Coming of Age, 1906
In 1905 the Australian Workers Union (AWU), the largest and most influential union in Australia, formally affiliated itself to the Victorian Labor Party. Headquartered in Ballarat, the union’s Victoria–Riverina branch was a large, sprawling, but well-connected, organisation. The union’s mass membership ensured that its leaders entered Labor’s deliberations with that most coveted of assets: the numbers. This strength was on show at the PLC’s conference, held once again at Melbourne’s Trades Hall building, in April 1906. The state party’s secretary, Patrick Heagney, was connected to the union. He was joined at the conference by the union’s leading figures: Arch Stewart, who would succeed Heagney in his post; Andrew McKissock, union powerbroker and soon-to-be senator; and the AWU’s state secretary, Edward Grayndler. These AWU men came with an agenda: to remove the socialist commitment from Labor’s program.
The first step in repudiating socialism was taken by Heagney, who moved to adopt the report of Labor’s 1905 national conference, including its moderate objective.1 In a well-timed coincidence, as soon as Heagney finished speaking, Labor’s federal leader, Chris Watson, just happened to enter the convention hall ‘and was accorded an enthusiastic reception’. His presence did not distract socialists from the implications of Heagney’s motion. One left-wing delegate moved that federal Labor’s pledge to nationalise monopolies should be replaced by the nationalisation of ‘the means of production, distribution, and exchange’. But this was to no avail—the conference voted to endorse the federal party’s position.
Soon after, a moderate delegate representing the Carlton branch moved to strike out the pledge to socialism accepted in 1905. Labor conferences at this time were frenetic events. Filled with debate and excitement—as well as long attention-sapping discussions of procedure and logistics—it was easy to fall behind developments. It was not always clear when a manoeuvre was being carried out, as, unfortunately for the socialists, it now was.
The Carlton proposal was carried by vocal assent. Clearly, many of those present had missed its implication. One of the socialists from the Toorak branch only subsequently objected to the damage that had been done, rising a ‘few minutes later’, to explain that ‘he had been under a misapprehension’. He did not realise that they had just struck out the hard-won dedication to a new socialist order. This was not received with the understanding he might have hoped for. Several interjectors bragged, ‘And it didn’t take us long’.2
Growing in confidence, the moderates were not yet satisfied. A motion was put to ban simultaneous membership of Labor and ‘any other political party’. It was moved by the inner-city Fitzroy branch, in direct reference to a number of Labor members joining ‘a new organisation’, insisting on the preservation of ‘their rights as Labourites’ while failing ‘to discharge their duties’. That this was an assault on the new political organisation in the state, the Victorian Socialist Party (VSP), founded that March by Tom Mann, was lost on no one. The mood of the moderates was perhaps best expressed by the delegate who interrupted a socialist speaker by simply shouting, ‘Let them go’.3 The socialists narrowly managed to avoid expulsion, but the underlying message was clear, they had been routed.
Such were the terms of Labor’s debate in 1906. A resurgent moderate section, underpinned by the AWU, seemed to be calling the shots. Socialists required a new strategy to achieve their goal. In this year, Curtin and Scullin were drawn into politics and into the orbit of the powerful men on each side of the debate. Their political careers were beginning.
Curtin and the Victorian Socialist Party
In 1915 Curtin, a figure of power and prominence in the Victorian labour movement, reflected on his early experiences in the VSP for its newspaper, using verse to summarise the emotion of the time: ‘Happy was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very Heaven!’
The words were a misquotation of the English romantic poet William Wordsworth’s ruminations on the French Revolution. Now, a successful and influential labour movement leader, Curtin recalled the party that had brought him into political life and had given him meaning and purpose at a time when he most needed direction. It was a movement of people drawn together in common cause, the betterment of humanity, and the radical opposition to capitalism.4
The VSP was an extraordinary and unusual organisation. Curtin was not alone in feeling such a deep personal connection to its operations, activities and prominent characters. Between 1906 and 1908, the VSP grew to be the largest socialist organisation in Australia. Numbering two thousand members, its intellectual reach extended far beyond this, and its influence, particularly on the ideological temperament of the labour movement, was sustained and extended by the youthful activists who organised under its banner, before building their careers as trade unionists and parliamentarians.5 For scope and extent of impact—and the ability to achieve stated aims—it is, arguably, the most successful socialist party in Australian history. At a meeting of Australian socialist organisations in 1907, the VSP outnumbered the combined membership of every other socialist ‘party’ in the country.6 Its growth was astounding, and alarming for those opponents of socialism in the conservative firmament, and within the Labor Party.
The reason for this stunning growth? Simple: Tom Mann. He was not the first to try to establish such a radical political presence down under, but he was by far the most successful. Mann’s prestige, charisma, organisational prowess and clear, principled, dedication to his cause made him a magnet for radicals who were sick of Labor’s prevarication and looking for clear and consistent working-class politics for major transformative change. Mann welcomed them all and sought to use their energies and enthusiasms to forge a new political presence, a party, but also a radical community, open to a variety of perspectives and approaches, but united by the same basic commitment to socialism.7
These were probably also the characteristics of the organisation that so entranced Curtin and drew him into a network of labour radicals that shaped his political life. The spectre of a ‘socialist party’ often evokes images of strictly regimented and ideologically pure cadres marching in unison, Bolshevik professional revolutionaries or Maoist brigades. But in this period socialism was considered (at least by most of its proponents) not a single set creed, but a diverse field of multiple perspectives.8 The VSP was no exception. Within its ranks were Marxists, artists, Christian socialists, feminists, utopians and everything in between. But while all strands of progressive thought were welcome, the leadership of the party was dominated by Mann and his acolytes.9 It was from this section that young figures who would come to occupy a central place in the Victorian labour movement emerged; Curtin and his closest friends were the most notable amongst them.
