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Introduction

This exhibition stands as testimony both to the range and depth of the Monash Rare Books collection, and to the prodigious fund of knowledge possessed by its custodian, Richard Overell. It covers the phenomenon of twentieth century communism from its European origins to its many manifestations across the world: France, Russia, Spain, the United States, China, Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia and of course Australia. And it reaches across time from the Paris Commune of 1871 to the radical chic 'music revolution' of 2005.

In addition to the classic texts on display - the Communist Manifesto, the "Little Red Book" of Chairman Mao, the Australian Communist Party Dissolution Bill - scholars will find items to amaze and amuse them. Americanists will enjoy the revelations in 1935 of the anti-Communist Elizabeth Dilling (Mrs. Albert W. Dilling), author, lecturer, world traveller and 'bourgeois housewife', who provides a detailed directory of front organisations in the United States. European historians will be diverted by Nora Murray's I spied for Stalin: Russian war-bride's dramatic life story, by a Russian woman who worked for the Russian secret police during the war. She fell in love with a British diplomat, one of her targets, and fled with him when he left. Australianists will marvel at the revelation, pointed out by Stuart McIntyre in his 1998 history of the Communist Party of Australia, The Reds, that Herbert Moore, sent by the Comintern in 1925 to bring the Communist Party of Australia into line with Moscow, was in fact a double agent. And students of Korean history may be surprised to know that Wilfred Burchett's claim in 1952 that the Americans were dropping plague and cholera infected insects in the North has recently been verified by American scholars Endicott and Hagerman.

The greatest rewards of the exhibition are of course for those interested in communism and radical socialism in Australia. Here too there is much that will be familiar: Egon Kisch, Menzies and the Communist Party Dissolution Bill, the Petrovs - and some surprises. The publishing details of many of the volumes on display testify to the easily forgotten fact that radical Australians have always lived in a mental world shaped not in Europe or Russia but in England and increasingly in America. The yellow dust-covers of the Gollancz Left Book Club dominated my father's bookshelves, for all his dislike of things British. And Jerry Rubin's Yippie manifesto, We are everywhere, published in 1971, coloured the imaginations of everyone who saw or hummed along with the musical Hair:

Previous revolutions aimed at seizure of the state's highest authority,
followed by the takeover of the means of production. The Youth
International Revolution will begin with mass breakdown of authority,
mass rebellion, total anarchy in every institution in the Western world.
Tribes of longhair, blacks, armed women, workers, peasants and students
 will take over.

Visually this exhibition carries some striking images, none more so than the portrait of Joe Stalin gracing the cover of the 1945 Woman's Weekly.  Richard notes in his catalogue that 'This was not a case of "radical chic" rather it was to promote an image of an avuncular "Uncle Joe" our powerful ally during the final days of the war'.  The Weekly worked closely with government agencies, promoting war-work when women were needed in the factories, and advising readers how to clean the grease from under their fingernails and take up cooking again when the war was over. Joe's smiling image reveals just how politically and nationally aware the Weekly - and Australian women - were expected to be in these times of national reconstruction. The image may also be understood as catching the strong sympathies of Australia's artistic community for Communism at this time. Australian artists have long been sympathetic with a critical approach to Australian society. The cover designs of the two Frank Hardy novels on display here make an interesting contract.  Power without Glory, published in 1950, has a dust jacketdesigned by Ambrose Dyson, from a family whose radical credentials were first established in the 1890s (his father, also Ambrose, was a Bulletin cartoonist). But the Dead are Many, published in 1975, and critical both of Australian society and of the rigidity of Russian Communism, has a cover designed by Charles Blackman, a much more modern radical.

The covers of Australian radical pamphlets also tell a fascinating story of ideological and social change. Early pamphlets seem to carry a mixed message: Frank Anstey's Red Europe, for instance, published in 1919, featured a lurid cover of fighting and bloodshed which might have graced an anti-Communist publication of the period, rather than welcoming 'the drum-beats of the Armies of Revolution' as Anstey intended. Others like the heroic masculine images promoting One Big Union adopted a social realist style, which again projected a universal rather than an Australian message. The illustration on the dust-jacket of Dymphna Cusack's Southern Steel is in Richard's words 'a masterpiece of socialist-realist art, showing the young couple embracing against a background of smoke stacks and a steel mill'.

