Communists made significant advances in trade unions during the later 1930s. After the initial breakthroughs in the Miners’ Federation and the Australian Railways Union, Ernie Thornton was elected secretary of the Federated Ironworkers’ Association, and Tom Wright secretary of the Sheet Metal Workers’ Union in 1936. Jim Healy won the same position in the Waterside Workers’ Federation in the following year, while party members consolidated leadership of the Seamen’s Union and made appreciable gains at state and branch level in a number of other unions. Midway through 1937 the party was able to report to the RILU that 29 of its members occupied full-time union posts. In the two centres of heavy industry, Newcastle and the Wollongong region of New South Wales, the trades councils were said to be ‘under Party leadership’, and a ‘decisive’ influence was claimed for communist delegates and their allies in the New South Wales Labor Council. Its Victorian counterpart proved more resistant but by this time the party could usually count on support from about one-third of the delegates to the Melbourne Trades Hall Council, and in Queensland the left was not far short of a majority on the Brisbane Trades and Labor Council.1 The efficacy of the united front was apparent at the National Congress of the ACTU in 1937 as the mining and transport delegates, the secretaries of the New South Wales and South Australian Trades Hall councils, even the secretary of the ACTU itself endorsed the resolution in favour of collective sanctions, which communists moved and the congress adopted by 79 votes to 48.2
Across a complex diversity of industries and occupations with their own distinctive characteristics, it is possible to identify some common patterns. First, communists achieved success by taking up the industrial demands of union members and prosecuting effective campaigns for better wages and conditions. In contrast to earlier pronouncements of an acute capitalist crisis that allowed no possibility of improvement, the party now accepted a partial economic recovery was under way. The recovery was fragile and incomplete, the world economy beset by fierce rivalry between the leading capitalist powers with intensified exploitation of their domestic workers and colonial markets. Dixon presented a Report on the Economic Struggle and the Tasks of the Communists in the Trade Unions to the Eleventh Party Congress in 1935 that attributed the increase in production from the depths of the Depression to ‘an increase in the exploitation of the workers by increasing the intensity of labour’. The task of the party was to lead resistance to the speed-ups and to demand that workers receive higher wages.3 It was a timely initiative. While national output increased after 1933 to finally attain pre-Depression levels by 1937, wages still lagged behind profits. In 1933 and again in 1934 the Arbitration Court rejected union applications to restore the basic wage it had cut in 1931; its 1937 supplementation fell a long way short of the ACTU’s submission. With the unions thus baulked by the national wage tribunal, militants in particular industries were able to persuade their workmates to turn instead to direct bargaining with employers; with the partial recovery, employers were more likely to yield to such union action.
Second, the seeds of of communist success had been sown some years earlier as the party turned from dissident agitation to involvement in union affairs. In the New South Wales Teachers’ Federation, for example, communists had worked during the early 1930s through an Educational Workers’ League, which counterposed a radical conception of working-class education to the apolitical, professional concerns of a union executive dominated by headmasters. From 1934 the militants concentrated on a campaign to restore salaries, and gradually, as this industrial strategy altered the character of the federation, communist teachers such as Hettie Weitzel won executive positions. The larger concern with the class character of education was now pursued through the union in popular front initiatives such as the Conference on Education for a Progressive, Democratic Australia organised in 1938 by Sam Lewis, the former secretary of the Educational Workers’ League and the driving force of the new teachers’ unionism.4
The number and duration of industrial disputes increased steadily from a lowpoint in 1933 to a new peak in 1938. Not all of them were led by communists, but the party’s application of its new industrial strategy brought immediate results. In January 1936 the Port Kembla (NSW) branch of the Federated Ironworkers’ Association imposed a ban on overtime in the BHP works there. A ten-week stoppage and deregistration of the union followed the sacking of a union delegate. The immediate outcome was a compromise—the company agreed to reduce overtime, though not to reinstate the communist delegate—and it was followed by growth of union membership, election of communist officials, further union gains in subsequent action and a greatly improved national award in 1939. It was this momentum that carried Ernie Thornton to national leadership of the FIA and established his union as a pacesetter in the new militancy.5 He had been put into the union as Victorian organiser in 1935 and his election as national secretary a year later was followed by the success of communists in two key branches: Scottish Pat McHenry, the ‘Grey Ghost’, in Port Kembla, and Welsh Charlie Morgan in Newcastle.6
Thornton rose quickly to become perhaps the most celebrated of the communist union leaders by the end of the decade—when he failed by just twelve votes to secure the presidency of the ACTU. A stocky, powerful man with a ‘flashing sabre-toothed tiger grimace of a smile’, he exemplified the qualities of the party industrialist: warm-hearted, generous, combative, domineering. With aggressive leadership he transformed a loose, ineffectual federation into a large, centralised and remarkably successful fighting organisation. A paper membership of 10 000 in 1935 increased to more than 20 000 by 1939 and doubled again by 1942, as the members secured greatly improved pay and conditions. Thornton had a reputation for strikes. His forthright statement to his union’s federal council, ‘We made strikes our business’, became notorious and indeed the FIA repeatedly confronted BHP and the owners of smaller foundries and workshops with threats of direct action to back its demands. But he was also adept in using industrial tribunals to achieve improved awards: during his first year as national secretary he appeared in no less than 27 such cases. Disputation, negotiation and arbitration constituted a repertoire of tactics, and while communist union leaders placed emphasis on the first, they owed their success to orchestration of all three. Thornton proclaimed that ‘a union official who is not prepared to lead men out on strike is not fitted for his position’; but added ‘so also is an official who, when the time for retreat has come, has not the courage to fight for his policy’. The proclamation emphasised both the responsibilities and the prerogatives of leadership, a role that Thornton assumed perhaps too readily, for he would later be denounced for rigging union ballots. This charge is difficult to sustain for the 1930s and is belied by the clear evidence of support in mass meetings. He typifies the communists who with the recovery from the Depression made the transition from unemployed agitation to union leadership—tough, intelligent, prickly, turbulent men who had battled all their lives for a job and a fair go. They were prepared to stand up to anybody on behalf of their members, and the members in turn stuck by them with a fierce loyalty.7
Meanwhile, in the Miners’ Federation, Bill Orr and Charlie Nelson joined safety issues and hours of work to wage demands in a log of claims that they served on the coal companies in 1937. After the union stopped production at selected pits, the dispute was taken to arbitration and the owners agreed to restore the wage cuts they had imposed in the 1929–30 lockout.8 There was also the lengthy campaign conducted by the New South Wales branch of the Australian Railways Union for a shorter working week, sick pay and leave entitlements, benefits gradually won by different sections of the union by dint of protracted local endeavours led by the state secretary, Lloyd Ross.9
A third feature of communist industrial activity is apparent in these examples—a patient, flexible, strategic prescience. Far from storming the industrial barricades, communist union activists were prepared to bide their time, mix direct action with recourse to arbitration, and work towards attainable objectives. Their campaigns were preceded by careful analysis and painstaking preparation; they laid the ground with workplace meetings, and used their own union publications, the party press and the mass media to build popular support for their demands. These tactics acknowledged a crucial fact: a small, highly disciplined party operating on a slender base of members in any single industry depended of necessity on the support and cooperation of a larger mass of non-communist union members. There were perhaps 3000 communist workers by the late 1930s in a workforce a thousand times that number. Beyond this, however, the communist union officials who had experienced the futility of precipitate militancy during the Depression were seized with the lessons of earlier defeats. The chief of those lessons was not to start a strike you could not win. The force of that maxim was driven home by the mixed fortunes of communists in the maritime transport industry.