The VSP grew from Mann’s frustration at Labor’s lack of socialist conviction. Unlike later socialist groups its intention was not to replace Labor, but to persuade its members, and leaders, to pursue a socialist goal. Reflecting on this approach later in life, Mann recalled that the plan was to work ‘not in hostility to the Labour Party, but untrammelled by its restrictions’.10 This entailed joint membership—in 1907 it was estimated that 90 per cent of VSP members were also members of Victorian Labor.11 In the first edition of the party newspaper, the Socialist, Mann editorialised that ‘Being Socialists we are therefore Labor men, but our labourism always includes Socialism’. He explained that socialists would ‘use the best influence we can in getting the Labor movement to the straight-out openly-avowed Socialist track’.12 Labor’s current objective of nationalising monopolies was not satisfactory, as it promised merely the ‘patching up [of] the present system’ and ‘leaving the ownership of the raw material and the tools of production in the hands of the capitalist monopolists’.13
This was an ambiguous strategy—at once part of Labor, and separate from it—and it posed major problems for both parties in the years to come. But what is most important for this story is how involvement in the VSP brought Curtin and his soon-to-be friends and allies into the labour movement, albeit its most radical edge. This commitment to transform rather than replace Labor was typical of Mann’s outlook, and defining for Curtin’s political career. It ensured that, while Curtin acquired a reputation as a youthful radical (both a help and hindrance at key moments of his political rise), he was always tribally Labor. His critiques and criticisms were those of a Labor loyalist, desperately wanting the party to live up to his aspirations. Although many were hostile to his convictions—Scullin amongst them—Curtin sought change from within rather than without. This may not have been the case had it been a different brand of radical, rather than Tom Mann, who held ideological sway over Victoria’s new socialist movement.
Though prepared to defend the PLC from the right wing, socialists frequently criticised Labor’s leaders and their direction for the party. That they could do so from within the party and the movement’s major forums often provoked the chagrin of moderates, who accused the VSP of being an electoral hindrance, responsible for Labor’s inability to break out beyond inner-city electorates.14 Such concerns did not blunt socialist demands. For the VSP, Labor’s main responsibility was to fight for the workers’ interests, and for VSP members this meant socialism. It was of primary importance that Labor should promote socialist principles, no matter the electoral cost. It was argued in the Socialist that ‘the Labour Party should assuredly be something more than a mere voting machine’.15 This meant that an entire generation of young socialist activists, such as Curtin, were trained to believe that conviction mattered more than electoral expediency, and that Labor was destined for a loftier purpose than incremental reform.
Mann was not just the VSP’s chief strategist, he was also a celebrity who connected Australia to the near-mythical world of British and European socialism. For a young man like Curtin, the main means to engage with the outside world had been through words, and he had lost many nights to reading by flickering candlelight.16 But in Mann, there was a living and breathing specimen of the world of radicalism beyond Australia’s shores, represented in the grand alliance of working-class and social-democratic parties: the Second International. Mann was happy to share his experiences, and to enjoy the credibility that he accrued through association. One night in the early history of the VSP he lectured to an eager Victorian audience on ‘Prominent Socialists I have Known’. His list of notables included Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels, the leader of the French socialists Jean Jaurès, the soon-to-be French president Alexandre Millerand, and German socialist leaders Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel, amongst others.17
Mann drew on the example of the large parties of social democracy in Europe to develop a cadre of socialist activists united by a sense of community. To this end, the party provided a wide range of social activities to bind these agitators together. The VSP held dances and weekend retreats in the campsites of the Dandenong Ranges, sponsored a cricket and football team, held a regular high tea, and celebrated key dates on the labour movement’s calendar with fetes and carnivals. Attendees at its meetings were welcomed by a socialist band. Children of socialist parents attended a Socialist Sunday School, and the party even inducted young children into the creed through a new rite of passage, the ‘Socialist Dedication’, which replicated a Christian baptism ceremony.18 The thought of young children being stolen from the faith by the insidious and irresponsible socialists provoked the ire of conservatives and the observant.19
The VSP sought to spread the socialist message throughout the working class, and swiftly developed an intellectual apparatus of some sophistication to do so. The party newspaper, the Socialist, was at the heart of these activities, providing ‘very high standards of journalism’ with a circulation of ‘many thousands’.20 The paper served as a tool of education and organisation, running numerous articles that translated socialist theory for a working-class audience, as well as frequent updates on party activities and campaigns. Regular activities focused on educational and propaganda meetings, where leading party members toured Melbourne’s working-class suburbs to speak on a range of socialist topics.21 One activist later recalled a weekend speaking calendar of ‘Smith Street, Collingwood … Commercial Road, Prahran, then the Market meeting in my own suburb’ on a Saturday, followed by a Sunday roster of ‘Nicholson Street, Footscray, and … the Town Pier, Port Melbourne’, before assembling for further meetings at the Yarra.22 By mid-1907 Curtin had become a regular fixture at these street corner meetings. One issue of the Socialist reported him spending his weekend lecturing at the South Melbourne markets one day, and at the Port Melbourne Town Pier the next.23
Important as these suburban meetings were for engaging the party membership and disseminating the socialist message, the most prominent and important part of the organisation’s public activities were the regular Sunday lectures. Socialists gathered on Sunday mornings at the speakers’ corner on the banks of the Yarra River, a well-known spot for radicals and progressives to deliver speeches and engage with the public. Having the chance to represent the party at the Yarra was ‘the acme of a Socialist speaker’s ambition in those days’.24 Following this, members made their way to the Guild Hall or the Bijou Theatre, popular and large venues for public events in the heart of Melbourne, for a major public lecture. These lectures drew party members together and provided a means to educate the converted, and convince those outside the party’s ranks. They were an integral part of Melbourne’s political life. The mainstay was Mann, who spoke on a wide range of issues week-by-week, ranging from Marx’s thought to how communism operated among animals.25 But other notables also took the stage, with progressives from a variety of perspectives being drawn to the large and enthusiastic socialist audiences.26 For a young working-class person interested in world affairs and the ideas of the great thinkers, there was nowhere else to be.
