt, Tom Mann, Mao Zedong, Harry Bridges, La Pasionaria) with a ‘Rogues Gallery’ (Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, a Japanese militarist, Chamberlain, Lyons—and Trotsky).48
The Stalinist terror demonised Trotsky as the evil genius behind every trace of opposition. When the communists turned on the Spanish POUM, they accused Trotsky of sabotaging the defence of Spain in order to assist the fascists. This malicious caricature gives him Nazi insignia and emphasises his Semitic features. (Source: ‘Workers’ Weekly’, 10 August 1937)
For Leon Trostky such endeavours were a capitulation to national chauvinism and a betrayal of proletarian internationalism. Australian communists did warn against xenophobia. The central committee advised in 1937 that the campaign against Japanese aggression should draw a clear line ‘between the Japanese fascists, militarists, imperialists, the government, which are planning war, and the Japanese people’, so that any suggestion of a ‘yellow peril’ should be rejected absolutely.49 In practice the distinction between a people and its government was often lost. Again, the communists’ cultivation of progressive national traditions was not exclusive. As the Gallery of Honour suggested, Australians were encouraged to celebrate a number of revolutionary heroes who embodied the best traditions of their countries—thus the party’s campaigns against racism in the United States, fascist aggression in Spain, and imperialism in India introduced Australians to a diverse repertoire of progressive patriotism, while figures such as Paul Robeson and Jawaharlal Nehru were incorporated into the experience of the left. Even so, the the popular front elevated nationhood as a category and nationalism as an ideology. Front communism sought to tame the savage beast that the fascists had set loose, to reclaim patriotism as a force for good by emphasising the national qualities of the parties that comprised the Communist International. But the beast would not be tamed. National antagonisms erupted into a new world war, the Communist International dissolved and eventually even communist countries confronted each other across national boundaries.
The popular front attracted appreciable numbers of writers, artists and intellectuals for the first time to communism. There was a perceptible quickening of cultural life in Australia in the second half of the 1930s that was apparent both in new levels of activity and a restless impatience with older forms. For many of the creative younger generation who came to adulthood during the decade, witnessed the collapse of the old society and felt the dangers of fascism and war, communism seemed the only realistic alternative. Even those who did not submit to the demands of party membership were drawn into its ambience of cultural engagement.
A popular front emphasised broad alliances and inclusive forms of organisation. The Writers’ League, formed in 1935 as a ‘broad and non-sectarian’ body, turned itself into the Writers’ Association after Nettie Palmer attended the Paris Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture Against Fascism in 1937, and in the following year it merged with the Fellowship of Australian Writers, which embraced all but the most decorous litterateurs. The theatre groups associated with the Workers’ Art Club reformed in Sydney and Melbourne as the New Theatre to attract a younger generation of urban progressives. The communist artists combined with others impatient with the stultifying conservatism of the academy to form the Contemporary Art Society in 1938.50 These realignments did not remove the commitment to an alternative, experimental culture that challenged restrictive forms and practices. Communist artists at this time continued to work mainly in linocut or graphic media rather than paint, and to draw cartoons, illustrate magazines, design pamphlet and book covers, produce stage designs and banners. The New Theatre took drama back from the open platform to the proscenium arch, but its productions still involved non-professional actors, producers and designers, using stylised sketches in a documentary and didactic mode, and commonly called on audience participation. The party opened the gates of cultural access, encouraging its members to participate. Branch life in itself trained communists in reading, writing, speaking, editing.51