The party had long held great expectations of the Seamen’s Union. Unsympathetic shipping companies, harsh working conditions, cramped accommodation and the draconian discipline of shipboard life all fostered a rough-and-tumble militancy among the workers in this vital transport industry. Ever since the union’s national secretary, Tom Walsh, had quit the the party in the early 1920s, communists endeavoured to re-establish control of the union, but had repeatedly failed to dislodge Walsh’s successor, Jacob Johnson, from the union headquarters in Sydney. Johnson and the branch secretaries in Melbourne and Brisbane were adherents of the rigidly doctrinaire Socialist Party of Great Britain, which allowed no compromise in the class war, and enforced the union rules as strictly as they upheld the letter of impossibilist Marxism. With decisions taken at monthly stop-work meetings, however, there was scope for local action, so as prosperity returned, ships’ crews began to demand piecemeal improvements. One such dispute escalated in August 1935 into a general stoppage, opposed by Johnson and led by the militants in Sydney under the leadership of Joe Keenan, a Scottish party member whose fiery oratory was well suited to the open union forum. When the arbitration court handed down a new award that reduced special rates and introduced penal clauses to curb strikes, the seamen again overturned the officials’ instructions in favour of a general stoppage. Although the Commonwealth government applied the licensing provisions of the Transport Workers’ Act to authorise non-union labour, the seamen held firm, and in late December 1935 at a large stop-work meeting they replaced Johnson as general secretary with Keenan. The Communist Party invested considerable effort into support of the seamen’s action. Keenan’s success, coinciding with the party congress, brought paeons of praise for ‘one of the most capable agitators and mass leaders’. The delegates elected him to the central committee.10
Within two months the strike was broken and Keenan discredited. The fault was not his alone: Johnson used the courts to cling to office, the shipping companies used the licensing provisions to man their ships with volunteers, the miners voted overwhelmingly against their union executive’s recommendation to support the seamen, and the ACTU refused assistance. Nevertheless, Keenan’s decision in February to urge a return to work played into the hands of the former officials, who now became firebrands to discredit him for selling the union out. ‘The seamen are really somewhat different to other workers’, J. B. Miles lamented, ‘they are most unruly’. Other leading party members added that they were ‘anarchistically inclined and very left’; one claimed their main argument was arsenic—‘they wanted to poison the volunteers’. But Keenan carried the blame for failing to understand the importance of collective action, and was further accused of dissolute laxity in portside pubs and brothels. In mid-1936 the political bureau decided to look elsewhere for leadership of the seamen and removed him from the central committee.11
The strategy of communists in the other major maritime union, the Waterside Workers’ Federation, offers an instructive contrast. Here too the ravages of the Depression and the legacy of the government’s licensing provisions had created deep divisions in the workforce: union members had to accept second or even third preference at the daily pick-ups behind members of the scab unions formed during the strike of 1928–29. Under these circumstances the conservative union leadership resisted all calls for precipitate strike action. Jim Healy offered a new approach. Healy, the president of the Mackay branch of the union who only joined the party in 1934, hailed from Manchester in England and had arrived in Queensland a decade earlier. He was a large, slow-talking pipe-smoker with a shrewd grasp of the limits of sectional militancy. In a series of articles in the Workers’ Weekly under the heading ‘What Is Wrong with the Waterside Workers’ Federation’ and directed at party members and sympathisers in the industry, Healy argued that unity of the workforce was the key to improvement. In 1937 he transferred to Sydney and at an interstate conference of the union later that year proposed a national campaign to win back some of the conditions lost over the past decade. A subsequent ballot installed him as general secretary.12
Healy immediately began rebuilding the federation. He established a union newspaper, along the same lines as those of the miners’ union and the ARU, to publicise union issues. He toured the branches to persuade militants that they must accept the former strike-breakers into their ranks in order to present a common front to the employer, no easy matter in close, portside communities where memories were long and the hatred of scabs was intense. One of the Port Melbourne party wharfies recalls Healy’s compelling argument:
You’ve been hitting ‘em on the head, you’ve been chasing them, you’ve been shooting at ‘em. You’ve thrown them over bridges. You’ve done everything possible to get rid of ‘em but they’re still here! Now the only way we can get rid of them is to absorb them into the Federation.
Healy was quite prepared to resort to industrial action—the campaign against trade with Japan saw branches of the federation repeatedly tie up ships during 1937 and 1938—but he was wary of engaging in such action without clear, immediate and attainable objectives. He glossed the party’s standard condemnation of industrial arbitration with acknowledgement of its utility: ‘We can expect little or nothing from the Arbitration Court … On the other hand, what little it is possible to gain from such a Court can only be gained by workers organised in industrial strength.’ He eschewed the general strike and usually retreated in the face of threats to invoke the Transport Workers’ Act in order to keep his union’s strength intact.13
Such pragmatism, willingness to learn from mistakes and preparedness to withdraw when necessary characterised communist activity in other industries. It was apparent in the mixed fortunes of the miners. During 1935 Orr and Nelson opened a campaign against mechanisation. They blamed the spread of coal-cutting machinery for increased accidents, wage reductions and loss of employment, and announced the union would prevent any ‘further introduction of mechanical appliances’. But when the lodge members of those pits most directly affected by mechanisation refused to implement the union ban, the leaders beat a hasty retreat. Instead, they made the increased productivity of the industry the basis for a general log of claims that brought the new award of 1937; and while they backed these demands with stoppages of selected pits, they insisted that such lightning strikes were ‘not a continuation of the anti-mechanisation campaign’.14
Similarly, the members’ rejection of their call at the beginning of 1936 for a general strike in support of the seamen inhibited Orr and Nelson from repeating such acts of solidarity. Communists had long since abandoned calls for general strikes, and henceforth they were reluctant even to embark on sympathy strikes. Indeed, as they consolidated their influence within trade unions, they turned away from workshop committees and other such mechanisms to coordinate action across organisational divisions that the Minority Movement had promoted during the Third Period. The change of communist strategy has been criticised as a shift to sectional militancy, but this is to lose sight of the coordinating role of the party itself. The party encouraged worker solidarity, and actively promoted union amalgamations; but its efforts to develop industrial campaigns always centred on the official peak bodies, the state trades hall councils and the ACTU.15
The party central committee recognised in 1936 after the Miners’ Federation refused to support the seamen that ‘The decision of the miners represents a set-back which will require much intense work’. Union secretary Orr was inclined to blame other comrades for such setbacks. He was especially critical of party members in the Newcastle district for neglecting to take up union campaigns in the lodges, while they in turn criticised his own failure to consult. The district organiser complained that ‘Comrade Orr is inclined to be neurotic owing to overwork and nerve trouble, and he is prone to bite your head off’. The fact that the union office was in Sydney and that Orr boarded in pubs while working there did not help. But the politbureau backed the union secretary, and agreed with him that the setbacks were the result of the ‘inadequate reaction of the Communist Party in localities’. As for the grumblings of his failure to consult, ‘leaders in the field must see when overburdened central leaders need protection from carping criticism’. Only in 1939, when the strain on this gifted, driven man, who had given so much to the Communist Party as well as to his union, became apparent in alcoholic binges, did the party leaders intervene. At their insistence he undertook to get into the field more often.16
The tension between communist union officials and local activists became more pronounced with the party’s successes, especially when officials imposed their own strategic pragmatism on more headstrong union members. In 1936 militants in two small Victorian coalmines defied Orr’s instructions and stopped work in pursuit of their claims. Orr blamed party members in nearby Wonthaggi for the action, which he said had flooded the pits with scabs. Charlie Nelson went down there to assist the striking unionists to retrieve their jobs. Those at the Sunbeam mine at Korumburra did so by occupying the mine in a dramatic operation portrayed in the film Strikebound, while the Wonthaggi miners marched on the other mine and defied armed guards to persuade the non-unionists to cease work. Even then, Orr was critical of the Victorians’ audacity. ‘I was concerned at the time that it might have been a boomerang against us, but they succeeded in holding the pit for 15 hours’, he said—in fact the Sunbeam miners had barricaded themselves underground for more than two days.17 When communists schooled in the iron discipline of the party’s democratic centralism came to union office, they had to adjust to the very different forms of democracy that obtained among a diverse membership. They extolled mass activity in the expectation that it would follow their lead. They legitimated their leadership in rank-and-file support on the assumption that they could channel the instinctive impulses of workers into purposeful action.