The party sought to involve its membership in its agitational activities. It expended a great deal of effort on promoting socialist education. Education was not an end in itself. Socialist pedagogy intended to strip bare the lies and mythologies spread by capitalism, and to instil systems of knowledge to inform the actions of socialist activists. This was an attempt to train and educate a generation of movement intellectuals who could articulate the experience of the working class and convincingly argue within the labour movement for socialism. A socialist, according to the party newspaper, ‘must be a thinker for others, a persuader of others’, which necessitated being engrossed in a culture of education in politics, philosophy, logic and elocution, provided by the party.27
Curtin was among this new generation of socialist thinkers and persuaders, and he learnt his lessons well. Before taking the stump on Melbourne’s street corners to spruik the benefits of socialism, Curtin learnt his trade in the ‘dark places’ of the basement of Zion Hall in Swanston Street, where the speakers’ and economics classes met.28 The dingy basement rooms were cold and untidy, but there Curtin entered a new world of debate and discussion, encountering many other young men and women who had felt as lost as he had and been drawn together in a search for meaning. The meetings later moved to a similarly dingy space on Collins Street, where, Curtin recalled:
overhead the city passed with click of heels and swish of skirts, while down below, lifting the world, were the great lion-hearts and flaming souls whose collective spirit still sits at the base of the temple, and is unconquered. Here were sung the first songs, here was breathed the message of the sun, here was lived the hundred years of Europe excelling all the centuries of Cathay.29
Though no-one knew it yet, this was a generation of future labour leaders serving their political apprenticeships. The speakers’ class developed basic skills in composition, grammar and oratory, which many young socialists lacked, their formal education usually having ended in their early teens. Alongside these basic skills, the classes focused on how to communicate socialist ideas to persuade an audience. Lessons provided practice for speakers in ‘address[ing] imaginery (sic) open air crowd[s] under criticism as to matter and method’.30 Such lessons stayed with Curtin. Years later, as prime minister, he related a trick learned in these days. Always lean your neck back against your collar, he explained. This way you can be sure to project your voice to the back of a crowded room. A useful piece of advice for the tempestuous atmosphere of parliamentary question time.31
The speakers’ class was responsible for another significant moment for Curtin: the first time his name appeared in print. In May 1906 a speech he had prepared for the speakers’ class on the topic of internationalism was singled out for ‘high praise’ and published in the Socialist.32 We can only imagine Curtin’s feelings upon opening the newspaper that week and seeing his name recorded for the first time. No doubt it was a unique thrill for someone so enamoured of the world of letters, who had spent many nights in the reading rooms of the public library. This was followed some months later by Curtin’s first formal article in the Socialist entitled ‘The International Spirit’.33 Emerging in both pieces was an argument that Curtin continued to hone over the years to come as he became a forceful and passionate ‘persuader of others’ in the cause of international socialism. Capitalism, he postulated, was an international system. The working class was, as a result, international. Workers had a responsibility to fight the system across national boundaries and refuse to accede to any higher loyalty than to the class itself.
These arguments directly shadowed, and were inspired by, Tom Mann. It is not entirely clear when Curtin and Mann first met, though Ross notes that Curtin’s contemporaries believed they came into contact ‘very early’.34 What is evident is that, during his period in the VSP, Curtin was drawn under Mann’s intellectual and political influence. Curtin heard Mann lecture frequently at the Bijou, and read his numerous articles in the Socialist. It is likely that Mann participated on occasion in the speakers’ class, and the jovial party leader probably engaged with young men such as Curtin frequently at party events. He almost certainly commissioned Curtin to write for the Socialist. Mann was the most important influence in Curtin’s formative political life, and the young socialist’s outlook was shaped by Mann’s arguments. On a personal level, they developed an affectionate relationship that persisted through the years. Later in his career, as opposition leader, Curtin assured an audience gathered to celebrate Mann’s eightieth birthday (with Mann himself absent) that they were unlikely to ‘ever see a greater man’.35
This was not the only long-lasting and defining relationship that Curtin formed in these years. Curtin was one among many young men and women drawn into the intellectual orbit of the Victorian Socialist Party, and Mann—though, perhaps, no other learned their lessons so well. Some of these young people came to great fame, such as the future premier of Victoria, John Cain, an enthusiastic VSP member and propagator of the socialist creed, and Curtin’s friend John Gunn, future premier of South Australia. Many other prominent unionists, feminists and Labor members first came to politics through the activities of the VSP at this time. But for Curtin, the most significant were his friends Frank Hyett and Edward ‘Jack’ Holloway.
