Endnotes

The sources on which this study is based are identified in the endnotes. Most are listed in Communism: A Resource Bibliography, compiled by Beverley Symons with the assistance of Andrew Wells and Stuart Macintyre, and published by the National Library of Australia in 1994. This bibliography provides a comprehensive guide to the manuscripts sources, communist and other contemporary publications, as well as memoirs, oral histories, secondary works, research dissertations and other materials. Although I have drawn on some additional works, principally outside the ambit of Beverley Symons’s compilation or produced after she completed her guide, they are too few to warrant separate listing.

 

The abbreviations used in the endnotes for organisations, publishers, libraries and archives are listed in the table of abbreviations.

The Australian records of the Communist International are indicated by the abbreviation CI. These records are held in Moscow by the Russian Centre for the Preservation and Study of Documents of Recent History. A microfilm copy of the records for Australia was deposited in the Mitchell Library by Barbara and Geoffrey Curthoys. The records use three numerical citations: the first is the number of the collection (the fond in Russian), the second gives the number of the series (opis) and the third the number of the file or folder (delo). The Mitchell Library has divided the microfilm into ten reels, classified as FM4 10415-24.

Where no repository is indicated for documentary sources, correspondence, taped interviews or transcripts, the item is in my possession.

Introduction

1 History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1939); L. L. Sharkey, An Outline History of the Australian Communist Party (Sydney: Marx School, 1944); E. F. Hill, Communism and Australia: Reflections and Reminiscences (Fitzroy, Vic: CPA (ML), 1989); W. J. Brown, The Communist Movement and Australia: An Historical Outline (Haymarket, NSW: Australian Labour Movement History Publications, 1986); Workers News Editorial Board, Betrayal: A History of the Communist Party of Australia (Marrickville, NSW: Allen Books, n.d.); Tom O’Lincoln, Into the Mainstream: The Decline of Australian Communism (Westgate, NSW: Stained Wattle Press, 1985).

2 Stan Moran, Reminiscences of a Rebel (Chippendale, NSW: APCOL, 1979); Edgar Ross, Of Storm and Struggle: Pages from Labour History (Sydney: APCOL, 1982); John Sendy, Comrades Come Rally! Recollections of an Australian Communist (Melbourne: Nelson, 1978); Bertha Walker, Solidarity Forever! (Melbourne: National Press, 1972).

3 Beverley Symons, Communism in Australia: A Resource Bibliography (Canberra; NLA, 1994).

4 Alastair Davidson, The Communist Party of Australia: A Short History (Stanford, California: Hoover Institution Press, 1969).

5 Oriel Gray, Exit Left: Memoirs of a Scarlet Woman (Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin Books, 1985); Dorothy Hewett, Wild Card: An Autobiography 1923–1958 (Ringwood, Vic.: McPhee Gribble/Penguin Books, 1990); Daphne Gollan, ‘The Memoirs of “Cleopatra Sweatfigure” ‘, in Elizabeth Windschuttle (ed.), Women, Class and History: Feminist Perspectives on Australia 1788–1978 (Melbourne: Fontana Books, 1980), pp. 313–29; Bernice Morris, Between the Lines (Collingwood, Vic: Sybylla Press, 1988); Amirah Inglis, The Hammer & Sickle and the Washing Up (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1995); Joyce Stevens (ed.), Taking the Revolution Home: Work Among Women in the Communist Party of Australia 1920–1945 (Fitzroy, Vic: Sybylla Press, 1987); Audrey Johnson, Bread and Roses: A Personal History of Three Militant Women and their Friends 1902–1988 (Sutherland, NSW: Left Book Club, 1990); Bernard Smith, The Boy Adeodatus: The Portrait of a Lucky Young Bastard (Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin Books, 1985); Roger Milliss, Serpent’s Tooth: An Autobiographical Novel (Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin Books, 1984); Dorothy Hewett, Chapel Perilous (Sydney: Currency Press, 1972).

6 These and the sources subsequently discussed are listed in Symons, Communism in Australia: A Resource Bibliography.

Chapter One Foundation

1 Guido Baracchi’s account of the cockroaches is in his memoir ‘The Twenties’, Baracchi papers (NLA MS 5241, folder 44).

2 Roneoed circular dated 22 October 1920, in Socialist Labor Party records (NLA MS 2576/4) and Hancock papers (ML MS 772/11).

3 That of Baracchi is held by Ann Turner; that of Norm Jeffery by John Sendy.

4 Involvement in the formation of the CPA is attributed to a host of individuals who make up the Investigation Branch’s Summary of Communism 1922–23 (AA, A6122, item 111).

5 J. Normington-Rawling, The Communist Party of Australia to 1930, Work in Progress Seminar, ANU, 4 May 1962; Brodney, Recollections, Brodney papers (SLV MS 10882/3).

6 International Socialist, 4 January 1919.

7 Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), ch. 2.

8 International Socialist, l0 January 1920.

9 See Bede Nairn’s entry for Garden in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 8, pp. 614–17. The best treatment of the Trades Hall Reds is by Miriam Dixson, Reformists and Revolutionists: An Interpretation of the Relations between the Socialists and the Mass Labor Organisations in New South Wales, 1919–27, PhD thesis, ANU, 1965, chs 1–3.

10 To the I.W.W. A Special Message from the Communist International (Melbourne: Proletarian Publishing Association, 1920); the foreword is dated 15 September. See generally Ian Turner, Sydney’s Burning (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1967); Verity Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism: The Industrial Workers of the World in Australia (Melbourne: CUP, 1995).

11 Joy Damousi, Socialist Women in Australia, c. 1880–1918, PhD thesis, ANU, 1987, ch. 7; Peter Morrison, The Communist Party of Australia and the Radical-Socialist Tradition, 1920–1939, PhD thesis, University of Adelaide, 1975, App. 3; Verna Coleman, Adela Pankhurst: The Wayward Suffragette 1885–1961 (Melbourne: MUP, 1996), chs 11–12; Adela Pankhurst Walsh to Tom Walsh, n.d., Walsh papers (NLA MS 2123/61).

12 He is recalled in Bob Brodney’s Recollections, Brodney papers (SLV MS 10882/3); the expulsion is recorded in the minutes of the VSP, 8 November, 2 December 1920 (NLA MS 564/1/6).

13 Ann Turner, Independent Working Class Education in Australia, 1917–29, MEd thesis, University of Melbourne, 1981, ch. 2 and her entry on Earsman in ADB, vol. 8, pp. 403–4.

14 ADB, vol. 11, pp. 641–2; Investigation Branch, Summary of Communism, p. 103 sets out the circumstances of the allegation.

15 The criticism was by Ray Everitt in International Socialist, 26 July 1919. Earsman’s letters to Baracchi of 12 and 19 August 1919 describing these manoeuvres were copied by the censor (AA MP 95, item 169/41/90).

16 W. P. Tuitene, interviewed by J. N. Rawling, Rawling papers (ANU N57/299) and Simonoff’s report to the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, November 1921; I am grateful to Greg Pemberton for providing me with a copy.

17 Eric Fried, ‘The First Consul: Peter Simonoff and the Formation of the Australian Communist Party’, in John McNair and Thomas Poole (eds), Russia and the Fifth Continent: Aspects of Russian–Australian Relations (St Lucia, Queensland: UQP, 1992), pp. 110–25.

18 Communist, 23 September 1921. Many years later Earsman presented a similar account in a letter to John Playford, 9 October 1958, Rawling papers (ANU N57/234).

19 Investigation Branch, The Secret Seven, Summary of Communism, pp. 132–3; see Fiona Capp, Writers Defiled (Ringwood, Vic.: McPhee Gribble, 1993), pp. 15–26.

20 International Socialist, 2 October 1920.

21 Minutes of conference called by Central Executive Committee of the ASP, 30 October 1920, Hancock papers (ML MS 772/9). Reardon’s version is repeated by J. N. Rawling in his unpublished history, Communism Comes to Australia, vol. 1, p. 72, Rawling papers (ANU N57/1).

22 International Socialist, 6 November 1920.

23 Communist Party of Australia, Manifesto to the Workers of Australia (Sydney: CPA, 1920).

24 Drusilla Modjeska and Marjorie Pizer (eds), The Poems of Lesbia Harford (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1985), p. 81 and introduction by Modjeska.

25 Communist, 19 August 1921.

26 International Socialist, 4 January 1919.

27 Australian Communist, 24 December 1920.

28 William Lane, The Workingman’s Paradise: An Australian Labour Novel (Brisbane: Dunlop, 1892).

29 W. J. Thomas, Venereal Disease: A Social Problem (Sydney: self-published, 1922).

Chapter 2 What was to be done?

1 ‘Labour Government in Australia’, in Lenin on Britain (London: Martin Lawrence, 1934), pp. 91–3. The provenance of the article, first published in Pravda on 13 June 1913, and its subsequent redactions are discussed by Rick Kuhn, ‘Lenin on the ALP: The Career of 600 Words’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 35, no. 1 (1989), pp. 28–49.

2 Jurgen Tampke (ed.), Wunderbar Country: Germans Look at Australia, 1850–1914 (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1982); Crauford Goodwin, Economic Enquiry in Australia (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1964), ch. 11.

3 Tom Poole and Eric Fried, ‘Artem, A Bolshevik in Brisbane’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 31, no. 2 (1985), pp. 243–54.

4 ‘Australia, the Lucky Country’, translated by Poole and Fried in ‘Artem, A Bolshevik in Brisbane’.

5 ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1951), vol. 1, p. 35.

6 ibid., pp. 44, 49.

7 ibid., p. 44.

8 ibid., p. 35.

9 Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth and Dissolution. Volume 2. The Golden Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), ch. 1.

10 V. I. Lenin, Selected Works in Three Volumes (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), vol. 1, pp. 143, 151.

11 ‘One Step Forward, Two Steps Back’ (1904), in ibid., p. 431.

12 A. J. Polan, Lenin and the End of Politics (London: Methuen, 1984).

13 ‘Conditions of Admission to the Communist International’, in Jane Degras (ed.), The Communist International 1919–1943: Documents, vol. 1 (London: OUP, 1956), pp. 166–72.

14 Fernando Claudin, The Communist Movement from Comintern to Cominform. Part One: The Crisis of the Communist International, trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), p. 104.

15 Vere Gordon Childe, How Labour Governs, first published 1923 (Melbourne: MUP, 1964); Humphrey McQueen, A New Brittania: An Argument Concerning the Social Origins of Australian Radicalism and Nationalism (Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin Books, 1970); Donald Horne, The Lucky Country: Australia in the Sixties (Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin Books, 1964).

16 ‘Freedom on the Wallaby’ (May 1891), in Henry Lawson, Poems Colin Roderick (ed.) (Sydney: John Ferguson, 1979), pp. 50–1.

17 Stuart Macintyre, The Labour Experiment (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1989).

18 G. C. Hewitt, A History of the Victorian Socialist Party 1906–32, MA thesis, La Trobe University, 1974.

19 Verity Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism: The Industrial Workers of the World in Australia (Melbourne: CUP, 1995).

20 Ian Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics: The Labour Movement in Eastern Australia 1900–1921 (Canberra: ANUP, 1965), chs 7–8.

21 Roger Coates, ‘Lenin’s Impact on Australia’, Australian Left Review, no. 24 (April–May 1970), pp. 26–32.

22 Quoted in Edgar Ross, The Russian Revolution: Its Impact on Australia (Sydney: SPA, 1972), p. 15.

23 Patrick O’Farrell, ‘The Russian Revolution and the Labour Movements of Australia and New Zealand’, International Review of Social History, vol. 8 (1963), pp. 177–97; Frank Farrell, International Socialism and Australian Labour: The Left in Australia 1910–1939 (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1981), chs 1–2.

24 Quoted by L. F. Crisp, The Australian Federal Labor Party 1901–1951 (London: Longmans Green, 1955), p. 280.

25 R. S. Ross, Revolution in Russia and Australia (Melbourne: Ross’s Book Service, 1920), pp. 6, 7, 30, 46–7.

Chapter 3 Recognition

1 Correspondence with the Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and Newtown branches during December 1920, and with an Adelaide branch on 27 January 1921, is in CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 4).

2 International Communist, 1 January 1921.

3 Minutes of recalled conferences, 6, 13 November 1920, and executive meetings 23, 29 November, 6, 11 December 1920, Hancock papers (ML MS 772/9).

4 Minutes of recalled conference, 11 December 1920, supplemented by further account reported in International Communist, 1 January 1921.

5 Reardon to Earsman, 14 December 1920, reprinted in Australian Communist, 24 December 1920, and International Communist, 1 January 1921.

6 Australian Communist, 24 December 1921.

7 T. Glynn, ‘Communists and Industrial Unionism’, Australian Communist, 31 December 1920; W. P. Earsman, ‘The Communist Party and Industrial Unionism’, Australian Communist, 14 January 1921; J. Garden, ‘The Pure and Simple “Communist”: An Elementary Lesson in Communist Tactics’, Australian Communist, 22 April 1921.

8 Donald Grant and Douglas Sinclair, open letter to Tom Glynn, International Communist, 19 March 1921; letter from Charlie Reeves in ibid., 26 March 1921; articles by Brodney and Everitt in ibid., 9, 16, 30 April 1921. See Verity Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism: The Industrial Workers of the World in Australia (Melbourne: CUP, 1995), ch. 15.

9 Sussex Street executive minutes, 22 January 1921, Hancock papers (ML MS 772/9), and Liverpool Street executive minutes in International Communist, 5 February 1921; letter from Thomas to friends in Brisbane, n.d. [early 1921], Comintern records (CI 495/94/17) and Christian Jollie Smith to Earsman, 8 July 1921, Investigation Branch report (AA, A981, COM 10); Communist, 11 November 1921.

10 Judd to Earsman, 16 March 1921 (NLA MS 2576/6); conference minutes, 25 March 1921, Hancock papers (ML MS 772/9).

11 Executive minutes, 22 January, 26 February 1921, Hancock papers.

12 Investigation Branch, Case of Paul Freeman (AA, A3932); notes by J. R. Rawling, Rawling papers (ANU N57/239); Bertha Walker, Solidarity Forever! (Melbourne: National Press, 1972), pp. 178–81; ‘Two Class War Fighters Remembered’, Workers’ Weekly, 23 July 1926. The first of Freeman’s articles was ‘Moscow Calls to Australia’s Trade Unions’, International Communist, 12 March 1921. His deportation is discussed by Ray Evans, ‘Radical Departures: Paul Freeman and Political Deportation from Australia Following World War One’, Labour History, no. 57 (November 1989), pp. 16–26.

13 Everitt and Reardon to Central Executive Committee of the Communist International, 22 March 1921, Comintern records (CI 495/94/6).

14 Sussex Street executive minutes, 1 April 1921, and correspondence, 5, 8 April 1921, Hancock papers (ML MS 772/9), supplemented by statements by Garden and Baker, Communist, 24 June 1921; International Communist, 7, 28 May 1921. See also the copies of the correspondence sent with an explanation by Reardon to the Communist International, 15 April 1921, Comintern records (CI 495/94/6).

15 Communist, 6, 13 May 1921; International Communist, 7, 14, 21 May 1921; Sydney Morning Herald, 7, 9 May 1921; there is a verbatim report of the May Day meeting in Investigation Branch’s Summaries of Communism 1920–7 (AA A8911, item 154) and also that of Norm Jeffery, CPA records (ML MS 5021, box 83). See also Andrew Moore, The Secret Army and the Premier: Conservative Paramilitary Organisations in New South Wales 1930–32 (Kensington: NSWUP, 1989), pp. 39–41.

16 For others see Raymond Evans, The Red Flag Riots: A Study of Intolerance (St Lucia, Qld: UQP, 1988), and Bobbie Oliver, War and Peace in Western Australia: The Social and Political Impact of the Great War 1914–1926 (Nedlands, WA: UWAP, 1995).

17 Earsman diary, 8, 10, 16, 17, 23, 25 April, 9, 15, 22 May 1921, Earsman papers, University of Edinburgh Library Special Collections; I am grateful to Ann Turner for providing me with a copy.

18 Earsman diary, 26 May–2 June 1921; entries for Quinton and Rees in Investigation Branch, Summary of Communism, 1921–23 (AA, A6122, item 111); and Lamb’s progress through Britain was reported to the Australian government on 20 July 1921, Hughes papers (NLA MS 1538/21/143–6). The misfortunes of the Adelaide delegates are described in the diary of Ted Moyle (in possession of Jim Moss), and by John Playford in History of the Left Wing of the South Australian Labor Movement, 1908–36, BA Hons thesis, University of Adelaide, 1958, pp. 42–3.

19 Earsman diary, 12–22 June and his report to the executive of the Sussex Street party, Hancock papers (ML MS 772/9), reprinted in Australian Left Review, no. 27 (October–November 1970), pp. 2–19; Earsman to Praesidium of the Third International, 16 June 1921, Comintern records (CI 495/94/6); Earsman to Simonoff, 11 August 1921, Earsman papers.

20 Earsman diary, 23 June–23 July, and his report, which differs in important respects from the diary. The progress of the other delegates is recorded in Investigation Branch, Summary of Communism 1922–23, pp. 66–8, 91, 99 (AA A 6122, item 11).

21 Earsman diary, 25, 28, 30 July 1921.

22 Earsman’s report to the Small Bureau on behalf of the Australian delegates, dated 5 August, Comintern records (CI 495/94/6); diary, 1–5 August 1921; letter to Sussex Street executive, 2 August 1921, Hancock papers (ML MS 772/9). See the Investigation Branch report on Smith (AA A6122/40, 111), and Geoff Bullen, ‘William Smith—Bohemian Socialist’, Recorder, no. 56 (February 1972), pp. 10–12.

23 Additional confidential report to CEC of CPA, n.d. CPA records (ML MS 5021, box 82).

24 See especially Wilkinson’s articles in Inprecorr, vol. 1, nos 15, 17 (9, 16 December 1921), and the report of the Anglo–American Bureau, 6 April 1922, Comintern records (CI 495/72/2). There is an account of Wilkinson’s departure from and return to Adelaide in the diary of Ted Moyle.

25 Earsman to Executive, Comintern, 12 August 1921, and to Rakosi, secretary of the Comintern, 4 September 1921, Comintern records (CI 495/94/6); diary, 6 August–4 December 1921, and Investigation Branch, Summary of Communism 1921–23, pp. 26–36. The arrest of Lamb and the confiscation of his passport are the subject of an Investigation Branch report (AA A981, COM 10), which also contains a copy of Earsman’s letter to the Comintern Secretariat giving the new address. A report to the prime minister on 9 March 1922 also reveals the Investigation Branch had access to his diary; Hughes papers (NLA MS 1538/21/196–200).

26 Two delegates of the Seamen’s Union submitted a report to their union but they arrived after the Congresses; Walsh papers (NLA MS 2123/61).

27 Earsman’s diary, 15 June 1921.

28 ibid., 5 August 1921.

29 ‘Who Are the Communists? The Result of an Investigation’, supplement to International Communist, 24 September 1921. For Miles’s loyalties, see his letter to A. T. Brodney, 21 May 1921, Rawling papers (ANU N57/270), and also Communist, 30 September 1921. He described his wartime inactivity in ‘This is J. B. Miles’, Communist Review, vol. 4, no. 2 (February 1937), pp. 6–10.

30 C. W. Baker to D. Rosen, 7 November 1921, Brodney papers (SLV MS 10882/5/9).

31 Communist, 19 August 1921.

32 Earsman’s articles began appearing in the Communist, 26 August 1921; the result of the Small Bureau hearing was reported by the acting secretary of Sussex Street, 20 October 1921, Hancock papers (ML MS 772/9), and his letter from London, 7 September 1921, is attached to the acting secretary’s report. The Investigation Branch’s Summary of Communism 1921–23 quotes from both correspondence and diary.

33 Freeman’s articles began appearing in International Communist from 6 June; his death was reported on 6 August 1921; Lamb to Reardon, n.d., Hancock papers (ML MS 772/9) and Investigation Branch report on Lamb (AA A6122/40, 111).

34 Baker to Reardon, n.d.; Reardon to C. E. France, 14 October, Reardon to Baker, 21 December 1921, Earsman to Reardon, 27 December 1921, Hancock papers (ML MS 772/9); minutes of the Annual Conference, 27–29 December 1921, Hancock papers (ibid.).

35 Earsman to Francis, 13 December 1921, and Francis, Notes, n.d., Brodney papers (SLV MS 10882/5/10); May Brodney [Francis] to Baracchi, Baracchi papers (NLA MS 5241); minutes of the Annual Conference, 22–29 December 1921.

36 Minutes of the Unity Conference, 18–19 February 1922, Hancock papers (ML MS 772/9); C. W. Baker to Executive Committee of the Communist International, February 1922, Comintern records (CI 495/94/6).

37 Everitt to Executive Committee of the Communist International, 7 February 1922, Comintern records (ibid.), drawing on letter from C. E. France to Reardon, 4 January 1922, Hancock papers (ML MS 772/9). The controversy over Smith continued in Communist, 20 January 1922 and International Communist, 29 January 1922.

38 Kuusinen to Garden and Reardon, 10 April 1922, Comintern records (CI 495/94/11), and minutes of the Anglo–American Bureau, 15 June 1922, Comintern records (CI 495/72/2).

39 Reardon to Brodney, 17 October 1921, Brodney to Reardon, 7 February 1922, and to Alf Rees, 25 April 1922, Brodney papers (SLV MS 10882/1/1).

40 Minutes of the Sydney branch of the ASP, 16 February–20 June (ML MS 2389/1); Rees to Brodney, 16 April, 3 May 1922, E. L. J. to Brodney, 16 May 1922, Reardon to Brodney, 18 June 1922, Brodney papers (SLV MS 10882/1/1); and Tom Payne, interviewed by Andrew Reeves and Ann Turner, 17 May 1976 (NLA).

41 Minutes of the combined Sydney branch of the CPA, 24 July 1922–24 January 1923, CPA records (ML MS 2389/1); minutes of the Unity Conference, 15–18 July 1922, and minutes of the First Annual Conference of the United CPA, 23–28 December 1922, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 1); statement by executive in Communist, 1 December 1922 and report of the executive to ECCI, 26 January 1923, Comintern records (CI 495/94/19); Investigation Branch, Summary of Communism, pp. 205–17.

42 Minutes of the Anglo–American Bureau, 15 June, 4 July, 8 August 1922, Comintern records (CI 495/94/11 and 72/2); Earsman to Comintern, 22 July, Comintern records (CI 495/94/11); his report to CPA, 10 December 1922, and ECCI to the United Communist Party of Australia, 25 December 1922, Earsman papers.