Not all party unionists subscribed to industrial pragmatism. Thornton, of the Ironworkers, frequently championed traditional forms of militancy. The golden rule of any strike, he told the Eleventh Congress in 1935, was to ‘knock the first scab over’. He continued on subsequent occasions to lament the moderation of front communism and the party’s eschewal of class conflict. ‘Where are our agitators in the Communist Party who can really stir up the people?’, he asked a plenum of the central committee in 1937. Two years later he compared the gradualism of the ARU and the Miners’ Federation with the combativeness of his own FIA. Miles rebuked him for his intemperance, but he was not alone in his misgivings about the reliance on industrial tribunals for piecemeal and painfully slow improvements. The ARU had to wait three years for settlement of claims it submitted in 1937. Having secured its first round of wage increases in 1937, the Miners’ Federation’s second round log of claims lodged in the same year dragged through the industrial tribunal until 1940. Orr himself appreciated the dampening effects of such displacement of energy. He observed at the central committee in 1937 that ‘There is perhaps less mass agitational work … than at the time when our party membership was only ten per cent of its present size’.18
The consolidation of communist industrial activity posed even more sharply the perennial question of how to reconcile revolution and reform. The party held that capitalism could not satisfy workers’ needs, yet the essential function of the unions was to make it do so. Leninism sought to resolve the contradiction by grounding trade union campaigns for better wages and conditions in a proper appreciation of the class struggle, and communists were therefore expected to guard against what were termed ‘economist’ illusions by drawing out the essential political lessons of every industrial campaign. The Communist International saw economism (or its left variant, anarchosyndicalism) as a persistent tendency of the Australian party, where practically ‘the whole leadership is composed of trade union functionaries’, who ‘have not time for studying the political questions’ and were more concerned to lead industrial campaigns than build the party. The Australian leaders themselves warned periodically against the same tendency. Orr told delegates to the Eleventh Congress that ‘We must remember that we are not in the struggle merely for the sake of the struggle, to win an extra sixpence, etc., but that we are in there as revolutionaries’. J. B. Miles observed in 1938 that ‘We are better trade unionists and our trade union numbers are greater, but too many who could do so without risk do not appear as Communists, while others overlook or submerge political questions under purely trade union problems’. Jack Blake went even further at the Twelfth Congress in the same year when he warned against the conventional demarcation of the political and industrial wings of the labour movement. The trade unions, he insisted, had keen interest in the struggle for peace and progress, so ‘to term such a movement an industrial movement could only tend to narrow its scope and hinder its full development’.19
This larger purpose was served by a renewed emphasis on research, education and publicity. All of the major communist unions employed research officers to assist in the preparation of claims, and in union publications these officers habitually linked the conditions of the industry to the larger economic and political circumstances. All of them encouraged working-class education, none more assiduously than the ARU which appointed Gordon Crane, a Communist Party member, as national education organiser responsible for a wide-ranging syllabus. All established union newspapers were conducted by talented journalists, and these traversed both national and international issues. A single issue of The Railroad, the publication of the New South Wales branch of the ARU, saw the union general secretary editorialising on the united front, reviewing a compilation of Lenin’s articles on Britain, scripting a dramatic presentation of the life of Lenin and presenting a chant for the release of Thälmann.20
Yet the politicisation of trade union activity brought its own problems. During the latter part of the 1930s the party’s opponents alleged repeatedly that the party was imposing its own extraneous concerns on union members. Whether it be the denunciation of fascist belligerence in a union newspaper, union affiliation to a communist fraternal organisation or industrial action in support of an international campaign, the communist union officials were accused of putting political considerations ahead of the members’ interests. Party members usually tried to answer such charges by showing the necessary connection between the industrial and the political. The Silksworth dispute, in which the maritime unions took up the master’s victimisation of the Chinese crew of a vessel that happened to be bound for Japan, provides a good example of the efficacy of such linkages: ‘Never had he met better unionists’, said the Newcastle Trades Hall secretary of the Chinese seamen.21 In its cultivation of the united and popular fronts, however, the party was inclined to minimise its distinctive purpose. Thus the resolution adopted in 1937, ‘The Stronger the Communist Party the Stronger the Labour Movement’, said that:
… every Communist is to be looked upon as the best trade unionist, eliminating every remnant of appearing as an opposition force in the unions, and declaring publicly (and this should be the content of our everyday work) that the Communist Party does not interfere in the internal affairs of the unions.22
This was a long way removed from the recent rigours of Class Against Class, and it was a disingenuous description of an organisation that still organised its industrial members in union fractions under party direction. The interests of Australian workers did not stop at the factory gate, nor was their concern restricted to the size of their pay packet. Communists leavened the union movement with energy, resolution and breadth of purpose. But the web of loyalties that joined communist and non-communist workers remained fragile.
In opening the campaign for the united front, the party had expected that its growing industrial influence would yield a commensurate political influence. The structure of the Australian Labor Party, to which affiliated unions contributed substantial resources and in which they were well represented, seemed to offer the opportunity to push out from the workplace. Communist trade unionists were not themselves eligible for membership of the Labor Party, but they were able to throw their union delegations at Labor conferences behind moves to break down the ALP’s isolationist foreign policy, to strengthen the left in local Labor branches, to contest right-wing control of state and federal executives, and to exert pressure on the parliamentary Labor Party for a united front.