The friendship between Curtin and Hyett, which began on the football field, became a powerful political double-act.36 It has been recognised before that Hyett was the more passionate speaker, a ‘mob orator’ who could inflame the emotions of his listeners, as well as an extremely effective organiser. What has been understated is the extent to which Curtin was the brains of the pairing—imbibing the thoughts and theories of European socialism, often mediated through Mann, to apply to Australian conditions. The two men would prove a potent combination and became the best of mates.
Edward Holloway was a young bootmaker from Tasmania who, like Curtin and Hyett, left school in his early teens but retained a deep desire for learning and knowledge. He had gained the sobriquet ‘Jack’ from an uninterested employer who—not bothering to learn the name of the young boy who swept the shop’s floor—beckoned him one day by calling ‘Come here, Jack’.37 It was an inauspicious start for the man who rose to become one of Australia’s most powerful unionists. He was a pivotal figure throughout Curtin’s career—an association that began in the VSP’s economics class. In his memoirs, written in 1954, Holloway recalled meeting Curtin as part of this ‘intimate group’ convening every Wednesday ‘to discuss or debate the social questions of the world’.38
Curtin was no longer labouring alone deep into the weary night, reading books nobody else cared for. He was in the midst of a new community equally driven by passions he shared: for knowledge, understanding and change. This was a world in which he was drawn into the company of other young men who played defining roles in his political life under the tutelage of Tom Mann.
As substantial and important as these male relationships were, the VSP was not an exclusively masculine world. Mann had a genuine dedication to involving women in the political life of the party, one that was far beyond that of other male socialist leaders, though it was shaped by the particular inflections of gender relations at the time. Just as with other political organisations of all stripes, it was men who occupied the spotlight, and women who conducted the ‘private’ realm work of fundraising, organising socials and pouring the tea.39
But this does not tell the whole story. For all its contradictions and failings, the VSP under Mann’s guidance did earnestly endeavour to involve women in party life. The historian of women and socialism, Joy Damousi, has observed that in this regard the VSP was ‘unique … in its attempts to integrate women into its organisation’.40 The party encouraged women to act as agitators within the socialist and labour movements—and leading activist women needed little encouragement. The VSP understood the oppression of women to be a product of capitalism, and considered it the responsibility of socialists to fight for equal rights for women.41
This was not simple posturing, as an article in the Socialist explained: ‘in our propaganda work the women share the same as the men. They take their full share of rough and tumble work, and are called upon to discharge a full share of intellectual work’.42 While the fullness of this equality was overstated, the prominent role of women in the party and its political activities is notable. Women occupied leadership roles, including serving as vice-president and on the VSP’s executive (though notably not president, nor near parity on the governing body).43 Women were encouraged to be orators and agitators, and were among the best the party had to offer. One, Mrs Bruce, was noted for her star turns on the soap box.44
Mrs Bruce was matriarch of the Bruce family, an influential socialist family with whom Curtin became close at this time, forming a lifelong relationship.45 John Gunn, Curtin’s friend, was Mrs Bruce’s nephew. Among Gunn’s siblings were two sisters, both of whom were active members of the VSP. Ethel later married Frank Hyett. Gunn’s sixteen-year-old sister Nancy, known to comrades and family as Annie, is identified by Day as Curtin’s ‘sweetheart’.46 Annie was an enthusiastic socialist, and a pupil in the party’s economics class. There is a paucity of details on their relationship, which came to a tragic end when the young Annie died in August 1906. For the sensitive young man this loss cut deep.47
Life had changed and changed quickly for Curtin. From maudlin isolation, he was now well-entrenched in a radical community of working-class intellectuals and dreamers. Within this network of socialists were many who would play a defining role in his political life, as he moved from the periphery of the movement towards its centre. It was early days, but his journey had begun. He was not the only one finding a place for themselves in the labour movement that year.
Scullin’s challenge to Alfred Deakin
The federal election had been announced for 12 December 1906, and the field had taken shape. In an electoral contest that did not promise too many surprises, eyes turned to the city of Ballarat, heartland of the Ballaarat constituency, held by the Australian Prime Minister Alfred Deakin. One correspondent for the liberal Ballarat Star newspaper was even compelled to verse:
Three good men,
See how they run.
They all run after a Federal seat.
And none of them think they’ll see defeat.
At least, so they tell the man in the street.
Three good men.
