Global War: 1914–1915
The war seemed far from over in April 1918. So much had changed in Australia since its outbreak in August 1914. Four years on and fierce and bloody battles still raged in Europe, and lists of the dead grew longer. In Australia, the country’s political leaders gathered at the governor-general’s mansion on the banks of the Yarra River to discuss how to replenish the country’s depleted battalions. Two groups glared across the table at one another. On one side sat representatives of the Nationalist Party, the new party of government formed in 1917 from the alliance between the former Labor hero Billy Hughes and his fellow party ‘rats’, and their erstwhile conservative opponents—it was a new ‘Fusion’, and it impressed Labor loyalists even less than the last.
Frank Tudor, now the leader of the federal parliamentary ALP, sat across from them. For years he had worked alongside these men. He had called them friends and comrades. Meeting in these circumstances was a bitter experience. But it was not one he had to suffer alone. James Scullin was by Tudor’s side. He was there as a man of influence, not just the editor of the Evening Echo, but also the president of the Victorian Labor Party. Scullin bemoaned the inability of those in attendance to ‘bring about harmony between all the different sections of the community’ as had existed ‘when the people of Australia were rushing to the colours in large numbers’ in August 1914.1 Scullin accused Hughes and his supporters of having destroyed what unanimity had existed by twice proposing referendums on compulsory military service, first in 1916 and again in 1917.
Such had Australian politics become by 1918. Accusations of disloyalty flew easily, with their implications unrestrained. Politics was locked in a fierce partisan deadlock, with neither side willing to give ground to achieve resolution. On the other side of the world, Australian soldiers waited for their next order into battle. The contrast with the state of the country in 1914 was stark. Then, Labor had been united, poised to win back government in the imminent federal election. The country was wealthy, confident and assured of its status as a ‘social laboratory’ experimenting in democracy and egalitarianism. By 1918 this all seemed to belong to the distant past.
How had this happened? Why had a united Labor Party torn itself apart? And why, for that matter, was the editor of a provincial labour newspaper now sitting in the residence of the governor-general, talking on equal terms with the prime minister of Australia?
James Scullin and the war
Scullin had been editor of the Echo for less than a year when the war began. Immediately, he was charged with a great responsibility: crafting the response of a newspaper that was the only labour daily in the state, and, effectively, the major ideological outlet for Victorian Labor’s moderates. It was an imposing task. And a melancholy one. Scullin was a believer, a deep believer in God’s love, and the necessity of peace in his service. It broke his heart to see the world at war.
Scullin supported the war effort with stoicism, not enthusiasm, as a matter of imperial duty. The chain of events that led to war proved the superiority, Scullin argued, of the ‘Labor ideal of abolishing international disputes by arbitration’. But any chance for arbitration had passed, and there ‘must be no backing down on Britain’s part’. In his view, Britain had, regrettably, been dragged into the conflict against its better intentions by the autocratic and militaristic Central Powers of Germany and Austro-Hungary. After its allies Belgium and Russia had been attacked, those who loved Britain would feel ‘grave disappointment’, if the empire stood aside. Though the war was ‘abhorrent’ to ‘thinking people’ he argued that Britain was ‘duty bound to actively assist her allies’.2 He was not alone in this estimation. The bulk of the labour movement similarly believed, with some regret, that Australia was duty-bound to contribute to the imperial effort. Federal Labor leader Andrew Fisher went so far as to promise that, under his government, Australia would contribute ‘our last man and our last shilling’ to the empire’s cause.3
According to Scullin, Australia’s contribution to the war effort was a matter of not just imperial loyalty, but also self-defence. If Britain were defeated, Australia would be without its protector and vulnerable to attack. The spectre of two nations loomed large in this regard for Scullin. The first was Australia’s ‘ally for the sake of convenience’, Japan, into ‘whose face the White Australia policy has been thrust’. The second threat was Germany. Scullin asserted, incorrectly, that ‘next to Britain Germany is the greatest colonising nation in the world’, pointing to the German presence in the South Pacific as a potential threat. For those who doubted Germany’s military capacities to launch an invasion across the globe, Scullin reminded: ‘Carthage said that Rome could never conquer Africa’.4
Although Scullin believed German aggression had triggered the war, he was appalled by the hyper-nationalism and racism that it brought to the fore. He condemned the acts of violence that broke out against German-Australians, stating that belligerence against the German community ‘cannot be too strongly denounced’. Referring to an incident in Melbourne in which a German club was attacked and the German flag dragged through the streets, Scullin stated that if ‘we have a quarrel with Germany we certainly have none with our German fellow citizens’, and labelled such acts of fervour as ‘reprehensible in the extreme’.5
Scullin believed it was necessary to support the war effort, but he was adamant that its burdens must be borne equally by all sections of Australian society, and feared that the working class would, ultimately, end up paying the price of a conflict it had not begun. He was particularly anxious about the prospect of the federal government borrowing immense sums to fund its contribution. He maintained that excessive borrowing would place the Commonwealth’s fortunes in the hands of exploitative financiers intent on extracting high rates of interest from the taxpayers.6 His solution was simple: target exploitative trusts and monopolies to ensure they paid their share.