The expectation came closest to realisation in New South Wales, where the left continued its campaign to unseat Jack Lang and his ‘inner group’ who ran the state Labor Party. The critics were known as the ‘industrialists’ because of their base in the Labor Council, but Lang’s autocratic conduct and continuing feud with the federal ALP enabled them to win over a growing number of local Labor branches. Their challenge culminated at an unofficial state conference in early 1938 with the election of an alternative state ALP executive under the parliamentary leadership of Bob Heffron, who had been one of the Trades Hall Reds associated with the Communist Party in the early 1920s, before he drifted away and entered parliament in 1930. His defection now from Lang’s inner group showed which way the wind was blowing. The industrialists had recently won control of the Labor Daily and radio station 2KY. Lloyd Ross’s younger brother Edgar moved from editing the Miners’ Federation’s journal, the Common Cause, to join other party journalists on the staff of the Labor Daily. Under the management of Charlie Nelson, the paper was renamed the Daily News in 1938 and held a circulation of 40 000. In August 1939 the federal executive of the ALP convened a state unity conference, which in turn confirmed the victory of Heffron and the industrialists.23
Jack Hughes and Wally Evans, respectively the vice-president and secretary of what was now recognised as the New South Wales branch of the Labor Party, would both subsequently declare their membership of the Communist Party. Hughes, an official of the Clerks’ Union, had in fact joined the party at the end of 1935 along with Bill Gollan, a leading member of the Teachers’ Federation, and other ALP radicals. On the instructions of the party leaders, they kept their allegiance private so that they could continue to work in the Labor Party along with Lloyd Ross. It was not an arrangement likely to convince non-communists of the bona fides of the united front, and these undeclared communists chafed at their inability to participate in party life, but needs must go where the devil drives.24
New South Wales was a special case, the gains achieved there made possible by the split in Labor ranks. Elsewhere, the growth of communist influence in unions affiliated to the ALP produced a strong resistance. As party secretary, J. B. Miles renewed the appeal for a united front with a letter to the federal secretary of the Labor Party in November 1936 applying for affiliation. He received no response until April 1937 when the federal executive rejected the application. In a resolution formulated by that resolute anti-communist, Arthur Calwell, it declared the Communist Party an ‘anti-Labor political organisation’ in direct conflict with the policy, platform and constitution of the ALP.25
This fresh rebuff presented the party with a quandary. In pursuit of the United Front it had cultivated closer relations with members of the Labor Party. Communist sympathisers had been directed to join and work for unity within local Labor branches. Even before the Eleventh Congress in 1935 suggested that party members also might be sent into the Labor Party, the politbureau conducted regular discussions with a communist fraction of the New South Wales ALP state executive. In 1936 the party’s rural organiser claimed that whole branches in regional towns of that state had been formed by communists, while Jack Blake estimated that twenty of the 60 local Labor branches in Victoria were under party control.26 But as soon as these units of the united front showed their colours, as they did in Victoria by affiliation to the MAWF, they risked expulsion. Initially the communist leaders expected them to run the risk. During 1936 the party repeatedly warned against sacrificing principles to expediency and reminded sympathisers as well as followers that the achievement of a united front would require exposure of the anti-communist Labor leaders. Communists therefore regarded the fierce battles within Labor ranks as a healthy sign. That attitude changed, however, as the urgency of international considerations was driven home. The threat of fascism and the danger of war demanded the defeat of the Lyons government, which in turn required the election of Labor to office. In a discussion with the Anglo–American Bureau of the ECCI in Moscow in mid-1937, Richard Dixon stated that a split in the Labor Party had at all costs to be averted. At the Twelfth Party Congress in the following year he said that even though the Labor leadership still clung to isolationism, the task of the party was to provide ‘constructive criticism’.27
The implications of this position were played out during the federal elections of 1937. As early as 1936 the party put forward the slogan ‘Down with the Lyons Government’. Following the pointed advice of the Comintern official who wrote as S. Mason in the Communist Review, the politbureau decided early in 1937 to throw its weight behind Labor. ‘Comrades, the role of reformism is no longer the same’, J. B. Miles told the central committee in March 1937. ‘Reformism is no longer the chief social prop of capitalism.’ The urgent need for working-class unity in defence of democracy made a Labor government imperative. The party therefore resolved to withdraw all its Senate candidates and run just two members for the House of Representatives in the elections that were due in October, so that it could assist Labor to office. Miles, who had been brought reluctantly to this position himself, characteristically presented it as a vindication of the leading role of the party: since the masses were moving left, the party could only remain ahead of them if it dropped its opposition to the Labor Party. Explaining the decision to readers of the Workers’ Weekly, Jack Blake was more prescient: ‘there may be some comrades who will develop the idea that this line worked out by the central committee is a right-wing deviation’.28
There were such comrades, especially in north Queensland where the Communist Party had grown rapidly to challenge, if not surpass, the number of Labor Party adherents. The party section in Cairns objected strongly to the decision not to run a communist candidate for the federal seat of Kennedy. In Townsville, where Fred Paterson was to contest the seat of Herbert, the section criticised the party’s general support for Labor and recorded its ‘resentment at the way the change was forced on the membership’. Other northern sections also rejected national policy. The comrades in the tropics had a reputation for independence, so a recent decision to reduce them to a sub-district under the control of Brisbane did not improve their temper. Even after Jack Henry, who had recently taken up duties there as district secretary, forced compliance at an aggregate meeting in Townsville, resentment lingered. Pat Clancy, the northern sub-district organiser, resigned in protest, while Paterson continued to state his opposition through the party’s north Queensland paper, the Guardian, which he edited. Miles explained to the central committee that the north Queenslanders were ‘very radical’ but suffered from an ‘anarchical tendency’. To raise their level of political understanding he did permit two of them to publish temperate criticism of the party’s election policy in the Communist Review, then sternly corrected their misconceptions and reminded all party members that ‘the discussion should be confined to consideration of how to apply the line’. A further contribution from Mount Mulligan, which observed that ‘Comrade Miles’ reputation for annihilating comrades who criticise the line of the Party is well known’, did not appear. Of all the critics, Paterson attracted Miles’s greatest ire. He was a lawyer, not a worker, and a liquidator. ‘The trouble with Comrade Paterson is that dialectics is a completely closed book to him and always has been.’ The politbureau withdrew his endorsement, and only restored it when Jack Henry guaranteed Paterson’s loyalty.29
The other communist candidate was Ralph Gibson, who stood in the Victorian seat of Flinders, which included Wonthaggi. Party members in that state readily accepted the instruction to work for a Labor victory, indeed Len Donald and Jack Blake had great difficulty in persuading the local comrades to contest state elections held just three weeks before the federal ones. Donald claimed that there were more than a dozen branches of the Labor Party in Victoria ready to declare support for communist affiliation, but since that would have weakened Labor on the eve of the election the communists were instead working for Labor candidates in ‘unofficial joint and parallel campaigns’. Such was their enthusiasm for the united front that they came under criticism for opportunist tailism. The leaders in Sydney judged that their election poster with the slogan ‘RIP UAP, Vote Labor’ gave no indication of the role of the Communist Party. Worse, in giving the impression that ‘we are just foisting ourselves upon the Labor Party’, it weakened rather than strengthened the united front, since it would lend credence to conservative allegations of the ‘Red Bogey’ and force the Labor Party to attack the Communist Party. All these predictions were fulfilled. Lyons did allege that the Labor Party was infiltrated by communists; Curtin did insist that Labor had no truck with them. To prove it, he cited the last federal election when communists had opposed his own party and, he claimed, attracted sufficient votes to defeat several Labor candidates. Communists responded with their own psephological analysis to buttress the claim that their preferences actually assisted Labor.30