But from 1944 the covers of Communist publications changed dramatically in style and content: the CPA went to meet the Australian Women's Weekly in a middle ground that is almost Norman Rockwellian.  A series of pamphlets published by the CPA towards the end of the war was directed to specific groups within Australian society  - homeowners, returned soldier, farmers, women  - to explain the communist vision for a post-war Australia. Rather than boldly stylised, their covers are positively homely, in the style of Weekly advertisements for cocoa, milk, and arrow-root biscuits; the cover of Houses, slums, private enterprise and the future would have looked entirely appropriate on an advertisement for the State Savings Bank loan scheme.

This moment of cultural accommodation was of course all too brief, and its historical legacy is not clear.  Richard Overell's exhibition captures many such surprising moments, all crying out for historical investigation. I hope they attract the open-minded scholars which they deserve.

Professor Marian Quartly
School of Historical Studies
Monash University

Preface

The aim of this exhibition is to indicate the range of left-wing and Communist-related held in the Monash Rare Book Collection. We have a large collection of pamphlets, books and posters, which we have been gathering for many years. This includes boxes of material distributed at Monash during the 1960s and 1970s when the University was a centre of student unrest. Much of this was collected at the time by Library staff and by academics such as Professor Harold Love of the English Department. Posters and fliers distributed on campus are still collected by Rare Books staff.

Study of our extensive collection of pamphlets allows researchers to follow controversies in fine detail.

The pamphlets and books have been acquired from many sources, e.g. the International Book Shop, Camberwell Books, which sold us the Herald press-cuttings volumes from the 1950s, as well as Norman W. Saffin's collection. Donations have come from the families of W. H. Tregear and Brian and Dorothy Fitzpatrick.

Radicalism is an area in which we continue to collect. This enables Monash University Library to provide access to primary resources in support of both undergraduate and post-graduate research into national and international left-wing activities.

Richard Overell,
Rare Books Librarian.

Large Upright Case

The Russian revolution

The Bolshevik Revolution took place in Petrograd in late 1917. The crucial event was the uprising of 6^th November in which the Bolsheviks, led by their Military Revolutionary Committee, with the soldiers of the Petrograd garrison, the sailors from Kronstadt and the workers' Red Guard captured the winter palace and arrested the members of the Provisional Government.

The War was still raging and the western press saw the events in Russia in terms of the collapse of resistance to Germany from the east. This was especially so as the Revolution had resulted from the Germans transporting Lenin, and other revolutionary leaders from Switzerland through Germany into Russia, obviously with a view to undermining the Russian war effort.

1. "Anarchy in Russia", presented by our special artist John Wladimiroff, The Graphic, 19 January 1918, p. 67-71.

The volume is open at a double-page spread of illustrations showing, "The red revolution in Russia: scenes recalling the terror and the commune"; and "The triumph of the Leninists: street fighting in Moscow and Petrograd." Here we see the bombardment of the Kremlin and the attack on the winter palace.

A later article in The Graphic, "The Russian "peace" with Germany", (16 February 1918, p. 198) gives details of the tactic of the Germans in concluding a separate peace with the Ukraine. This was later formalised in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918) thus giving Germany the opportunity of diverting all its forces to the Western Front.
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2. "The Liberators", Punch, 10 February 1918, p. 115.

Punch was from the beginning sceptical of the idealism of the Russian revolution. Here we see two Bolsheviks standing amid smoking ruins. The glowering man, bald, but bearded, is especially typical of the Punch-style revolutionary.
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3. "The position in Russia", The Lone Hand, 2 July 1917, p. 379-380.

The Lone Hand was an Australian monthly edited by J. F. Archibald, one of the founders of the Bulletin. It was a radical nationalist publication, but was equivocal concerning the turn of events in Russia. In March 1917 there was a general mutiny of troops in Petrograd. A provisional government had been formed which included the Socialist, Kerensky as the Minister of Justice. Czar Nicholas II abdicated on 15 March, leaving the country under the control of the Provisional Government. By mid-1917 the Russian troops were disorganised and in retreat.

The Lone Hand article reflects how the West had at first welcomed the fall of the Czar, because, "naturally it was expected by Russia's allies that the revolution would free Russia for greater activity on the War." However this hope had turned to disappointment.

Kerensky and the Provisional Government were not in favour of peace, but the Bolshevik elements were, and they were just about to attempt to seize power.