In practical terms, Scullin continued his advocacy for a referendum to empower the central government as the most effective means to resolve the ‘Great Problem’ of protecting working class interests in the war economy. While acclaiming Labor’s return to office in the September 1914 federal election, he lamented that the repudiation of past referendums had left Australian workers vulnerable to ‘predatory combinations’. This would remain the case for as long as ‘the hands of the people’s representatives are tied by the restrictions contained in the Constitution’.7 He concluded: ‘we can take it for granted that the Referendum questions will soon be submitted again’ now that Labor was back in government.8 Such optimism proved to be misdirected—with the gravest of consequences.
Curtin and the war
Curtin was gripped by despair, personal and political, at the onset of war in 1914. Personally, he was torn apart by his separation from Elsie. After three years of corresponding across the Bass Strait, Elsie informed Curtin that she was going to travel to South Africa to live with her brother. The stay lasted two years. Before the journey, she had come to Melbourne to say goodbye. Jack finally worked up the nerve to propose, and she enthusiastically agreed. Elsie later recalled ‘when I was waving to him from the ship’s rail, I would have given anything to have been able to grab my baggage from the hold and run down the gang-plank again’.9
Still hurting from Elsie’s departure, Curtin next had to grapple with the implications of the outbreak of war, and the collapse of the working class internationalism he so ardently believed in. He had placed his hopes in the Second International, the grand alliance of the world’s social democratic parties, and its pledges to scupper the war plans of the capitalists. But when war came almost all of these parties had diligently declared their support for their own country’s objectives in the conflict. Internationalism and the movement for peace were crushed in the patriotic stampede. Even Gustave Hervé had capitulated, converting to the brand of hypernationalism that appalled Curtin.
Australian socialists were confused. Some groups, usually small and isolated, declared their opposition to the war. The syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World condemned a situation that saw workers ‘slay each other’, for ‘Whether Briton, German, or Australian, we are all brothers, all workers, all slaves’.10 The Victorian Socialist Party’s (VSP) response, on the other hand, was muted. Robert Ross, the party’s secretary, was uncertain about the correct position to take on this unfathomable conflict. The VSP, as a result, was insipid in its statements on the war, in neither strong opposition nor support, and it was hardly able to provide the intellectual leadership the radical left required.11
But not so Jack Curtin, secretary of the Timber Workers Union and editor of the Timber Worker newspaper. His was an unambiguous response. Where Ross was untethered and unsure, Curtin was grounded by the theoretical system he had been developing and propounding for the past half-decade. He drew upon these intellectual labours to declare his opposition to what he deemed an imperialist war. Crucially, he did so not as an isolated individual shouting to the winds, but as an influential trade union leader among a network of radicals at the Melbourne Trades Hall Council (THC).