The two communist federal candidatures were premised on the judgement that they offered a good prospect of success. Paterson came closest with 12 523 votes, about half those won by the successful Labor candidate. His 21.2 per cent of the total poll compared well with the 24.5 per cent he had attracted in a by-election for the smaller state seat of Bowen in 1936, which increased in the 1938 state election to 29.3 per cent. Gibson’s tally of 4630 in Flinders, 9 per cent of the poll and 120 fewer votes than he had attracted in 1934, was a major disappointment. Along with the poor showing in the state elections when two communist candidates received 5700 votes, the Victorian result vindicated local critics, led by Thornton, who rose up in condemnation of Len Donald as district secretary and forced his transfer to Sydney. The party also put up four candidates for the New South Wales elections in March 1938, who attracted just over 10 000 votes. ‘The Communist Party is a Labor Party—a Labor Party of a new type’, Miles told the voters of Bulli in a radio broadcast. Eight communists stood for the Queensland parliament in the following month, and none came close to Paterson’s level of support. The Western Australians contested the state seat of Fremantle in 1939 and mustered a derisory 308 votes. Well might the ECCI conclude that ‘our comrades are recognised as good trade unionists, but politically our comrades are not recognised’.31
They had greater success in local government, especially in localities where they enjoyed close relations with Laborites. In Number 2 District the party negotiated a united front to contest the Lake Macquarie shire council elections in 1939 and campaigned vigorously among the miners, the unemployed and retired workers, small farmers and even the surf clubs. A majority of united front candidates were returned, the sole communist candidate only narrowly defeated. In the same year Fred Paterson was elected to the Townsville city council and Jim Henderson to the Wangaratta shire council in north Queensland, which encompassed the coalmining town of Collinsville.32
The Communist Party of Australia embraced the pro-Labor policy in 1937 because it believed Labor could win. Enormously encouraged by the electoral successes of the popular front in France and Spain, the Australians thought they could both assist and benefit from a Labor victory. They overlooked the crucial difference between those examples of the electoral popular front, where the danger of fascism was such that communist, socialist and radical parties entered into formal agreements to repulse it, and their own unrequited overtures to a parochial Labor Party whose leaders saw nothing to gain and much to lose from any such alliance. The non-Australian members of the Anglo–American Bureau were more sceptical, and rebuked the Australians for mechanical application of a tactic that called for wholehearted enthusiasm—thus the ECCI criticised Miles and Sharkey for cutting short the party’s discussion of its election policy.33
Beyond such defects in implementation, however, there remained the stubborn fact that the Labor leaders did not want communist assistance. The Australian communists thus found that their subordinate position circumscribed any capacity to influence the Labor Party. Having renounced open antagonism, they were left as unwanted advisers, forever holding back their censure in order to sustain a non-existent partnership. As the Communist Party grew, this problem became more pronounced. In the immediate aftermath of its defeat in the 1937 federal election, Sharkey observed that the Labor Party was ‘drifting onto the rocks’, so that communists would have to help rebuild it. The party criticised John Curtin, the federal leader, for his cautious moderation but forbore from actions that might have endangered his position. It denounced the Labor premiers who spurned all offers of cooperation, but always stopped short of action that might split Labor or damage its popular standing: ‘It is not the Labor Party as such we are fighting, but some of the reactionary right-wingers’. Communists had opened the campaign for a united front in the expectation that they could exert their considerable influence in the labour movement to win the Labor Party. As Bill Orr put it, by ‘pulling strings in the trade unions and labour leagues’ they would make the ALP amenable to their objects. Instead, by the end of the decade they found themselves accommodating their own policies to Labor’s internal dynamics. Even as they pressed Labor to abandon its isolationist foreign policy, the communist leaders raised a moistened finger to test the wind lest they damage the illusory united front.34
A popular front called for a popular party. After 1935 the members of the central committee vied with each other to tell cautionary tales of the misplaced rigour that marooned Australian communism. One related a meeting of a party unit at Lithgow. It opened at 7.15 p.m. with the secretary reading through the correspondence. Then the five members present related their various activities: this one had to prepare the factory bulletin, another was responsible for finance, yet another had to arrange for sale of literature. Then there were social activities to organise, trade union business to consider, study classes that needed evaluation, the agenda of the next meeting of the Trades and Labor Council to be discussed, and so on. ‘We learned that most of the comrades were in difficulties with their wives and had domestic troubles, and were also in trouble because they were unable to carry out all their party tasks.’ The meeting finished close to midnight with much of the work still to be transacted. Another member of the central committee observed that the majority of recruits passed quickly out of the party. As soon as they signed the application form they were immediately weighed down with duties: ‘We are apt to have arbitrary demands for activity and dues payments, and so-called deadheads are wiped off wholesale’.35
After 1935 the party began to recruit a higher proportion of white-collar workers, public servants, professionals and intellectuals; the unemployed members were returning to industry and no longer able to sustain the same level of activity. Lance Sharkey recognised the altered circumstances in his appeal to ‘Join the Communist Party’:
You will not be asked to expose yourself to victimisation, nor have to spend all your time on Party work. The Party is ‘growing up’ and the old harmful ‘leftism’, as it will, in inner-Party life of the past, has been largely abolished.36
In his reply to the discussion before the Twelfth Party Congress, J. B. Miles noted ‘remnants of an old sectarian defect, the idea that so-and-so is not developed, not a Communist, not up to a standard set by our stick-in-the-mud members’. He accepted that the new members had neither the time nor the resolution of the older diehards, and in any case the need to popularise the party called for a different style of work. There was no longer the same imminent threat of illegality or fear of victimisation, so that party members could now work openly as part of a ‘people’s movement’.
This lifting of the clandestine veil was a necessary condition of the popular front, heralded by Miles’s own emergence from secrecy in 1935 and subsequent national tour. The party had previously drawn comfort from its semi-legal status, and counted the efforts to repress it as evidence of its importance, but that notoriety no longer suited the changed aspirations. It therefore commenced legal proceedings in May 1935 to compel the government to lift the ban on transmission of its publications. The action was joined by the Commonwealth, and occupied Fred Paterson and Clive Evatt for more than a year, but eventually it became clear to the attorney-general, Robert Menzies, that it was likely to succeed and he arranged for a settlement. The postal ban was lifted, and although federal and state agencies continued to hamper the party’s activities, the danger of illegality receded.37
Party officials took advantage of the changed circumstances to lighten the load. Ralph Gibson, who was notorious for his own breakneck tempo, reported in 1939 that ‘We do not do disciplinary driving as we used to do in Victoria and do not crack the whip as we used, but in place of that we have to produce amongst the Party members a real desire to be active’. As exhortation replaced peremptory instruction, party work was turned into a form of voluntary endeavour invested with transformative qualities. Thus Jean Devanny celebrated the ‘unconquerable optimism, indefatigable zeal, flaming enthusiasm’ of the stalwarts who stood at the factory gates or knocked on doors to peddle the party’s newspapers; this was a constant, time-consuming task, and the frequent rebuffs had a debilitating effect on morale but Devanny assured the canvassers that ‘every paper sold is a block of granite in the building of a Soviet Australia’. Similarly, a contributor to the pre-congress discussion in 1938 scattered capital letters as he anticipated the superhuman intelligence that would guide its work: ‘Soaring like an Eagle, Keen-eyed and Far-visioned, High above the Sparrow-like Policy of Isolation and Sectarianism of the Leaders of the ALP … Congress will trace from its mountain eyrie of Marxism-Leninism the path that Labor must travel in order to reach its goal’. If ordinary members became accustomed to such overblown rhetoric, they were more likely to translate it into demotic idiom: thus the celebrated valediction of a stalwart from the inner suburbs of Melbourne, ‘See you this arvo at the demo; up the revo!’38
One aspect of party life did not diminish. Early in 1935 the central committee announced a year of intensive study of Marxism-Leninism to remedy the indifference to theory that it saw as an ingrained national weakness. Party education was systematised around core texts, Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, Marx’s Wage-Labour and Capital and Value, Price and Profit, Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? and State and Revolution, Stalin’s codification of Lenin and other exegeses. All recruits were expected to undergo training in classes that were conducted by senior members under the supervision of two new epigones, E. W. (Ernie) Campbell and L. H. (Harry) Gould. They also prepared a new training manual that blended dogmatism with patient endeavour. Its emphasis was on organisation rather than theory, and its exposition of the principles of activity elaborated the understanding needed for patient construction of the popular front. ‘A mistake, a bad statement, a failure to carry out work, even hostility to the Party, does not necessarily mean that the person is ‘‘no good’’.’ On the other hand, ‘The Party is not weakened, but strengthened, by removing members who are incorrigible’. The object was practical dogma, ‘revolutionary zeal combined with American efficiency’.39