The (hopefully) amateur poet gave voice to some of the hearty cynicism of Australian electors to their prospective parliamentary representatives. All three candidates, including Deakin, were ‘so cocksure’ that they were ‘the real Simon Pure’. One, was ‘free from party strife’ and waved ‘an anti-socialist flag’; the second lived ‘a political life’ and ‘merely waves a rag’; and the third, ‘has married a caucus wife’ and has ‘his flag in a bag’. You, the poet assured, ‘never saw such things in your life’.48
The Ballarat campaign effectively crystallised the major issues of Australian politics at the time into the contest for one seat, particularly prized because of its occupant. Of the poet’s sketches, the first candidate, waving the anti-socialist flag, was Joseph Kirton, running for the newly named Anti-Socialist Party, led by Deakin’s antagonist, George Reid. The canny Reid had renamed his Free Trade Party in an explicit attempt to capitalise on anxiety about the rise of ‘socialist’ Labor. The second, who ‘merely waves a rag’ was Deakin himself, anticipating a lacklustre local contest that would allow him to strut and fret upon the national stage as he campaigned for his party to continue in government. The third, wed to a ‘caucus wife’, was an unknown. The matrimonial reference was to Labor’s commitment to pledging its MPs to vote in line with the majority of the parliamentary party, or caucus, a level of control considered restrictive and undemocratic by many liberals (including Deakin). Beyond the confines of the nearby PLC branch, the Catholic community, a local debating club and the customers who visited his grocery, very few knew who this Labor candidate was. But as a result of his efforts in carrying Labor’s standard as he assailed the prime minister’s own territory, he would find his name and his picture in newspapers across the continent. For this candidate, James Scullin, the campaign would be an introduction to the world of the powerful political coterie based in Ballarat, and more specifically, around the AWU’s headquarters at number 2 Chancery Lane, near the centre of town.
The 1906 election, whatever the appearances, proved historic. It was the last fought between three major parties: Protectionist, Anti-Socialist/Free Trade, and Labor.49 The short-lived Watson administration of 1904 had demonstrated Labor could govern, and the party’s key figures were hungry for a return to power. Some, including Watson, countenanced the prospect of alliance with liberals to try and make this so. But Victorian irreconcilables were convinced that any such alliance tainted its principles and would reduce the likelihood of a Labor government that could implement the movement’s demands. After decades tied to the state’s liberals, the newly converted Victorian party insisted on Labor’s independence.50 What better way to make this independence clear, and to demonstrate all past alliances void, than to take on the most prominent and powerful liberal in the country, Prime Minister Alfred Deakin?
But who to choose to undertake this imposing task? While the seat was considered unwinnable for Labor, the political context made the choice of a candidate particularly significant. The ALP required a standard bearer who could articulate and defend its principles and policies against the most imposing political figure of his time. In September 1906, as the election loomed, the PLC’s central executive endorsed James Scullin as Labor’s candidate.51 Unfortunately, the precise process and rationale is lost to us. Considering the newfound AWU influence, he would not have been selected had he not received some measure of support from the union’s powerbrokers, figures to whom he had already demonstrated his worth, such as Charlie McGrath.
Taking on Alfred Deakin in a battle of policy, and a contest of wits, was no easy task. Eccentric and brilliant, Deakin was a leviathan of liberal politics, and one of the most significant figures in the shaping of the Federation through the 1890s and then its early years. Known for his extraordinary intellect, he combined ‘rhetorical flights’ with a precise command over policy. Warm and charming, he was referred to as ‘Affable Alfred’, even by his political rivals.52 Deakin’s biographer, Judith Brett, has described his ‘extraordinary’ oratory, with:
rapid delivery, words, phrases, images, arguments, quotations and examples streamed from his mouth in complex, well-shaped sentences as he strode around the platform, gesturing for emphasis, his voice rising on crescendos of fervour and gliding down to quiet appeals. Tall and strong, with thick dark hair and mesmeric brown eyes, Deakin had the compelling physical presence of a great actor and the stamina for long performances in which body, mind and voice worked in unison.53
Against such an imposing figure of the Australian political firmament, Scullin was, at first, given little chance.
Scullin’s other opponent, Joseph Kirton, was a well-established, if less intimidating, figure. Chair of the Ballarat Water Commission, Kirton was in a brief interregnum from representing the seat of Ballarat West in the Legislative Assembly, losing it in 1904 (to Tom Mann’s socialist collaborator Harry Scott Bennett), and winning it again in 1907 (when Bennett refused to stand).54 Kirton ran in the 1906 federal election as an Anti-Socialist in opposition to the rise of Labor. At this point, the Australian electoral system operated on a first-past-the-post basis. Some in the ALP’s ranks hoped that, by splitting the anti-Labor vote, Kirton might inadvertently aid their cause.55 But Scullin, ever reflective and levelheaded, was not getting his hopes up.
At the end of October Scullin launched his campaign on a wet and windy evening in a town famous for its chill with a mass gathering at Her Majesty’s Theatre, a refined and spacious meeting place in Ballarat’s heart. Chairing the meeting was the influential AWU figure, Andrew McKissock, president of the local Labor branch. In 1914 his union connection saw him selected, and elected, as a Labor senator for Victoria. His more immediate political ambitions were local, and the following year he challenged Kirton for the seat of Ballarat West—losing, only to depose his rival in a subsequent election in 1908.56 Also present was the sitting member for the hotly contested Ballarat West constituency, Bennett, who spoke ‘at some length’ in support of Scullin’s candidacy.57
The meeting made the Melbourne news, with the Age reporting Scullin’s explanation, ‘at considerable length’ of Labor’s program.58 Over the course of the campaign Scullin regularly lectured his audiences for anywhere between ninety minutes and two hours. Remarkably, he delivered this speech while suffering from a bout of influenza that had kept him bedridden for days.59 He was, Scullin told his assembled supporters and interested onlookers, ‘filled with a sense of the greatest humility’ knowing that he challenged a figure who occupied such an ‘exalted position’ compared to the ‘humble niche he himself filled’.60
Scullin needed to defend and justify Labor’s program from its most adroit detractor, and to make intelligible the reasons for its independence from the liberals. But this was not the era of professional politics based on a twenty-four-hour media cycle, with bulletins distributed from the leaders’ office or party headquarters with that day’s talking points. Scullin had scope to put his own imprint on his descriptions of Labor’s purpose and prerogatives.61 As such, there is a glimpse here of the young man’s emerging politics. This campaign provides an adumbration of the perspective being developed that he honed and nuanced over the years to come, as well as the skills in debate and rational persuasion he had nurtured at South Street.