In May of 1914 Curtin won the THC’s endorsement of the Second International’s Hardie-Vaillant resolution.12 This motion was moved at the Second International’s 1910 Congress and stipulated that to prevent an outbreak of war the workers of the world should unite across borders in a general strike.13 Curtin was reported in the Labor Call as having made a ‘fine speech’ at a meeting on the ‘general stoppage of work as the best means of preventing war between nations’. Unfortunately, there is no record of the ‘very interesting discussion’ that took place on this motion, but it was accepted unanimously.14 On the outbreak of war, however, this commitment was proven to be a rhetorical statement of solidarity rather than a practical position. This does not mean it was irrelevant. Throughout the war this motion proved to be an important touchpoint for a section of left-wing anti-militarists who consolidated power and influence at the THC. Although it would take time to bear fruit, Curtin’s cultivation of this anti-war sentiment proved to be of great importance for the ideological temperament of the Victorian labour movement.
Curtin considered it his duty to educate the working class, and he used the Timber Worker to articulate a strong anti-war message. One article, entitled ‘Back to the Abyss’, provides a particularly potent example of his thoughts in response to the cataclysm. Curtin condemned capitalism as a system consumed by ‘the driving force of economic chaos’, deriving from the fact that ‘production has outgrown the assimilative capacity of the market’ in the world’s imperial centres. As a result, the capitalists sought ‘a dumping-ground’ for ‘surplus productions’ outside their own borders. This, he argued, motivated the colonial expansion by the major powers that underpinned the drive to all-out European war.
Curtin captured the mood of the moment in his inimitable, and somewhat melancholic, style: ‘The day turns back to the night, even as our eyes are fixed on the noontide sun’. Workers would be blooded on the battlefield, but this would not be the limit of the conflict’s ill-effects. War, he argued, ‘is not only the assassin’s trade, it is the exploiter’s auxiliary’. He predicted that social deprivation would swiftly grow, and the ‘streets will echo to the tramp of the hungry men, while wives and children weep in silence and sorrow’. His answer was for the state to nationalise industry to ensure plentiful work. If ‘the State shall be responsible for feeding, clothing and equipping the soldiers defending the nation’, Curtin suggested, ‘it is an equally valid proposition that it shall be responsible for the organisation with which communities combat destitution and death within the gates’. This required ‘compulsion’ by the workers’ movement to force the state to meet labour’s demands.15
He took any opportunity to spread his radical message. In the federal election of 1914, ‘by special request and at enormous expense’, Curtin declared his candidature for the ALP in the blue-ribbon seat of Balaclava. Curtin’s opponent was a prominent and powerful Labor antagonist, the former Victorian premier, William Watt, of the Commonwealth Liberal Party. It was an exhausting campaign for Curtin against an experienced and adept opponent. He wrote to Elsie of eight arduous weeks on the stump, going ‘from Town Hall to street-corner, to Sunday School Rooms & Cottage meetings talking “about it and about”’. In the last ten days, he partially complained and partially bragged, there were still ‘10 working nights before me & 23 meetings I think we will smash the previous deficit of 9,700 to very small dimensions comparatively’.16
Balaclava was a notably conservative seat, which showed little sympathy for the anti-imperialist cause. But even in such circumstances, while representing Labor as a candidate for the first time, Curtin brought a socialist message to the hustings. He critiqued defence policies for being overly reliant on British protection and declared himself to favour the creation of an air force to repel invaders. This was an argument about Australian defence and technology that, if somewhat naïve in this context, proved to be prescient. He went on to argue that less should be spent on defence—a radical position to take shortly after the declaration of war.17
Curtin did not defeat Watt at the polls. But he did cut the conservative majority in the seat from nearly nine thousand to five thousand.18 He had made an impression. He was, a sketch in the Labor Call gushed, ‘one of those rare men who carry the impress of greatness’.19 The war would provide him with plenty of opportunities to prove it.
Crisis to crisis
In the initial stages of the war the majority of the labour movement shared Scullin’s perspective rather than Curtin’s. In 1914 large numbers of working class men, many of whom were active unionists, signed up to serve in the imperial forces. The Australian Workers Union (AWU) had so many members under arms that Holloway appealed to Defence Minister George Pearce on its behalf to have an entire division drawn from that union’s men alone.20
Many of these working class men signed up due to imperial loyalty. Some sought adventure beyond Australia’s shores. For others, the reason was simpler: enlisting promised a steady wage. Economic conditions had worsened in the lead up to the conflict. The disruption of trade and continuing drought led to job losses in urban and rural industries, and unemployment had nearly doubled by the end of 1914 to eleven per cent, swelling enlistment queues. Earnings lagged behind the rapid growth in prices: real wages alone fell ten per cent from 1914–1915.21 From the outset, economic conditions seemed to confirm Scullin and Curtin’s fears that the working class would pay the cost of the war both on the battlefields and the home front.