Chapter 4 Tactics

1 The augmentation of the authority of the Congress and Executive by the Fourth Congress of the Communist International is documented in Jane Degras (ed.), The Communist International 1919–1943: Documents, vol. 1 (London: OUP, 1956), pp. 436–42.

2 Earsman diary, 8–9 May 1921, University of Edinburgh Library Special Collections.

3 See the reports of Earsman, 12 July 1921, Bill Smith, 17 August 1921, and Jim Quinton, 29 September 1921, Comintern records (CI 534/7/1; 495/94/6).

4 Communist, 25 August 1922.

5 Raymond Markey, In Case of Oppression: The Life and Times of the Labor Council of New South Wales (Sydney: Pluto Press, 1994), p. 190.

6 Communist, 11, 18 November 1921, 10, 14 February, 7 April 1922; Direct Action, February 1922, and Glynn to Earsman, 7 March 1922, CPA records (ML).

7 John Playford, History of the Left Wing of the South Australian Labor Movement, 1908–36, BA Hons thesis, University of Adelaide, 1958, ch. 2.

8 Anglo–American Bureau meeting, 6 April 1922, Comintern records (CI 495/72/2); the reservations of Sussex Street are apparent in the editorial in Communist, 8 July 1921, while Garden’s account appeared in the party monthly, Proletarian, August 1921. See generally the Official Report of the All-Australian Trades Union Conference (Melbourne: ALP, 1921); Ian Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics: The Labour Movement in Eastern Australia 1900–1921 (Canberra: ANUP, 1965), ch. 9; and Miriam Dixson, ‘The First Communist ‘‘United Front’’ in Australia’, Labour History, no. 10 (May 1966), pp. 20–31.

9 Theses on Tactics Adopted by the Third Congress of the Communist International (Sydney: CPA, 1921), and ECCI directives on the united front, 18 December 1921, reprinted in Degras (ed.), The Communist International, vol. 1, pp. 307–16; Communist, 24 March, 9 June 1922.

10 Minutes of the Anglo–American Bureau, 8, 10, 11, 24 August 1922, Comintern records (CI 495/72/2); Earsman diary, 7–11 August, 9 November 1922, and report by W. P. Earsman, 13 December 1922, Earsman papers and CPA records (ML MS 5021, box 82); credentials letter, 1 September 1922, Comintern records (CI 491/1/353); and Earsman’s articles in Inprecorr, vol. 2, no. 63 (1 August 1922) and Communist, 1 September 1922.

11 Earsman diary, 10 August, 14 October, 18 November, 5, 20 December 1922, 10, 22 January, 21 February, 4 April, 14 June 1923, 14 August 1924; entry by Ann Turner in ADB, vol. 8, pp. 403–4.

12 Fourth Congress of the Communist International: Abridged Report (London: CPGB, 1923), p. 291; Earsman to Kuusinen, 4 February 1923, and general secretary of CPA to Comintern, ‘Reporter for the Colonies’, 2 November 1923, Comintern records (CI 495/94/17, 19). The minutes of the Second Conference, 23–24 December 1922 give a membership of 128, though this figure omits the former ASP members of the Sydney branch who might have added as many as 75; CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 1).

13 Garden’s speech reported in Inprecorr, vol. 2, no. 116 (22 December 1922), pp. 968–70, and Fourth Congress of the Communist International, pp. 230–2; J. N. Rawling, Communism comes to Australia, p. 118, Rawling papers (ANU N57/1).

14 Tom Payne, interviewed by Andrew Reeves and Ann Turner, 17 May 1976 (NLA).

15 Scotsman, 10 February 1923; Earsman to ECCI, 16 February, 16 March 1923 and diary, 22 February, 22 March 1923; Garden to ECCI, 17 July 1923; Bob Stewart to Communist International, 11 September 1923, Comintern records (CI 495/94/17, 23 and 117); Arthur Hoyle, John Smith (Jock) Garden (1882–1968): A Political Biography (Canberra: self-published, 1984), pp. 47–8, who draws on Lossiemouth testimony. More than a decade later, as a Labor member of the House of Representatives, Garden rebutted conservative accusations of communist irreligion with the claim that he was ‘holding a mission in the north of Scotland’ in 1922, 146 CPD p. 341 (27 March 1935).

16 Earsman, ‘Lenin and Australia’, typescript, n.d., Earsman papers.

17 ibid.

18 Tom Payne, address to Victorian branch of the ASSLH, n.d. Payne’s version is retrospective, hostile and dubious.

19 The letter was published in Communist, 23 February 1923.

20 Minutes of the First Annual Conference of the United CPA, 23–8 December 1922, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 1); the relevant resolutions were published in Communist, 22 December 1922.

21 Workers’ Weekly, 27 July 1923.

22 Workers’ Weekly, 17, 24, 31 August, 7 September 1923.

23 Communist, 10 June 1921, 5, 19 May 1922; Sydney Morning Herald, 4 October 1921, Sydney Sun, 17 May 1922 for the attack by Ley; Annie Allison to Executive Committee of the Young Communist International, 18 March 1923, Comintern records (CI 533/10/1). See ADB, vol. 10, pp. 97–8, for the minister, T. J. Ley, and see generally Ray Sutton, Labour Movement Youth Organisation and Policy in Eastern Australia, c.1918–c.1939, PhD thesis, ANU, 1990, ch. 1.

24 H. L. Denford to R. Stewart, 2 November 1923, Comintern records (CI 495/94/19); and his report as financial secretary to the Fifth Conference of the CPA, 26–8 December 1925, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 1).

25 ‘Capitalist Home Life and Communism’, Australian Communist, 7 January 1921. See Joy Damousi, Women Come Rally: Socialism, Communism and Gender in Australia 1890–1955 (Melbourne: OUP, 1994), chs 5–6.

26 ‘Woman’s Approach to Communism’, Communist, 18 August 1922, and resolution to establish women’s groups in minutes of the First Annual Conference of the United CPA, 23–28 December 1922 CPA records (ML 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 1); see also Hetty Weitzel, ‘Women of the Working Class. Why They Are Not Yet in the Movement’, Workers’ Weekly, 16 November 1923; and Joyce Stevens (ed.), Taking the Revolution Home: Work Among Women in the Communist Party of Australia 1920–1945 (Fitzroy, Vic.: Sybylla Press, 1987), pp. 24–5.

27 Workers’ Weekly, 6 July 1923.

28 Baracchi, ‘The Twenties’, Baracchi papers (NLA MS 5241, folder 44).

29 The complex factional patterns of the New South Wales branch of the Labor Party have been treated at length by D. W. Rawson, The Organisation of the Australian Labor Party 1916–1941, PhD thesis, ANU, 1954, ch. 5; Miriam Dixson, Reformists and Revolutionaries: An Interpretation of the Relations between the Socialists and the Mass Labor Organisations in New South Wales, 1919–27, PhD thesis, ANU, 1965, chs 5–6; Heather Radi and Peter Spearritt (eds), Jack Lang (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1977), chs 3–4; Bede Nairn, The ‘Big Fella’: Jack Lang and the Australian Labor Party 1891–1949 (Melbourne: MUP, 1986), ch. 3; and Jim Hagan and Ken Turner, A History of the Labor Party in New South Wales, 1891–1991 (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1991), part 2. The underlying dynamics are best treated in Miriam Dixson, Greater than Lenin? Lang and Labor 1916–1932 (Melbourne: Melbourne Politics Monograph, 1976).

30 Workers’ Weekly, 13, 20, 27 July, 3 August, 12 October 1923; Daily Telegraph, 3 August 1923; Common Cause, 26 September 1923; W. J. Thomas, A Red Revolution for £500! An Account of the Weaver–Thomas Conspiracy Case (Sydney: Sydney Printing House, n.d. [1923]). See Edgar Ross, A History of the Miners’ Federation of Australia (Sydney: Australasian Coal and Shale Employees’ Federation, 1970), pp. 318–20.

31 The Workers’ Weekly published ‘Twelve Reasons Why the Labor Party Should Allow the Affiliation of the Communist Party’ in a series of articles from 1–29 February 1924.

32 Quoted by Ross McMullin, The Light on the Hill: The Australian Labor Party, 1891–1991 (Melbourne: OUP, 1991), p. 134.

33 Financial secretary’s report to the Fifth Conference of the CPA, 26–8 December 1925, CPA records (ML 502 ADD-ON 936, box 1).

34 ECCI to CPA, 18 August 1924, Comintern records (CI 495/18/229); Garden to Piatnitsky, 26 August 1924; Montefiore to Albert Inkin (a CPGB member in Moscow), 1 February 1925 Comintern records (CI 495/94/26); and Investigation Branch, Summary of Communism 1922–23, pp. 281–2 (AA A6122, item 111). The visit of Rubin Herscovici is the subject of an Intelligence Branch file (AA A8911, item 154).

35 Minutes of the Third Conference of the CPA, 22–27 December 1923, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 1).

36 Minutes of the Melbourne branch, 7 January 1925; Brodney to Garden, 7 January 1925, and Christian Jollie Smith to Brodney, n.d., Brodney papers (SLV MS 10882/5/11).

37 Minutes of the Fourth Conference of the CPA, 26–28 December 1924, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 1); Workers’ Weekly, 19 December 1924, 9 January 1925.

38 Workers’ Weekly, 9 January, 20 February 1925. Alastair Davidson, The Communist Party of Australia: A Short History, (Stanford, California: Hoover Institution Press, 1969) p. 33, and Frank Farrell, International Socialism and Australian Labour: The Left in Australia 1919–1931 (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1981), p. 65, both suggest he was the originator of the decision.

39 Workers’ Weekly, 5 June 1925.

40 Garden’s report to the Fifth Conference of the CPA 26–28 December 1925, CPA records (ML MS 5021, ADD-ON 1936, box 1); see Dixson, ‘Reformists and Revolutionaries’, ch. 6; Davidson, The Communist Party of Australia, ch. 2.

41 Baruch Hirson and Lorraine Vivian, Strike Across the Empire: The Seamen’s Strike of 1925 in Britain, South Africa and Australasia (London: Clio Publications, 1992), esp. ch. 6; Brian Fitzpatrick and Rowan Cahill, The Seamen’s Union of Australia 1872–1972: A History (Sydney: SUA, 1981), ch. 9.

42 Baracchi to Tom Wright, 9 December 1925, Comintern records (CI 495/94/26); letter from Baracchi to Labor Daily, 24 December 1925; ‘The Twenties’, Baracchi papers.

43 Minutes of the Melbourne branch, Brodney papers, as in note 36.

44 Baracchi, interviewed by Miriam Dixson, 11 July 1962; Minutes of the Fifth Conference of the CPA, 26–28 December 1925, organising secretary’s report, as in note 40.

45 E. M. Higgins, ‘Moralisings while on SS Baradine, June–July 1924’, Rawling papers (ANU N57/174); Christian Jollie Smith to Higgins, 9 January, 18 July 1924, Higgins papers (ML MS 740/11); Higgins to Pollitt, September 1924, 25 March 1925, Higgins papers (ML MS 740/4, 7) and Workers’ Weekly, 31 July 1925. The figure of 40 members is attributed to him by Baracchi, interviewed by Miriam Dixson; in an interview with J. N. Rawling, 11 February 1952, Rawling papers (ANU N57/198), Higgins suggested there were 129 members.

46 Seven Poor Men of Sydney, first published 1934 (Sydney: Sirius, 1981), pp. 57–8, 125, 148, 172–4, and Hazel Rowley, Christina Stead: A Biography (Melbourne: William Heinemann, 1993). Baracchi’s self-identification is noted in David Walker, ‘Guido Baracchi’, Overland, no. 97 (December 1984), p. 16.

47 Baracchi, ‘The Twenties’.

Chapter 5 Communism goes bush

1 Report on ‘The Communist Menace in Australia’, Latham papers (NLA MS 1009/27/120–62).

2 Minutes of the CPA Central Executive, 2 March 1926; minister for trade and customs to secretary of the CPA, 22 November 1926, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 4) and report to Comintern, 15 April 1926, Comintern records (CI 495/72/14); Frank Cain, The Origins of Political Surveillance in Australia (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1983), chs 6–7; Sam Ricketson, ‘Liberal Law in a Repressive Age: Communism and the Law 1920–1950’, 3, Monash University Law Review (1976), pp. 101–33; Laurence W. Maher, ‘The Use and Abuse of Sedition’, 14 Sydney Law Review (September 1992), pp. 287–316.

3 David Carment, ‘Sir Littleton Groom and the Deportation Crisis of 1925: A Study of Non-Labor Response to Trade Union Militancy’, Labour History, no. 32 (May 1977), pp. 46–54; Bruce’s speech and the Nationalist handbook are in the Latham papers (NLA MS 1009/26/1, 9).

4 File on the Crimes Act Amendment Bill, which includes Latham’s second reading speech, Latham papers (NLA MS 1009/27/1); Garran to Latham, 9 November 1928 (AA A467, item SF42/64).

5 Despatches from Casey (AA, A467, SF42/64); see Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievesky, KGB: The Inside Story of its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990), pp. 82–4; Francis Beckett, Enemy Within: The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party (London: John Murray, 1995), ch. 2.

6 The extensive literature on these movements is listed in Andrew Moore, The Secret Army: Conservative Paramilitary Organisations in New South Wales 1930–32 (Kensington: NSWUP, 1989).

7 Investigation Branch, Summary of Communism, 26 July 1922 (AA A1979/199), and H. E. Jones, ‘Communism in Australia’, 22 June 1927 (AA A467); see also Fiona Capp, Writers Defiled (Ringwood, Vic.: McPhee Gribble, 1993), pp. 15–26.

8 Higgins to Pollitt, 22 March 1925, Higgins papers (ML MS 740/7); for Barracchi, see chap. 4, note 42 supra.

9 Jock Garden, ‘In Soviet Russia’, Workers’ Weekly, 22 June 1923.

10 Australian Communist, 24 December 1920, and Proletarian, no. 29 (June 1923); Howie reported by Baracchi, ‘The Twenties’, Baracchi papers (NLA MS 5241, folder 44).

11 Baker, ‘Building a Communist Party’, Communist, 29 July 1921.

12 Baracchi, ‘The Twenties’.

13 For the first of these incidents see Raymond Evans, The Red Flag Riots: A Study of Intolerance (St Lucia, Qld UQP, 1988); D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, first published 1923 (London: Ace Books, 1961), p. 307; the pamphlet Under Which Flag? (Sydney: Nationalist Federation, 1928) is discussed by Andrew Lee, Nothing to Offer But Fear? Non-Labor Electioneering in Australia, 1914–54, PhD thesis, ANU, 1997, ch. 4.

14 Frank Sheridan to A. T. Brodney, 20 November 1921, Brodney papers (SLV MS 10882/5).

15 See for example, the defence of the trial of the socialist revolutionaries in Communist, 7 November 1922, and of religious leaders, 6 April 1923.

16 This was the proposition advanced by Carl Baker and opposed by J. B. King in August 1922; see Communist, 11 August 1922.

17 Communist, 15 July 1921; the editorial was by Carl Baker.

18 Autobiographical notes, 1920, in Higgins papers (ML MS 740/4, item 19).

19 Rajani to Salme Dutt, n.d. [February 1924], Dutt papers, CPGB archives, Manchester, UK; I owe this quotation to Kevin Morgan; Higgins, ‘Moralisings’, June–July 1924, Rawling papers (ANU N57/174).

20 Higgins, ‘Australia the Superior’, Communist Review, no. 2 (February 1925), pp. 12–13, quoted by Rick Kuhn who takes Higgins’s phrase as the title of his study, Paradise on the Instalment Plan: The Economic Thought of the Australian Labour Movement between the Depression and the Long Boom, PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 1985, p. 15.

21 Workers’ Weekly, 8 January 1926.

22 Seven Poor Men of Sydney, first published 1934 (Sydney: Sirius, 1981), p. 174.

23 J. K., ‘The Australian Labour Movement as Viewed By an Outsider’, Proletarian, n.s. no. 8 (August 1925), pp. 15–16. See David Akers, The Making of a Marxist: Jack Kavanagh, 1879–1914, paper presented to third national conference of the ASSLH, Newcastle, 25 June 1993, and ‘Rebel or Revolutionary? Jack Kavanagh and the Early Years of the Communist Movement in Vancouver, 1920–1925’, Labour/Le Travail, no. 30 (Fall 1992), pp. 9–44; Margaret Sampson, Intellectual History from Below? The Diary of Jack Kavanagh, unpublished paper, History Department, University of Newcastle, 1989; and the Investigation Branch file on Kavanagh (AA A467).

24 Minutes of the Fifth Conference of the CPA, 26–28 December 1925, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 1).

25 Minutes of the Central Executive of the CPA, 4 January 1926, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 3); Workers’ Weekly, 15 January 1926.

26 Labor Daily, 6 December 1926; Sydney Morning Herald, 8 December 1926; Workers’ Weekly, 10 December 1926; the fullest treatment of these complex events is Bede Nairn, The ‘Big Fella’: Jack Lang and the Australian Labor Party 1891–1949 (Melbourne: MUP, 1986), chs 6–7.

27 Arthur Hoyle, John Smith (Jock) Garden (1882–1968): A Political Biography (Canberra: self-published, 1984), p. 64; Frank Farrell, Inter- national Socialism and Australian Labour: The Left in Australia 1919–1939 (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1981), pp. 89–90.

28 Report of the Third All-Australian Trade Union Congress, 7 August 1926, (Sydney: New South Wales Labor Council, 1926); see the lengthy intelligence report (AA A981); and Farrell, op. cit., ch. 5.

29 Esmonde Higgins, interviewed by J. D. B. Miller, 26 January 1952, Rawling papers (ANU N57/198).

30 The debate with Kavanagh was reported in Workers’ Weekly, 24 December 1926; Garden’s articles appeared 27 May–24 June 1927.

31 Workers’ Weekly, 7 August 1925 reports their formation. Membership figures come from a report by the CPA to ECCI, 14 April 1926, Comintern records (CI 495/94/26).

32 She explained the divisions in Workers’ Weekly, 31 July 1925 and minutes of the conference; see also Justina Williams, The First Furrow (Willagee, WA: Lone Hand Press, 1976), pp. 84–97.

33 Branch minutes and correspondence, Brodney papers (SLV MS 10882/5/9, 11).

34 Workers’ Weekly, 11 December 1925; K. H. Kennedy, ‘The Anti-Communist Pledge Crisis’, in D. J. Murphy et al. (eds), Labor in Power: The Labor Party and Governments in Queensland 1915–57 (St Lucia, Qld: UQP, 1980), pp. 369–81.

35 Workers’ Weekly, 16 October 1925. His recollections of the tour appear in Andrew Moore (ed.), The Writings of Norm Jeffery (Campbelltown, NSW: Sydney Branch of the ASSLH, 1989), pp. 25–30, based on manuscript in the Gilmore papers (NLA MS 727/8/51).

36 For Hetty Weitzel, see J. C. Beaglehole, Victoria University College (Wellington: New Zealand University, 1949), p. 191; Martin Sullivan, ‘Hetty Ross Formerly Hetty Weitzel’, Hecate, vol. 22, no. 1 (1996), pp. 127–38; and Ross Edmonds, In Storm and Struggle: A History of the Communist Party in Newcastle 1920–1949 (Newcastle: self-published, 1991), p. 11.

37 ADB, vol. 10, pp. 675–6, and profile by Edgar Ross in Communist Review, vol. 4, no. 10 (October 1937), pp. 44–8.

38 Jack Blake, interviewed by Laurie Aarons, August 1979 (ML) and information given to me, July 1997. Airey assumed the name of Blake when he returned in 1933 from training in the Soviet Union.

39 ADB, vol. 11, pp. 98–9 and profile in Workers’ Voice, 14 September 1938.

40 Richard Dixon, ‘Early Years in the Party’ in Australia Left Review, no. 48 (September 1975), pp. 48–54. Walker assumed this name when he returned at the same time as Blake from the Soviet Union.

41 Harry den Hartog, interviewed by Frank Strahan and Andrew Reeves, 4 September 1982 (UMA).

42 Ike the Red, ‘Ten Years On—Will This be So?’, Workers’ Weekly, 21 May 1926.

43 Workers’ Weekly, 8 January 1926; CEC report to groups, June 1926, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 4).

44 Minutes of Sixth Conference of the CPA, 26–28 December 1926, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 1).

45 CEC report to groups, October 1926, as in note 43.

46 Militant Women’s Group report in minutes of the Seventh Conference of the CPA, 24–28 December 1927, pp. 50–1, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 1). Copies of the group’s bulletin, The Woman Worker, are in the Kavanagh papers (ANU P12/2/6). See also Audrey Johnson, Bread and Roses: A Personal History of Three Militant Women and Their Friends 1902–1988 (Sutherland, NSW: Left Book Club, 1990), ch. 1.

47 See, for example, the protracted requests of the International Secretariat of International Red Aid for an account of the expenditure of £600 sent as three months’ running expenses (CI 539/3/232).

48 Higgins to Pollitt, 30 August 1926, Rawling papers (ANU N57/158); Rawling, Communism Comes to Australia, p. 256 (ANU N57/1).

49 These membership figures come from minutes of the 1927 conference, and two reports to ECCI, one by Herbert Moxon and the other by a Comintern representative, R. W. Robson, Comintern records (CI 495/94/41, 42); there are minor discrepancies.

50 Judah Waten, Scenes of Revolutionary Life (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1982).

51 Judah Waten, ‘Seventy Years’, Overland, no. 86 (December 1981), pp. 16–18.

52 Report by Ross to British Secretariat, 15 April 1926, Comintern records (CI 495/72/114).

53 Tom Payne, address to Victorian branch of the ASSLH, n.d.; E. M. Higgins, ‘Moralisings while on SS Baradine, June–July 1924’, Rawling papers, (ANU N57/174). The correspondence is noted in Kevin Morgan, Harry Pollitt (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 121.

54 Workers’ Weekly, 11 April 1924. For Dietzgen and this intellectual culture, see Stuart Macintyre, A Proletarian Science: Marxism in Britain 1917–1933 (Cambridge: CUP, 1980); for the labour colleges, Ann Turner, Independent Working Class Education in Australia, 1917–29, MEd thesis, University of Melbourne, 1981; and for the reading history of the Australian labour movement, Lucy Taksa, ‘Spreading the Word: The Literature of Labour and Working-Class Culture’, in John Shields (ed.), All Our Labours: Oral Histories of Working Life in Twentieth Century Sydney (Kensington, NSW: NSWUP, 1992), pp. 64–85.