Noel Counihan took his pencil to the countryside when he and Judah Waten set off north from Melbourne in the winter of 1935. Waten had been expelled from the party once more as the result of ‘petty bourgeois irresponsibilities’, and he proposed to act as Counihan’s manager and hunt out country notables prepared to sit for caricature portraits that could be exhibited and sold. Through Albury, Wagga Wagga, Tumut and Goulburn (where Bishop Burgmann welcomed them with stately courtesy) they proceeded with sufficient success to clear their pub bill and move on. Christmas found them in Sydney, where Noel met Stan Cross and George Finey. In the new year it was on to Orange, Tamworth, Armidale and Brisbane, where they befriended Raphael Cilento. This was fortuitous. Cilento, the director-general of medical services in Queensland, was an influential patron who helped them sell a substantial proportion of the portfolio. But he was also the honorary Italian consul and at a celebratory meal the guests fell out with their host over Mussolini. Thus ended the Wanderjahr and there was just enough from the proceeds of the Brisbane exhibition to pay their passages back to Melbourne.52
At the All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 the leading party authority on culture, A. A. Zhdanov, took Stalin’s description of writers as ‘engineers of human souls’ to codify the artistic doctrine of socialist realism, a heightened realism that faithfully rendered the heroic struggle of the working class to help it achieve its appointed goal. In the communism of the popular front, artists and writers were to cast off narcissistic aestheticism and take their rightful place alongside the only truly creative class, the proletariat. Socialist realism, with its insistently political message, is seen by some literary critics as an incubus on the creative imagination of Australian communist writers such as Katharine Susannah Prichard. Her earlier novels such as Working Bullocks (1926) and Coonardoo (1929), with their rich vitality and sensuality, are compared with those written after she had returned from a writers conference in the Soviet Union in 1933, in which the class struggle takes precedence over human subjectivity.53 This view has been contested, partly on the grounds that Zhdanov’s speech was not published in Australia during the 1930s and the term ‘socialist realism’ not commonly used until after the Second World War; but it was certainly promulgated earlier and its effects were readily apparent in a range of contemporary statements. That it stultified artistic creativity, at least in its initial impact, is equally dubious as the denial that it was promulgated.54
Writers such as Alan Marshall and John Morrison were publishing at this time vignettes of working life in party newspapers and journals, fragments of experience and action in which the short sentences, direct diction and urgent immediacy blurred the distinction between fiction and documentary. There was a close relationship between such prose and the experimental genre of reportage, which was a new form of journalism strongly influenced by Egon Kisch and characterised by one of its Australian practitioners, Tom Fitzgerald, as ‘a report plus atmosphere, comment and deduction’; not ‘copy-cat realism’ but ‘lessons for human progress’. Then there were political novels such as John Harcourt’s Upsurge (1934), a jagged distillation of events in Western Australia in which ‘the story and actual fact walk hand in hand’. The Melbourne New Theatre’s play Thirteen Dead (1937), based on a recent underground explosion at the Wonthaggi state mine, used a similar technique of ‘dramatic reportage’ to drive home the lesson that capitalism destroyed lives in its compulsive drive for profits. As David Carter has suggested, such writing deliberately challenged literary convention; its politicisation of the text was such that it ‘entails thinking of propaganda, not as bits of political rhetoric insufficiently made over into art, but as an available narrative strategy’.55
In their laconic intimacy, the short stories of Marshall and Morrison resemble those of Henry Lawson, who was championed by the Fellowship of Australian Writers during the 1930s just as enthusiastically as he was claimed by the Communist Party. The more direct influences on writers of the left came from abroad: Dos Passos, Hemingway, Steinbeck and the New Masses magazine, Gide and Malraux, Gorky and Sholokhov. Among the members of the Writers’ League in Melbourne, in fact, there was resistance to the minority of enthusiasts—Frank Huelin, Len Fox, Arthur Howells—who advanced claims for an Australian literary tradition: when one member introduced the work of Joseph Furphy, hardly anyone else knew of him. The more established figures associated with the literary popular front—Vance and Nettie Palmer, the Essons, Miles Franklin, Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw—appreciated only too well how fragile was the space occupied by Australian literature. In the satirical novel on the sesquicentenary written by Miles Franklin and Dymphna Cusack, Pioneers on Parade (1939), we see the snobbish denial of convict origins as an obstacle to the development of an independent Australian civilisation. It is in the native soil and from those who who mixed their sweat and tears with it that these radical nationalists expected a real culture to grow. Both the fiction and the art of the later 1930s moves from the stark depiction of embattled labour, alternatively crushed or heroically defiant, to a more affirmative rendition of popular endeavour from early pioneering days to the present, a collective memory gathered into a narrative of progress.56