The revolution was an affair of the intellectuals and of Petrograd. The lower classes in the cities found liberty thrust upon them and hardly knew what to do with it  - except to secure the vodka, which had been so long prohibited. (p. 379)

A section of the article has the sub-heading, "Lanine the disturber". This is a reference to Lenin. It begins,

"One party of extremists that has been a source of danger is that of the "international socialists" under the leadership of Lanine, who are in favour of peace at any price." (p. 380)

"Lanine" [or Lenin] is described as "a chronic rebel and belongs to a family of rebels. … He has been playing Germany's game in Russia by opposing the war policy of Kerensky, but he has failed to swing the bulk of the Russian socialists over to his side." (p. 380)

The October 1918 issue of The Lone Hand carried an article, "Why the Russian revolution failed", by E. J. Dillon. It begins, "The rapturous joy with which the downfall of Czardom was hailed, has changed into a bewildered horror at the excesses of the Bolsheviki." (p. 457)

4. Litvinov, M. M. (Maksim Maksimovich), 1876-1951
               The Bolshevik revolution : its rise and meaning / by Maxim Litvinoff ; with foreword by E.C. Fairchild. 2nd edition. (London : British Socialist Party, 1918)

Maxim Litvinoff was the Ambassador in Britain for the new Russian regime. In his account of the Revolution he makes the case for the Russian peace negotiations with Germany. He asks,

What else could the Bolsheviks have done, with such a terrible legacy as they had received on their hands, in the shape of hunger, lack of every necessity for war, disorganisation of the State machinery, dislocation of the entire transport system, and with all the bourgeois elements against them, especially in the Ukraine, where they had gone so far as to make a separate peace with the Germans and to invite them to march into their own country to help them against the Bolsheviks and their own pro-Bolshevik popular masses? (p. 52-53)

There is a photograph of Litvinoff and his wife in The Graphic, 12 January 1918, p. 38. The article, "Men and women in the public eye" begins its section on Russia as follows, "The whimsical Russian situation brings to the front many personalities quite unknown before to the general public. … Lenin, for example, was for some time a great reader in the British Museum." Of Litvinoff the writer remarks, "Mr. Litvinoff, the representative they have chosen for the Court of St. James, has been living at Golders Green. In 1915 he married Miss Ivy Low, a niece of Sir Sidney Low." (p. 38)

The British Socialist party, the publisher of Litvinoff's booklet, was formed in 1911. Some members were keen to join the Second International, while others wanted to amalgamate with the Labour Party. By 1918, the Russian Revolution had inspired a group of the members to form a British Communist Party. In 1920 they decided to disband the Socialist Party and to form the Communist Party of Great Britain.

5. Anstey, Frank, 1865-1940.
               Red Europe / by Frank Anstey. (Melbourne : Fraser & Jenkinson, [1919])

Frank Anstey was a radical Labor politician. From 1902 he was the ALP member for Brunswick, and was elected to Federal parliament as the member for Bourke in 1910. He had been associated with various left-wing organisations. In 1918 he visited Europe with the imperial press mission, and spoke to prominent socialists. Red Europe is an account of his tour and the conclusions he drew from it.

Despite the lurid cover, Red Europe is pro-Communist. Anstey supported the revolutionaries in Russia and welcomed them as signalling the beginning of a world-wide overthrow of oppression. His book ends, "Capitalism listens with quaking soul to the drum-beats of the Armies of Revolution. Those beats grow louder and louder  - they draw nearer and nearer." (p. 192)
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6. Marx, Karl, 1818-1883.
               The Communist manifesto / by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. [Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei. English] (Melbourne : Proletarian Publishing Association, 1932)

This edition, published in Melbourne during the Depression, includes the six early prefaces. The first is by Marx and Engels, dated 1872, the remaining five, from 1883 to 1893 are by Engels alone as Marx had died early in 1883. The first preface gives the background to the origins of the Manifesto.

The Communist League, an International Workers Union, which, owing to the conditions of its time, could not but be of a secret nature, commissioned the undersigned at a Congress held in London in 1847 to write and publish a detailed theoretical and practical programme of the party. That was the origin of this Manifesto, the manuscript of which was sent to London some weeks previous to the February Revolution. First published in German, it has since gone through at least a dozen different editions in Germany, England and America. (p. 3)

The Communist Manifesto is essentially a call to arms. It begins, "A spectre is haunting Europe  - the spectre of Communism." (p. 18), and ends,

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have the world to win.