55 Workers’ Weekly, 16 May, 19 September 1924, 3 June–14 October 1927; Party Training Manual (Sydney: CPA, 1928), p. 6.

56 Report on work among women in Australia, 23 September 1927, Comintern records (CI 495/94/35).

57 Hetty Ross, ‘The Women of the Working Class’, Workers’ Weekly, 28 May 1926.

58 E. Reynolds, letter to Workers’ Weekly, 11 March 1927.

59 See the report in Workers’ Weekly, 24 April 1925, and the biographical sketch in Joy Damousi, Socialist Women in Australia, c. 1890–1918, PhD thesis, ANU, 1987, pp. 304–5; Rickie was one of the six parliamentary candidates in 1925. See generally, Joy Damousi, Women Come Rally: Socialism, Communism and Gender in Australia 1890–1955 (Melbourne: OUP, 1994).

60 As recalled by Edna Ryan in Joyce Stevens (ed.), Taking the Revolution Home: Work Among Women in the Communist Party of Australia 1920–1945 (Fitzroy, Vic.: Sybylla Press, 1987), p. 125. Jean Devanny, Sugar Heaven (Sydney: Modern Publishers, 1936); Katharine Susannah Prichard, Intimate Strangers (London: Cape, 1937)

61 Communist, 28 July 1922; Workers’ Weekly, 12, 26 January, 28 September 1923.

62 Workers’ Weekly, 23 January 1925.

63 Immigration policy resolution in minutes of the Fifth Conference of the CPA, as in note 24; the resolution follows closely Jack Kavanagh’s analysis of ‘The Immigration Menace’, Workers’ Weekly, 7 August 1925.

64 This from a leaflet issued in north Queensland, reported in Workers’ Weekly, 3 July 1925; a similar appeal to Italian timberworkers in Western Australia appeared in the same newspaper on 31 July 1925.

65 Peter Alexanders, interviewed by Stelios Korbetis, 24 January 1987, was a founder-member.

66 Minutes of the Seventh Conference of the CPA, 24–28 December 1927, pp. 38–40, CPA papers (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1938, box 1). This early phase of Italian communist activity in Australia seems to have escaped the notice of historians; see Gianfranco Cresciani, Fascism, Anti-Fascism and Italians in Australia, 1922–1945 (Canberra: ANUP, 1980), p. 117.

67 Lawrence, Kangaroo, p. 305.

68 Howie to Murphy, n.d. [1927?], Comintern records (CI 495/94/43).

Chapter 6 The line straightens

1 Baracchi’s resignation was reported to ECCI on 24 January 1926 and the cable requesting an Australian representative was received on 8 February, Comintern records (CI 495/94/26); CEC report to groups, February 1926, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 4). The Comintern correspondence is also contained in an Investigation Branch file (AA A467).

2 Minutes of the Bureau, 22 April, 20 May 1926, Comintern records (CI 495/72/114) and ‘Resolution on the Australian Question’, Comintern records (CI 495/2/57).

3 ‘The Political Situation and Our Attitude to the ALP’, in minutes of the Sixth Conference of the CPA, 25–28 December 1926, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 1).

4 Thus L. L. Sharkey, An Outline History of the Communist Party of Australia (Sydney: Marx School, 1944), pp. 20–3 presents the issue as a fight against the heresy of Australian exceptionalism, while from a Trotskyist perspective Tom O’Lincoln, Into the Mainstream: The Decline of Australian Communism (Westgate, NSW: Stained Wattle Press, 1985), p. 36 emphasises the importance of the Kremlin. Alastair Davidson, The Communist Party of Australia: A Short History (Stanford, California: Hoover Institution Press, 1969), pp. 48–51 sees the episode resulting in ‘rigid Comintern control’. J. D. Blake, ‘The Australian Communist Party and the Comintern in the Early 1930s’, Labour History, no. 23 (November 1972), pp. 38–47 disputes this interpretation. Peter Morrison, The Communist Party of Australia and the Radical-Socialist Tradition, 1920–39, PhD thesis, University of Adelaide, 1976, ch. 4, and Barbara Curthoys, ‘The Communist Party and the Communist International (1927–1929)’, Labour History, no. 64 (May 1993), pp. 54–69 provide more nuanced accounts.

5 Among the substantial body of work on the International, Franz Borkenau, World Communism: A History of the Communist International (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), Julius Braunthal, History of the International. Volume 2: 1914–1943 (London: Thomas Nelson, 1967), E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917–1923, vol. 3 (London: Macmillan, 1953) and Socialism in One Country 1924–6, vol. 3 (London: Macmillan, 1964), and Fernando Claudin, The Communist Movement from Comintern to Cominform. Part One: The Crisis of the Communist International, trans. Brian Pearce, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975) are of particular value.

6 In an extended review of the revisionist works, Theodore Draper, ‘American Communism Revisited’, in A Present of Things Past: Selected Essays (New York: Hill & Wang, 1990) defends the earlier view, while the alternative position is surveyed in Michael E. Brown et al. (eds), New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993).

7 Minutes of the CEC, 15 April 1927, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 3); Workers’ Weekly, 3 June, 15 July, 5 August 1927.

8 Minutes of the CEC, 20 August 1927.

9 The Investigation Branch compiled detailed reports on these activists in 1922 and 1925 (AA A6122, item 135).

10 Workers’ Weekly, 13, 27 November, 4, 11 December 1925; see Andrew Moore (ed.), The Writings of Norm Jeffery (Campbelltown, NSW: Sydney Branch of the ASSLH, 1989), pp. 27–9; Anne Smith, ‘McCormack, Rymer and the Bowen Industrial Trouble, 1925’, in Lectures on North Queensland History, no. 4 (1984).

11 K. H. Kennedy, ‘The South Johnstone Strike and Railway Lockout, 1927’, Labour History, no. 31 (November 1976), pp. 1–13. The best account of political currents in Queensland remains E. M. Higgins’s, The Queensland Labour Government, 1915–1929, MA thesis, University of Melbourne, 1954.

12 Moxon’s report in minutes of the seventh Conference of the CPA, 24–28 December 1927, pp. 25–9, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 1); Workers’ Weekly, 16 July–21 October 1927 passim, and issues of Solidarity, the strike bulletin of the Townsville group, September 1927, Kavanagh papers (ANU Z400, box 4).

13 Minutes of the CEC, 20 August 1927, as in note 7.

14 Minutes of the British–American Bureau, 3, 4 August, and Political Secretariat of ECCI, 10, 14 October 1927 (CI 495/72/27 and 495/3/39–40); part of the resolution appeared in minutes of the Seventh Conference of the CPA, 24–28 December 1927, pp. 12–15, as in note 12.

15 Robson’s report to Political Secretariat of ECCI, 20 April 1928, Comintern records (CI 495/3/63) and letter to ‘Bob’ [Stewart?], 30 January 1928, Comintern records (CI 495/94/41).

16 Minutes of the Seventh Conference of the CPA, 24–28 December 1927, pp. 36–9, 61–5, as in note 12.

17 ibid., pp. 66–70.

18 ibid., pp. 75–8.

19 See his chairman’s address to the conference, ibid., p. 2.

20 ibid., p. 61. Other accounts, including those of Blake and Curthoys (cited in note 4), state wrongly that Higgins was removed.

21 ibid., p. 80.

22 Edna Ryan, typed notes on Alastair Davidson, The Communist Party of Australia, Kavanagh papers (ANU P12/9/2), supplemented by her contribution to Joyce Stevens (ed.), Taking the Revolution Home: Work Among Women in the Communist Party of Australia 1920–1945 (Fitzroy, Vic.: Sybylla Press, 1987), pp. 120–36, and written communication to me, 23 June 1994.

23 Statutes adopted at the Sixth Congress, in Jane Degras (ed.), The Communist International 1919–1943: Documents, vol. 2 (London: OUP, 1960), pp. 464–71.

24 Robson to Kuusinen, 19 April 1928, and report, 18 April 1928, Comintern records (CI 495/94/41).

25 Moxon, ‘Report of the Representative of the CC of the CPA on “Party Factions” ‘, 7 April 1928, and statement to secretariat, 20 April 1928, Comintern records (CI 495/94/42).

26 ‘Report of Comrades Jeffery and Ryan on the Position of the Communist Party of Australia’, 10 April 1928, and further reports, 18 April 1928 (ibid.).

27 The resolution was adopted by ECCI on 27 April 1928, Comintern records (CI 495/3/64).

28 ‘Communist Party and Queensland Labor Party’, Workers’ Weekly, 20 July 1928, and subsequent articles, 27 July, 3, 17, 24, 31 August, 14 September 1928.

29 ‘Report of the Representative of the CPA on Matters Arising Out of the CI Letter and Resolutions’, 6 September 1928, and CEC of CPA to ECCI, 20 September 1928, Comintern records (CI 495/94/42, 44); ECCI, ‘To the CEC of the Australian Party’, 2 October 1928, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 8). Higgins’s subsequent report to the CEC on the Congress, dated 20 December 1928, is in the Rawling papers (ANU N57/371).

30 Wright to ECCI Secretariat, 21 May 1928, 2 October 1928, Comintern records (CI 495/94/43, 495/6/16).

31 Dutt to Pollitt, 6 January 1928, Pollitt to Dutt, 13 February 1928, Dutt papers (CPGB archives, Manchester, UK).

32 Higgins’s report to the CEC of the CPA, 20 December 1928, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 3), and report to the Eighth Conference of the CPA, 22–27 December 1928, together with his handwritten notes, Rawling papers (ANU N57/370).

33 ECCI, ‘To the CEC of the Australian Party’, 2 October 1928, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 8).

34 Higgins to Pollitt, n.d. [September 1928], Higgins papers (ML MS 740/7); the document prepared by Moxon is in Comintern records (CI 495/94/41); Higgins’s reference to ‘friends at court’ is in a letter to Robson, 21 February 1929, Comintern records (CI 495/94/52), and see also the remarkably well-informed report based on British intelligence sent by R. G. Casey to S. M. Bruce, 21 February 1929, (AA A467). The ECCI warning is contained in the letter to the CEC of the CPA, 2 October 1928, as in note 33.

35 Shelley to Maruschak, 31 October 1928, Comintern records (CI 495/94/44).

36 Minutes of the praesidium meeting, 12 November 1928, and of the CEC, 3 December 1928, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 3).

37 Minutes of the Eighth Conference of the CPA, 22–27 December 1928, passim, Rawling papers (ANU N57/370).

38 ibid., p. 19 and attached group leaders’ reports.

39 ibid., pp. 23–4.

40 ibid., p. 29. cf. Davidson, The Communist Party of Australia, p. 50, who suggests Moxon and Sharkey were dropped.

41 Kavanagh, ‘Pages from Party History’, Rawling papers (ANU N57/250).

42 Minutes of the Eighth Conference, pp. 29–31 and Kavanagh’s appended trade union report; the resolution appeared in Workers’ Weekly, 11 January 1929.

43 Director, Investigation Branch to Secretary, Attorney-General’s Department, 5 October 1928 and Latham to solicitor-general, 6 November 1928 (AA A467); and Miriam Rechter (Dixson), The Strike of Waterside Workers in Australian Ports, 1928, and the Lockout of Coalminers in the Northern Coalfield of New South Wales, MA thesis, University of Melbourne, 1957.

44 Sydney Morning Herald, 8 May 1929; the earlier Sydney demonstration was reported in the same paper and the Labor Daily on 28 March 1929.

45 CEC minutes, 11, 18 February 1929 (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 3) and report in Sydney Morning Herald, 23 February 1929; Workers’ Weekly, 30 August 1929 and passim. The weekly bulletins of the Timber Workers’ Disputes Committee in New South Wales, the Picket Line, 19 June–17 October 1929, Kavanagh papers (ANU P12/2/4), give a clear account of Kavanagh’s strategy. See Miriam Dixson, ‘The Timber Strike of 1929’, Historical Studies Australia and New Zealand, vol. 10, no. 40 (May 1963), pp. 479–92.

46 See, in addition to Rechter, ‘The Strike’, Robin Gollan, The Coalminers of New South Wales: A History of the Union 1860–1960 (Melbourne: MUP, 1963), ch. 9; and Edgar Ross, A History of the Miners’ Federation of Australia (Sydney: Australasian Coal and Shale Employees’ Federation, 1970), chs 13–14.

47 Report of the All-In Conference of the Militant Minority Movement, 19–20 July 1929, p. 9, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 16). Norm Jeffery described the differences within the CEC on the appropriate strategy for the Minority Movement in an earlier report, 20 February 1929, and enlarged on the issues in a letter to the RILU, 16 May 1929 (CI 534/7/4).

48 The importance of this factor is set out in Frank Farrell, ‘Explaining Communist History’, Labour History, no. 32 (May 1977), pp. 1–10, and Moscow’s priorities were also noted by the Investigation Branch (AA A981). Barbara Curthoys, ‘The Comintern, the CPA and the Impact of Harry Wicks’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 39, no. 1 (1993), p. 24, identifies the RILU official as G. Sydor Stöler, but does not recognise him as ‘Pan’, a name she misattributes to A. Lozovsky, the general secretary of the RILU (p. 27). It was Edna Ryan who named the visitor ‘Pan’ because his mission was to establish the Pan-Pacific Worker (personal communication, 28 June 1994) and there were several references to his mission at the Ninth Conference in December 1929. He wrote in this journal and in Inprecorr, vol. 9, nos 23, 66 (17 May, 29 November 1929) as ‘Carpenter’, but Inprecorr, vol. 9, no. 62 (1 November) has an Australian article by Stöler.

49 Wright to Lozovsky, 26 September 1929, Comintern records (CI 534/7/4).

50 Miles, ‘The Challenge to Capitalism and Reformism’, Workers’ Weekly, 31 May 1929; Moxon, ‘After the Queensland Elections’, Workers’ Weekly, 24 May 1929, and ‘Communist International New Line Correctly Applied’, Workers’ Weekly, 9 August 1929.

51 Tripp to Rawling, 21 January 1963, Rawling papers (ANU N57/109).

52 CEC minutes, 15 September 1929, and letter to groups, 16 September 1929, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, boxes 3, 4); see election articles in Workers’ Weekly, 20, 27 September 1929.

53 Letters from Moxon and Sharkey to CEC, 16, 22 September 1929, CPA records (ML MS 5021, ADD-ON 1936, box 8), and copies in Comintern records (CI 495/94/52). The correspondence between Moxon and Miles is in a separate file of the CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 28).

54 ‘Report by Comrade Clayton [the pseudonym of Tripp] on the Present Situation in Australia Comintern records, September 1929’ (CI 495/94/52) and a further submission to ECCI, 20 September 1929, Comintern records (CI 495/3/162). Tripp recounted his advocacy in Moscow in an interview with J. N. Rawling (ANU N57/109) and his diaries for the period are in the Tripp papers (UMA).

55 The telegrams are held in the minutes of the CEC, CPA records (ML, as in note 53), and copies are contained in Comintern records (CI 495/72/52–3).

56 Political Secretariat of ECCI, Comintern records (CI 495/4/3).

57 Workers’ Weekly, 25 October, 15 November 1929.

58 Workers’ Weekly, loc. cit., and 6, 27 December 1929.

59 CEC to Anglo–American Bureau, 16 December 1929, Comintern records (CI 495/94/61).

60 Moxon, letter from Melbourne, 12 December 1929, Brodney papers (SLVMS 10882/5/10)

61 Higgins to Harry Pollitt, 21 March 1930, Comintern records (CI 495/94/61).

62 Minutes of the Ninth Conference of the CPA, 26–31 December 1929, pp. 40, 43, 64–5, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 1); telegram from ECCI in Workers’ Weekly, 10 January 1930; telegram to ECCI in Comintern records (CI 495/94/53).

Chapter 7 Bolshevisation

1 Kavanagh diary, 20 February 1930, Kavanagh papers (ANU Z400, box 1); Workers’ Weekly, 14 March 1930.

2 Andrew Metcalfe, For Freedom and Dignity: Historical Agency and Class Structures in the Coalfields of NSW (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988), ch. 9 includes a table summarising the charges and convictions. Christian Jollie Smith undertook more than 250 defences on behalf of the CPA; ‘Notes on Cases for IWCPA’, n.d. [1932], Thorne papers (ANU P15/8).

3 Workers’ Weekly, 17, 31 January 1930; Cessnock Eagle, 24 January 1930, quoted in Ross Edmonds, In Storm and Struggle: A History of the Communist Party in Newcastle 1920–1940 (Newcastle: self-published, 1991), p. 55; Sydney Morning Herald, 13, 16 January 1930.

4 See J. D. Blake, ‘The Australian Communist Party and the Comintern in the Early 1930s’, Labour History, no. 23 (November 1972), p. 45, and Higgins to Pollitt, 21 March 1930, Comintern records (CI 495/94/61); Moxon’s accusation about the lockout in Workers’ Weekly, 21 November 1930.

5 Workers’ Weekly, 14 March, 4 April 1930.

6 Copies of letters from Moxon to Ryan, 6, 10, 19 February 1930, Kavanagh papers (ANU P12/3/7/1–3); Workers’ Weekly, 28 February, 21 March 1930; Sydney Morning Herald, 28 February 1930; Frank Farrell, International Socialism and Australian Labour: The Left in Australia, 1919–1939 (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1981), ch. 7; Jim Hagan, The History of the ACTU (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1981), pp. 94–5.

7 CEC to ECCI, 24 February 1930, Comintern records (CI 495/94/61); Moxon to ECCI, 13, 19 March 1930, Comintern records (CI 495/94/61), and ECCI Resolution of the Situation in Australia and the Tasks of the CPA, November 1930, Comintern records (CI 495/4/63), and also in the Report of the Tenth Congress of the CPA (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 1); Ryan to Lozovsky, 9 March 1930, Comintern records (CI 534/7/5) and quoted in Melbourne Argus, 4 March 1930. Copies of the correspondence between Ryan and the CEC are in the Kavanagh papers (ANU P12/3/7). See also Barbara Curthoys, ‘The Comintern, the CPA and the Impact of Harry Wicks’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 39, no. 1 (1993), pp. 23–36.

8 Kavanagh to CEC, 29 January 1930, Comintern records (CI 495/94/61) and also in Rawling papers (ANU N57/251); Kavanagh diary, 31 January 1930, as in note 1.

9 Moxon to ECCI, 19 March 1930; Workers’ Weekly, 21 March, 25 April 1930; CEC minutes, April 1930, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 3).

10 Descriptions of Moore come from Gil Roper, interviewed J. N. Rawling, 1961 (ANU N57/291), and Edna Ryan, personal communication, 23 June 1994; Bernard K. Johnpoll and Harvey Klehr (eds), Biographical Dictionary of the American Left (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), pp. 414–5.

11 Barrington to Esmonde Higgins, n.d. [19 April 1930], Rawling papers (ANU N57/158); Workers’ Weekly, 25 April, 6 June 1930; Moore to ECCI, 25 July 1930, Comintern records (CI 534/7/5).

12 CEC minutes, 4 May 1930; Moore to RILU, 25 May, 25 September 1930, Comintern records (CI 534/7/5, 6); ECCI to Moore, 21 November 1930, Comintern records (CI 495/4/65).

13 Moxon to PB, 28 January 1931, state correspondence and reports, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 4); Workers’ Weekly, 20 March 1931; Edna Ryan, personal communication, 23 June 1994; Joyce Stevens (ed.), Taking the Revolution Home: Work Among Women in the Communist Party of Australia 1920–1945 (Fitzroy, Vic.: Sybylla Press, 1987), pp. 120–36.

14 CEC minutes, 26 April, 24 May 1930, as in note 9; Kavanagh diary, 22 May, 22 June 1930, as in note 1.

15 ‘Censure and Warning of Com. Kavanagh’, Workers’ Weekly, 6 June 1930.

16 In 1917 Russia was still using the Julian calendar, so 15 October in Russia was the equivalent of the West’s 7 November.

17 Workers’ Weekly, 5 December 1930; correspondence between Kavanagh and CEC, and subsequent appeals to the Tenth Congress of the CPA and the ECCI in the Kavanagh papers (ANU P12/3/1–5), Rawling papers (ANU N57/251, 375) and Comintern records CI 495/94/61. J. N. Rawling’s unpublished history, Communism Comes to Australia, pp. 349–65, Rawling papers, ANU N 57/1, provides a detailed narrative.

18 An application of Ryan was reported in Workers’ Weekly, 2, 16 September 1932. Kavanagh submitted a long statement of self-criticism to Workers’ Weekly, 4–18 September 1931, and was then put on probation for a year; the probation was extended a further year in September 1932, and in September 1933 he gave further assurances. He was expelled in June 1934. Kavanagh to CCC, 18 September 1932, and CCC to Kavanagh, 26 September 1932, 21 September 1933, 16 May 1934, Kavanagh papers (ANU P12/3/4/4 and P12/3/5/4); Workers’ Weekly, 29 June, 20 July 1934.

19 Higgins to Pollitt, 11 January 1931, Rawling papers (ANU N57/198).

20 Workers’ Weekly, 3 October, 5 December 1930.

21 Workers’ Weekly, 21 November 1930; Moxon was quoted by Jeffery in the minutes of the Tenth Congress of the CPA, April 1931, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 1), and his organisational faults were discussed in a separate organisational session, Comintern records (CI 495/94/20); there were further accusations at the closed session of the CC plenum, 2 January 1932 (AA A 6335, item 31). See also Beris Penrose, ‘Herbert Moxon, a Victim of the ‘‘Bolshevisation’’ of the Communist Party’, Labour History, no. 70 (May 1996), pp. 92–114.

22 It has been suggested that Moore proposed Sharkey as the new party secretary and that Christian Jollie Smith, no longer an active member but still very influential, objected; Rawling, Communism Comes to Australia, p. 367.

23 Biographical details from J. B. Miles, interviewed by Roger Coates, 12 January 1965; Carole Ferrier (ed.), Point of Departure: The Autobiography of Jean Devanny (St Lucia, Qld: UQP, 1986), p. 157.

24 Moore to Organisation Department, ECCI, 25 September 1930, Comintern records (CI 534/7/5).

25 Minutes of the Tenth Congress of the CPA (transcript is marked 11.45 a. m. Monday).

26 ibid., and Tripp interviewed by Rawling, Rawling papers (ANU N57/109); Moore’s address was published as Australia and the World Crisis (Sydney: CPA, 1931).

27 CI 495/4/63 and also in minutes of the Tenth Congress, as in note 21. A delay in the receipt of this letter was a contributory factor in the postponement of the congress.