As communists ventured out from their oppositional fastness, they encountered a new constituency that responded less to national traditions or local concerns than overseas influences and international issues. A younger generation of educated Australians who came to adulthood in the 1930s rejected the enclosed conservatism of their parents. They looked outwards, past the mental boundaries of the British Empire, to new centres of energy and innovation. Few of these restless, enquiring young men and women were drawn to the dogmas of communism in its proletarian Australian accents, which sounded no less parochial to ears attuned to cosmopolitan modernism, but they were attracted to the cultural ambience of the left. They did not suffer acute material distress, since their professional qualifications and intellectual skills afforded reasonable comfort, but they were appalled by the misery, the waste, and perhaps most of all the sheer irrationality of the capitalist Depression. By contrast the Soviet Union appeared efficient, purposeful, progressive. Its heroic feats of construction appealed to technicians, its mass programmes of literacy and culture to teachers. For those who watched with alarm the march of the fascist dictatorships, and the pusillanimity or worse of the bourgeois democracies, communism seemed the only realistic alternative. Such dissident middle-class sympathisers did not easily adapt to the demands of party membership but they swelled the popular front.
This altered climate of opinion especially affected journalists, just as they shaped it. The dark machinations of diplomacy, big business, spies and treachery crossed the genres of reportage, travel writing and the thriller, so much so that the writings of Graham Greene, Eric Ambler and Ernest Hemingway became emblematic of the decade. Journalism was at once glamorous and seedy, competitive and world-wearily cynical, its privileged access to events constrained by media proprietors deeply complicit in the structures of power. In Melbourne Keith Murdoch assembled a remarkable combination of youthful talent for his Herald and Weekly Times chain—Brian Fitzpatrick, John Fisher, John Hetherington, Kim Keane, Clive Turnbull; Edgar Holt, Frederick Howard and Douglas Wilkie from England; and later James Aldridge, Rupert Lockwood and Alan Moorehead. As Moorehead recalls:
Nearly all of us were left wing and we glowed with hate for Mussolini and the up and coming Hitler. We read such books as John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World and Sholokov’s And Quiet Flows the Don … Every one of us I suspect was secretly planning or already working on a novel.
The view here is outwards, and most of these journalists would try their hand abroad; some, like Moorehead, never returned. Earlier, as undergraduates, these ambitious young men affected a style of raffish sophistication. On the Melbourne campus there was Cyril Pearl, who became an editor for the Packer press in Sydney, and Alwyn Lee and Sam White, both briefly party members, who cut their teeth on the Labour Club’s magazines, Proletariat and Stream, before departing for careers overseas. Sam eloped with Mary Wren, as Alwyn Lee had decamped to Sydney with Guido Baracchi’s wife.57
Stream, a volatile mixture of Lenin, Joyce and Pound, gave way in the later 1930s to the sober exhortations of the Left Book Club News and the monthly club selections in their uniform livery, brick red for the hardbacks, tangerine for limpcover editions. The Left Book Club was a significant extension of the popular front. Established in Britain by the left-wing publisher Victor Gollancz, it provided members with cheap editions of works concerned with fascism, the threat of war and poverty. Gaetano Salvemini’s Under the Axe of Fascism and Robert Brady’s The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism were complemented by Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China and Hewlett Johnson’s The Socialist Sixth of the World. The party promoted the Left Book Club in Australia both in the trade unions and through encouragement of club groups that met to discuss the books and participate in progressive politics. The central committee advised that it was important for party members to play an active role in these suburban groups, and to ‘guide the political line’. By 1938 there were 4000 Australian members, an Australian Left News and a full-time organiser.58