Once the initial excitement had passed, the war became an unremitting grind. In the months that followed its outbreak, an eager audience devoured news from the front, anticipating glorious victories that did not come. In April of 1915, Australian troops departed Egypt, where they had been waylaid en route to Europe. Their landing at Gallipoli gripped the public imagination and fired ardour for the war effort, but the campaign soon settled into a bloody stalemate.22
Without military glories to justify the sacrifice, grumblings began to be heard on the home front. Scullin wrote of the growing economic strains faced by the working class and identified the perpetrators: ‘army contractors’, who were the ‘evil fruit’ of the ‘evil system’ of capitalism. ‘Army contractor’ was a term deployed by Scullin to denote the tranche of private capitalists that eagerly manipulated the emergency situation to their own advantage, using the adjustment to war production to sell goods at inflated prices (particularly basic commodities such as food).23 They had, Scullin alleged, taken ‘advantage of the nation’s peril to swell their profits’.24 There was only one way to deal with the war contractor, he asserted, ‘the Government itself undertaking the work hitherto entrusted to him’.25
Scullin used his pen to try to prompt Labor to fulfil the ‘specific purpose’ for which it had been elected: ‘to deliver the people from the intolerable burden of the ever increasing cost of living’.26 He continued to insist that the referendum to control trusts and prices would be the necessary lynchpin for all other reforms.27 The referendum was a necessity to strengthen the will of those conducting the battle—the Australian workers—and to protect Labor’s constituency from ‘the unscrupulous gangs that have deliberately and cold-bloodedly depleted Australia of meat, sugar, butter, etc’.28 It was not to be discarded. Fisher agreed, in principle. He said so, time and again.29 And yet the referendum was not announced. This prevarication caused great concern in the union movement, particularly in Victoria. Fears grew that the government’s zealousness in pursuing war objectives had led to it losing focus on its primary mission: protecting its working class constituency.30
The powerful leaders of the AWU were particularly concerned. While Scullin prosecuted the union’s case publicly through the Echo, his friends and comrades were contemplating what action they should take within the movement’s forums. The union had spent a great deal of time and energy amassing influence within Labor. But now it seemed that the party’s parliamentary representatives were no longer listening. A tension existed at the core of Labor as a parliamentary party founded by an extra-parliamentary social movement. Vere Gordon Childe, later a famed communist archaeologist who at the time worked for the New South Wales Labor government, provided one of the first sustained analyses of this relationship in 1923 in his seminal text How Labour Governs. Childe argued that the ALP was defined by a ‘novel view of democracy’ in which members of parliament were considered to be delegates of the movement, rather than constituency representatives.31 Through controls such as a pledge of principles all MPs had to sign, an enforced solidarity amongst the party caucus, and the supremacy of union-dominated conference over policy-making, industrial labour sought to guide its creation. Labor MPs, particularly those in government, bridled under such restrictions and acted to assert their autonomy as members elected by the people, ultimately responsible to their constituencies, not the labour movement.
These intra-movement tensions were apparent as the AWU gathered in conference in January 1915.32 Beneath the usual pageantry of such an occasion, the movement’s tectonic plates were threatening to shift. The clearest indication came in the most innocuous of discussions. John McNeill (Scullin’s brother-in-law) put forward a proposal to tithe members of his Victorian branch to pay a political organiser.33 This motion prompted an incisive intervention from secretary Ted Grayndler, who chose this moment to ruminate on the relationship between the movement’s industrial and political wings, giving voice to the tensions that Childe outlined. Grayndler explained that he was unequivocally in favour of an industrial movement ‘with sole control over the men sent into Parliament’. They should consider a change to federal laws to revoke the payment of politicians entirely, so that unions could control Labor members through payment of their wages. The problem with Labor arose, he argued, ‘when majorities were obtained’, and Labor evinced far less of a ‘fighting capacity to that displayed when in opposition’.34
It was clear to all present what Grayndler meant—Labor was supposed to be a trade union party, and that meant fighting to protect the conditions of the working class. It was time for Labor to prove its loyalty and bring forward the referendum. Beneath his words was a warning; if the federal Labor government did not bring on the referendum, then the loyalty of its hitherto greatest and most important supporter, the AWU, was not assured. This was as far as Grayndler was willing to go, for now, but the threat hung in the air.