28 Moore to ECCI, 10 November 1930, Comintern records (CI 495/7/5); minutes of the Tenth Congress and Moore’s statement in the minutes of the organisation session, p. 76, Comintern records (CI 495/94/20); Workers’ Weekly,

29 May, 31 July, 27 November 1931, 15 January 1932; Organisation Report, 31 December 1931, CPA records (ML MS 5021, box 82); Third Plenum of the CC 25–27 December 1932, p. 135, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 3). 29 Workers’ Weekly, 17 August 1931.

30 Jollie Smith to A. T. Brodney, 19 September 1929, Moxon to Brodney, 17 February 1930, Brodney papers (SLV MS10882/5/11). Circulation reported to Third Plenum of the CC, p. 156, as in note 28. At the Eleventh Congress of the party in 1935, Sharkey as editor sharply reduced the circulation figures for the early 1930s.

Chapter 8 Class Against Class

1 Jack Blake, interviewed by Laurie Aarons, August 1979 (ML) and by me, July 1997; copies of CIB files in Blake papers (ML MS 5971/1/4).

2 Red Leader, 23 October 1931. A report of the Minority Movement conference is in Comintern records (CI 534/7/7).

3 Workers’ Weekly, 10 October, 21 November 1930, 13 February, 10 April 1931.

4 ECCI to CC of CPA, 22 October 1932, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 8); see also Alastair Davidson, The Communist Party of Australia: A Short History (Stanford, California: Hoover Institution Press, 1969), pp. 56–60. There are few studies of industrial activity in the Third Period, though individual union histories contain some information. L. J. Louis, Trade Unions and the Depression: A Study of Victoria 1930–1932 (Canberra: ANUP, 1968), and Joanne Scott, ‘Don’t Cop it Passively’: Strikes, Lockouts and Unemployed Protests in Queensland 1929–39, BA Hons thesis, University of Queensland, 1990, chs 1–2 are useful state accounts. The minutes of the Second National Congress of the MM, December 1933, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 16) provide a good retrospective view.

5 Red Leader, 15, 22 January 1932; and report of conference, Comintern records (CI 534/7/7).

6 Workers’ Weekly, 6, 13 May 1931, 8 July, 26 August 1932; Red Leader, 13 July, 17 August 1932; Sydney Morning Herald, 1 August 1932; minutes of the PB, 26 September 1931, 4 May, 24 June 1932, Comintern records (CI 95/94/70, 95); minutes of the Third Plenum, 25–27 December 1932, p. 168, CPA records (ML 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 3).

7 The series of articles appeared in Red Leader, 27 July–14 September 1932; on Orr, personal communication from Bob Gollan.

8 Workers’ Weekly, 8, 15 August 1930, 9 January, 16 October 1931. See Andrew Moore, ‘The Pastoral Workers’ Industrial Union’, Labour History, no. 49 (November 1985), pp. 61–74, and Alastair Davidson, The Communist Party of Australia 1920–35: Policy and Organisation, PhD thesis, ANU, 1966, pp. 371–86. There are extensive records of the PWIU collected by an agent of the New South Wales Graziers’ Association in the records of that organisation (ANU E256/261).

9 Robinson in Wendy Lowenstein, Weevils in the Flour: An Oral Record of the 1930s Depression in Australia, rev. edn (Newham, Vic.: Scribe Publications, 1989), pp. 148–50; Jarmson, interviewed by Laurie Aarons, 19 July 1981 (ML).

10 E. H. Carr, The Twilight of the Comintern, 1930–1935 (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 38–9; Wray Vamplew (ed.), Australians: Historical Statistics (Sydney: Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, 1988), p. 152. The traditional forms of unemployed protest are described in Stuart Macintyre, Winners and Losers: The Pursuit of Social Justice in Australian History (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1985), ch. 4. The two best accounts of unemployed activity in the Depression are Judy Mackinolty, Sugar Bag Days: Sydney Workers and the Challenge of the 1930s Depression, MA thesis, Macquarie University, 1972, and C. J. Fox, Unemployment and the Politics of the Unemployed: Victoria in the Great Depression 1930–37, PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 1984.

11 Minutes of the OBU of Unemployed and UWM, 1928–32, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 16); Kavanagh diary, 20, 28 July, 1 August 1930, Kavanagh papers (ANU Z400 box 1); Workers’ Weekly, 1, 8 August, 24 October 1930.

12 For Sydney, Workers’ Weekly, 14, 21, 28 November 1930. For Melbourne, Workers’ Weekly, 31 October 1930; Argus, 24 October–3 November 1930; C. R. Walker, ‘The Fight of the Unemployed’, Pan-Pacific Worker, vol. 3, no. 12 (1 December 1930), pp. 359–61, and Louis, Trade Unions and the Depression, pp. 169–70. For Adelaide, Workers’ Weekly, 16 January 1931; Adelaide Advertiser, 10 January 1931, and Ray Broomhill, Unemployed Workers: A Social History of the Great Depression in Adelaide (St Lucia, Qld: UQP, 1978), pp. 176–9. For Darwin, a report of the Department of Home Affairs (AA A31/4202). For Perth, Workers’ Weekly, 13 March 1931; West Australian, 7 March 1931; transcript of interview with Sid Foxley, 28 October 1970, Battye Library (PR 6361/2); Geoffrey Bolton, A Fine Country to Starve In (Nedlands, WA: UWAP, 1972), pp. 146–57, and Sandra Wilson, ‘Police Perceptions of Protest: The Perth ‘‘Treasury Riot’’ of March 1931’, Labour History, no. 52 (May 1987), pp. 63–74.

13 Sydney Morning Herald, 29 July, 20 August 1930 on the Clovelly case; Counihan quoted in Judy Mackinolty, ‘Meeting Them at the Door: Radicalism, Militancy and the Sydney Anti-eviction Campaign of 1931’, in Jill Roe (ed.), Twentieth-Century Sydney: Studies in Urban and Social History (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1980), p. 210, and also in Bernard Smith, Noel Counihan: Artist and Revolutionary (Melbourne: OUP, 1993), p. 87.

14 Minutes of the PB, 13 May, 20 June 1931, Comintern records (CI 95/40/70); Workers’ Weekly, 26 June 1931; Red Leader, 2 October 1931 and the report by Christian Jollie Smith, ‘Notes on Cases for ICWPA’, n.d., Thorne papers (ANU P15/8)’; Mackinolty, ‘Meeting Them at the Door’.

15 Joanne Scott, ‘“A Place in Normal Society”: Unemployed Protest in Queensland in the 1930s’, Labour History, no. 65 (November 1993), pp. 136–49; Ross Edmonds, In Storm and Struggle: A History of the Communist Party in Newcastle 1920–1940 (Newcastle: self-published, 1991), pp. 43–6; Sheilah Gray, Newcastle in the Great Depression (Newcastle: City Council, 1989); Peter Hempenstall, The Meddlesome Priest: A Life of Ernest Burgmann (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993), pp. 145–7.

16 Kylie Tennant, The Battlers (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1941); Frank Huelin, ‘Keep Moving’: An Odyssey (Sydney: ABS, 1971).

17 Workers’ Weekly, 6, 13, 20 November 1931, 5 August 1932; Argus, 2, 14 November 1931; Sunraysia Daily, 2 November 1931; Tony McGillick, Comrade No More: The Autobiography of a Former Communist Party Leader (West Perth: self-published, 1980), pp. 73–6; and ‘Down with Fascism’, leaflet issued by Mildura section (CI 495/4/130).

18 George Bliss, ‘The Battle of Cairns’, in Len Fox (ed.), Depression Down Under, 2nd edn (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1989), pp. 85–92; Brian Costar, ‘Controlling the Victims: the Authorities and the Unemployed in Queensland during the Great Depression’, Labour History, no. 56 (May 1989), pp. 1–14.

19 Vera Deacon, ‘Making Do and Lasting Out’, in Fox (ed.), Depression Down Under, pp. 95–119; Karl Strom, ‘Slacky Flats’, Australian Left Review, no. 85 (Spring 1983), pp. 46–52.

20 Workers’ Weekly, 16, 23 May 1931, 4, 11 November 1932; Red Leader, 16 November 1932; Len Richardson, The Bitter Years: Wollongong During the Great Depression (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1984), ch. 4; Gray, Newcastle in the Great Depression, pp. 46–8; Justina Williams, The First Furrow (Willagee, WA: Lone Hand Press, 1976), pp. 123–30 and ‘The March from Frankland River’ in Katharine Susannah Prichard, Straight Left, ed. Ric Throssell (Sydney: Wild & Woolley, 1982), pp. 23–34; George Bliss in Lowenstein, Weevils in the Flour, pp. 173–7.

21 ‘Sectarianism—Our Approach to the Masses is Incorrect’, Workers’ Weekly, 20 November 1931; minutes of the PB, 13 May, 28 November 1931 (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 15) and Industrial Report to Plenum, 31 December 1931 (ML MS 5021, box 82)

22 Jim Comerford, quoted in Metcalfe, For Freedom and Dignity: Historical Agency and Class Structures in the Coalfields of NSW (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988), p. 105.

23 Age, 18 September 1931; Red Leader, 25 September 1931; Ralph Gibson, The People Stand Up (Ascot Vale, Vic.: Red Rooster Press, 1983), p. 53; Louis, Trade Unions and the Depression, pp. 183–4.

24 Membership reported in ECCI letter to CC of CPA, 22 October 1932 (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 8); see also organisational report for 1931 and UWM minutes as in note 11, 3 January 1932.

25 Les Barnes, recorded April–May 1991.

26 John Hughes, interviewed by Laurie Aarons, September 1980 (ML), and by Ken Mansell, 7 May 1983 (ML); Robert Cooksey, Lang and Socialism: A Study in the Great Depression (Canberra: ANUP, 1971), ch. 3. Payne rejoined the CPA in 1932 on the insistence of the PB; see minutes, 27 February 1932, as in note 6.

27 Workers’ Weekly, 10 June 1932. Bede Nairn, The ‘Big Fella’: Jack Lang and the Australian Labor Party 1891–1949 (Melbourne: MUP, 1986), pp. 284–5 describes the protest meeting, and Miriam Dixson, Greater than Lenin? Lang and Labor 1916–1932 (Melbourne: Melbourne Politics Monograph, 1976) explores his popular appeal.

28 Workers’ Weekly, 6, 13 May 1932; Red Leader, 11 May 1932; Argus, 2, 3 May 1932; Gibson, The People Stand Up, p. 54.

29 The aggregate statistics appear in Colin A. Hughes and B. D. Graham, A Handbook of Australian Government and Politics 1890–1964 (Canberra: ANUP, 1968); see also Peter Morrison, The Communist Party of Australia and the Radical-Socialist Tradition, 1920–39, PhD thesis, University of Adelaide, 1976, pp. 400–3.

30 Alf Watt, Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the Communist Movement in Australia (Surry Hills, NSW: SPA, n.d. [1987]), p. 14.

Chapter 9 The Depression communists

1 Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), ch. 3.

2 Harry Hartland in Wendy Lowenstein, Weevils in the Flour: An Oral Record of the 1930s Depression in Australia, rev. edn (Newham, Vic.: Scribe Publications, 1989), p. 47; Wray Vamplew (ed.), Australians: Historical Statistics (Sydney: Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, 1988), pp. 133, 152.

3 Les Barnes, recorded April–May 1991; Mona Frame (ed.), Wherever the Struggle: The Story of Carl King (Campbelltown, NSW: Sydney Branch of the ASSLH, 1991), pp. 14–16, and Carl King, interviewed by Ken Mansell, 5 May 1983 (ML).

4 Lila Thornton, quoted in Robert Murray and Kate White, The Ironworkers: A History of the Federated Ironworkers’ Association of Australia (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1982), p. 87, and interviewed by Ken Mansell, 3 May 1983 (ML); Joe Carter, interviewed by Laurie Aarons, 1986 (ML).

5 Bill McDougall, typescript, n.d., in possession of Laurie Aarons; Flo Davis quoted in Audrey Johnson, Bread and Roses: A Personal History of Three Militant Women and Their Friends 1902–1988 (Sutherland, NSW: Left Book Club, 1990), p. 109; Ted Bacon, interviewed by Laurie Aarons, n.d. (ML); Johnno Johnson, interviewed by Ken Mansell, 5 May 1983 (ML).

6 Workers’ Weekly, 14 February, 3 October 1930; Laurence W. Maher, ‘The Use and Abuse of Sedition’, 14, Sydney Law Review 287–316 (September 1992).

7 Argus, 4 January 1931, 22 October 1932; Justina Williams, The First Furrow (Willagee, WA: Lone Hand Press, 1996), pp. 100–01.

8 Argus, 10 May 1932; H. E. Jones to Secretary of Attorney-General’s Department (AA A981, item COM part 1); see also Frank Cain, The Origins of Political Surveillance in Australia (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1983), pp. 244–5, and Robert Haldane, The People’s Force: A History of the Victoria Police (Melbourne: MUP, 1986), p. 217. Peter Coleman, Obscenity, Blasphemy, Sedition: Censorship in Australia (Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, n.d. [1963]), pp. 112–13 notes that the Scullin government did restrict the scope of the prohibition of the importation of seditious literature.

9 132 CPD, pp. 334, 812, 1402 (30 September and 16, 30 October 1931).

10 See, for example, the seizure of a press at Kurri Kurri used to produce the Militant Miner, reported in Sydney Morning Herald, 3 March 1930; the conviction of two Melbourne men for printing leaflets, Argus, 31 March 1931; the confiscation of a press in Melbourne, Argus, 20 January 1932. The conviction of a party member in Sydney for distributing handbills produced on a roneo machine was set aside on appeal financed by the firms that sold such machines; Jollie Smith, ‘Notes on Cases for ICWPA’, n.d. [1932], Thorne papers (ANU P15/8).

11 Workers’ Weekly, 14 November–19 December 1930; Working Woman, December 1931; Sydney Morning Herald, 29 November 1930. Carole Ferrier (ed.), Point of Departure: The Autobiography of Jean Devanny (St Lucia, Qld: UQP, 1986), pp. 124–8, and Grace Peebles in Johnson, Bread and Roses, pp. 32–6 provide direct testimony.

12 Workers’ Weekly, 1 August 1930, 25 December 1931; Sydney Morning Herald, 30 August 1930, 17 December 1931; 132 CPD, pp. 923–64 (14 October 1931); Roger Milliss, Serpent’s Tooth: An Autobiographical Novel (Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin, 1984), pp. 76–8.

13 The preparations for armed force and sabotage were discussed in the closed session of the CC plenum, 2 January 1932 (AA A6335, item 31) and there is some corroborative evidence. The South Australian action was reported by the premier (Argus, 5 September 1931) and confirmed by Tony McGillick, Comrade No More: The Autobiography of a Former Communist Party Leader (West Perth: self-published, 1980), pp. 54–6.

14 ‘Comrade Ryan Realises Own Error’, Workers’ Weekly, 2 October 1931; though in an earlier article, ‘Plugger Gets Plugged’, 18 September, the paper had justified the action. See also the report of the assault on Martin in Sydney Morning Herald, 16 September 1931, and minutes of the PB, 26 September 1931, Comintern records (CI 95/94/70).

15 The WDC was preceded by a Labour Volunteer Army, formed in 1927 to protect pickets on the northern coalfields, and revived as the Labor Defence Army under the auspices of NSW Labor Council in January 1930. It was known briefly as the Workers’ Defence Army before assuming its standard name in mid-1930; Workers’ Weekly, 17, 24 January, 28 November 1930; Sydney Morning Herald, 20 January 1930; Sharkey to Lozovsky, n.d. [June 1930], (CI 534/7/5). The Investigation Branch claimed the WDC published its own bulletin, the Red Fist (AA A467, bundle 21, SF7/2), but I have not seen a copy.

16 Red Leader, 19 October, 26 April 1933. The depositions of those beaten in the Bankstown eviction incident are in the Thorne papers (ANU P15/8); Johnson, Bread and Roses, pp. 38–43 discusses the Irish section of the WDC, which also figures in the debate at the closed session of the CC plenum, 2 January 1932, as in note 13.

17 Argus, 10 March 1931; Sydney Morning Herald, 28 April 1931. See generally Michael Cathcart, Defending the National Tuckshop (Fitzroy, Vic.: McPhee Gribble, 1988), and Andrew Moore, The Secret Army and the Premier: Conservative Paramilitary Organisations in New South Wales 1930–32 (Kensington: NSWUP, 1989).

18 Eric Campbell, The Rallying Point: My Story of the New Guard (Melbourne: MUP, 1965); pp. 70, 107–8; editorial, Workers’ Weekly, 27 November 1931. See also the leaflet, ‘A Call to Action by the Workers’ Defence Corps’, dated 23 October 1931, Comintern records (CI 495/94/56).

19 Argus, 23–25 November 1931; Sydney Morning Herald, 13–17 November 1931.

20 Argus, 14–15 December 1931; Sydney Morning Herald, 28 November–16 December 1931; List of Names of Certain Communists in New South Wales, announced in the Legislative Assembly on 1 December and published as a separate parliamentary paper on 23 December 1931.

21 Workers’ Weekly, 4 March 1932, Sydney Sun, 27 February 1932; Keith Amos, The New Guard Movement 1931–1935 (Melbourne: MUP, 1976), pp. 70–1.

22 Workers’ Weekly, 25 March, 13 May, 1932 and AA A1931/8304; 134 CPD, 1140–2, 1156–76 (23 May 1932); see Geoffrey Sawer, Australian Federal Politics and Law 1929–1949 (Melbourne: MUP, 1963), pp. 55–7.

23 Workers’ Weekly, 9, 30 September 1932, 7, 14 April, 12, 26 May, 21 July 1933; Red Leader, 4 September 1931, 1 June, 10 August 1932, 10 May 1933; Sydney Morning Herald, 2 April, 25, 26 October 1934; Argus, 26 April, 29 September 1932; See Cain, The Origins of Political Surveillance, pp. 245–50; and Peter Morrison, The Communist Party of Australia and the Radical-Socialist Tradition, 1920–39, PhD thesis, University of Adelaide, 1976, pp. 334–41.

24 There is a large file of letters calling for a ban on communism (AA A1606, file B5/1) and Latham’s exasperated reply was to a persistent correspondent, H. C. Cropper (AA A432, item 1933/152). His pleas to the states were in 1933 (NLA MS 1009/53/73) and 1934 (AA A467, bundle 28SF10/15).

25 Workers’ Weekly, 24 June 1932, 3, 24 March, 7, 12 April, 26 May, 30 June, 4 August 1933; Noel Counihan in Wendy Lowenstein, Weevils in the Flour, pp. 390–6; Bernard Smith, Noel Counihan: Artist and Revolutionary (Melbourne: OUP, 1993), pp. 91–5; C. J. Fox, Unemployment and the Politics of the Unemployed: Victoria in the Great Depression 1930–37, PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 1984, pp. 565–87; Cecile Trioli, Unemployment and Local Resistance: The Free Speech Fights in Brunswick During the Depression Years 1930–33, BA Hons thesis, Deakin University, 1990.

26 Workers’ Weekly, 16 March, 31 August, 10 October 1934, 18 January 1935; Red Leader, 28 March, 11 July 1934, 16, 30 July 1935; Sydney Morning Herald, 26 February, 12 March 1934; Fascism in the Sydney Domain (Sydney: International Labour Defence, 1934); Ferrier (ed.), Point of Departure, p. 166.

27 CEC minutes, 4 May 1930, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 3).

28 Judah Waten, Time of Conflict (Sydney: ABS, 1961), pp. 166–7; Stan Moran in Lowenstein, Weevils in the Flour, p. 212; McGillick, Comrade No More, p. 49; Workers’ Weekly, 22 August 1930; report of Control Commission to ECCI, 8 January 1932, Comintern records (CI 495/94/94).

29 Ferrier (ed.) Point of Departure, pp. 134–5; Moxon to ‘Frank’, n.d., Comintern records (CI 495/94/94); Sydney Morning Herald, 30 June, 2 July 1931; Workers’ Weekly, 19 July 1931.

30 The vilification of Trotsky and the Left Opposition had begun in 1928. The allegations of sabotage and conspiracy began with ‘Soviet Arrests British Agents’ and ‘Counter Revolutionaries Sentenced in Moscow’, Workers’ Weekly, 7 November, 12 December 1930.

31 The story was given to me by Edna Ryan, personal communication, 23 June 1994, and he was identified as Detective Sergeant Whitlock by John Johnson, interviewed by Ken Mansell, 5 May 1983 (ML). Baker’s name first appeared in the Workers’ Weekly on 25 June 1926 and was removed on 25 October 1938. In 1936 Miles described him as the party’s ‘best routine worker’; CC minutes, 10–12 April 1936, [p. 224], CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 4).

32 ‘Political Letter of the ECCI’, Workers’ Weekly, 16 May 1930.

33 Workers’ Weekly, 31 January, 2 May 1930, 23 January, 12 June 1931; CEC circulars, 10, 18 March 1930, Comintern records (CI 495/94/61). The CEC minutes, 4 May 1930, record that Waten was convalescing from tuberculosis but in fact he went to England at the end of the year; see his application for readmission, 5 March 1957, Jack Hughes papers (ML), and Jack Beasley, Red Letter Days: Notes from Inside an Era (Sydney: ABS, 179), pp. 103–4.

34 Minutes of the PB, 13 May 1931, 22 July 1932, Comintern records (CI 95/94/70, 95); Shelley to ‘Comrades’, 6 August 1932, Comintern records (CI 534/7/8).

35 Minutes of the Third Plenum, 25–27 December 1932, p. 85 and minutes of the PB, 28 April 1933, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 3); Workers’ Weekly, 5 May 1933.

36 The passage from Stalin’s authoritative codification of communist doctrine, The Foundations of Leninism, was quoted in Workers’ Weekly, 10 March 1933. ‘Censure and Warning of Com. Kavanagh’, Workers’ Weekly, 6 June 1930; Sharkey in minutes of the Third Plenum, p. 59; Workers’ Weekly, 3 October 1930.

37 Miles in minutes of the Third Plenum, 25–27 December 1932, p. 21; ‘War and Illegality’, instructions issued by the CC, n.d., Rawling papers (ANU N57/384); and ECCI to CC of CPA, 22 October 1933, in ECCI letters, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 8). R. Cram described the techniques of conspiratorial work in ‘Organisational Questions’, Communist Review, vol. 1, no. 8 (November 1934).