Working men of all countries, unite! (p. 51)

The economic programme of Communism is spelled-out,

The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But moderate bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.

In this sense the theory of the Communists may be summed up in a single sentence: Abolition of private property. (p. 32)

The rhetoric of the Communist manifesto was relevant for the Bolsheviks in 1917 and 1918, but became increasingly remote in Western countries later in the twentieth century.

The Marxist economic theory was elaborated in Das Kapital. This put forward a labour theory of value where Capitalist society depended on "surplus value", the profit the capitalist made on the worker's labour after paying the worker for his labour. Volume 1 was published in 1867; volume 2 appeared posthumously, edited by Engels in 1885.

The Forerunners

7. L'illustration, journal universel, 3 June 1871, p. 312-313. "Paris en feu" and "Les incendies de Paris."

Karl Marx saw the Paris Commune of 1871 as an example of the people rising up against the "bourgeois Republicans" who had corrupted the ideals of the French Revolution. The insurrection had taken place on 18 March 1871, during the Franco-Prussian War. The German army had Paris surrounded, and the capital had capitulated. The revolutionary element in the city rose up against the National Assembly and proclaimed a "Commune" formed of "the elixir and chosen men of sansculottic patriotism", on the model of the Commune of 1792. The Communards proceeded to burn the Palace of the Tuileries and other public buildings, and put to death some "enemies of the people". Clergymen in particular were targeted; even the Archbishop of Paris was executed.

The regular French troops re-grouped at Versailles and, under the watching eyes of the German army, suppressed the Commune, executing most of the leaders. The engravings show some of the "incendiares" being led along, under arrest; some of them being executed; and some of the bodies and coffins laid out.
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8. Marx, Karl, 1818-1883.
               The Paris Commune : including the "First manifesto of the International on the Franco-Prussian War," the "Second manifesto of the International on the Franco-Prussian War," "The Civil War in France" / by Karl Marx ; with introduction by Frederick Engels ; with notes to the American edition by Lucien Sanial. (New York : New York Labor News, 1919)

These works were originally published by the General Council of the International Workingman's Association; the two manifestoes on the Franco-Prussian War appearing in 1870, and, the essay on the Civil War in France, Bürgerkrieg in Frankreich, in 1871. The final paragraph reads,

Workingman's Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators, history has already nailed to the eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priests will not avail to redeem them. (p. 105)

9. Kropotkin, Petr Alekseevich, 1842-1921
               The Commune of Paris. (London : J. Turner, 1896)

Kropotkin was a Russian Prince who espoused anarchism and renounced his title. He was jailed in Russia (1874-76) but escaped to England. He also lived in Switzerland and France, where he was also imprisoned (1881-86). While in England he wrote for such journals as the Nineteenth Century, and Freedom, a journal of anarchistic communism. His work on the Paris Commune was published by Freedom as number two in its series of pamphlets. Kropotkin saw the Commune as beginning "a new era in that long series of revolutions whereby the peoples are marching from slavery to freedom." (p. 3)

Kropotkin was most impressed with the idea of the Communards in governing Paris, and eventually France itself, as a series of small local council units. He was intent on inspiring his readers with the example of this uprising of the common people, brutally repressed by the French middle classes.

Overthrown, but not conquered, the Commune in our days is born again. It is no longer a dream of the vanquished, caressing in imagination the lovely mirage of hope. No! the "Commune" of today is becoming the visible and definite aim of the revolution rumbling beneath our feet. The idea is sinking deep into the masses, it is giving them a rallying cry. We count on the present generation to bring about the Social revolution within the Commune, to put an end to the ignoble system of middle class exploitation, to rid the people of the tutelage of the State, to inaugurate a new era of liberty, equality, solidarity in the evolution of the human race. (p. 7-8)

10. Nordhoff, Charles, 1830-1901.
               The communistic societies of the United States : from personal visit and observation : including detailed accounts of the Economists, Zoarites, Shakers, the Amana, Oneida, Bethel Aurora, Icarian, and other existing societies, their religious creeds, social practices, numbers, industries, and present condition / By Charles Nordhoff. (London : John Murray, 1875)

This is an account of cults existing in the United States in the period immediately after the Civil War. Most of them are religious but some are formed of believers of economic theories. All have a belief in communal living and communal property.