Scullin campaigned, he made clear, without malice or personal animosity towards Deakin or Kirton. He would not ‘speak ill of his opponents’ for both ‘were gentlemen’. But the gentlemen were wrong in their estimation of Labor. Scullin focused his analytical prowess on refuting Deakin’s recent allegation that Labor was too focused on the future to the detriment of the present needs of Australia—its program devoid of practicalities in favour of ‘ideals’. Labor’s representatives in parliament were solid men, Deakin had avowed, but the party itself was run by an insidious ‘machine outside’, making Labor an unreliable, if not impossible, ally.62
Scullin turned the logic on its head. While denying that Labor was a party of dreamers and absent-minded utopian schemers, he argued that governments ‘should look ahead’.63 They should have a vision of the future they wished to achieve—this is what an objective was for. A government, Scullin asserted, was like a ‘father’ who (revealing the gendered logic of Scullin’s worldview) ‘looked into the future, and saw that his family was provided for when they grew up’. Labor’s objective was simple: socialism. This firm commitment was much better, he argued, than the prime minister’s vague ‘few ideas of what they were goin[g] to do—some day’.
But this was not a full-throated defence of the radical socialism advanced by Mann and Curtin. The party’s objective was simple, he assured his audience, securing for ‘all citizens the full results of their labour’. Was there anything ‘ideal or visionary in that?’ The Labor program—what it intended to achieve in government through practical policies—was separate from this objective. Because while the program could be implemented, the ‘objective was not yet attainable’. Scullin was arguing that while the party was guided by hopes of a faraway socialist future, its immediate program was one of moderate reform. Socialism was achievable as part of a long-term process, perfectly constitutional, through which collectivist policies could be implemented through the machinery of government, and the citizenry educated as to its positive values.
The differences may seem subtle, but this was an important point of delineation between Scullin and Labor’s socialists. Unlike Mann, who believed the socialist future was just beyond the horizon and should guide every contemporary step, Scullin was working on a different political temporality in which the present was the domain of the pragmatic, while socialism belonged to the far-distant future.
This does not mean that Scullin failed to articulate a far-reaching vision of radical change in its own right. He attacked the status quo that saw a ‘few individuals’ own ‘the means of production’, ensuring the ‘unequal distribution’ of wealth and resources. What was needed, he argued in echo of Labor’s 1905 objective, was the nationalisation of monopolies. This should be followed by a referendum to entrench protection as the official creed of the Commonwealth, and the implementation of the ‘new protection’, under which the benefits of tariffs would be offered only to those employers who used the profits accrued to ‘pay good wages’ and ensure ‘that the prices were fixed for the consumer’. There should be, he argued, an amendment to the Arbitration Act to allow for preference in state employment to be granted to trade unionists. With a particular passion he advocated for a land tax on unimproved land values, ‘the only fair tax of all’.
This was not the socialist Commonwealth, but neither was it the liberalism to which the Victorian labour movement had previously clung. This vision was based on a far-reaching belief in collectivism rather than the individualism of the liberals, and it looked to centralised state power to ensure workers received their fair share. Deakin may claim credit for some of these policies, Scullin declared, but this was to seek acclaim for Labor’s good work, reminding him of ‘the rooster which did all the cackling when the hen had laid her egg’. The initiative, Scullin insisted, had been Labor’s, and much of it inspired by the cynically alluded to ‘machine’, which was, itself, no more than a ‘number of energetic people united together’ who selected representatives to send to parliament bound by a commitment to a common program.
After the speech came question time, and Scullin agreed to field a number of queries, one of which was particularly notable. He was questioned on his opinion of the state of the Federation. He held back little in his response. The state parliaments, he believed, ‘would eventually be abolished’.64 This was a direct repudiation of the intentions of Deakin and the other founders of Federation, who had prepared a carefully crafted system with appropriate checks and balances to prevent the Commonwealth from gaining too much power.
Scullin, and other Laborites, recognised that the federal system restrained reforming ambitions. The requirement for negotiation between states (most of which continued to have an unelected or heavily undemocratic upper house in their parliaments, dominated by conservatives and vested interests) was a block on ambitions for wide-scale reform. To create a country suited for the working class required a constitutional overhaul. For Scullin, this extended to the abolition of the states themselves. It was a radical position, and one that indicates his bold ambition for Australia and his belief that it could be made anew.