38 Claude Jones recalling his elder brother, interviewed by Laurie Aarons, June 1980 (ML).

39 Transcript of interview with Roper by Rawling (ANU N57/291); Miles in minutes of the Fourth Plenum, 1–2 April 1934 [p. 94], CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 3).

40 Workers’ Weekly, 4 March 1932; Miles in minutes of the Third Plenum, p. 63, as in note 35.

41 Minutes of the Tenth Congress of the CPA, April 1931, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 1); Tripp told J. N. Rawling of his knowledge of Moore in an interview in 1961, Rawling papers (ANU N57/109).

42 E. H. Carr, The Twilight of the Comintern 1930–1935 (London: Macmillan, 1982), ch. 2; Workers’ Weekly, 20, 27 November, 11, 25 December 1931.

43 Moore to organisation department CEC, 7 June 1930, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 3); Workers’ Weekly, 15, 22 April, 30 September 1932; W. Orr to Anglo–American Bureau of ECCI, 20 June 1932, Comintern records (CI 495/94/94). Higgins’s boast is quoted in Ralph Gibson, The People Stand Up (Ascot Vale, Vic.: Red Rooster Press, 1983), p. 53.

44 Argus, 8 November 1932; Gibson, The People Stand Up, pp. 50, 56–7.

45 Workers’ Weekly, 22 July, 5 August, 21 October, 4, 11 November 1932; minutes and correspondence of Number 4 District, 1932 in file marked ‘Melbourne documents’ and additional material in state correspondence and reports 1932–40, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, boxes 4, 5).

46 ‘Political Statement of No. 4 District to the ECCI and Party Plenum 1932’, and minutes of the meeting of the district committee, 8 January 1933, in Melbourne documents and also Comintern records (CI 495/94/109); Waten, Time of Conflict, pp. 176–8.

47 Minutes of the Third Plenum, as in note 35; Workers’ Weekly, 13, 20 January 1933.

48 ‘Weaknesses and Mistakes of Our Party’, Workers’ Weekly, 1 April 1932.

49 Workers’ Weekly, 2 December 1932, 14 April, 5 May 1933; minutes of the PB, 14 January 1933, Comintern records (CI 95/94/105); ‘Editorial’, Militant, 1 October 1933; Susannah Short, Laurie Short: A Political Life (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992), chs 2–3.

50 Workers’ Weekly, 6, 13, 20 July 1934 for the expulsions of Tripp and Kavanagh; Kavanagh subsequently joined the Workers’ Party. There are frequent reports in the Communist Party press of fights between Melbourne communists and Lovegrove; Red Star, 26 August 1932, 13 February 1935 and transcript of interview with Foxley, 28 October 1970, Battye Library (PR 6361/2).

51 Workers’ Weekly, 18 August, 1 September 1933.

52 A. J. Baker, Anderson’s Social Philosophy: The Social Thought and Political Life of Professor John Anderson (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1979), pp. 79–100; Brian Kennedy, A Passion to Oppose: John Anderson, Philosopher (Melbourne: MUP, 1995), ch. 6; Workers’ Weekly, 6 December 1929.

53 ‘The Working Class’, Proletariat, vol. 1, no. 1 (April 1932); ‘Freedom and the Class Struggle’, Proletariat, vol. 1, no. 2 (July 1932); Miles in Workers’ Weekly, 29 April 1932, and Anderson’s reply, 20 May 1932, followed by further criticism in subsequent issues. The suppression of Anderson’s third article is related by one of the Workers’ Weekly editors, Alwyn Lee, in a letter to J. N. Rawling, 1 January 1962, Rawling papers (ANU N57/90) and it appeared as Censorship in the Working-Class Movement (Sydney: Sydney University Freethought Society, n.d. [November 1932]). Kavanagh’s comment on the typescript is in Rawling papers (ANU N57/206) and the party condemnation in Workers’ Weekly, 11, 25 November 1932. Baker and Kennedy, ibid., summarise his contributions to the Militant.

54 Ralph Gibson discusses the Labour Club in The People Stand Up, pp. 45–6; Workers’ Weekly, 27 May 1932, for Baracchi; Miles in minutes of the Third Plenum, p. 69, as in note 35.

55 Argus, 3, 4 May 1932, and The University Riots (Melbourne: Workers’ Art Club, n.d. [1932]); Sydney Morning Herald, 8 November 1932.

56 John Sendy, Ralph Gibson: An Extraordinary Communist (Melbourne: Ralph Gibson Biography Committee, 1988), p. 48, and letters from Gibson to his mother during 1931, Gibson papers (NLA MS 7844, box 1, folder 1).

57 O’Day’s article, ‘Why I Am a Communist’, first appeared in Smith’s Weekly, and was republished in Workers’ Weekly, 12 February 1932 and then as a pamphlet, The Dr Who Tells, Rawling papers (ANU N57/414). His arrest and trial were reported in Argus, 8 November, 3 December 1932, the criticism in Workers’ Weekly, 9 December 1932, and the self-criticism in minutes of the Third Plenum, pp. 171–2, as in note 35.

58 The appraisals of Gibson come from PB minutes, 14 January, 24 February, 13 May 1933.

59 ‘Statement on the ‘‘Lesser Evil Theory’’ by Paterson, 1932’ (AA A8911, item 158), quoted in Ross Fitzgerald, The People’s Champion: Fred Paterson (St Lucia, Qld: UQP, 1997), pp. 63–71; see also Fred Paterson: A Personal History (Brisbane: Labour History Society, 1994).

60 Workers’ Weekly, 12 August, 2 September 1932, 10 March 1933; letter from DC, District 3 to CC, 13 April 1933; minutes of the Fourth Plenum, [p. 81], as in note 39. Miles gave a lengthy account of his arguments with Paterson to the CC, 22–23 February 1935, [pp. 145–6], CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 15).

61 Guido Baracchi, interviewed by David Walker in Overland, no. 97 (December 1984), p. 20; Jess Grant in Joyce Stevens (ed.), Taking the Revolution Home: Work Among Women in the Communist Party of Australia 1920–1945 (Fitzroy, Vic.: Sybylla Press, 1987), p. 172; Claude Jones, interviewed by John Sendy, n.d., in possession of John Sendy.

62 Moxon and Lindsay Mountjoy in minutes of the Tenth Congress of the CPA, April 1931, as in note 41; further information from minutes of the closed session of the CC Plenum, 2 January 1932, and interview with Sid Foxley, 28 October 1970, as in note 50.

63 The UWM organiser was Tom Payne, who rejoined the CPA in 1931; in Lowenstein, Weevils in the Flour, p. 215.

64 Nelson in minutes of the Tenth Congress of the CPA, April 1931, as in note 41; A. F. Howells, Against the Stream: The Memories of a Philosophical Anarchist 1927–1939 (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1983), p. 35; Frank Hardy, ‘They Eat Their Babies in Russia’, in The Loser Now Will Be Later To Win (Carlton, Vic.: Pascoe Publishing, 1985), pp. 54–81. Snowy Hall appears in George Bliss’s account in Len Fox (ed.), Depression Down Under, 2nd edn (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1989), pp. 85–92, as Snowy Paul, though in Red Leader, 16 November 1932, he is James Hill.

65 Miles in minutes of the Third Plenum, pp. 18–19, as in note 35; Dixon in minutes of the CC, 22–23 February 1935, [p. 54], CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 3).

66 Perry Anderson, ‘Communist Party History’, in Raphael Samuel (ed.), People’s History and Socialist Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 145–56.

67 Frank Huelin in Lowenstein, Weevils in the Flour, p. 385; see also his Keep Moving: An Odyssey (Sydney: ABS, 1973).

68 Ferrier (ed.), Point of Departure, pp. 129, 174.

Chapter 10 Towards the united front

1 E. H. Carr, The Twilight of the Comintern, 1930–1935 (London: Macmillan, 1982).

2 Moore in minutes of the Tenth Congress of the CPA, [p. 7], CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 1); Miles in minutes of the Third Plenum, 25–27 December 1932, pp. 22–3, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 3). The main resolution of the plenum was formulated at Anglo–American Bureau meetings in October 1932, Comintern records (CI 495/3/338).

3 ‘For Unity in Struggle Against Capitalist Offensive and Fascism’, Workers’ Weekly, 21 April 1933.

4 Minutes of the PB, 14 March 1933, Comintern records (CI 95/94/105); ‘For the Correct Application of the Line of the Comintern’, and ‘Some Mistakes Which Must Be Overcome’, Workers’ Weekly, 28 April, 12 May 1933.

5 Carr, The Twilight of the Comintern, ch. 6; minutes of the Fourth Plenum, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 3) and resolution ‘On the Present Situation in Australia and the Tasks of the Party’, Workers’ Weekly 20 April 1934; minutes of the CC, 1 July 1934 [p. 104], CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 3).

6 Minutes of the CC, 20–23 October 1934, [pp. 5, 49] as in note 5; ‘For Unity of Action of the Working Class’ and ‘Why the United Front With the ALP?’, Workers’ Weekly, 2, 23 November 1934.

7 Letter from State Executive of the Victorian ALP to District Committee CPA, 10 April 1935, Rawling papers (ANU N57/396). Minutes of the CC, 22–23 February 1935, [pp. 8, 131–2, 147], 1–3 June 1935, [p. 151], as in note 5.

8 G. Dimitrov, The Working Class Against Fascism (Sydney: Modern Publishers 1935); ‘Report of L. Sharkey on 7th World Congress CI’, p. 5, in minutes of the Eleventh Congress of the CPA, 27–31 December 1935, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 1).

9 Minutes of the CC, 1–3 June, [p. 10], 21–22 September 1935, as in note 5, and minutes of special meeting of the CC, 16 November 1935, (file marked J. Loughran 1935) CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 28).

10 Miles in minutes of the CC, 22–23 February 1935, [p. 145], as in note 5. Paterson had launched the earlier campaign for a united front at a meeting in the Sydney Domain reported in Workers’ Weekly, 5 October 1934.

11 Jim Comerford, quoted in Andrew Metcalfe, For Freedom and Dignity: Historical Agency and Class Structures in the Coalfields of NSW (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988), p. 111.

12 Minutes of the Anglo–American Bureau, and resolution on ‘The Situation and Tasks of the MM in Australia’ 15 October 1932, Comintern records (CI 495/72/148); minutes of the PB, 23 September, 5 November 1932.

13 These are among the work bulletins listed in Beverley Symons, Communism in Australia: A Resource Bibliography (Canberra: NLA, 1994), part 2. The Noel Butlin Archives of Business and Labour at the ANU holds the fullest collection, but many more are scattered in other repositories. A large sample was sent to Moscow, Comintern records (CI 495/94/61, 75, 100, 108).

14 Brian Costar, ‘Two Depression Strikes, 1931’, in D. J. Murphy (ed.), The Big Strikes: Queensland 1889–1965 (St Lucia, Qld: UQP, 1983), pp. 186–201.

15 ‘For Mass United Struggle Against Capital’, Red Leader, 19 April 1933.

16 For the mechanism of party control, see J. B. Miles to Number 3 District Committee, 4 October 1933, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 5); minutes of the National Congress of the MM, 24 December 1933, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 16), and minutes of the Fourth Plenum, pp. 4c, [138], as in note 5. See also the criticism of ‘The Plenum of the CC of the Communist Party of Australia’, Inprecorr, no. 30, 7 July 1933, pp. 670–1.

17 Minutes of the CC, 20–23, October 1934 [pp. 7–8, 22–3]; February 1935 [p. 73]; 30 June–1 July 1934 [p. 168], as in note 5; ECCI to CPA, 23 November 1934, Comintern records (CI 495/3/427).

18 Robin Gollan, The Coalminers of New South Wales: A History of the Union 1860–1960 (Melbourne: MUP, 1963), ch. 10; Edgar Ross, A History of the Miners’ Federation of Australia (Sydney: Australasian Coal and Shale Employees’ Federation, 1970), ch. 14. Voting figures in Red Leader, 3 January 1934.

19 Red Leader, 7, 14 February, 21 March, 30 May, 25 July, 1 August 1934; Workers’ Voice, 22 June, 27 July 1934; see Peter Cochrane, ‘The Wonthaggi Coal Strike, 1934’, Labour History, no. 27 (November 1974), pp. 12–30, and Andrew Reeves, Industrial Men: Miners and Politics in Wonthaggi, 1909–68, MA thesis, La Trobe University, 1977, ch. 2. The union election results are reported in Red Leader, 11 July 1934, and the MM membership figures are in minutes of the Fourth Plenum of the CC, 1–2 April 1934, [p. 118], and minutes of the CC, 30 June–1 July 1934 [pp. 25, 70], as in note 5.

20 Workers’ Weekly, 6 September 1935; Ross quoted in Mark Hearn, Working Lives: A History of the Australian Railways Union (NSW Branch) (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1990), p. 52; see also Stephen Holt, A Veritable Dynamo: Lloyd Ross and Australian Labour 1901–1987 (St Lucia, Qld: UQP, 1996), chs 3–5.

21 Evidence of inability to make progress in the maritime and pastoral industries was presented, for example, in the minutes of the Fourth Plenum [pp. 33, 76–7, 88, 140], as in note 5; see also Rupert Lockwood, Ship to Shore: A History of Melbourne’s Waterfront and its Union Struggles (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1990), part 6; Brian Fitzpatrick and Rowan Cahill, The Seamen’s Union of Australia 1872–1972: A History (Sydney: SUA, 1981), chs 10–11; L. J. Louis, ‘Recovery from the Depression and the Seamen’s Strike of 1935–6’, Labour History, no. 41 (November 1981), pp. 74–86, and A. E. Davies, The Meat Workers Unite (Melbourne: AMIEU (Victorian branch), 1974), pp. 78–115.

22 J. A. Merritt, ‘’The Federated Ironworkers’ Association in the Depression’, Labour History, no. 21 (November 1971), pp. 48–61; the member is quoted in Robert Murray and Kate White, The Ironworkers: A History of the Federated Ironworkers’ Association of Australia (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1982), p. 70.

23 Dixon in Workers’ Weekly, 23 February 1934, and ‘Problems of Militant Trade Unionism’, Communist Review, vol. 1, no. 5 (August 1934), p. 16; Orr in minutes of the CC, 30 June–1 July 1934, p. 28; Miles and Dixon in minutes of the CC, 22–23 February 1935 [pp. 6–9, 37], as in note 5.

24 ibid. [pp. 53, 83, 95] and minutes of the Eleventh Congress of the CPA [p. 175], as in note 8.

25 Nina Fishman, The British Communist Party and the Trade Unions, 1933–45 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996).

26 Red Leader, 14, 21 March, 18 April, 29 August, 5 September 1934; Workers’ Weekly, 6 April, 2, 30 November 1934, and Dixon in minutes of the CC, 22–23 February 1935 [p. 35], as in note 5. See Diane Menghetti, The Red North: The Popular Front in North Queensland (Townsville: History Department, James Cook University of North Queensland, 1981), chs 2–3; ‘The Weil’s Disease Strike 1935’, in Murphy (ed.), The Big Strikes, pp. 202–16, and Beris Penrose, The Communist Party and Trade Union Work in Queensland in the Third Period: 1928–35, PhD thesis, University of Queensland, 1993, ch. 7.

27 Red Leader and Workers’ Weekly, June–December 1935 passim; Jean Devanny, Sugar Heaven (Sydney: Modern Publishers, 1936) and a new edition with an introduction by Carole Ferrier (Flemington, Vic.: Redback Press, 1982).

28 Henry in minutes of the Eleventh Congress of the CPA [p. 237], as in note 8; King in Mona Frame (ed.), Wherever the Struggle: The Story of Carl King (Campbelltown, NSW: Sydney Branch of the ASSLH, 1991), p. 19; CC resolution ‘on tasks of the party in the sugar industry’, 14 January 1936, state correspondence and reports, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 5).

29 The approach of the PWIU is reported in minutes of the Eleventh Congress [p. 210], as in note 8.

30 See, for example, Alastair Davidson, The Communist Party: A Short History (Stanford, California: Hoover Institution Press, 1969), ch. 3; Robin Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists: Communism and the Australian Labour Movement 1920–1950, new edn (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1985), ch. 2.

31 Miles in minutes of the Eleventh Congress [p. 181], as in note 8; R. Cram, ‘The Increased Vote in Hartley’, Communist Review, vol. 2, no. 6 (June 1935), pp. 51–5; Hills quoted by Les Barnes, recorded April–May 1991, and see Wendy Lowenstein and Tom Hills, Under the Hook: Melbourne Waterside Workers Remember Working Lives and Class War 1900–1980 (Prahran, Vic.: Melbourne Bookworkers, 1982), pp. 67–82.

32 Eleanor Dark, Waterway (Sydney: F. H. Johnston, 1938).

33 Women in Australia: From Factory, Farm (Sydney: Central Committee Women’s Department, n.d. [1932]); Working Woman, January 1932; Kollontai’s work had been published in 1920 by Andrade’s Bookshop.

34 For the organisation of the Women’s Department, see the report to the Women’s Department of ECCI, 15 July 1931, Comintern records (CI 495/94/72); and for a frank appraisal of its record, Hetty Weitzel in minutes of the CC, 1–3 June 1935 [p. 143], as in note 5. See Joyce Stevens (ed.), Taking the Revolution Home: Work Among Women in the Communist Party of Australia 1920–1945 (Fitzroy, Vic.: Sybylla Press, 1987), ch. 1.

35 Thompson in minutes of the Fourth Plenum, 1–2 April 1934 [pp. 160–6], as in note 5; Red Leader, 14 February 1934; Working Woman, September 1932; Raelene Frances, The Politics of Work: Gender and Labour in Victoria, 1880–1939 (Melbourne: CUP, 1993), pp. 144–6 discusses a similar dispute of women garment workers in 1935.

36 ‘The Communist in the Home’, Workers’ Voice, 23 November 1934.

37 Clara Zetkin, ‘Lenin on the Woman Question’, Communist Review, vol. 2, no. 3 (March 1935), pp. 14–24; CC to All Districts, 27 March 1935, CC circulars and statements 1933–41, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 5); Miles in minutes of the Eleventh Congress [p. 182], as in note 8; Ryan in Stevens (ed.), Taking the Revolution Home, pp. 124–6; Carole Ferrier (ed.), Point of Departure: The Autobiography of Jean Devanny (St Lucia, Qld: UQP, 1986), pp. 153–4, 157–8, 169–71.

38 Ray Sutton, Labour Movement Youth Organisation and Policy in Eastern Australia, c.1918–c.1939, PhD thesis, ANU, 1990, esp. chs 3–5.

39 Letter from L. Aarons and Beryl Glendinning to ‘Cde Newman’, 5 June 1931 (AA A467, bundle 94, SF 42/64); ‘Baden-Powell’, Workers’ Weekly, 23 January 1931; ‘Build the Young Communist League’, Workers’ Weekly, 9 March 1934; Audrey Blake, A Proletarian Life (Malmsbury, Vic.: Kibble Books, 1984), pp. 91–2. Reports to the Youth Department of the ECCI are in Comintern records (CI 533/10/1).

40 Miles in minutes of the CC, 22–24 February 1935 [p, 14], as in note 5, and reports by representatives of the YCL to plenums; Sharkey in Workers’ Weekly, 6 December 1935; Harry Torr, A Better League of Youth’, Communist Review, vol. 3, no. 3 (March 1936), pp. 43–8.

41 Workers’ Weekly, 25 September 1931.

42 See especially Moxon, ‘Hands off the Aborigines’, Red Leader 25 September 1931, various articles by Jeffery in the Workers’ Weekly earlier in 1931, and a letter from Sawtell to Workers’ Weekly, supporting Moxon, as well as his encomium to anthropology in Red Leader, 20 June 1934. Wright’s involvement is described by Mary Wright in Audrey Johnson, Bread and Roses: A Personal History of Three Militant Women and Their Friends 1902–1988 (Sutherland, NSW: Left Book Club, 1990), pp. 130–1. I have also drawn on an unpublished paper by Bob Boughton and on information about Sawtell provided by Verity Burgmann.

43 The Aboriginal politics are discussed in Heather Goodall, Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770–1972 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996), and Wright’s influence is noted in Raymond Markey, In Case of Oppression: The Life and Times of the Labor Council of New South Wales (Sydney: Pluto Press, 1994), pp. 264–5; report of the Western Australian organiser in minutes of the Fourth Plenum [p. 172], as in note 5; Workers’ Weekly, 4 May, 8, 15 June 3 August 1934; Red Leader, 20 June, 4 July, 15 August 1934. See Andrew Markus, ‘Talka Longa Mouth’, in Ann Curthoys and Andrew Markus (eds), Who Are Our Enemies? Racism and the Australian Working Class (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1978), pp. 138–57.

44 Jack Blake, interviewed by Laurie Aarons, August 1979, and information given to me, July 1997; Gianfranco Cresciani, Fascism, Anti-Fascism and Italians in Australia, 1922–1945 (Canberra: ANUP, 1980), chs 5–6; Stelios Kourbetis, Ethnicity Versus Class? A Study of Greek Radicals in Australia 1920–89, MA thesis, La Trobe University, 1990, ch. 3; David Rechter, Beyond the Pale: Jewish Communism in Melbourne, MA thesis, University of Melbourne, 1986, ch. 3.

45 The memoirs are in the possession of Amirah Inglis, who kindly allowed me to read them.

46 Justina Williams, The First Furrow (Willagee, WA: Lone Hand Press, 1976), pp. 143–7; Ted Docker and Rolf Gerritsen, ‘The 1934 Kalgoorlie Riots’, Labour History, no. 31 (November 1976), pp. 79–82.

47 Chapman in report of the congress, Workers’ Weekly, 6 October 1933, Red Leader, 4, 11 October 1933.

48 Eric Marshall, It Pays to Be White (Sydney: Alpha Books, 1973), p. 65; J. N. Rawling, Communism Comes to Australia, pp. 425–8, Rawling papers (ANU N57/1). Rawling was national secretary of the MAWF and his papers contain a substantial documentary record.

49 Burgmann to Rawling, 13 September 1934, Rawling papers (ANU N57/225); Rawling criticised Burgmann in War! What For?, vol. 1, no. 10 (January 1935), p. 168.

50 Workers’ Weekly, 19 October 1934–1 March 1935; Workers’ Voice, 5 October 1934. L. J. Louis, ‘Victorian Council Against War and Fascism: A Rejoinder’, Labour History, no. 44 (May 1983), pp. 39–54 is the fullest account and employs the Investigation Branch records; see also Egon Kisch, Australian Landfall (London: Secker & Waburg, 1937), and Julian Smith [T. M. Fitzgerald], On the Pacific Front: The Adventures of Egon Kisch in Australia (Sydney: Australian Book Services, 1936).