Campbell, a Sydney recruit trained at the Lenin School, laid out communist doctrine as a set of syllogisms, finished and complete, which allowed no uncertainty and were able to encompass every eventuality. Gould was an Irishman who had spent time in the United States and began his party career with a flurry of heroically proletarian doggerel verse. He became the director of the party school, long foreshadowed and finally realised in a twelve-week intensive course undertaken in 1938 by twenty hand-picked students, who included Doug Gillies from South Australia, Ted Bacon from Queensland and Max Thomas, an unemployed activist turned printer. It was held in a block of flats at Kingsford, and attended by Sharkey and Dixon.40
The limitations of this party training are readily apparent. It replicated Stalin’s schematic rendition of Lenin, who had himself rigidified the frequently speculative formulations of Marx and Engels into the language of a military manual. From time to time Australian communists talked of the need to speak more intelligibly. ‘We are not a sect’, insisted one in 1937, and should take care to use ‘the language of the masses’. Harry Gould urged members to keep in mind the fresh faces in the audience in order to repeat the same leaden exhortation to ‘speak in the language of the masses’.41 In 1939 a party member took the creation of the party’s national school as an opportune moment to call for a more substantial, ‘painstaking overhaul of our language’. He argued that since communists were the inheritors and guardians of ‘real human tradition’, they should make ‘purity of language’ a matter of honour. As examples of the hackneyed phrases and lurid jargon that disfigured communist usage, he cited ‘granite foundations’, ‘cohorts of reaction’, ‘the vile conduct of the Trotskyists’, ‘capitalist pimps’ and ‘fascist hordes’ as well as the fulsome terms of endearment for party leaders. A number of members agreed with him. James Rawling did so as a linguistic conservative who objected to the errors of style and taste, the exaggeration, bathos and grammatical faults in party newspapers; others were more concerned with the habitual parroting of ‘Communese’, which acted as a barrier between communists and non-communists. Steve Purdy, for the central committee, defended the ‘Leninist-Stalinist’ vocabulary and also put the case for neologism: ‘Advanced politics cannot be adequately voiced by conservative language’. Harry Gould suggested the critics suffered from a ‘bourgeois intellectualism’ and reminded them that ‘In the beginning was the deed’.42
This was a rare instance of open debate of an issue that simmered in party circles. Communist rhetoric codified an understanding of politics that enclosed its practitioners within the certainties of language. It fired their enthusiasm and validated their heroic zeal, but it also separated them from non-initiates. Communist education systematised this understanding into a comprehensive philosophy. It provided intellectual justification for the arcane terminology but taxed the capacity of many. The inner mysteries of dialectical materialism, which was meant to animate an otherwise inert mechanism of base and superstructure, simply baffled many of those to whom it was expounded; witness the Newcastle maritime worker who proudly announced that he had been reading all about this ‘diabolical materialism’. Yet the party’s theoretical practice should not be dismissed too glibly. With all of its oversimplifications, it provided communists with a means of understanding their politics, a concentrated capacity for strategic analysis of the alternatives with which they were presented, and an ability to situate themselves in a larger historical perspective. More than this, it was their own proletarian knowledge. That provenance greatly enhanced communism’s appeal since it presented a systematic alternative to the received knowledge and culture, an alternative that banished all traces of intellectual inferiority. You did not have to master such a system of ideas to feel its power.43
The growth of the party nationally was slow but appreciable. In early 1936 there were 3000 members on the books, a slight advance on the position at the time of the Eleventh Congress; by the middle of the year the number had fallen to 2700. Then came a significant lift, to 4124 at the beginning of 1937, and that level was maintained over the next two years. The proportion of unemployed members declined, those in unions increased. There were more women members, perhaps 15 per cent of the total by the end of 1937, and the number of middle-class recruits was apparent in the increase of street units at the expense of factory units. A new spurt of growth meant that the central committee issued 4421 cards in mid-1939.44
The pattern of growth is clarified by communist fortunes at the state level. In 1937 the party accepted the state boundaries as the basis of its own districts, reunited Broken Hill and the Riverina with Numbers 1 and 2 Districts in New South Wales, and joined Numbers 3 and 9 Districts in Queensland. New South Wales remained the party’s home base, closely supervised by the Sydney-based politbureau, free from the deviations and factional tendencies that beset other states. It held its numerical supremacy with 1850 members in 1939.
Victoria, on the other hand, was a recurrent object of criticism. It had grown during the mid-1930s, to 683 members in 1935 and 950 in 1937, but never managed to throw off a reputation for unreliability. In 1935 Richard Dixon observed that ‘the Melbourne comrades draw up beautiful plans of work’ but never realised them and instead abused the central committee for their own failures. Part of the difficulty was the collision of powerful personalities. Two Moscow-trained comrades, Len Donald and Jack Blake, had been sent down from New South Wales to provide direction. Donald, the loyal larrikin, was a first-class organiser and a terrible public speaker; Jack Blake was a powerful dialectician but utterly bereft of small talk. Together, they made a good team. However, they clashed repeatedly with the turbulent Ernie Thornton, who enjoyed considerable latitude as a leading union official and was permitted to carry the Victorian banner in repeated outbursts at central committee meetings in Sydney. In 1937 Blake left for the Soviet Union to represent the Australian party. In his absence, Thornton used the failure of the recent parliamentary campaigns to mount a coup. Abandoned by Miles, Donald confessed to bureaucracy, passivity, personal degeneracy and resistance to criticism, and was transferred to Sydney. He continued to serve the party faithfully but Blake thought he was never the same. He drank more, lost his perkiness, ‘he didn’t have the heart’.45
Thornton had little time for the niceties of the popular front. An instinctive militant who had left school at thirteen, he resented intellectuals: when Brian Fitzpatrick once told him he split his infinitives, he retorted he did not know what an infinitive was and indicated he thought that the blame lay with the grammar. Relations with Ralph Gibson, who replaced Donald as Victorian district secretary, remained strained and it was perhaps as well that Thornton shifted to Sydney in 1939 to base himself at the FIA national office. Gibson might be taken as an extreme example of the Melbourne radical tradition—earnest, improving, closely engaged in civic life, intellectually serious and sometimes censorious of the hedonism up north—that party leaders in Sydney found quite alien. ‘Once and for all’, Miles castigated him before the central committee as he reported on local ructions, ‘we want to get rid of this situation that keeps on developing in Victoria’. Party membership there had slipped by this time to 860.46
Meanwhile, as noted earlier, Queensland rehabilitated itself from laggard to pacesetter. Where there had been 616 members in 1935, 361 north of the tropic and and 255 south of it, by 1939 there were 1220. With the turn to the fronts the improvement of the party’s fortunes was dramatic: a rump of unemployed activists in Brisbane at loggerheads with the labour movement became a large, influential body of activists in unions that chafed against an unresponsive state Labor government. In early 1936 the district secretary confessed that ‘twelve months ago if we had gone near Trades Hall we would have been assaulted’; by 1939 his successor could advise the politbureau that the party controlled the Brisbane Trades and Labor Council.47
It was further north that communism came closest to constituting a genuine mass movement. With their own regional newspaper and extensive involvement in local life, these communists provided impetus and direction for regional aspirations. They were both class warriors who fought absentee owners, union officers down south and Brisbane bureaucrats, and civic leaders of isolated occupational communities which had to create their own amenities. Thus they combined oppositional and affirmative roles. In the coalmining town of Collinsville, for example, the union officials, the cooperative society, the volunteer ambulance and even the local Caledonian society turned out to welcome J. B. Miles during his 1936 national tour. Collinsville sustained four Communist Party branches and just one ALP branch; 48 per cent of its voters supported Paterson for state parliament in 1938, while in neighbouring Scottsville the figure was 75 per cent.48 The sugar and meatworkers, the railwaymen and wharfies in the larger coastal towns, all sustained a combative militancy. The Spanish Civil War and other anti-fascist campaigns had special appeal for Italian and Spanish immigrant families in the canefields. The party also assisted local Aboriginal initiatives and in 1936 even supported a four-month strike of Torres Strait Islanders working in the pearling industry. When Ralph Gibson went on a national tour on his return from the International Peace Congress in 1937, he remarked how the movement ‘suddenly leaps into life when you get north of Townsville’.49