In this opening meeting Scullin had set the tone for his campaign. His was an appeal based on passion, and the belief in a different way of doing things, but it remained at all times rational and reasoned, appealing to the intellect of his listeners, as well as their emotions. Knowing that his chances were limited, Scullin took responsibility for dispelling myths perpetuated about Labor: how it organised and what it believed. In lengthy speeches he returned to these themes, explaining to crowds across the electorate what Labor stood for, elucidating the planks in its platform, and justifying its objective.65
Scullin proved to be a thorn in Deakin’s side. His persistence in refuting Deakin’s claims, and his calm advocacy for the Labor program ensured that the prime minister could not take his own seat for granted.66 As his party’s greatest asset, Deakin was required to take to the hustings for other candidates in what was shaping as a tight national election. Even outside Ballarat, Deakin could not escape Scullin’s challenge. At one meeting at the Port Melbourne Town Hall, while campaigning for the local Protectionist candidate, Deakin was greeted with ‘hooting’ by local stevedores. Upon commencing his speech Deakin was interrupted by a call from the crowd for ‘three cheers for Scullin’ which ‘were heartily given’. An impassioned member of the crowd interjected midway into Deakin’s speech, ‘Scullin’s got you done’, a heckle received with ‘Cheers and laughter’.67 There was a perceptible change in the tone of Scullin’s campaign—a faint hope, that, perhaps, he could achieve the unprecedented and topple Deakin. Clearly, he was not the only one. In November Kirton announced that he was withdrawing from the campaign.68 For Deakin, this came as a relief. It meant that there would be only one clear anti-Labor candidate. It was also a harbinger of developments to come in Australian politics.
If Scullin was to win against the odds, no small amount of credit would belong to the mastermind of his campaign, Arch Stewart, who orchestrated the actions of ‘a battalion of skilled canvassers … working on the most methodical and effective lines’ from the ‘nerve-centre of the Labor movement’—the AWU office.69 For anyone seeking to advance their careers in Labor politics, Stewart was already a good man to know, and his influence was only set to grow. Born in nearby Sebastopol and growing up in Curtin’s hometown of Creswick, Stewart had a long history of union involvement. At one point this resulted in his blacklisting by local employers, leading him to undertake a position selling groceries in Ballarat. An AWU-loyalist, he had taken on the task of establishing a Labor presence in the city after a visit from Tom Mann in 1902, acting as the secretary of the local party. In the years to come he was also elected to Victorian Labor’s executive, replacing Patrick Heagney as its secretary. When Labor determined in 1915 to appoint a secretary to its new national executive, Stewart was the man approached for the job. Throughout the campaign he and Scullin worked closely, and established a strong relationship built on common esteem and trust. One day, many years later, Scullin eulogised Stewart at his funeral, telling the mourners gathered in the Coburg general cemetery: ‘He was a man whose word was his bond’.70
In the end, despite the energy and enthusiasm of his campaign, Scullin was able to poll only 6408 votes to Deakin’s 12 900.71 In conceding defeat, he paid tribute to Deakin, who had ‘fought the contest honourably and fairly’. Scullin had much to be proud of in this campaign. He had carried Labor’s banner with great pride and served its cause to acclaim. His name was known. He had demonstrated his ability to articulate a big-picture vision for Labor and Australia in front of figures of power and influence in the labour movement.
On Sunday 23 December Scullin was invited to address Ballarat Labor’s end-of-year Christmas meeting, held at the town’s Trades and Labor Council building. Scullin spoke at length about Labor’s task, taking particular care to note the need for further education of the working class. With this, Curtin would have agreed. Scullin, the devout Catholic, told his congregation that it was Labor’s mission to ensure the end of class division through the development of co-operatism, and to fight for power, ‘not as an end, but as a means to establish by rational and practical means the great Christian inspiration of “Peace on earth”.’72 For two young men, full of hope and aspiration, the dream was for a better world of equity and peace.
It was not the hope of peace, however, but the threat of war that defined the next stage of their journeys to power.
Notes
1 ‘The Parliament of Labour’, Tocsin (Melbourne), 19 April 1906, p. 2.
2 ibid., p. 4.
3 ibid.
4 ‘Ten Years Ago’, Socialist (Melbourne), 27 August 1915, p. 4.
5 Verity Burgmann, ‘In Our Time’: Socialism and the Rise of Labor, 1885–1905 (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), p. 135.
6 Geoffrey Hewitt, A History of the Victorian Socialist Party (MA Thesis, La Trobe University, 1974), p. 59.
7 Bertha Walker, Solidarity Forever!: A Part Story of the Life and Times of Percy Laidler—The First Quarter of a Century (Melbourne: National Press, 1972), p. 30.
8 RN Berki, Socialism (London: JM Dent and Sons, 1975), p. 16.
9 Osborne, ‘Tom Mann’, p. 141.
10 Mann, Tom Mann’s Memoirs, p. 157.
11 Strangio, Neither Power Nor Glory, p. 75.
12 ‘The New Party’, Socialist (Melbourne), 2 April 1906, p. 4.
13 ‘Liberalism. Labourism. Socialism’, Socialist (Melbourne), 28 July 1906, p. 4.
14 Strangio, Neither Power Nor Glory, p. 76.
15 ‘The Labor Conference’, Socialist (Melbourne), 6 April 1907, p. 5.
16 Ross, John Curtin, p. 9.
17 Socialist (Melbourne), 20 April 1906, p. 5.
18 Walker, Solidarity Forever, pp. 30, 35–45.
19 Liam Byrne, ‘Constructing a Socialist Community: The Victorian Socialist Party, Ritual, Pedagogy, and the Subaltern Counterpublic’, Labour History, no. 108 (2015): p. 114.