51 Workers’ Voice, 16, 23 November 1934; A. F. Howells, Against the Stream: The Memories of a Philosophical Anarchist 1927–1939 (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1983), p. 76 and chs 6–8 passim. See also Carolyn Rasmussen, The Lesser Evil? Opposition to Fascism and War in Australia 1920–1941 (Melbourne: History Department, University of Melbourne, 1992), chs 3–5. There is a large file of protests against the government’s treatment of Kisch (AA A981, file COM 37).

52 Ralph Gibson, One Woman’s Life: A Memoir of Dorothy Gibson (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1980), p. 41, quotes Alexander on this challenge, and Len Fox, Broad Left, Narrow Left (Chippendale: APCOL, 1982), p. 20 also discusses it.

53 Minutes of the CC, 21–22 September, [pp. 4, 60], as in note 5, for Rawling. The allegations about CC preference for compromise were published subsequently, Militant, n.s. vol. 1, nos 1–2 (September, October 1938), and disputed at the time by Miles in a circular, 4 March 1935 (CC circulars and statements 1933–41), as in note 37, and minutes of the CC, 1–3 June 1935 [p. 4]. The extent of party control of the MAWF is argued in Ken Slater, ‘Egon Kisch: A Biographical Outline’, Labour History, no. 36 (May 1979), pp. 94–103; David Rose, ‘The Movement Against War and Fascism’, Labour History, no. 38 (May 1980), pp. 76–90; Len Fox, ‘The Movement Against War and Fascism: A View from Inside’, Labour History, no. 39 (November 1980), pp. 78–82; and Louis, ‘The Victorian Council Against War and Fascism: A Rejoinder’. See also Alastair Davidson, The Communist Party of Australia 1920–35: Policy and Organisation, PhD thesis, ANU, 1966, pp. 393–425.

54 Major-General J. H. Bruche to minister for defence, 19 November 1934 (AA A467, SF7/2); Civil Security Intelligence, no. 68 (31 May 1935), 84 (31 October 1936) (AA A8911, file 159). It is clear that the leaders of the CPGB, for example, were kept ignorant of members’ espionage activities; Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990); Francis Beckett, Enemy Within: The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party (London: John Murray, 1995), ch. 5.

55 Strife, vol. 1, no. 1 (13 October 1930), quoted in Charles Merewether, ‘Social Realism: The Formative Years’, Arena, no. 46 (1977), pp. 65–80. See also David Carter, Realism as a Contemporary Response to the Modern: Left-Wing Cultural Attitudes and the Concept of Modernity in Australia, 1930–65, MA thesis, University of Melbourne, 1982, ch. 1; Julie Wells, Integrating Literary and Political Activity: Katharine Susannah Prichard, Jean Devanny and Communist Writers During the 1930s, PhD thesis, Monash University, 1994, ch. 2, and Bernard Smith, Noel Counihan: Artist and Revolutionary (Melbourne: OUP, 1993), ch. 4. The banners are identified in Red Leader, 11 May 1932, and appear on the dustjacket of Judah Waten, Scenes of Revolutionary Life (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1982).

56 Smith, Noel Counihan, p 80; for Finey, Workers’ Weekly, 11 November 1932, and Ferrier (ed.), Point of Departure, pp. 160–4.

57 The argument over workers’ theatre ran in Red Leader from 12 April to 16 August 1933, and Orr spoke in support of Devanny at the PB, 13 May 1933. Devanny’s contribution appeared in Red Leader on 24 May 1933, and her unrepentant statement on 14 February 1934.

58 ‘Notes of the Month’, Strife, vol. 1, no. 1, p. 7; Workers’ Art, vol. 1, no. 1 (April 1933), pp. 8, 17.

59 Workers’ Weekly, 7 September 1934, 19 April 1935; Red Leader, 12 December 1934; Len Donald in minutes of the CC, 20–23 October 1934 [p. 30], as in note 5; see Peter Coleman, Obscenity, Blasphemy, Sedition: Censorship in Australia (Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, n.d. [1963]), pp. 115–18.

60 M. I. Kalinin, ‘On Communist Education’, quoted in Ralph Gibson, The People Stand Up, p. 56.

61 Statistics from Workers’ Weekly, 15 June 1934, 5 July 1935; minutes of the CC, 1–3 June 1935, [pp. 110–13], as in note 5; Len Donald, ‘Forward to a Mass Bolshevik Party’, Communist Review, vol. 2, no. 4 (April 1935), pp. 46–51; minutes of the Eleventh Congress [p. 196], as in note 8.

62 Colin A. Hughes and B. D. Graham, A Handbook of Australian Government and Politics 1890–1964 (Canberra: ANUP, 1968); minutes of the CC, 20–23 October 1934, [p. 12], as in note 5.

63 Minutes of the Fourth Plenum, 1–3 April 1934 [p. 132], as in note 5; minutes of the Eleventh Congress [p. 215], as in note 8.

64 The Sydney Morning Herald, 13 February 1934, reported the move of the party headquarters; John Sendy, Melbourne’s Radical Bookshops: History, People, Appreciation (Melbourne: International Bookshop, 1983), chs 9–11 discusses party shops in that city.

65 Memoirs of Itzhak Gust in possession of Amirah Inglis; John Sendy, Melbourne’s Radical Bookshops, pp. 102–3.

66 There is a report on the Sydney newspaper press in minutes of the Eleventh Congress [p. 197], as in note 8 and Gil Roper, who worked on it, published allegations of mismanagement in Militant, 24 January 1938.

67 Inprecorr, no. 30, 7 July 1933, pp. 670–1, discussed in minutes of the PB, 7 September, 6 October 1933, Comintern records (CI 495/94/106), and ECCI to CPA, 23 November 1934, Comintern records (CI 495/3/427); Miles in minutes of the Fourth Plenum [p. 92], and CC, 22–24 February 1935, [p. 11], as in note 5.

68 Blake, interviewed by Laurie Aarons (ML); he changed his name by deed poll to John David Blake in August 1934.

69 ibid.; notebooks from the Lenin School are in the papers of Ted Tripp (UMA) and Richard Dixon (NLA); Alf Watt, Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the Communist Movement in Australia (Surry Hills, NSW: SPA, n.d. [1987]), p. 14 describes the Sydney training.

70 Dixon in minutes of the CC, 30 June–1 July 1934 [p. 115], as in note 5; the analogy of the fire brigade was first used by the head of the Comintern Organisation Bureau, Ossip Piatnitsky, and used at the same CC meeting [p. 15]; Gibson, The People Stand Up, p. 38 makes the observation about the ‘fossilised bureaucrats and chatterers’, and the occasion was the Fourth Plenum.

71 Blake, interviewed by Laurie Aarons (ML).

72 Minutes of the CC, 22–23 February 1935 [pp. 16–17], as in note 5.

73 Workers’ Weekly, 21 November 1931, quoted in L. J. Louis, Trade Unions and the Depression: A Study of Victoria 1930–1932 (Canberra: ANUP, 1968), p. 35; minutes of the CC, 21–2 September 1935 [p. 107].

74 Agenda and draft resolutions for the Eleventh Congress, Rawling papers (ANU N57/398); minutes of the Eleventh Congress, pp. 3–4, as in note 8.

Chapter 11 Communism by fronts

1 Ralph Gibson, One Woman’s Life: A Memoir of Dorothy Gibson (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1980), p. 40; Audrey Blake, A Proletarian Life (Malmsbury, Vic.: Kibble Books, 1984), p. 104; Len Fox, Broad Left, Narrow Left (Chippendale, NSW: APCOL, 1982), pp. 18, 35, chs 7, 16.

2 ‘The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International’, main address to the Seventh Congress, in George Dimitrov, Against Fascism and War (New York: International Publishers, 1936), p. 4.

3 ‘History and Illusion’, New Left Review, no. 220 (November–December 1996), pp. 117–18.

4 CC to all Districts, 4 October 1935, CC circulars and statements 1933–42, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 5); Richard Dixon, Peace or War?: The Case for Sanctions Explained (Sydney: CPA, n.d. [October 1935]).

5 ACTU Congress minutes, 1935, in Jim Hagan (ed.), Australian Trade Unionism in Documents (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1986), p. 112; see also CC circular, 6 December 1935, as in note 4; E. M. Andrews, Isolation and Appeasement in Australia: Reactions to the European Crises, 1935–1939 (Canberra: ANUP, 1970), ch. 2; Stephen Holt, A Veritable Dynamo: Lloyd Ross and Australian Labour 1901–1987 (St Lucia, Qld: UQP, 1996), pp. 48–50.

6 Workers’ Voice, 22 November 1935, quoted in Susan Blackburn, Maurice Blackburn and the Australian Labor Party 1934–1943 (Canberra: ASSLH, 1969), p. 15.

7 Argus, 3 April 1936. See minutes of the CC, 10–12 April 1936 [pp. 130–3, 149], CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 4); J. D. Blake, ‘The Fight for Unity Against War in Victoria’, Communist Review, vol. 2, no. 11 (November 1935), pp. 19–26, and L. Donald, ‘For the Unity of the Labor Movement in Victoria’, Communist Review, vol. 3, no. 4 (April 1936), pp. 1–6; Ralph Gibson, The People Stand Up (Ascot Vale, Vic.: Red Rooster Press, 1983), pp. 151–3; L. J. Louis, ‘Victorian Council Against War and Fascism: A Rejoinder’, Labour History, no. 44 (May 1983), pp. 39–54.

8 Kate White, John Cain and Victorian Labor 1917–1957 (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1983), ch. 4; Carolyn Rasmussen, ‘Challenging the Centre—the Coburg ALP Branch in the 1930s’, Labour History, no. 54 (May 1988), pp. 47–63; minutes of the CC, 10–12 April 1936 [pp. 114–20], as in note 7.

9 Minutes of enlarged PB Meeting, 21 March 1936, CC minutes 1936–40, as in note 7; Workers’ Weekly, 28 April 1936 et seq. See Murray Goot, ‘Radio LANG’, in Heather Radi and Peter Spearritt (eds), Jack Lang (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1977), pp. 119–37; Bede Nairn, The ‘Big Fella’: Jack Lang and the Australian Labor Party 1891–1949 (Melbourne: MUP, 1986), ch. 13; Jim Hagan and Ken Turner, A History of the Labor Party in New South Wales 1891–1991 (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1991), pp. 88–94.

10 ‘The United Front in South Australia’, Communist Review, vol. 3, no. 6 (June 1936), pp. 54–8.

11 IPC records (UMA), and Carolyn Rasmussen, The Lesser Evil: Opposition to War and Fascism in Australia 1920–1941 (Melbourne: History Department, University of Melbourne, 1992), chs 5–7. Sharkey noted the shift from the MAWAF to the IPC in minutes of the CC, 20–2 November 1936 [p. 108], as in note 7.

12 Quoted in Ralph Gibson, My Years in the Communist Party (Melbourne: International Bookshop, 1966), p. 58.

13 Sam Aarons, quoted in Amirah Inglis, Australians in the Spanish Civil War (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987), p. 118.

14 The problems of recruitment were discussed in a CC circular, 7 January 1938, as in note 4.

15 Geoffrey Cox, Defence of Madrid (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937) on Barry; Jim McNeill, ‘Man of Humour and Kindness’, in Len Fox (ed.), Depression Down Under, 2nd edn (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1989), pp. 68–74 on Dickinson; Walters in Workers’ Weekly, 8 February 1938; Riley quoted in Inglis, Australians in the Spanish Civil War, p 117; Lloyd Edmonds, Letters from Spain, ed. Amirah Inglis (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1985); for Hurd, Stuart Macintyre, Militant: The Life and Times of Paddy Troy (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1984); Prichard in Workers’ Weekly, 28 January 1938 on Stevens. See generally Inglis, Australians in the Spanish Civil War, chs 6–7; Nettie Palmer and Len Fox, Australians in Spain, 2nd edn (Sydney: Current Book Distributors, 1948).

16 Workers’ Weekly, 14 May, 6 July 1937; CC to district committees, 20 October 1936, as in note 4; on Hodgson, Judith Keene, The Last Mile to Huesca: An Australian Nurse in the Spanish Civil War (Kensington, NSW: NSWUP, 1988); Aileen Palmer quoted in Inglis, Australians in the Spanish Civil War, p. 126, and Judith Keene, ‘A Spanish Springtime: Aileen Palmer and the Spanish Civil War’, Labour History, no. 52 (May 1987), p. 85. The detailed dossiers of the Australian volunteers in Comintern records (CI 545/6/67) pay considerable attention to political reliability.

17 Alan Moorehead, A Late Education: Episodes in a Life (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1980); Fisher in ADB, vol. 14, p. 172; Rowan Cahill, Rupert Lockwood and the Spooks, unpublished paper presented to Espionage and Counter-Espionage conference, University of Western Sydney, 12 October 1996.

18 Keene, ‘A Spanish Springtime’; Ken Coldicutt, ‘The Party, Films and I’, in Sixty Years of Struggle, vol. 2 (Sydney: Red Pen Publications, n.d. [1982]), pp. 61–4; Crawford’s account of his interest in Spain appears in Old Bebb’s Store and Other Poems, edited by Stuart Macintyre (Melbourne: History Department, University of Melbourne, 1992), pp. 1–22.

19 Lyons, 151 CPD, pp. 56–7 (11 September 1936), quoted in Andrews, Isolation and Appeasement, p. 93; Atheistic Communism: The Encyclical ‘Divini Redemptoris’ (Melbourne: Australian Catholic Truth Society, 1937), and Patrick O’Farrell, The Catholic Church and Community in Australia, rev. edn (Melbourne: Nelson, 1977), pp. 389–90; Gilroy in Freeman’s Journal, 9 March 1939, quoted in Keene, Last Mile to Huesca, p. 58.

20 The fullest account of the Melbourne debate is in Inglis, Australians in the Spanish Civil War, pp. 95–9; for the Adelaide meeting, see the Adelaide Advertiser, 6–11 May 1937, Workers’ Weekly, 11 May 1937.

21 B. A. Santamaria, Against the Tide (Melbourne: OUP, 1981), p. 35; see Colin H. Jory, The Campion Society and Catholic Social Militancy in Australia (Sydney: Harpham, 1986).

22 Les Barnes, recorded April–May 1991; Thornton in minutes of the CC, 10–12 April 1936; Lithgow report in minutes of CC, 20–22 November 1936, [p. 79], as in note 7.

23 L. Harry Gould, ‘Clergymen and Communism’, Communist Review, vol. 4, no. 6 (June 1937), pp. 51–5; Burgmann reported in Workers’ Weekly, 2 June 1936, and Peter Hempenstall, The Meddlesome Priest: A Life of Ernest Burgmann (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993), pp. 192–6; Farnham Maynard, Economics and the Kingdom of God (Melbourne: Student Christian Movement, 1929).

24 Miles in Workers’ Weekly, 30 June 1936, and also his statements in minutes of the CC, 24–7 July 1936, [p. 138], and 6–7 November 1937 [p. 49], as in note 7; CC to district committees, 19 April 1937, as in note 4; L. L. Sharkey, An Appeal to Catholics: Democracy, Fascism, Mexico, Spain, Peace, War (Sydney: Modern Publishers, 1937).

25 O’Day in Workers’ Weekly, 11 June, 9 July 1937, and quoted in Wendy Lowenstein, Weevils in the Flour: An Oral Record of the 1930s Depression in Australia, rev. edn (Newham, Vic.: Scribe, 1989), p. 194, and Alf Watt, Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the Communist Movement in Australia (Surry Hills, NSW: SPA, n.d. [1987]), p. 19.

26 Workers’ Weekly, 27 July 1937; Hagan (ed.), Trade Unionism in Documents, p. 113.

27 Workers’ Weekly, 10 September, 8 October 1937, 28 January, 1 February, 15 April, 10, 27 May 1938; ‘A. London’ [Jack Blake] to CPA, 25 September 1937, Comintern records (CI 495/14/19), and CC circulars, 5 October 1937, 18 May 1938, as in note 4; Hagan, History of the ACTU, pp. 106–7; E. M. Andrews, Australia and China: The Ambiguous Relationship (Melbourne: MUP, 1985), ch. 3.

28 Bob Cram in minutes of the CC, 6–7 November 1937 [pp. 44–6], as in note 7; Workers’ Weekly, 15–26 October 1937, Sydney Morning Herald, 15–23 October, 22 November 1937; Vic Bird, SS Silksworth Dispute of 1937: A Memoir (Melbourne: May Day Committee, 1991).

29 Roach quoted in Jon White, ‘The Port Kembla Pig Dispute of 1938’, Labour History, no. 37 (November 1979), p. 70. See also Workers’ Weekly, 18 November 1938–24 January 1939; Len Richardson, ‘Dole Queue Patriots: The Port Kembla Pig-Iron Strike of 1938’, in John Iremonger, John Merritt and Graeme Osborne (eds), Strikes: Studies in Twentieth Century Australian History (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1973), pp. 143–58; Rupert Lockwood, War on the Waterfront: Menzies, Japan and the Pig-iron Dispute (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1987).

30 Isaacs in Argus, 13 January 1939. See also A. W. Martin, Robert Menzies: A Life. Volume 1, 1894–1943 (Melbourne: MUP, 1993), pp. 251–6; Stan Moran, Reminiscences of a Rebel (Chippendale, NSW: APCOL, 1979), pp. 17–18.

31 Cameron Hazlehurst, Menzies Observed (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1979), pp. 144–5; K. S. Inglis, This is the ABC: The Australian Broadcasting Commission 1932–1983 (Melbourne: MUP, 1983), pp. 61–2; Workers’ Weekly, 7, 28 July, 13 October 1936; Judge Foster’s Banned Speech (Melbourne: Council for Civil Liberties, 1938).

32 Workers’ Weekly, 8, 22, 25 February 1938, and 2 May, 10 June, 12 July, 17 August, 3 September for protests against von Luckner; Sydney Morning Herald, 16–28 February 1938; L. P. Fox, Von Luckner—Not Wanted (Sydney: MAWF, 1938); Gianfranco Cresciani, Fascism, Anti-Fascism and Italians in Australia 1922–1945 (Canberra: ANUP, 1980), pp. 108–9.

33 CC circular, 17 August 1937, 14 February 1939, as in note 4; L. P. Fox, Australia and the Jews (Melbourne: League for Peace and Democracy, 1939); David Rechter, Beyond the Pale: Jewish Communism in Melbourne, MA thesis, University of Melbourne, 1986, ch. 3.

34 Inglis, Australians in the Spanish Civil War, pp. 194–9.

35 Statement by Baracchi to CC, 12 February 1940, p. 48, Baracchi file, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 25).

36 Minutes of the CC, 5–7 March 1937, as in note 7; Mason’s article first appeared in Inprecorr, vol. 16, no. 33 (18 July 1936) and then Communist Review, vol. 3, no. 9 (September 1936), pp. 25–30, and was followed by ‘A Program for Peace for the Australian People’, ibid., vol. 4, no. 1 (January 1937). He also wrote several other articles for Inprecorr as well as a critical report on the Australian party’s implementation of the Seventh Congress decisions, Comintern records (CI 495/20/7). CC circular on the election, 20 September 1937, as in note 4.

37 L. G. Stewart, ‘Defeat the Lyons Government But—’, Communist Review, vol. 4, no. 6 (June 1937), pp. 7–8; Thornton in minutes of the CC, 6–7 November 1937 [p. 24], as in note 7; statement by Baracchi to CC, 12 February 1940, p. 45, as in note 35; Marty in minutes of the Anglo–American Bureau, 27 September 1937, Comintern records (CI 495/14/19).

38 Dixon in Workers’ Weekly, 11 November 1938; ‘People’s Front to Advance Australia Fair’; Miles’s address to congress, Workers’ Weekly, 25 November 1938; Constitution and By-Laws of the Communist Party of Australia (Sydney: CPA, 1938), p. 4; Blake in The Way Forward: Decisions of the Twelfth Congress (Sydney: CPA, 1938), pp. 48–9.

39 Blake in minutes of CC, 24–27 July 1936 [p. 46], as in note 7; J. N. Rawling, Make the Rich Pay, Comintern records (CI 495/14/304) and Who Owns Australia (Sydney: Modern Publishers, 1937), and CC circular, September 1937 (the pamphlet expanded in three subsequent editions and by 1939 30 000 copies had been sold); see generally Rick Kuhn, Paradise on the Instalment Plan: The Economic Thought of the Australian Labour Movement between the Depression and the Long Boom, PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 1985, ch. 5.

40 Lloyd Ross in minutes of the CC, 17–19 February 1939, as in note 7.

41 Ralph Gibson, Socialist Melbourne (Melbourne: State Committee of CPA, n.d. [1939]) in Rawling papers (ANU N57/1128).

42 Browder quoted in Fraser M. Ottanelli, The Communist Party of the United States from the Depression to World War II (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), p. 123; Pollitt in Kevin Morgan, Harry Pollitt (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 100; PCF in M. Adereth, The French Communist Party, A Critical History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 63.

43 See, for example of communist interest, a commemoration of the seventieth anniversary, Hector Ross, ‘Eureka Stockade’, Workers’ Weekly, 5 December 1924.

44 Lloyd Ross, William Lane and the Australian Labor Movement (Sydney: self-published, 1937); Brian Fitzpatrick, British Imperialism and Australia (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1939).

45 J. N. Rawling, The Story of the Australian People, parts 1–6 (Sydney: Modern Publishers, n.d.). See John Pomeroy, ‘The Apostasy of James Normington Rawling’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 37, no. 1 (1991), pp. 17–38.

46 Holt, A Veritable Dynamo, pp. 21–2; Rawling in Workers’ Weekly, 14 December 1934, Red Leader, 12 December 1934; Miles in minutes of CC, 24–27 July 1936 [p. 115], as in note 7; Workers’ Weekly, 15, 25 September, 30 October 1936; L. P. Fox, The Truth About Anzac (Melbourne: VCAWF, n.d. [1936]), pp. 2, 14.

47 Sharkey in minutes of the CC, 20–22 November 1936 [p. 92], as in note 7; Dixon in minutes of the CC, 6–7 November 1937 [pp. 62–3]. See G. Dimitrov, The Working Class Against Fascism (Sydney: Modern Books, 1935).

48 Sydney cadres’ discussion of sesquicentenary, 28 August 1937, Comintern records (CI 495/14/304); ‘The Sesqui-centenary’, Communist Review, vol. 5, no. 2 (February 1938), pp. 3–4; Workers’ Weekly, 26 April, 2 May 1938. See Julian Thomas, ‘1938: Past and Present in an Elaborate Anniversary’, in Susan Janson and Stuart Macintyre (eds), Making the Bicentenary (Melbourne: Australian Historical Studies, 1988), pp. 77–89.