Everything pointed to the referendum. There was no Plan B.
Curtin’s radical solution
By 1915 Curtin had other ideas, but little time to develop them. As union secretary he was exhausted, wrung out by the demands of his role’s routine. Almost single-handedly, Curtin was labouring to the benefit of the workers in an insecure industry, in a contracting economy. It was a punishing load. After a long day’s toil he would ‘sit me down to a heap of accumulated letters—stenographer at elbow, & thus answer, ignore, appeal, protest or repudiate as the need demanded’. It was an arduous time, one made worse by the distance from Elsie, and the heartbreak of watching the European working class, in whom he had placed so much hope and faith, ‘locked in drunken blood-clasp at each other’s throat’.35
Curtin was frustrated by federal Labor. If, he wrote, ‘ever there was an occasion when Labor-in-Power might be expected to be bold, even defiant, in its proposals of amelioration, now is the hour and here is the place’. Labor had been elected to further the interests of the working class, so ‘the Government must either accomplish the things demanded or pass away even as its predecessors’.36
But Labor, he alleged, was fixated on maintaining capitalism, and this was the reason it allowed the workers’ position to decline while profits exploded. It did not have to be this way. He pointed to the areas of the economy where the government had already intervened to manage the war effort. If the government could take such action to wage war, he wrote, then ‘it is imperative, urgent and logical that it organise factories, workshops, mines, farms, and forests to supply the materials requisite for the equipment
of life’.
This was the party’s responsibility, and mission, according to Curtin:
Labor stands—if it stands for anything—for the substitution of national control, public management, and social organisation for the existing monopoly, anarchy, and rascality conditioning the production and distribution of the means of human subsistence.37
When Fisher and his supporters argued that constitutional restrictions required a referendum to grant it powers, Curtin rejected federal Labor’s ‘flimsy excuses’. Curtin argued that if ‘the constitution stands between the toilers of the nation and bread and meat, then smash the constitution’.38
Labor government wasn’t enough for Curtin. Labor had to justify itself by its actions when it governed, and nothing was more important than advancing the interests of the working class. This was the core of his outlook. Laws he could abide, but not if they prohibited that fundamental aim. Labor had to be for something more than the maintenance of the established order, even in wartime. Especially in wartime.
Much changed between this point of his career and his later prime ministership. But it bears noting that a significant element of Curtin’s leadership in the Second World War was his conviction that a Labor government must win not only the war, but also the peace.39 By this he meant utilising the government’s full powers to forge a reform program to ensure that the machinery of government that could re-craft the economy and massively expand its function to conduct the war could use the same institutions to fight poverty and want. As prime minister, Curtin authorised a program of reconstruction intended to do just this.40 In 1915 the young radical was learning the lessons that would infuse and shape his later premiership.
As the months passed without substantial action from the federal Labor government, Curtin’s frustration grew. In April 1915 he called for Labor to immediately submit the bills for the referendum. He argued that every ‘Bill the Government gives priority to over the Referendum Bills will indicate their insincerity and make-believe’. This time he concluded with the barely concealed threat that ‘we are on the threshold of a new historic epoch’. Once the smoke cleared and the dead were counted ‘there will be a reckoning with the war-makers … and it were well for the Governments of this Commonwealth to save themselves from the wreckage’.41 For Curtin, the referendum was only the start of this process.