The Australian Council for Civil Liberties was another forum for progressive activity. Formed in Melbourne at the end of 1935, it took up political censorship, the use of the Crimes Act against communist activity, the attack on Ottavio Orlando and the plight of refugees from fascism. Its secretary and moving spirit was the radical intellectual Brian Fitzpatrick, who was more closely aligned with the left than some of the professors and lawyers who swelled its list of office-bearers found comfortable. While Fitzpatrick recruited such allies as Judah Waten and Rupert Lockwood, his object in constructing what he described hesitantly as a ‘United Front (mmm?) of liberals, C.P. and subsidiaries, and all unionists’ depended upon his own ability to secure ‘their co-operation in semi-darkness’.59
‘The middle class appreciates strength in the uncertainties and wants to be on the side of the millions—whether the millions of the people or the pounds of the millionaires depends largely on the working class.’ This appraisal from Lloyd Ross captures the lingering communist suspicion of the new social constituency it cultivated for the purpose of a popular front. The middle class fitted awkwardly into a Marxist class analysis based on relations of production, as its intermediate status suggests. Members of the middle class were regarded as waverers in search of certainty and in need of firm proletarian guidance. Ross cited the example of Frank Dalby Davison who, as president of the Fellowship of Australian Writers, had initiated the merger with the Writers’ Association, and described him as ‘somewhat of an intellectual ne’er-do-well and political libertine’. Those middle-class progressives who were drawn to the Communist Party had to overcome their instinctive liberal inhibitions. In 1936, when a Melbourne newspaper was conducting one of its periodical communist witch-hunts, an earnest correspondent demurred:
There are few thinking people today who do not admit that we need some change in our social system. History shows that progress is only made by a handful of enthusiasts propagating their particular doctrines. If we give full freedom to these movements right and truth must prevail.
The correspondent was Wilfred Burchett, another of the questing Australians drawn to investigative journalism by the example of Kisch. Burchett has recalled that when he applied to join the party at this ‘stage of mental, moral and ideological development’ he was ‘repelled’ by the violent language of the Communist Manifesto. Evelyn Shaw, who abandoned legal studies for art, found the dictatorship of the proletariat an obstacle when she joined in 1937.60
A notable proportion of the recruits to the Communist Party at this time were women, for the popular front provided greater opportunity for female activity than the earlier, insistently masculine proletarianism of Class Against Class. The male leaders of the popular front party also encouraged a broader participation. According to Mary Wright, who had helped organise the party demonstration for International Women’s Day in 1935, it was Jack Miles who asked, ‘How long are you going to keep it to yourselves?’ No matter that he had previously instructed the party women to stick to the straight and narrow. The organisers duly approached a number of women’s groups, including the Federation of Women Voters and the United Association of Women, all of which it had previously condemned as mere apologists for bourgeois feminism. At the party congress in December 1935 it was reported that an approach had been made to the United Association of Women’s redoubtable Jessie Street but that she had taken fright. However, her support was secured for an enlarged Women’s Day in 1936, and this provided the basis for communist participation in her campaign for equal pay for women, and for mobilisation of community groups in campaigns to improve family services. In the same year the party’s monthly, Working Woman, was abandoned and replaced by Woman Today, which enlarged the ambit of female interests with articles on fashion, mothercraft and family health as well as women’s careers. To the woman worker and woman as auxiliary to her worker-husband, were added the woman writer, the woman as peace activist, the progressive woman.61
The change proceeded from the party leaders’ recognition that ‘our percentage of women members is so appallingly weak’, and it entailed no reconsideration on their part of the subordination of gender to class. Party women felt their inequality keenly, and in subsequent autobiographical writings they are acutely aware of the double standards that operated under the aegis of a puritanical party of universal emancipation; but there is little of such questioning in the contemporary party record. Many of the women recruited into the party in the 1930s had independent careers: of those who have recorded their memories, Marie Gollan, Jess Grant, Joyce Batterham and Flo Davis were teachers; Bernice Morris and May Pennefather were nurses; Justina Williams a journalist; Betty Roland a playwright; Mona Brand an advertising copywriter; Evelyn Shaw an artist; Audrey Blake a shop assistant; Joan Goodwin an unemployed graduate. Such a sample is manifestly skewed towards those best able to articulate their experience, but it does suggest some instructive patterns. Typically women were drawn into popular-front activity before they joined the party, and brought to their communist commitment a level of education and a breadth of experience beyond the organised labour movement. Some became full-time party or union organisers, others worked in a part-time capacity. All remained in subordinate positions.62