One of the larger groups, the "Rappist, or Harmony settlement", was situated at Economy, on the Ohio River. They were referred to as the "Economites". Founded by a German, George Rapp, they believed in the imminence of the Millennium, and saw their settlement as the fulfilment of the "Sun Woman" passage from Revelations (12:1-6). They were shrewd at business and made large profits from the production of high quality wine and beer. However, as they all took a vow of chastity, the settlement died out early in the twentieth century.

11. George, Henry, 1839-1897.
               Progress and poverty : an inquiry into the cause of industrial depressions, and of increase of want with increase of wealth : the remedy / by Henry George. (London : Kegan Paul, Trench, 1884)

Henry George was an American, born in Philadelphia. He worked as a printer and journalist, though at one point in his life he was reduced to begging to feed his family. He developed his own economic theory, which was based on the fact, as he saw it, of the surplus value generated by a community being absorbed in the rise in land values and the subsequent rise in rent. His solution was for the State to apply a single tax on land and abolish taxes on industry and personal income. This was first set forth in Our land and land policy in 1870, which was followed by his major work, Progress and Poverty, first published in 1879. His ideas were enormously popular among working people and "Single Tax Leagues" were set up in the United States, Britain, and Australia. He was particularly popular in Ireland and his ideas underpinned the Irish National Land League led by Parnell and Davitt. He made speaking tours of the world, visiting Australia and New Zealand in 1890. Generations of socialist were influenced by his theories.

12. Morris, William, 1834-1896.
               Communism : a lecture  / by William Morris. (London : The Fabian Society, 1903)

This lecture "was written for delivery as a spoken address to the members of the Hammersmith Socialist Society in 1893." (p. 3)

Although Morris is best-known as a writer, a craftsman, and designer of wallpaper and fabrics with elaborate floral decorations, he was also a committed socialist. In 1880 he joined the Democratic Federation, a new socialist party with Marxist beliefs. By 1884 this group has split and Morris became the leader of the more radical faction, which became the Socialist League. He preached the overthrow of the status quo, and a belief in a new social order where distinctions of class and nationality would not prevail. The Hammersmith branch, where this lecture was given, was one of the most active.

Many of the British radicals were members of the Fabian Society. This had been formed in January 1884 to promulgate the principles of socialism in Britain. Perhaps the most famous members were George Bernard Shaw and the Webbs. Their tracts, of which this was number 113, were widely circulated in an attempt to influence the British intelligentsia.

13. Grahame, Stewart.
               Where socialism failed : an actual experiment. With illustrations and a map / by Stewart Grahame [pseud.] London : Murray, 1913.

This is an account of "New Australia" or, "Cosme" an Australian socialist settlement formed in Paraguay in 1893. The leader was William Lane, the author of the utopian novel, Workingman's paradise (Brisbane, 1892). There were personality conflicts and Lane left in 1899. By 1905 the settlement had disintegrated although many of the people remained. Some of their descendants still live in Paraguay.

Chapter 1 of Grahame's book begins with some background to the Australian radical movement.

The Australian Socialist party commenced its career as an active fighting force in 1889, the first manifestation of its might falling like a bombshell, not at home, but in Great Britain. When the London dock labourers came out on strike … it was freely prophesied that sheer starvation would drive them back to work within a short time. The prophets were disappointed however, for, to the surprise of most people in England, including the strikers themselves, their meagre funds were reinforced by a contribution of £30,000 cabled from Brisbane, and, thus assisted, the dock labourers gained the day. (p. 1)

This donation was organised by William Lane, the editor of The Boomerang, a radical weekly published in Brisbane, which promoted the works of Karl Marx, Edward Bellamy, and Henry George. Lane was the founder of the Australasian Labour Federation. The "Cosme" colony was organised on communistic lines by Lane's New Australia Co-operative Settlement Association. Apart from Lane himself, the poet Mary Gilmore was the most prominent member.
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14. Schaack, Michael J.
               Anarchy and anarchists : A history of the Red terror and the social revolution in America and Europe : Communism, socialism, and nihilism in doctrine and in deed : The Chicago Haymarket conspiracy, and the detection and trial of the conspirators by Michael J. Schaak, Captain of Police. (Chicago : F.J. Schulte & Company, 1889)

Terrorists were active in Europe, Britain, and the United States in the second half of the nineteenth-century. Typically they saw themselves as anarchists and the bombs they used resembled shot-puts with wicks. Novelists such as Joseph Conrad, in The Secret Agent (1907), and Henry James, in The Princess Cassamassima (1886) wrote about anarchists and the fear they engendered into the populace of London.