Curtin spoke not just for himself, but for the network of influential socialist union leaders that had arisen in the state. They were not a faction in the modern sense, but can be clearly identified as a section of the movement that worked together to realise a common aim. The connections among these socialists were established in the crucible of the VSP. Men and women who had met in the VSP’s economics and speakers’ classes, who had danced at its balls, argued and joked at its picnics, and learnt their core activist skills at its public meetings and soapbox routine, maintained these relationships as they rose through the labour movement’s ranks. By 1915 eleven unions had VSP leaders and sent socialists as their delegates to the THC. Alongside this solid bloc was a strong contingent of union leaders who had previously been VSP members, such as Jack Holloway. He was joined by figures of influence such as Fred Katz of the Clerks’ Union, R Smart of the Typographical Society, PJ Brandt of the Pastrycooks Union, and Edward Russell of the Agricultural Implement Makers.42 They were in loose alliance with other left-wingers who had never been VSP members, such as Jack Cosgrave, the well-regarded secretary of the Cycle Trades Union, and May Francis (later May Brodney), leader of the women textile workers.43 Although they had no single leader, Curtin provided their intellectual ballast and gave voice to their anti-imperialism.
Curtin had spoken when most of this group were too fearful to raise their opposition to the war. But by the middle of 1915, as the situation on the front reached stalemate and economic tensions at home grew, this socialist section of the labour movement discovered its confidence and began to flex its muscles. At the PLC’s 1915 conference, for instance, socialists won acceptance of a motion calling for an international working class conference to discuss methods to end the war.44 Soon after the THC adopted a position that the belligerent powers, including Britain, should declare their preferred terms for peace.45 These were small but sure steps as this section of socialists began to push back against the pro-war tide of public opinion. In September 1915 they took this further. That month, socialists on the THC declared the council’s opposition to compulsion for overseas service.46 In December 1915 the government requested that all men not yet in uniform fill out cards explaining why they had not enlisted. The socialist delegates Fred Katz and AD Jones successfully moved at the THC that the council ‘recommends to the members belonging to Unions which are affiliated with the Trades Hall Council to ignore the cards which the War Council have instructed to be sent out’.47
The strength of the movement’s left wing was growing, with the THC their main bastion of power and influence. And then the paradox, the Curtin conundrum. At this moment when it seemed that at last Curtin was not labouring in vain, when it appeared that there was hope once more for working class solidarity, he fell into a deep melancholy and depression. In November 1915 he abruptly resigned from the secretaryship of the Timber Workers Union. The causes were many. The wearying grind clearly shaped his decision. His responsibilities, he complained in a letter to Elsie, had kept him ‘a bond slave to the unknown & unlooked for daily troubles of 4000 men’. What was the point of his activity, he asked himself, when his efforts had done little to win his members to socialism? The timber workers would not ‘pay for Socialist literature nor turn up to lectures:—they are the apotheosis of a Labor movement staggering to the grave’.48 Compounding it all was an act of personal betrayal and financial malfeasance by his assistant at the union who embezzled over £200, causing Curtin great embarrassment.49
Curtin was exhausted. He was wrung out, emotionally and physically; after years of turmoil and strife, he had grown weary of the constant struggle. In a depressed state, he again fell into reliance on alcohol. His faith had been sapped; his determination eroded. Things looked grim, and he probably felt, now that his friends and comrades were finally speaking against the effects of the war, that someone else could carry the weight of the struggle. But as was so often the way with Curtin, the decline was temporary. In a time of war, the next crisis was never too far away.
Prime Minister Billy Hughes
And now for the man who unwittingly did so much to bring Scullin and Curtin together on their parallel journeys. Both Scullin and Curtin had, with different motivations and strategic ambitions, advocated forcefully for the referendum to grant the Commonwealth government the power to control prices. Labor Prime Minister Andrew Fisher was inactive on this issue, but not hostile, promising that a vote would, at some point, be held. But in October 1915 Fisher abruptly resigned, and was appointed Australia’s high commissioner in London.
William Morris ‘Billy’ Hughes was his replacement. Hughes was a brilliant man. Eccentric, belligerent and endlessly resourceful, he had bided his time. Born in London of Welsh heritage, he had left for Australia in 1884 as a sickly teaching assistant. Since his induction in Labor politics, he had come to be a defining Labor figure, founding a union on Sydney’s docks before winning his place in the colonial parliament. The Labor Call lauded him as ‘the brainy and indefatigable exponent of all that is best and most sincere in Labor politics’.50 His vitriol in parliament had, mostly, been aimed at Labor’s opponents to the delight of the workers who had placed him there. His shrewd tactical acumen had advanced legislation dear to the labour movement’s heart. Surely, it was hoped, he could overcome the impasse and take the decisive action necessary to prevent the working class suffering further at the hands of the ruthless capitalists? Action such as, say, the referendum.