Some were young. Daphne Gollan joined the party in 1938 while still in her teens and studying part time at the University of Sydney and working at the Mitchell Library. Her account combines youthful engagement with mature reflection. She joined, she recalls, because the Communist Party seemed the only political organisation that stood actively for socialism and against fascism; but she admits the additional attraction that she found it ‘shocking and conspiratorial’. Her problem on joining the party ‘was that of all women in organisations in which they are greatly outnumbered: overshadowed development’. The limits of her experience in the public domain were narrower than those of men; much of her activity was mediated by men, and having found her own way into the party she was ‘speedily headed off, cornered and captured’. When war came and it was necessary for her to adopt a pseudonym, she put forward Cleopatra Sweatfigure. ‘That’s enough, comrade. We are not joking’, a member of the central committee told her. In fact, she insists, she was not joking. ‘The colours of life were very bright then.’63
One field of women’s activity was the youth movement. From its parlous condition in the early 1930s the Young Communist League quickly applied the strategies of the popular front to youth activity. A National Youth Congress in Sydney in September 1935 attracted 71 delegates from church organisations and university student clubs, who formulated a Declaration of the Rights of Australian Youth. This in turn resulted in the Australian Youth Council, one of the genuinely popular fronts. The YCL itself was reorganised by Jean Devanny’s daughter, Pat, who had recently returned from the Lenin School well-trained in such work. Her bulletin, the League Organiser, provided members with exhaustive advice on how to cultivate support. An article on ‘How to Work in a Cricket Club’, for example, explained the need to be a good sport, to mix with all your team-mates but pay particular attention to the captain, and to point out the class significance of sport as opportunity arose. Through the Workers’ Sports Federation, well-organised Easter and Christmas camps and local YCL clubs offering games and dances, the party attracted larger numbers of teenagers.64
Upon her return from Moscow in 1938, Audrey Blake took charge of the party’s youth work in Melbourne and greatly expanded its scope. Its Workers’ Sports Federation was on a scale far larger than in other cities, its holiday camps grew to a peak attendance of 2400. The winter programme in that year included football, netball, table tennis, boxing and gymnastics (‘To win in the class struggle we have to keep fit’), dramas, dances and rallies, classes in history, political economy, cookery and public speaking, conducted tours of the Herald office in Flinders Street, Parliament House and the city courts. She described it as a ‘movement for peace, freedom and progress’; it might equally be seen as a regimen in progressive civics. Even so, the title of the organisation remained an obstacle to the aim of building a large, anti-fascist alliance of youth, and in 1939 it was reformed as the League of Young Democrats. The popular magazine Pix provided an illustrated report of the league’s premises, two floors and the basement of the Tattersall’s building in the city, with a gymnasium, a cooperative cafe, even a printery, a place humming with purposeful activity.65
The popular front undoubtedly struck a chord among many Australians who had not previously been associated with the left. Its internationalism appealed to those who were alarmed by world developments, its affirmative nationalism attracted those weary of the insular colonialism that dominated Australia between the wars. The appeal to middle-class progressives, artists and intellectuals seemed to weaken the class barriers that had dominated the country’s political life, and to provide the labour movement with an infusion of new energy. But as Len Fox’s formulation suggests, the broad left was in tension with the narrow left. The Communist Party, the most rigidly proletarian of political parties, might have relaxed its dogma but it certainly did not relax its control and it is to this interplay of the narrow with the broad that we now turn.