Schaack's book has detailed descriptions of the methods of the anarchists, for example the way in which they manufactured their bombs. In 1889, when this book was published, the Chicago Haymarket riot was still fresh in people's memories. This incident had taken place on 4 May 1886 when radicals had met in Haymarket Square in Chicago to protest the actions of police on the day before. On 3 May police had attacked a group of strikers who had gathered outside the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company's works to demonstrate against the use of scab labour. This was part of ongoing action by workers seeking an eight-hour day. One of the strikers was killed in this altercation. The Haymarket rally was peaceful until the police began to disperse the crowd, then a bomb was thrown, and a riot started. Seven police were killed. Eight anarchist labour leaders were arrested and found guilty. Four were hung on November 11, 1887, and another committed suicide. The remaining three were later pardoned, in 1893. There was much debate surrounding the trial; some of the accused were not present at the riot but were condemned for supposedly conspiring to commit violence.

This was a turning point in American labour history. Many workers blamed the Knights of Labor, the major union pushing for the eight-hour day, for being involved in the riot, and there was a general drift towards the less radical newly-formed American Federation of Labor.
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The IWW

15. Pease, Frank Chester.
               Revolution and the I.W.W. / [Frank Chester Pease]. (Sydney : Australian Administration of the Industrial Workers of the World, [191-?])

Industrial unionism and politics. (Sydney : Issued by the I.W.W. Club, [1911?])

16. Boote, Henry E. (Henry Ernest), 1868-1949.
               Guilty or not guilty? : an examination of the I.W.W. cases / by H.E. Boote. ([Sydney] : Labor Council of N.S.W., [1916 or 1917])

The Two wars. (Sydney : National Executive, I.W.W. Club, [1916])

17. Workers' International Industrial Union.
               Revolutionary industrial unionism : tactics and plan of the Workers' International Industrial Union, the one great union. (Melbourne : Literature and Education Bureau of the Workers' International Industrial Union, [1918])

18. Cleary, P. S. (Patrick Scott), b. 1869.
               The One Big Union : will it emancipate the worker? / by P.S. Cleary. (Sydney : Angus & Robertson, 1919)

19. Ross's monthly of protest, personality and progress. (Melbourne : Robert Samuel Ross, 1916-[1923])

The IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) often referred to as the "Wobblies", were founded in Chicago in 1905. They opposed the American Federation of Labor on the grounds that the earlier organisation accepted capitalism and, because they were formed by craft unions, did not represent non-skilled workers. They promoted the idea of "One big union". The IWW line on World War I was that it was a capitalist war and America should not become involved.

The IWW spread quickly to Australia and by 1907 there were cells active in most states. They campaigned against the war, and in particular against conscription, in fact against all kinds of recruiting. When Thomas Barker, the editor of Direct Action, was imprisoned the IWW in Sydney, they began to utter counterfeit £5 notes in an attempt to wreck the Australian economy.

Their campaigns also included arson and when a policeman was shot and killed in NSW, two of their members were found guilty and hung, in December 1916. The organisation was banned in August 1917. Twelve of their members were still in jail for offences such as sedition, committed during the anti-recruiting agitation, and there were continuing representations made to have their cases reviewed. The ALP, when it came to power in 1920, instituted a Royal Commission. The findings were that some of the men were guilty, while others were not, but most were released.

The IWW's style of revolutionary industrial unionism proved unpalatable in Australia, although Bob Ross in his newspaper, Ross's monthly was still pushing the "One big union" concept in the 1920s, as can be seen from the cartoon on the front page of the issue for 9 June 1923.
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Communism in Australia
The early years

20. Ross, R. S. (Robert Samuel)
               Eureka : freedom's fight of '54 / by R.S. Ross. (Melbourne : Fraser & Jenkinson, 1914)

21. Friedum, S. F.
               Constructive revolution : the Russian revolution and socialist industrial unionism / by S.F. Friedum. (Sydney : Worker Print, [1919])
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22. Ross, R. S. (Robert Samuel)
               Revolution in Russia and Australia : describing and discussing the Soviet system (political and economic sides), the dictatorship of the proletariat (for and against), the Australian alternative / by R.S. Ross. (Melbourne : Ross's Book Service, 1920)
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23. Communist International.
               Communist tactics of revolution : the role of the Communist Party in the proletarian revolution. (Sydney : Communist Party of Australia, [1920])