Such hopes and expectations were swiftly dashed. Disappointment swept through the union movement after Hughes declared there would be no referendum. He sought to insulate himself from criticism. Conferencing with the state premiers he won an assurance that they would each seek to transfer power from their legislatures to the Commonwealth.51 It was, socialists alleged, a betrayal. For as one radical labour movement commentator pointed out, to ‘imagine that the Legislative Councils would agree to practically sign the death warrant of the class they largely represented, was unthinkable folly’.52 By allowing the premiers to seek to transfer their authority willingly, rather than deploying the referendum to take the powers from them, Hughes had engineered an impasse where state governments could blame uncooperative, but overwhelmingly powerful, conservative-dominated legislative councils for impeding their efforts. It was, once again, the old block on labour reform. But this time, it was a Labor prime minister who had allowed it to happen. Throughout the labour movement outrage and disappointment was intense—nowhere more so than in Victoria.53
Scullin, at first, sought to defend the prime minister’s action, determined to grant his former colleague the benefit of the doubt. He acclaimed Hughes’s acumen in securing support for the transferring of state powers, while making it clear that such a move was not, ultimately, satisfactory. The reason was simple: powers ceded in this manner could later be reclaimed. For Scullin, the intention was to fundamentally transform the nature of Australia’s democracy, not just to secure temporary respite from the exploitation of the wartime profiteers.54 But it became clear to Scullin that a tactical advantage had been ceded in the short-term as well, and the conservatives would use their influence to block any transfer of powers.55 It was, he admitted, ‘a most unsatisfactory’ situation.56
The mood was tense, and the movement was uncertain. It was a situation that could not last for long.
1 Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, ‘Report of the Proceedings of the Conference Convened by His Excellency the Governor General: On the Subject of the Securing of Reinforcements under the voluntary system for the Australian Imperial Force Now Serving Abroad’, p. 11, Australian Workers Union (AWU), E154/38/2, Noel Butlin Archives Centre (NBA).
2 ‘Our Duty to Britain and to Ourselves’, Evening Echo (Ballarat), 5 August 1914, p. 2
3 ‘Australian Patriotism’, Age (Melbourne), 1 August 1914, p. 15.
4 ‘What In (sic) Means’, Evening Echo (Ballarat), 6 August 1914, p. 2.
5 ‘Our Duty to Britain and to Ourselves’, Evening Echo (Ballarat), 5 August 1914, p. 2.
6 JH Scullin and R Jordan, ‘Concerning Practical Suggestions’, Evening Echo (Ballarat), 21 August 1914, p. 2; JH Scullin, ‘The Financial Problem’, Evening Echo (Ballarat), 14 September 1914, p. 2.
7 JH Scullin, ‘The Great Problem’, Evening Echo (Ballarat), 12 September 1914, p. 2.
8 JH Scullin and R Jordan, ‘“Stand Down!’”, Evening Echo (Ballarat), 7 September 1914, p. 2.
9 Langmore, Prime Ministers’ Wives, p. 120.
10 ‘WAR! What For?’, Direct Action (Sydney), 22 August 1914, p. 2.
11 Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, p. 70.
12 After first introducing the matter that March: THC Minutes, 26 March 1914, 1978.0082.00010, pp. 25–27, UMA; THC Minutes, 28 May 1914, 1978.0082.00010, pp. 41–42, UMA.
13 This resolution had been deferred for further consideration by the world’s social-democratic parties: Farrell, International Socialism and Australian Labour, 18.
14 ‘Trades Hall Council’, Labor Call (Melbourne), 4 June 1914, p. 2.
15 J Curtin, ‘Back to the Abyss’, Timber Worker (Melbourne), 10 October 1914, p. 1.
16 Black, Friendship is a Sheltering Tree, p. 73.
17 ‘The Balaclava Contest’, Labor Call (Melbourne), 20 August 1914, p. 1.