The red north sent a succession of able organisers down south, first Jack Henry in 1937, then Les Sullivan, Jim Slater and Albert Robinson; and no wonder, since they brought a distinctive elan that was captured in Jack Henry’s boast to a Brisbane cadre, ‘They’re the real mass leaders’—he had what struck her as the ‘queer idea that if you were from south of the Tropic of Capricorn you weren’t a mass leader’. These men, and they were emphatic in their masculinity, carried with them a reputation for anarchism, a common party term of disapproval mixed with grudging admiration, which in this case signified a devil-may-care impatience for the constraints of officialdom. In Brisbane Ted Bacon thought the impetuosity arose from the fact that so many of the Queensland party members were seasonal workers—shearers, canecutters, mill-hands, meatworkers, wharfies—in a frontier setting free of the constraints of more settled regions. They certainly enjoyed a reputation for irreverence. ‘We were larrikins’, boasted the Toowoomban Claud Jones, ‘bush larrikins’ with ‘a militant don’t-give-a-bugger attitude. If you were out of a job, you didn’t get all upset and get ulcers, you’d go get a quid or thieve a quid or go to a two-up game or something else.’ He liked to relate the occasion when J. B. Miles told him, ‘The trouble with you, Jones, you’re too much of a larrikin’, and he replied, ‘A few more fucking larrikins and less theoreticians, and we might get somewhere’.50
Western Australia also made ground. The 130 members in 1935 increased to 350 by 1939. Many of the recruits had spent their formative years in the Depression, sometimes on the dole and sometimes eking a living from casual work. As they found their way back to employment, these Depression communists began to challenge the entrenched moderation of the state Labor government and the compliant union officials who were its chief clients. Other party recruits were university students or young urban professionals, impatient with the provincial complacency and drawn to the International Peace Campaign, the Workers’ Art Club, the Left Book Club and the Modern Women’s Club established by Katharine Susannah Prichard. The substantial southern European communities living on the goldfields or working market-gardens around Perth contributed further recruits. The long distance from the eastern states also gave party members a relative autonomy. Only Wilfred Mountjoy, the district secretary, had substantial experience of national affairs, based on his apprenticeship at the national headquarters in Sydney in the early 1930s. Katharine Susannah Prichard, a revered but somewhat remote figure, as the customary non-contraction of her name suggests, alone possessed the prestige to challenge his authority, and she did so in missives to the central committee that warned of his drinking and unreliability. The politbureau left him in charge.51
South Australia, by contrast, languished. Party membership had declined from 53 in 1935, of whom perhaps 40 were financial, to 31 active members in 1936 and to a mere 20 in 1937. Some improvement began with the arrival from Melbourne of Alan and Joan Finger in 1936. Both university graduates, they had greatest success in building up the peace movement and Left Book Club with a number of middle-class recruits, including Elliot Johnston, a lawyer, and two sons of E. S. Kiek, the principal of the Congregational theological college. By 1939 there were 105 members of the party. The few union members were prominent in a local labour movement remarkably free of the divisions that characterised the eastern states. Tom Garland, who represented the Amalgamated Engineering Union, served a term as president on the Trades and Labour Council before becoming state secretary of the Gas Employees’ Union in 1937, and Joe Flanagan, a tramway worker, was also president of the TLC in 1938. But they were too few to establish more than a personal following.52
Tasmania and the Northern Territory remained backwaters, despite spasmodic attempts to revive them. In 1935, when there were 21 members on the books in Tasmania, the party Secretariat attempted to explain that the Third Period was over and the islanders should stop abusing the workers; in particular, Sydney implored, ‘avoid using unnecessary adjectives’ in your leaflets. Number 8 District duly considered the advice and reported that the reason for its minute size was ‘the crooks and sabotagers’ who disrupted its work. Esmonde Higgins provided Sydney with a first-hand report when he went to Tasmania in 1936 as a WEA tutor. He found just ten active members, who seemed incapable of any collective activity beyond denigration. The 36 members recorded in 1939 were far less significant than sympathetic union officials such as Bill Morrow, the state secretary of the ARU.53
Party finances grew with membership, but remained precarious. Dues were set at sixpence per week for employed members and threepence for unemployed members. These membership fees were low, less than the cost of admission to the cinema, football or cricket, but most could afford no more. Some of the income from dues was retained for local or district use, some remitted to national headquarters. In 1939 the party’s national budget provided for expenditure of £2725; of this £750 was for sustenance payments to party workers, £600 for propaganda, £350 to subsidise the Workers’ Weekly, £250 for repayment of loans, and lesser sums for rent, office expenses and fares. Income from dues was expected to amount to £1680, and the balance would be made up of special levies and donations. But all of the states were behind with their dues payments, an endemic condition. At the local level we get a glimpse of the exigencies from a financial statement of the Sydney eastern suburbs section in 1936. There were 290 members who paid £8/3/-per week in dues (indicating that some were contributing more than sixpence). The income was split in four unequal parts, among the unit, section, district and central committee, which left the section £2 for its own needs. It expended £10 per week on rent, office expenses, and the support of four party workers (each of whom had to get by on a meagre weekly allowance of 32s 6d). The deficit was made up by collections, socials, raffles and donations.54
The burden of such special fund-raising was extraordinary. In 1936 the party raised £5000 in addition to ordinary dues. The north Queenslanders independently put together £1500 to establish their newspaper in that year while the Victorians issued £2150 in party bonds to purchase a new press for theirs. Some of the party’s schemes were distinctly dodgy. One section organiser in Sydney ran a book on horse and dog races, and his own rake-off only came to light when he bought a house. Party cadres could hardly expect to become homeowners: Lance Sharkey’s level of sustenance payment as party president, raised to £4/10/-a week in 1939 and still below the basic wage, made him the highest paid functionary of all. Communists in trade union posts usually enjoyed a better salary but paid a proportion of it directly to the party. The party had to borrow to acquire its Sydney headquarters, and borrow again to finance the purchase of new printing equipment. Guido Baracchi was the principal shareholder of the holding company for the party press, though when the Workers’ Weekly moved in 1939 from its George Street premises to take up the offices at Rawson Place newly vacated by the Miners’ Federation, it benefited from the union’s generous terms.55
It is difficult to establish the level of foreign subsidy. The records of the Communist International and the files of Australian intelligence disclose various payments to Australia from the time of its formation, but neither source is sufficiently systematic to allow the calculation of reliable aggregate figures. During the 1920s it was possible to make financial transfers from Moscow to Sydney, via London, but this channel closed in the late 1920s. Australian delegates to the Soviet Union requested and sometimes received subventions. Higgins is reported as bringing back £1000 from the Sixth Congress of the Communist International in 1928, and Sharkey returned from Moscow with £720 in a money belt in 1930, which combined two six-month instalments of a monthly subsidy of £60 for the Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat and £60 for the work of the Australian party. Bill Orr received £300 for the Minority Movement on the same visit and a further £260 by courier in 1931. Jack Ryan had previously obtained £170 for the PPTU, Jean Devanny received a cheque from London for nearly £200 for Workers’ International Relief in 1931, and Ted Tripp claims that he was handed nearly £1000 for International Class War Prisoners’ Aid by a representative of the Communist International in London at the same time.56 These payments were intended to sustain the work of front organisations at a time when the party itself was indigent, and frequently they were diverted to defray the party’s most pressing debts—not the least of J. B. Miles’s service to the Australian party was his capacity to manage its finances so that it lived within its means. Irregular remittances continued during the 1930s, sent by individual draft from London to a cooperative third party here, but Australian intelligence was convinced that they amounted to no more than £500 per annum.57 The celebrated Moscow Gold, which might have contributed a substantial proportion of the Australian party’s income when it was on its uppers, was a negligible factor now that it flourished.
A number of the organisational changes were introduced in the late 1930s to simplify the party’s cumbrous structure and thereby increase its appeal. At the 1938 Congress the old district committees became state committees, and the units became branches; the intermediary level of the section had been abolished in 1937. The change from district to state was merely nominal, but that from unit to branch aggregated small groups into larger ones, mostly based on residential location but also allowing for common-interest groupings.