20 Frank Farrell, International Socialism & Australian Labour: The Left in Australia 1919–1939 (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1981), p. 6.
21 Outlined in the Socialist’s regular ‘Work of the Week’ columns.
22 Alf Wilson, All for the Cause: Being the Experience of a Socialist Propagandist. In the Tom Audley Collection, 84/117, 1984.0117 Unit 1, p. 15, University of Melbourne Archives.
23 ‘Work of the Week’, Socialist (Melbourne), 15 June 1907, p. 3.
24 Wilson, All for the Cause, p. 15.
25 ‘Bijou Theatre’, Socialist (Melbourne), 20 May 1906, p. 5.
26 Walker, Solidarity Forever, p. 40.
27 ‘Training for Socialism’, Socialist (Melbourne), 8 December 1906, p. 4.
28 ‘Work of the Socialist Party’, Socialist (Melbourne), 5 January 1907, p. 4.
29 ‘Ten Years Ago’, Socialist (Melbourne), 27 August 1915, p. 4.
30 ‘The Speakers’ Class’, Socialist (Melbourne), 19 January 1907, p. 6.
31 John Thompson, On Lips of Living Men (Melbourne: Lansdowne Press, 1962), p. 66.
32 J Curtin, ‘Speakers’ Class’, Socialist (Melbourne), 5 May 1906, p. 7.
33 J Curtin, ‘The International Spirit’, Socialist (Melbourne), 1 September 1906, p. 5.
34 Ross, John Curtin, p. 13.
35 ‘Report of the Public Meeting Held In Celebration of Tom Mann’s 80th Birthday’, Sam Merrifield Collection, SLV. Manuscripts, MS13045, Box 15, pp. 4–5.
36 Ross, John Curtin, p. 24.
37 Holloway, From Labor Council to Privy Council, pp. 4–5.
38 ibid., p. 23.
39 Joy Damousi, Women Come Rally: Socialism, Communism and Gender in Australia 1890–1955 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 34–35.
40 ibid., p. 47.
41 Mann, Socialism, p. 36.
42 Tom Mann, ‘To Women Comrades’, Socialist (Melbourne), 4 January 1908, p. 4.
43 Hewitt, A History of the Victorian Socialist Party, p. 296.
44 ‘The Movement’, Socialist (Melbourne), 6 April 1907, p. 2.
45 Ross, John Curtin, p. 24.
46 Day, John Curtin, p. 93.
47 ibid., p. 98.
48 ‘Jottings and Jingles’, Ballarat Star, 13 October 1906, p. 3.
49 There was an emerging differentiation between liberal and conservative protectionists at the time, with some of the latter having supported the short-lived Free Trade prime minister George Reid from 1904-1905.
50 Paul Strangio, ‘“An Intensity of Feeling Such as I Had Never Before Witnessed”’, in Paul Strangio and Nick Dyrenfurth (eds), Confusion: The Making of the Australian Two-Party System (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2009), p. 148.
51 ‘Central Executive PLC’, Tocsin (Melbourne), 20 September 1906, p. 7.
52 Stuart Macintyre, ‘Alfred Deakin’, in Michelle Grattan (ed.), Australian Prime Ministers (Chatswood: New Holland Publishers, 2016), p. 46.
53 Judith Brett, The Enigmatic Mr Deakin (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2017), p. 4.
54 Weston Bate, ‘Kirton, Joseph William (1861–1935)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/kirton-joseph-william-6977/text12123, published first in hardcopy 1983, accessed online 24 August 2019.
55 Robertson, JH Scullin, p. 11.
56 Kathleen Dermody, ‘McKissock, Andrew Nelson’, Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate, accessed: http://biography.senate.gov.au/andrew-nelson-mckissock/.
57 ‘Ballarat’, Age (Melbourne), 24 October 1906, p. 8.
58 ibid.
59 ‘The Fight for Ballarat’, Worker (Brisbane), 1 November 1906, p. 5.
60 ‘Federal Elections’, Ballarat Star, 24 October 1906, p. 2.
61 Robertson, JH Scullin, p. 11.
62 ‘Mr. Deakin’s Policy’, Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 18 October 1906, p. 7.
63 ‘Federal Elections’, Ballarat Star, 24 October 1906, p. 2.
64 ibid.
65 ‘The Ballarat Electorate’, Ballarat Star, 7 November 1906, p. 6; ‘Mr. J. H. Scullin’s Candidature’, Ballarat Star, 17 November 1906, p. 1.
66 Brett, The Enigmatic Mr Deakin, p. 344.
67 ‘Prime Minister Heckled’, Argus (Melbourne), 28 November 1906, p. 7.
68 ‘A Labor Rally’, Ballarat Star, 27 November 1906, p. 2.
69 ‘The Fight for Labor in Victoria’, Worker (Brisbane), 6 December 1906, p. 5.
70 Peter Love, ‘Stewart, Archibald (1867–1925)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/stewart-archibald-8660/text15143, published first in hardcopy 1990, accessed online 24 August 2019.
71 Age (Melbourne), 14 December 1906, p. 8.
72 ‘Political Labor League’, Ballarat Star, 25 December 1906, p. 3.