18 ‘The Elections’, Argus (Melbourne), 21 June 1913, p. 19.
19 ‘John Curtin’, Labor Call (Melbourne), 6 August 1914, p. 6.
20 EJ Holloway, The Australian Victory over Conscription in 1916–17 (Melbourne: Anti-Conscription Jubilee Committee, 1966), p. 3.
21 Stuart Macintyre, The Oxford History of Australia: Volume 4, 1901–1942, The Succeeding Age (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 145–146, 155, 163.
22 Joan Beaumont, Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2013), pp. 55–156.
23 ‘Alternative for Socialism’, Evening Echo (Ballarat), 6 March 1915, p. 2.
24 ‘The Butter Shortage, and Some Statistics’, Evening Echo (Ballarat), 7 June 1915, p. 2.
25 ‘Alternative for Socialism’, Evening Echo (Ballarat), 6 March 1915, p. 2.
26 ‘The Fisher Government Stands Firm’, Evening Echo (Ballarat), 19 June 1915, p. 2.
27 ‘Why Carry on Two Wars?’, Evening Echo (Ballarat), 2 June 1915, p. 2.
28 ‘The Fisher Government Stands Firm’, Evening Echo (Ballarat), 19 June 1915, p. 2.
29 ‘A Matter of Party’, Evening Echo (Ballarat), 14 April 1915, p. 2.
30 THC Minutes, 29 October 1914, 1978.0082.00010, p.78, UMA.
31 Vere Gordon Childe, How Labour Governs: A Study of Workers’ Representation in Australia (Parkville, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2nd edn, 1964), pp. 15–18.
32 AWU, Official Report of the Twenty-Ninth Annual Convention (Sydney:Worker Trades Union Printery, 1915).
33 ibid., p. 12.
34 ibid., p. 14.
35 Black, Friendship is a Sheltering Tree, p. 76.
36 J Curtin, ‘The Famished Legion’, Timber Worker (Melbourne), 10 February 1915, p. 2.
37 ibid.
38 J Curtin, ‘The Struggle for Bread’, Timber Worker (Melbourne), 16 January 1915, p. 2.
39 ‘At the Dawn of a Victorious and Better Day’, Australian Worker (Sydney), 28 July 1943, p. 1.
40 Stuart Macintyre, Australia’s Boldest Experiment: War and Reconstruction in the 1940s (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2015), pp. 25, 43, 59.
41 J Curtin, ‘War and Work’, Timber Worker (Melbourne), 9 April 1915, p. 2.
42 Hewitt, A History of the Victorian Socialist Party, p. 193.
43 Jennifer Feeney and Judith Smart, ‘Jean Daley and May Brodney’, in Marilyn Lake and Farley Kelly (eds), Double Time: Women in Victoria—150 Years (Ringwood: Penguin, 1985), pp. 276–287.
44 ‘PLC Annual Conference’, Labor Call (Melbourne), 15 April 1915, p. 2.
45 THC Minutes, 29 July 1915, 1978.0082.00010, p. 138, UMA.
46 THC Minutes, 16 September 1915, 1978.0082.00010, p. 150, UMA.
47 THC Minutes, 9 December 1915, 1978.0082.00010, p. 173, UMA. This opposition was later rescinded when it was clarified that such a refusal was illegal: THC Minutes, 20 January 1916, 1978.0082.00010, p. 180, UMA.
48 Black, Friendship is a Sheltering Tree, p. 80.
49 Day, John Curtin, p. 207.
50 RN Walton, ‘In Harness’, Labor Call (Melbourne), 24 September 1914, p. 2.
51 Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, p. 79.
52 En Avant, ‘Resurrection of the Referendum’, Labor Call (Melbourne), 6 January 1916, p. 4.
53 Strangio, Neither Power Nor Glory, p. 116.
54 ‘Labor Party Vindicated’, Evening Echo (Ballarat), 6 November 1915, p. 2.
55 ‘The Scrap of Paper’, Evening Echo (Ballarat), 8 November 1915, p. 2.
56 ‘Not Peace But Inaction’, Evening Echo (Ballarat), 13 November 1915, p. 2.