There was keen debate about the name of the paper when the party decided to abandon the title ‘Workers’ Weekly’, and further argument about whether it should identify itself as a communist publication. This first issue of the ‘Tribune’ describes itself as ‘the people’s paper’. The cartoon in the top left-hand corner was taken from the British ‘Daily Worker’. (Source: ‘Tribune’, 1 September 1939)
Even the terminological changes marked a turn by the party towards familiar forms, as did the renaming of the party’s newspapers. In June 1939 the Victorian Workers’ Voice became the Guardian. As early as March 1938, a new title was canvassed for the Workers’ Weekly, ostensibly on the grounds that it was no longer a weekly publication. Eventually the alternatives narrowed to Tribune or Clarion, both appropriately radical yet unspecific. Consultation established members’ clear preference for the former; there was then further discussion whether the renamed paper should identify itself as a publication of the Communist Party. Eventually the politbureau decided ‘there was no principle in the matter’ and the secretariat should make a decision once the paper’s layout was determined. The Tribune first appeared on 1 September 1939, the bannerhead shorn of its hammer and sickle, and identifying itself simply as ‘The People’s Paper’.58
The party also glossed its rules on democratic centralism. The rules had previously favoured the centralism at the expense of the democracy, prescribing a ‘unified, firm discipline’ and enjoining ‘rapid and precise execution’ of directives. The changes introduced at the Eleventh Congress emphasised the democratic basis of such authority, provided for ‘free and positive discussion’ in reaching decisions, and set down the accountability of all officials to representative assemblies. This was scarcely an accurate description of how the Australian party actually worked. Its national congress, nominally the supreme body, met only three times during the 1930s. Constituted by delegates elected by state conferences, its composition and agenda were in fact closely prescribed from above. The central committee it elected was also determined in advance, and it too became a passive, acquiescent assembly as its numbers grew: that elected at the Twelfth Congress in 1938 had 29 members. Real authority rested with the politbureau, which also expanded to seven permanent and three candidate members by 1938. All of these were full-time party or trade union functionaries, and the seven permanent members—Miles, Sharkey, Dixon, Wright, Orr, Docker and Simpson—had all occupied leading positions since the beginning of the decade. Dixon was assistant secretary to Miles, and Sharkey was styled party president. In a party attempting to re-invent itself in a more popular idiom, the signs of ossification were clear.
The pattern was replicated at each level of the party’s work through the full-time party workers. They supervised, invigilated and drove every aspect of communist activity. The number of these cadres was never precisely calculated, but cannot have been less than 50; even the stripling Western Australian District supported four of them. Their frequency in a party so relatively small astonished the ECCI, which sensed that they both sustained and enclosed the Australian party. Sometimes Moscow called for a reduction of numbers and sometimes for an improvement in their quality: in 1937 it stipulated that every cadre should enjoy the confidence of ‘the common people’.59 The nature of cadres’ duties imposed a heavy strain that a single example must illustrate. Bob Cram was born in Newcastle in 1906 and completed an apprenticeship as a carpenter before moving to Sydney. He joined the party in 1926, became a full-time worker and was elected to the central committee. In 1934 he was sent back to Newcastle as party organiser and guided its revival there. But by 1939 he was in serious trouble. With a sick wife, six children to support and mounting debts, his party work suffered. Cram interpreted the politbureau’s strictures criticising him for not making greater progress as an attempt to isolate him, and alleged that Ted Docker, who was sent up from Sydney to remedy the weaknesses, was spying on him. He therefore resigned from his post and returned to work as a builder. This was perhaps an unusual example—the party accepted the resignation and lent Cram the working capital for his new venture—but it illustrates the confluence of personal and political difficulties.60
The authority of the cadre rested on something more than the party rules. Daphne Gollan captures one aspect of it in her observation that ‘these men lived isolated lives of unremitting work, much of it routine, for which they were paid a pittance’. She also notes the consequent danger of corruption in the sense of power that ‘flowed from the deference with which we listened to them’. Members such as Gollan appreciated the extraordinary sacrifices the party functionary made, and respected such self-denial of worldly comforts, yet these same admirable qualities also exposed the cadre to the temptations of hubris. Austerity could isolate the cadre, dedication could confine him within a habitual round of activity, doctrine could become a substitute for creative endeavour. The party functionaries certainly cultivated an air of infallibility. Just as the party line was never wrong—rather, objective conditions had changed—so the expositors of the line embodied a collective infallibility. As so often, Guido Baracchi caught this reification of a constantly shifting yet always binding warranty when he implored that ‘we find some other expression for the wretched term ‘‘Party line’’, which suggests something to be toed, or something to be negotiated as a tight-rope, or something to be sold as a commodity’. The line had to be toed, negotiated and sold, but behind it lay the force of experience, the habit of authority.61
The cult of the leader transformed the party secretary, J.B. Miles, from a quiet dogmatist into an inspiring proletarian patriarch. Jean Devanny hailed a ‘political genius’ with a ‘deep tenderness underlying’ his hard exterior. Counihan’s caricature sharpened Miles’ features to suggest a sympathetic perspicacity. (Source: ‘Communist Review’, January 1939)
The deference to which Gollan refers was cultivated with augmented assiduity in the later 1930s. From the time of J. B. Miles’s national tour it became customary to greet him with special salutations; a banner inscribed with his name was flying at the Sydney Domain when he returned there in August 1936. Profiles of Miles and Sharkey presented them as both ordinary and extraordinary. Miles was portrayed as a slight man with a Scottish burr, a ‘hard-clamped aggressive mouth’ softened by the ‘twinkle deep back in the eyes’ (and this was how Noel Counihan’s caricature portrayed him to readers of the party press). He smoked and drank in moderation, was not a teetotaller but objected to ‘drinking to the detriment of the Party’. He worked a twelve-hour day but relaxed with popular cinema, where he preferred Joe Brown to Clark Gable and Popeye to Hollywood he-men, as well as light fiction. ‘It’s a big jump from Lenin to Edgar Wallace but I do it, easily.’ Jean Devanny went further in an encomium written for the women of Bulli when Miles stood for that state electorate in 1938:
I have known many men in politics and literature and art, but judged from every point of view, J. B. Miles stands out among the biggest, in artistry, in principle. To hear him analysing a situation, stripping every unessential from it, laying bare its core, is an experience a Communist can never forget.
The hyperbole, and the choice of expression, is startling. Elsewhere Devanny recorded the coldness and anger with which her secret lover treated her, his puritanism and contempt for culture. Yet here she hailed him as a ‘political genius’, the pride and champion of all women, with a ‘deep tenderness underlying that often biting tongue’: all who went to him in their trials felt his ‘grandeur of character’.62
Something similar occurred in the profile of Sharkey. He was presented as a son of the soil, steeped in communist theory, yet always a man of the people. The list of his virtues was directed so unerringly to his limitations as to suggest parody. It was noted that ‘like all the leaders of our Party, Comrade Sharkey was temperate in his habits’; in fact his binges in Moscow were notorious. He was a brilliant mass agitator; actually his oratory was leaden. He had an instinctive genius; yet when he took up Lenin’s favourite pastime of chess, lesser party members had to be careful to lose. Perhaps these pastiches passed over the heads of these victims; in any event, their status in party assemblies was inviolable. Thornton, the most audacious of the notables, was brought before the politbureau for displaying insufficient respect at the party congress in 1938. He explained that he had made jokes at Sharkey’s expense because of the party president’s ‘seriousness’, which exacerbated his own ‘lackadaisical attitude’. After appropriate self-criticism he was warned not to repeat the offence.63