49 See, for example, Trotsky’s ‘Against the “People’s Front”’ (1935), in David Beetham (ed.), Marxists in the Face of Fascism: Writings by Marxists on Fascism from the Inter-War Period (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), pp. 204–7; CC circular, 12 March 1937, as in note 4.

50 Len Fox, Dream at a Graveside: The History of the Fellowship of Australian Writers 1928–1988 (Marrickville, NSW: Fellowship of Australian Writers, 1989), ch. 12; Angela Hillel, Against the Stream: Melbourne New Theatre 1936–1986 (Melbourne: New Theatre, 1986), pp. 6–8; Richard Haese, Rebels and Precursors: The Revolutionary Years of Australian Art (Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin Books, 1981), chs 2–3.

51 I draw here on Charles Merewether, Art and Social Commitment: An End to a City of Dreams 1931–1948 (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1984), pp. 9–13, and Andy Croft, ‘Authors Take Sides: Writers and the Communist Party 1920–1950’, in Geoff Andrews, Nina Fishman and Kevin Morgan (eds), Opening the Books: Essays on the Social and Cultural History of British Communism (London: Pluto Press, 1995), pp. 83–101.

52 This version comes from Bernard Smith, Noel Counihan: Artist and Revolutionary (Melbourne: OUP, 1993), ch. 7. Judah’s version, related to me in the early 1980s, was that he tried to prevent Noel from cruelling their pitch but that his kicks under the table only inflamed a companion who was in his cups.

53 A. A. Zhdanov, On Literature, Music and Philosophy (London: Lawence & Wishart, 1950), pp. 9–15; Drusilla Modjeska, Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers 1925–1945 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1981), ch. 6; see also Carole Ferrier, ‘Jean Devanny, Katharine Susannah Prichard and the “Really Proletarian Novel”’, in Carole Ferrier (ed.), Gender, Politics and Fiction: Twentieth-Century Australian Women’s Novels (St Lucia, Qld: UQP, 1985), pp. 101–17.

54 Jack Beasley, A Gallop of Fire: Katharine Susannah Prichard On Guard for Humanity (Earlwood, NSW: Wedgetail Press, 1993), p. 159, asserts that social realism was not advocated in Australia during the 1930s but it is central to A. Lunacharsky, On Soviet Art (Sydney: Workers’ Art Club, 1933).

55 Julian Smith [Tom Fitzgerald], Newspaper Reporting and Modern Reportage (Sydney: Writers’ League, 1935), pp. 5, 10, 13; Harcourt quoted in Richard Nile’s introduction to a facsimile edition of Upsurge (Nedlands, WA: UWAP, 1986), p. xiii; Angela O’Brien’s introduction to Thirteen Dead (Melbourne: New Theatre Playscripts, 1993), p. 9; David Carter, ‘Documenting and Criticising Society’, in Laurie Hergenhan (ed.), The Penguin New Literary History of Australia (Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin Books, 1988), p. 375.

56 A. F. Howells, Against the Stream: The Memories of a Philosophical Anarchist, 1927–1939 (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1983), p. 119; Rob Darby, ‘Fictions and Histories, in Richard Nile and Barry York (eds), Workers and Intellectuals (London: Edward Blackwood, 1992), pp. 84–101.

57 Moorehead, A Late Education, p. 30.

58 CC circular, 5 July 1938; Gordon Crane, ‘Left Book Club and Labor Movement’, Communist Review, vol. 5, no. 12 (December 1938), pp. 23–6; Robin Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists: Communism and the Australian Labour Movement 1920–1950, new edn (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1985), pp. 66–70.

59 Fitzpatrick to Mollie Bayne, 12 April 1937, quoted in Don Watson, Brian Fitzpatrick: A Radical Life (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1978), p. 90.

60 Ross in minutes of the CC, 17–19 February 1939 [pp. 9, 31], as in note 7; Burchett in Argus, 18 November 1936, and At the Barricades (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1981), p. 48; Evelyn Healy, Artist of the Left: A Personal Experience 1930s–1980s (Sydney: Left Book Club, 1993), p. 3.

61 Mary Wright in Audrey Johnson, Bread and Roses: A Personal History of Three Militant Women and Their Friends 1902–1988 (Sutherland, NSW: Left Book Club, 1990), p. 115; minutes of the Eleventh Congress, p. 94, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 1); Workers’ Weekly, 25 February, 13 March 1936; CC circular, 17 April 1936, as in note 4.

62 Gollan, Grant, Batterham and Davis in Joyce Stevens (ed.), Taking the Revolution Home: Work Among Women in the Communist Party of Australia, 1920–1945 (Fitzroy, Vic.: Sybylla Press, 1976); Pennefather, Blake and Goodwin in Red Matildas (16 mm film, 1984), and Blake, A Proletarian Life; Bernice Morris, Between the Lines (Collingwood, Vic.: Sybylla Press, 1988); Justina Williams, Anger & Love (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1993); Betty Roland, Caviar for Breakfast (Melbourne: Quartet Books, 1979), and The Devious Being (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1990); Mona Brand, Enough Blue Sky (Potts Point, NSW: Tawny Pipit Press, 1995); Evelyn Healy (Shaw), Artist of the Left. The earlier estimate of female membership is from CC circular, 17 April 1936.

63 Daphne Gollan, ‘The Memoirs of “Cleopatra Sweatfigure”’, in Elizabeth Windschuttle (ed.), Women, Class and History: Feminist Perspectives on Australia 1788–1978 (Melbourne: Fontana Books, 1980), pp. 313–29.

64 League Organiser, December 1935, and reports to YCL in Great Britain, Comintern records (CI 533/10/1); see Ray Sutton, Labour Movement Youth Organisation and Policy in Eastern Australia, c.1918–c.1939, PhD thesis, ANU, 1990, ch. 5.

65 ‘For a Life with a Purpose’, roneoed programme, 1938, Comintern records (CI 495/14/304); Pix, 15 July 1939; Audrey Blake, ‘The Eureka Youth League: A Participant’s Report’, Labour History, no. 42 (May 1982), pp. 94–105, and ‘Notes on the Development of the Eureka Youth League and its Predecessors’ (ML). See also Harry Stein, A Glance Over an Old Left Shoulder (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1994), chs 6–7.

Chapter 12 Growth pains

1 ‘Material on Australia’ prepared for Anglo–American Bureau, 19 July 1937, Comintern records (CI 495/18/1212); Stanley B. Petzell, The Political and Industrial Role of the Melbourne Trades Hall Council, 1927–1949, PhD thesis, La Trobe University, 1978, ch. 6.

2 Jim Hagan, The History of the ACTU (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1981) pp. 105–6

3 Dixon here quoted Stalin; minutes of the Eleventh Congress, 27–31 December 1935 [p. 143], CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 1).

4 Bruce Mitchell, Teachers, Education and Politics: A History of the Organization of Public School Teachers (St Lucia, Qld: UQP, 1975), chs 4–5. A lengthy report of the Conference on Education appears in the Civil Security Intelligence bulletin, no. 90, 31 May 1937 (AA A8911, item 59).

5 Workers’ Weekly, 4 February–31 March 1936; J. A. Merritt, A History of the Federated Ironworkers’ Association of Australia, 1909–52, PhD thesis, ANU, 1967, ch. 6; Len Richardson, The Bitter Years: Wollongong during the Great Depression (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1984), ch. 7; Peter Cochrane, ‘Anatomy of a Steelworks: The Australian Iron and Steel Company, Port Kembla, 1935–39’, Labour History, no. 57 (November 1989), pp. 61–77.

6 Merritt, A History of the Federated Ironworkers’ Association, ch. 6; Robert Murray and Kate White, The Ironworkers: A History of the Federated Ironworkers’ Association of Australia (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1982), ch. 5; and Charlie Morgan, interviewed by Laurie Aarons, n.d. (ML).

7 Thornton quoted in J. A. Merritt, A History of the Federated Ironworkers’ Association’, p. 296, and Smith’s Weekly, 23 November 1940; the description of him is given by John Sendy, Comrades Come Rally! Recollections of an Australian Communist (Melbourne: Nelson, 1978), ch. 36. The statistics are from Merritt, pp. 223–4, 265–7.

8 Workers’ Weekly, 9 July–13 August 1937; Robin Gollan, The Coalminers of New South Wales: A History of the Union 1860–1960 (Melbourne: MUP, 1963), ch. 10; Edgar Ross, A History of the Miners’ Federation of Australia (Sydney: Australasian Coal and Shale Employees’ Federation, 1970), ch. 14.

9 Mark Hearn, Working Lives: A History of the Australian Railways Union (NSW Branch) (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1990), ch. 3; Stephen Holt, A Veritable Dynamo: Lloyd Ross and Australian Labour 1901–1987 (St Lucia, Qld: UQP, 1996), ch. 4.

10 Minutes of the Eleventh Congress [p. 177], as in note 3; see L. J. Louis, ‘Recovery from the Depression and the Seamen’s Strike of 1935–6’, Labour History, no. 41 (November 1981), pp. 74–86; Brian Fitzpatrick and Rowan Cahill, The Seamen’s Union of Australia 1872–1972: A History (Sydney: SUA, 1981), part 1, chs 10–11, part 2, ch. 1.

11 Minutes of the CC, 10–12 April 1936 [pp. 30–5, 44, 54]; 24–7 July 1936 [p. 133]; Keenan to Sharkey, 7 September 1936, Melbourne documents 1932–8, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, boxes 4, 5); report by Ron Hurd to ECCI, 18 November 1936, Comintern records (CI 534/7/8).

12 Workers’ Weekly, 27 October 1936, 12 February–5 March, 26 October 1937; North Queensland Guardian, 4 September 1937; Victor Williams, The Years of Big Jim (Victoria Park, WA: Lone Hand Press, 1975), chs 5–6.

13 Wendy Lowenstein and Tom Hills, Under the Hook: Melbourne Waterside Workers Remember Working Lives and Class War 1900–1980 (Prahran, Vic.: Melbourne Bookworkers, 1982), p. 86; Healy in Workers’ Weekly, 26 October 1938.

14 W. Orr, Mechanisation: Threatened Catastrophe for Coalfields (Sydney: Miners’ Federation, 1935), p. 13; Workers’ Weekly, 7 August 1936; see Ross, History of the Miners’ Federation, pp. 367–8, and Of Storm and Struggle: Pages from Labour History (Sydney: APCOL, 1981), p. 61.

15 Rick Kuhn, Paradise on the Instalment Plan: The Economic Thought of the Australian Labour Movement between the Depression and the Long Boom, PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 1985, pp. 35–7.

16 CC circular, 10 January 1936, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 5); Orr in minutes of CC, 20–22 November 1936 [pp. 30–3]; R. Cram in minutes of CC, 22 September 1935, as in note 11; minutes of discussion of Sydney cadres, 21 August 1937, Comintern records (CI 495/14/304); minutes of the PB, 21 September 1939, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 15).

17 Andrew Reeves, Industrial Men: Miners and Politics in Wonthaggi, 1909–1968, PhD thesis, La Trobe University, 1977, ch. 3; and Strikebound, feature film directed by Richard Lowenstein, 1983; Orr in minutes of the CC, 10–12 April 1936 [pp. 90–1], as in note 11.

18 Thornton in minutes of the Eleventh Congress, [p. 284]; minutes of the CC, 6–7 November 1936, [p. 23]; minutes of the CC, 17 February 1939 [pp. 88–9]; Orr in minutes of CC, 5–7 March 1937, [pp. 54–5].

19 Minutes of the Anglo–American Bureau discussion, 5 July 1937, Comintern records (CI 495/94/19); Orr in minutes of the Eleventh Congress [p. 203], as in note 3; J. B. Miles, ‘A Question of Balance’, Communist Review, vol. 5, no. 11 (November 1938), p. 60; Blake in The Way Forward: Decisions of the Twelfth National Congress of the Communist Party of Australia (Sydney: CPA, 1938), pp. 40–1.

20 The Railroader, 10 October 1935; see also the minutes of the Education and Organising Committee of his union, 1936–41, Ross papers (NLA MS 3939, box 7).

21 Newcastle Morning Herald, 18 October 1937.

22 Comintern records (CI 495/18/212).

23 Bede Nairn, The ‘Big Fella’: Jack Lang and the Australian Labor Party 1891–1949 (Melbourne: MUP, 1986), ch. 13; Jim Hagan and Ken Turner, A History of the Labor Party in New South Wales 1891–1991 (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1991), pp. 88–94.

24 Hughes, interviewed by Laurie Aarons, September 1980 (ML); Gollan, interviewed by Laurie Aarons, n.d (ML); see also David McKnight, ‘The Comintern’s Seventh Congress and the Australian Labor Party’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 32, no. 3 (July 1997), pp. 395–407.

25 Copy of application in CC circulars and statements, 1933–42, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 5); Workers’ Weekly, 25 February, 27 April 1937; Patrick Weller and Beverley Lloyd (eds), Federal Executive Minutes 1915–1955 (Melbourne: MUP), pp. 201–3.

26 Minutes of the CC, 20–22 November 1935 [p. 72]; 10–12 April 1936 [p. 181]; 24–27 July 1936 [p. 46], as in note 11.

27 Minutes of the discussion of the Anglo–American Bureau, 5 July 1937, pp. 13–19, Comintern records (CI 495/14/19), and The Way Forward, p. 25. Dixon appears in the ECCI minutes as ‘Emery’.

28 Miles in minutes of the CC, 5–7 March 1937 [pp. 110–1], as in note 11; Blake, ‘Tasks of the Communist Party in the Coming Federal Election’, Workers’ Weekly, 25 May 1937.

29 Letters to the CC from the Cairns and Townsville sections, 27 April, 10 May 1937; report of northern sub-district discussion, 12 May 1937; letters from Jack Henry to CC, 19 May, 3 June 1937, and his article ‘Federal Election: Return a Labor Government’, North Queensland Guardian, 26 June 1937; D. C. Price to Communist Review, 15 July 1937; all in state correspondence and reports CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 4); Communist Review, vol. 4, no. 6 (June 1937), pp. 7–15; Miles and Henry in minutes of the CC, 18–20 June 1937 [pp. 27, 71–3], as in note 11.

30 Len Donald in minutes of the CC, 18–20 June 1937 [pp. 44–6]; CC circular, 20 September 1937, and CC to editorial boards, 22 September 1937, CC circulars and statements, 1933–42, as in note 25.

31 Minutes of the discussion of the Anglo–American Bureau. 5 July 1937, p. 9; Colin A. Hughes and B. D. Graham, A Handbook of Australian Government and Politics. (Canberra: ANUP, 1968) and Voting for the Australian House of Representatives 1901–1964 (Canberra: ANUP, 1974), pp. 167, 188, 190.

32 Cram in minutes of the CC, 17–19 February 1939 [pp. 68–70], as in note 11; North Queensland Guardian, 1 April 1939.

33 Minutes of the discussion of the Anglo–American Bureau, 23 September 1937, Comintern records (CI 95/14/19).

34 Sharkey in minutes of the CC, 6–7 November 1937 [p. 67], as in note 11; CC circular, 1 July 1939; Orr in minutes of the PB, 21 March 1936, p. 9, as in note 16.

35 Minutes of the CC, 1–12 April 1936 [pp. 165, 245], as in note 11.

36 Sharkey, ‘Join the Party’, Workers’ Weekly, 1 September 1936; Miles, ‘Go to Masses in Own Name’, Workers’ Weekly, 18 November 1938.

37 Attorney-General’s Department special file (AA A467, SF42/89); Workers’ Weekly, 4, 20 May 1937; Frank Cain, The Origins of Political Surveillance in Australia (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1983), p. 251.

38 Gibson in minutes of the CC, 17–19 February 1939 [p. 109], as in note 11; Devanny in Workers’ Weekly, 23 November 1937; Tony Wallis, ‘A Guide and Clarion Call’, Workers’ Weekly, 8 November 1938; Mrs Kearney, quoted in Len Fox, Broad Left, Narrow Left (Chippendale, NSW: APCOL, 1982), p. 33.

39 Communist Review, vol. 2, no. 2 (February 1935), pp. 1–4; E. W. Campbell in Workers’ Weekly, 2 December 1935; The Communist Party and its Work: A Course for Party Members (Sydney: CPA, n.d. [1938]), pp. 3, 4, 16.

40 CC circular, 27 May 1938 and report in Communist Review, vol. 6. no. 2 (February 1939), pp. 93–5; Max Thomas, interviewed by Laurie Aarons, 27 March 1980 (ML).

41 E. Fisher, ‘More Agitation, More Propaganda’, Communist Review, vol. 4, no. 10 (October 1937), pp. 40–3; L. Harry Gould, ‘Agitation and Propaganda’, Communist Review, vol. 5, no. 4 (April 1939), pp. 13–16.

42 Kevin Connolly, ‘Overhauling Our Language’, Communist Review, vol. 6, no. 5 (May 1939), pp. 289–95; Rawling, ‘Conserving Our Language’, vol. 6, no. 8 (August 1939), pp. 497–9; Purdy in vol. 6, no. 6 (June 1939), pp. 370–2; Gould, ‘A Grammar of Politics’, vol. 6, no. 9 (September 1939), pp. 574–6.

43 Reference to ‘diabolical materialism’ in Ross Edmonds, In Storm and Struggle: A History of the Communist Party in Newcastle 1920–1940 (Newcastle: self-published, 1991), p. 29.

44 Minutes of the CC, 10–12 April 1936 [pp. 206–7], 24–7 July 1936 [p. 17], June 1939 [p. 48], as in note 11; Information on Australia for ECCI, 19 July 1937, Comintern records (CI 495/18/212); CC circular, 19 August 1937, as in note 16.

45 Minutes of the CC, 22 February 1935 [p. 42], as in note 11; Len Donald to CC, 11 January 1938, Melbourne documents 1932–38, as in note 11; Jack Blake, interviewed by Laurie Aarons, August 1979 (ML), and Les Barnes, recorded April–May 1991.

46 Minutes of the CC, 17–19 February 1939 [p. 114], as in note 11; Ralph Gibson, My Years in the Communist Party (Melbourne: International Bookshop, 1966), pp. 67–8.

47 Gil Burns in minutes of the CC, 10–12 April 1936 [p. 172], as in note 11; Jack Henry in minutes of the PB, 1 June 1939, as in note 16.

48 Miles in minutes of the CC, 24–27 July 1936 [pp. 114–15], as in note 11; Diane Menghetti The Red North: The Popular Front in North Queensland (Townsville: History Department, James Cook University of North Queensland, 1981), pp. 169–70; Jim Henderson, interviewed by Ken Mansell, 1983 (ML).

49 Ralph to Dorothy Gibson, 26 May 1937, Gibson papers (NLA MS 7844, box 1, folder 1); see Joanne Scott, ‘Don’t Cop It Passively’: Strikes, Lockouts and Unemployed Protests in Queensland, 1919–1939, BA Hons thesis, University of Queensland, 1990, ch. 3, and North Queensland Guardian, 29 January 1938, for Aboriginal protest.

50 Jess Grant in Joyce Stevens (ed.), Taking the Revolution Home: Work Among Women in the Communist Party of Australia 1920–1945 (Fitzroy, Vic.: Sybylla Press, 1976), p. 171; Ted Bacon, interviewed by Laurie Aarons, n.d (ML); Claude Jones, interviewed by Laurie Aarons, June 1980 (ML).

51 Prichard to Guido Baracchi, 6 November 1938, Baracchi papers (NLA MS 5241, folder 2); see Justina Williams, The First Furrow (Willagee, WA: Lone Hand Press, 1976), pp. 152–63; Stuart Macintyre, Militant: The Life and Times of Paddy Troy (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1984), chs 3–4.

52 Workers’ Weekly, 7 September 1937; Tony McGillick, Comrade No More: The Autobiography of a Former Communist Party Leader (West Perth: self-published, 1980), pp. 78–80; Jim Moss, Representatives of Discontent: History of the Communist Party in South Australia (Melbourne: Communist and Labour Movement History Group, 1987), ch. 4.

53 Secretariat to DC, 11 April 1935; DC to Secretariat, 23 June 1935, state correspondence and reports; Higgins to Secretariat, 12 April 1936, Rawling papers (ANU N57/187); Audrey Johnson, Fly a Rebel Flag: Bill Morrow 1888–1980 (Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin Books, 1986), part 2.

54 CC budget, 1939, in CC circulars and statements, as in note 16; section financial statement in Rawling papers (ANU N57/102).

55 Minutes of the CC, 18–20 June 1937 [p. 71], as in note 11; minutes of special committee to consider case of F. Wiggin, 3, 22 May 1937 and Control Commission to CC, 14 June 1937, Wiggin file, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON, box 16); minutes of the PB, 11 July 1939 for Sharkey’s sustenance, as in note 16; details of holding companies in Rawling papers (ANU N57/402).

56 For Higgins, Investigation Branch to Attorney-General, 24 August 1928 (AA A4671, SF42/64); for Sharkey and Orr, Orr to Budget Commission of RILU, 3 October 1932 (CI 534/7/8); Ryan to ‘Friend’ in Berlin, 9 March 1930, Comintern records (CI 534/7/5); for Devanny, Carole Ferrier (ed.), Point of Departure: The Autobiography of Jean Devanny (St Lucia, Qld: UQP, 1986), p. 135; Tripp, interviewed by Rawling, 1961, Rawling papers (ANU N57/109).

57 Civil Security Intelligence, no. 90, 31 May 1937 (AA A8911, file 59).

58 Minutes of the PB, 8 May, 1, 24 August 1939, as in note 16.

59 Anglo–American Bureau, ‘The Stronger the Party the Stronger the Labour Movement’, 22 July 1937, Comintern records (CI 495/18/1212); and Dixon’s report to CC, 6–7 November 1937, as in note 11.

60 Minutes of the PB, 3 August 1939, as in note 16; Edmonds, In Storm and Struggle, pp. 133–4.

61 Daphne Gollan, ‘The Memoirs of “Cleopatra Sweatfigure”’, in Elizabeth Windschuttle (ed.), Women, Class and History: Feminist Perspectives on Australian 1788–1978 (Melbourne: Fontana Books, 1980), p. 317; statement by Baracchi to CC, 12 February 1940, Baracchi file, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 25).

62 Jack Kavanagh to Edna Ryan, 5 August 1936, Kavanagh papers (ANU P12/4/38); ‘This is J. B. Miles’, Communist Review, vol. 4, no. 2 (February 1937), pp. 6–10; Workers’ Voice, 31 August 1938, Jean Devanny in Workers’ Weekly, 22 March 1938, and Ferrier (ed.), Point of Departure pp. 156–8, 168–72.

63 ‘L. Sharkey, Chairman, C.C., Communist Party of Australia’, Communist Review, vol. 4, no. 4 (April 1937), pp. 38–9; information from John Sendy; minutes of the PB, 2 February 1939, as in note 16.

Chapter 13 The socialist sixth of the world

1 Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above 1928–1941 (New York: Norton, 1990), p. 356; Alec Nove, ‘Stalin and Stalinism—Some Introductory Thoughts’, in Alec Nove (ed.), The Stalin Phenomenon (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993), p. 13.

2 A fuller account of Australian apprehensions of the Soviet Union is provided by Margaret Lindley Ashworth, A World to Win: Socialist Utopia, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Communist Party of Australia, PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 1993.

3 Tom Garland, Contrasts: A Reply to the ‘Progress of Communism’ by A. Grenfell Price (Adelaide: FOSU, 1932), in Rawling papers (ANU P57/1163).

4 See, for example, the diary of Percy Hannett, NSW president of the Electrical Trades Union in 1929 (ANU N62).

5 Memoirs of Itzhak Gust in possession of Amirah Inglis; the report of the Australian delegation for the RILU, dated 22 May 1932, and a minority report of F. Goozeff, are in the papers of Tom Walsh (NLA MS 2123/11/folder 102).

6 For the protracted campaign to reinstate Beatrice Taylor, see Bruce Mitchell, Teachers, Education and Politics: A History of the Organization of Public School Teachers (St Lucia, Qld: UQP, 1975), pp. 115–8, and for records of the Beatrice Taylor Defence Committee, the Rawling papers (ANU N57/306); for the sacking of the Victorian delegate, see Alison Churchward, The Australian Railways Union: Railway Management and Railway Work in Victoria, 1920–39, PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, pp. 467–8. Red Leader, 8 November 1933, and the Argus, 23–4 May 1934 report later dismissals. For official surveillance of the 1934 delegation, see the Investigation Branch file (AA A981, COM11).

7 Ben Scott and J. Healy, Red Cargo: A Report of the Waterside Workers’ Federation … Delegates to the Soviet Union, May Day 1934 (Sydney: FOSU, 1934); W. A. Smith, A Tramwayman Talks on Russia (Melbourne: Ruskin Press, 1935), reprinting talks broadcast on Radio 3KZ; Alf Northage in North Queensland Guardian, 21 August 1937; J. E. Goldsmith in Workers’ Voice, 3 August 1934.

8 Katharine Susannah Prichard, The Real Russia (Sydney: Modern Publishers, n.d. [1934], p. 19; Jack Wall to J. B. Miles, 4 May 1934, CC circulars and statements, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 5); Tony McGillick, ‘21 Years of Revolution’, Communist Review, vol. 5, no. 11 (November 1938), pp. 37–41; poem dated 7 October 1934, in possession of Laurie Aarons, and Jane Aarons, ‘Improvements in Two Years’, Working Woman, vol. 5, no. 5 (December 1934).

9 The serialisation began in April 1934, and its interruption was noted in Workers’ Voice, 15 June 1934.

10 Greenwood in Proletariat, October 1933, quoted by Ralph Gibson, The People Stand Up (Ascot Vale, Vic.: Red Rooster Press, 1983), p. 74; Woodruff in Workers’ Voice, 1 December 1933. The first usage of the term ‘fellow traveller’ recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary is in 1936.

11 Jessie Street, Truth or Repose (Sydney: ABS, 1966), ch. 12.

12 David Caute, The Fellow-Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism, rev. edn (London: Yale University Press, 1988); Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China and Cuba (New York: OUP, 1981); Walter Laqueur, The Dream that Failed: Reflections on the Soviet Union, 1928–1978 (New York: OUP, 1994), ch. 1.

13 Workers’ Weekly, 31 December 1935, 17, 24 January 1936.

14 L. Sharkey, ‘Stakhanov and the Current Anti-Soviet Misrepresentations’, Communist Review, vol. 3, no. 5 (May 1936), pp. 1–14; King in Workers’ Weekly, 27 January, 14, 17 July 1936.

15 Greenwood, loc. cit.; Prichard, The Real Russia, p. 193.

16 Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York: OUP, 1990), and Dmitri Antonovich Volkogonov, Stalin, Triumph and Tragedy, trans. Harold Shukman (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991) are cases of such condemnation; Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 2nd edn (New York: OUP, 1994), and J. Arch Getty and Roberta Thompson (eds), Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives (Cambridge: CUP, 1993) are examples of revisionism.

17 Stan Moran and Ernie Campbell had Sam Aarons buy them a meal in Moscow in 1934, interviewed by Laurie Aarons, 1968 (ML); Betty Roland, Caviar for Breakfast (Melbourne: Quartet Books, 1979), pp. 71, 78, 111.

18 Audrey Blake, A Proletarian Life (Malmsbury, Vic.: Kibble Books, 1984), pp. 21–35.

19 Jack Blake, interviewed by Laurie Aarons, August 1979 (ML), ‘A Free and Happy Life’, Communist Review, vol. 6. no.1 (January 1939), pp. 8–13, and ‘Trotskyites and Labor’, vol. 6, no. 7 (July 1939), pp. 439–42; there is an extensive analysis of Stalinism as ‘the authoritarian syndrome’ in Blake’s Revolution from Within (Sydney: Outlook, 1971), ch. 2.

20 Gerald Peel, ‘Stalin’, Communist Review, vol. 6, no. 5 (May 1939), 281–2. See the similar fulsome doggerel in The People’s Poetry, issued by the poetry group of the NSW branch of the Left Book Club, no. 1 (November 1939), pp. 8–9.

21 Frank Hardy, But the Dead Are Many (London: Bodley Head, 1975); see also Paul Adams, The Stranger from Melbourne: Crisis and Modernism in the Writings of Frank Hardy, PhD thesis, Monash Uni- versity, 1997, ch. 2.

22 Nettie Palmer quoted by Drusilla Modjeska, Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers 1925–1945 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1981), p. 113; Gibson to Baracchi, n.d., Baracchi papers (NLA MS 5241); Gibson, Freedom in the Soviet Union (Melbourne: Friends of the Soviet Union, n.d. [1935?]); Baracchi, ‘Twenty Years of Karl Radek’, Communist Review, vol. 4, no. 3 (March 1937), pp. 43–50; statement by Baracchi to CC, 12 February 1940, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 25).

23 Labor Review, vol. 1, no. 8 (April 1933), p. 17.

24 Workers’ Weekly, 9 October 1936, 8 February, 4 March 1938.

25 A. London [Blake] in minutes of the Anglo–American Bureau, 23 September 1937, Comintern records (CI 495/14/19); CC circular, 17 June 1937, CC circulars and statements, as in note 8; minutes of the PB, 10 February 1938, Comintern records (CI 495/14/305); Miles in minutes of special committee to consider the case of F. Wiggin, 22 May 1937, p. 1, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 16).

26 An English-language edition appeared in Australia in 1939 and it was serialised in the Communist Review from June 1939.

27 History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1939), pp. 333–4.

Chapter 14 War

1 Quoted in Cameron Hazlehurst, Menzies Observed (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1979), p. 138.

2 R. Dixon, Defend Australia? The Communist Attitude Towards Defence Explained (Sydney: Modern Press, 1936); Dixon, ‘Communist Defence Policy’, Communist Review, vol. 6, no. 4 (April 1939); CC to state committees, 3 March 1939, CC circulars and statements, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 5).

3 Minutes of the PB, 18 May, 29 June, 13, 27, 29 July, 22 August, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 15); Workers’ Weekly, 26 May–1 August 1939; Jim Hagan, The History of the ACTU (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1981), p. 175.

4 Workers’ Weekly, 18 April, 6, 13 June 1939; minutes of the PB, 1 June 1939; see E. M. Andrews, Isolation and Appeasement in Australia: Reactions to the European Crises 1935–1939 (Canberra: ANUP, 1970), ch. 8.

5 Workers’ Weekly, 25 August 1939.

6 Minutes of the PB, 24 August 1939; CC circular, 4 September 1939, CC circulars and statements, as in note 2; Diane Menghetti, The Red North: The Popular Front in North Queensland (Townsville: History Department, James Cook University of North Queensland, 1981), p. 150. The fullest justification was Soviet–German Non-Aggression Pact Explained (Sydney: CC of CPA, n.d.).

7 Tribune, 5, 9, 22 September 1939; CC circular, 4 September 1939, as in note 2; party statement in Sydney Morning Herald, 15 September 1939.

8 The arguments in the CPGB are examined by Kevin Morgan, Against Fascism and War: Ruptures and Continuities in British Communist Politics 1935–41 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989).

9 ECCI, ‘Regarding the Line of the CPA on the War Question’, 4 October 1939, and ‘Proposals for the CPA’, 3 November 1939, Comintern records (CI 495/14/308); CC circulars, 6 October, 7 November 1939, as in note 2; Tribune, 6 October, 7 November 1939; minutes of PB, 14 November 1939, as in note 3; Miles in minutes of the Victorian State Committee, 17 December 1939, state correspondence and reports 1931–40, CPA records (ML MS 5021 AD-DON 1936, box 4), and letter to Communist Review, vol. 6, no. 12 (December 1939), p. 714.

10 Les Barnes, recorded April–May 1991. Ralph Gibson suggests in The People Stand Up (Ascot Vale, Vic.: Red Rooster Press, 1983), p. 370 that the declaration of war and the state committee meeting occurred on the Saturday 2 November, and his Sunday address at the party hall followed it, but Paul Hasluck, The Government and the People 1939–1941 (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1952), p. 152 confirms Barnes’s chronology, though Menzies’s radio announcement occurred at 9.15 p.m. on the Sunday evening.

11 The Truth About Finland (Sydney: CPA, n.d.).

12 Minutes of the PB, 15 December 1939, as in note 3 and Tribune, 19 December 1939; J. N. Rawling Breaks With Stalinism (Sydney: J. McMahon, 17 December 1939); ‘An Ex-Member of the Communist Party’, Sydney Morning Herald, 6 March 1940, and ‘Communism in Australia’, Sydney Morning Herald, 6, 7 March 1940; Militant, vol. 3, no. 4 (April 1940). See Rawling’s manuscript account of these events (ANU N57/25), and Stephen Holt, ‘The Case of James Rawling, Ex-Communist’, Quadrant, vol. 33, no. 12 (December 1989), pp. 60–4.

13 As related to me by Bob Gollan, a member of the class; there is correspondence with Eric Aarons, another member, in the Baracchi papers (NLAM5 5241) and reference in the minutes of the PB, 17 October 1939, as in note 3. Baracchi and Roland met with Rawling and two other ‘dissident communists’ in October 1939; notes of the discussion are in the Rawling papers (ANU N57/23).

14 Minutes of special meeting of Central Executive, 18 December 1939, Baracchi file, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 25), and subsequent statements by Baracchi in same file; Tribune, 23 February 1940; Baracchi, Who Is the Coward? J. B. Miles’ Record and Mine (Sydney: Communist League (Fourth International), n.d.).

15 Betty Roland to CC, 12 February 1940, in Baracchi file; Militant, vol. 3, no. 3 (March 1940), and Roland interviewed by Ken Mansell, 1983 (ML).

16 See, for example, the letter sent by L. Duncan to Miles, October 1940, Melbourne documents 1932–38, CPA records (ML MS 5021 ADD-ON 1936, box 5).

17 Sydney Morning Herald, 15 December; Argus, 27 January 1940; Les Barnes, recorded April–May 1991 and Ralph Gibson, My Years in the Communist Party (Melbourne: International Bookshop, 1966), p. 82; Jack Williams in Ross Edmonds, In Storm and Struggle: A History of the Communist Party in Newcastle 1920–1940 (Newcastle: self-published, 1991), p. 94.

18 Daily Telegraph, 4, 11, 18 November 1939; Sydney Sun, 27, 28 December 1939; Sydney Morning Herald, 11, 25, 29 December 1939, 1 January, 8 January 1940; Tribune, 1, 5, 9 January 1940; CC circular, 10 January 1940, as in note 2; Civil Liberty, vol. 3, no. 3 (February 1940). There is a full police report on the 24 December meeting in AA A467, SF42/43.

19 Argus, 12, 16, 19 February; Tribune, 20 February 1940; Gibson, My Years in the Communist Party, pp. 82–3; reports from Queensland state committee to central committee, 15, 22 February 1940, state correspondence and reports, as in note 9. The pattern of attacks on communist meetings is described by Brian Fitzpatrick, National Security and Individual Insecurity, 2nd edn (Melbourne: Left Book Club, April 1940), pp. 43–7.

20 Sydney Morning Herald, 4, 8, 15 April, 27 May 1940; Tribune, 5, 9, 16 April 1940.

21 Menzies and Chamberlain quoted in Hasluck, The Government and the People, pp. 198, 211; letter from Menzies to Bruce, 11 September 1939, in R. G. Neale (ed.), Documents on Australian Foreign Policy 1937–49, vol. II (Canberra: AGPS, 1976), p. 256.

22 Robin Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists: Communism and the Australian Labour Movement 1920–1950 (Canberra: ANUP, 1975), pp. 93–4; Warwick Eather, ‘“Protect the Newcastle Steelworks”: BHP, the Trade Unions and National Security’, Labour History, no. 57 (November 1989), pp. 78–88.

23 As Jack Hughes acknowledged in an interview with Ken Mansell, 7 May 1983 (ML); see Sydney Morning Herald, 25 March 1940, and Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists, pp. 91–3.

24 Military Board memorandum to War Cabinet, 3 January 1940, AA A467, SF42/43; see Frank Cain, The Origins of Political Surveillance in Australia (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1983), pp. 262–5; David Carment, ‘Australian Communism and National Security, September 1939–June 1941’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, vol. 65, part 4 (March 1980), pp. 246–56.

25 A copy of the manual, dated 28 November 1939, was obtained and circulated by the party; CPA records (ML MS 5021, box 85).

26 The official war history testifies to the inadequacy of facilities in the camps that were constructed for the trainees; Gavin Long, To Benghazi (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1952), ch. 3.

27 The Argus claimed on 18 January 1940 that the Sydney CIB had discovered an attempt had been made to wreck CSR’s caneite plant at Pyrmont, but provided no evidence, and the Investigation Branch observed the same of claims by military intelligence in AA A467, SF 42/43.

28 Les Barnes, recorded April–May 1991; Cecil Sharpley, The Great Delusion: The Autobiography of an Ex-Communist Leader (Melbourne: William Heinemann, 1952), p. 27; for agitation in training camps, Tribune, 17, 24, 26 November 1939 and after; see also Beverley Symons, All Out for the People’s War …, BA Hons thesis, University of Wollongong, 1993, ch. 2. The decoded KGB messages are available on the Internet as http://www.nsa.gov/docs/venona/venona.html.

29 Civil Liberty, vol. 3, no. 4 (July 1940).

30 Argus, 2, 9, 20, 24 April, 6, 22, 25 May 1940; Communist Review, vol. 7, no. 5 (May 1940), p. 257, n.s., vol. 1, no, 1 (January 1941), p. 2; 163 CPD, p. 1273 (24 May 1940); Carment, ‘Australian Communism and National Security’.

31 163 CPD, p. 1298 (27 May 1940) and Hasluck, The Government and the People, appendix 3; Cain, Origins of Political Surveillance, pp. 268–9 notes that a letter from this printing worker, Caldwell, to Sharkey was intercepted by the censor and concludes that his message did not get through, but several party members state that it did.

32 Age, Argus and Courier-Mail, 17 June 1940. Bill Gollan, interviewed by Ken Mansell, 4 May 1983 (ML) and Marie Gollan in Joyce Stevens (ed.), Taking the Revolution Home: Work Among Women in the Communist Party of Australia 1920–1945 (Fitzroy, Vic.: Sybylla Press, 1987), pp. 155–6; Ted Bacon, interviewed by Ken Mansell, 21 April 1983 (ML), and by Laurie Aarons n.d. (ML); Laurie Aarons, interviewed by Stewart Harris, 17 December 1991 (NLA); Lila Thornton, interviewed by Ken Mansell, 3 May 1983 (ML).

33 Raid on New Theatre in AA A467, SF42/81; see also Fiona Capp, Writers Defiled (Ringwood, Vic.: McPhee Gribble, 1993), p. 160. The CPSU story is related by Ted Bacon, interviewed by Ken Mansell, and Stan Moran in Reminiscences of a Rebel (Chippendale, NSW: APCOL, 1979), p. 20. Jess Grant in Stevens (ed.), Taking the Revolution Home, pp. 175–6; Betty Roland, interviewed by Ken Mansell, 1983 (ML); Peter Cook, Red Barrister: A Biography of Ted Laurie (Bundoora, Vic.: La Trobe University Press, 1994), p. 52; Barbara Boles, interviewed by Ken Mansell, 1 May 1983 (ML).

34 Annie Graham in Stevens (ed.), Taking the Revolution Home, p. 166; Eleanor Dark, The Little Company (Sydney: Collins, 1945), pp. 102–4; Serg Penna, interviewed by Ken Mansell, 23 April 1983 (ML).

35 Kay Saunders, War on the Homefront: State Intervention in Queensland 1938–1948 (St Lucia, Qld: UQP, 1993), ch. 5; Les Barnes, ‘June 15, 1940’, Recorder, no. 163 (July 1990), pp. 11–13.

36 Argus, 10, 15 June 1940; Sydney Morning Herald, 1, 11 June 1940; Justina Williams, The First Furrow (Willagee, WA: Lone Hand Press, 1976), pp. 164–72; Stuart Macintyre, Militant: The Life and Times of Paddy Troy (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1985), pp. 60–2; John A. McKenzie, Challenging Faith (Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1993), pp. 99–104.

37 Eva Bacon, interviewed by Ken Mansell, 21 April 1983 (ML) and by Laurie Aarons, n.d. (ML).

38 Wally Clayton, interviewed by Ken Mansell, 30 April 1983 (ML) and on a video recorded at the Communists and the Labour Movement Conference, Melbourne, 23–24 August 1980 (SLV).

39 There are two substantial files on Clayton, one compiled by ASIO (AA A6119, item 53) and the other by the party’s Central Disputes Committee, Hughes papers (ML). The best treatment of the allegations against him is David McKnight, Australia’s Spies and Their Secrets (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994).

40 A copy of the police report is in AA A6119, item 53.

41 John Sendy, Ralph Gibson: An Extraordinary Communist (Melbourne: Ralph Gibson Memorial Committee, 1988), pp. 85–6; Ted Bacon, interviewed by Laurie Aarons, n.d.; Les Barnes, ‘June 15, 1940’, and recorded April–May 1991; Barbara Boles, interviewed by Ken Mansell; Edgar Ross, Of Storm and Struggle: Pages from Labour History (Sydney: APCOL, 1981), ch. 12; Communist Review, n.s. vol. 1, no. 1 (January 1941), p. 2.

42 Cain, The Origins of Political Surveillance, pp. 270–1; Phyllis Johnson, interviewed by Ken Mansell, 6 May 1983 (ML) on Flo Davis, and in Central Disputes Committee file on the police spy, Rex Cann, Hughes papers (ML); see also Tribune, 7 November, 18 December 1940, 24 May 1941, for Johnson’s case and AA A467, SF42/6 for Paterson’s. A large number of prosecution files are in AA A92, SF42, and Brian Fitzpatrick summarised the use of the national security regulations in The War and Civil Rights (Melbourne: ACCL, December 1940).

43 Hobart Mercury, 25 February 1941; The War and Civil Liberties. Second Series (Melbourne: ACCL, May 1941), pp. 17–18.

44 Margaret Bevege, Behind Barbed Wire: Internment in Australia during World War II (St Lucia, Qld: UQP, 1993), pp. 44–5, 121, 123–4; Gianfranco Cresciani, Fascism, Anti-Fascism and Italians in Australia, 1922–1945 (Canberra: ANUP, 1980), ch. 8; Menghetti, The Red North, pp. 161–2; Saunders, War on the Homefront, ch. 2.

45 The Case of Ratliff and Thomas (Sydney: Australian Civil Rights Defence League, n.d.) and AA A467, SF42, 4–5; Daily Telegraph, 21–30 July 1941; Max Thomas, interviewed by Laurie Aarons, 27 March 1980 (ML); Hasluck, The Government and the People, appendix 7.

46 Doug Brideson, recorded by Edgar Waters, 7 December 1992 (NLA TRC 2608/29).

47 Lloyd Ross, quoted in Stephen Holt, A Veritable Dynamo: Lloyd Ross and Australian Labour 1901–1987 (St Lucia, Qld: UQP, 1996), p. 68.

48 L. L. Sharkey, Congress Report on the Work of the Central Committee from the 12th to the 13th Party Congress (Sydney: CPA, 1942), p. 6.

49 Quoted in Paul Herlinger, A History of the New Theatre, 1939–1953, MA thesis, University, of Sydney, 1989, vol. 2 pp. 52–3.

50 Gibson, My Years in the Communist Party, p. 86; Colin A. Hughes and B. D. Graham, Voting for the Australian House of Representatives 1901–1964 (Canberra: ANUP, 1975), pp. 199–222.

51 Tribune, 4 May 1941.

52 Mason [J. B. Miles] and McShane [Lance Sharkey], The Coming War in the Pacific (Sydney: CPA, n.d. [1940]), and What is This Labor Party? (Sydney: CPA, n.d. [1941]); Tribune, 16 February, 7 April 1941.

53 Paterson reported in AA A467, SF 42, 6.

54 Holt, A Veritable Dynamo, pp. 69–75.

55 Tribune, 7 April 1941; see Edgar Ross, A History of the Miners’ Federation of Australia (Sydney: Australasian Coal and Shale Employees’ Association, 1970), pp. 386–7, and L. F. Fitzhardinge, The Little Digger 1914–1952: William Morris Hughes, a Political Biography, vol. 2 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1979), pp. 652–4.

56 J. A. Merritt, A History of the Federated Ironworkers’ Association of Australia, 1909–52, PhD thesis, ANU, 1967, pp. 265–7, 295; AA A467, SF42/120.

57 Tribune, 26 April, 22 June 1941.

58 Tribune, 27 July 1941.

Conclusion

1 A phrase I owe to Sean Scalmer, The Career of Class: Intellectuals and the Labour Movement in Australia, 1942–1956, PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 1996, p. 69.