24. Communist Party of Australia.
               Party training manual / Communist Party of Australia. ([Sydney] : The Party, 1928)

There were Socialist parties formed in Australia in the last part of the nineteenth century. In the early years of the twentieth century these were brought together under the umbrella of the Socialist Federation of Australia. However, most Australians committed to labour reform were followers of the Australian Labor Party. This had grown from an initiative of the Sydney Trades and Labour Council in 1891, and was one of the major parties in Australian politics. The early Socialist parties split on the question as to whether or not they should oppose the ALP or try to influence it from within. After the Communist Party was formed in 1920, this issue continued to divide party members.

Among the items on display we see an early attempt to establish the Eureka Stockade as part of an Australian radical nationalist tradition. Other pamphlets develop the relationship between the Russian revolution and the Communist Party of Australia. Peter Simonoff, the first Soviet Consul-General to Australia actively encouraged the Australian socialists to form a Communist Party. The first meeting, on 30^th October 1920, was organised by the Australian Socialist Party and held at their hall in Sydney.

The party spent most of the 1920s trying for a "united front" with the Labor Party, but the ALP was extremely wary. In 1928 the Comintern decreed that the Communist parties in the various countries around the world must become the leaders of the workers' struggles. The Party Training Manual from that year sets as its aim to equip party members "with a working knowledge of revolutionary theory and practice … to more effectively dispel the reformist illusions, which bind the mass of the workers to the chariot of Capitalism." (p. 3) This manual evolved from classes in Marxist theory given by party leader, Jack Kavanagh in 1926.
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25. "Labor spurns Communism's eye-wash" Labor Call, 14 January 1937, p. 1.

In accordance with changes in Comintern policy, local Communist parties fluctuated in their attitudes to labor movements. During some periods they denounced them as "capitalist lackeys" while at other times they sought to form a united front with them.

Links to the Communist Party were always electoral suicide and the conservative parties would make the most of public perceptions of Communist infiltration of the Unions and the Labor Party in every election.

This front-page article of Labor call, the paper of the Victorian branch of the ALP, begins,

In keeping with Communist moves throughout the world to gain control of the workers by disruptive or surreptitious methods, an abortive attempt has been made in England to establish a "united front." Every Labor Party in the world has turned such overtures down flat giving Communism a nasty jolt under the chin from which it cannot recover.

Australia long since applied the boot to Communist proposals, both wings of Labor having seen through the anti-Australian smoke-screen of falsity.
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Communism in Britain

The Communist Party of Great Britain was formed in mid-1920, out of such groups as the Workers' Socialist Federation and the "Hands off Russia" Movement. Among the original members were people such as Harry Pollitt and Rajani Palme Dutt.

26. Independent Labour Party (Great Britain)
               The I.L.P. and the 3rd International : being the questions submitted by the I.L.P. delegation to the executive of the 3rd International and its reply (London, National Labour Press, 1920)

The fledgling Communist Parties sent delegates to meetings of the Third International (Comintern) set up by the Russian revolutionaries. The First International Workingman's Association, aimed at establishing socialism in all countries, had been set up by Marx in London in 1864. This had split over attitudes to Anarchism; and the Second International was instituted in Paris in 1889. The series of Congresses they organised concentrated on the means of achieving socialism, condemning co-operation with bourgeois liberals. In effect, it ceased to function with the outbreak if war in 1914. The Third International had as its aim the overthrow of world governments and the institution of international Communism. It was disbanded in 1943 as reassurance to the Allies during World War II.

27. Postgate, Raymond, 1896-1971.
               How to make a revolution / Raymond Postgate. (London  : Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, 1934.) [Jim Cairns copy with his signature].

Raymond Postgate was one of the founding members of the Communist Party of Great Britain. He was well-known as a writer on radical subjects. This work has chapters on the major revolutionary movements of the past, as well as a chapter on the general strike, on armed revolution and on Communist tactics. He gives advice as to which tactics he considers are likely to work and which tactics are useless. His chapter on Communism includes much criticism of the adherence of the Party in Britain to the dictates of the Comintern, which he believed were inappropriate to local conditions.

The book on display was published by the Hogarth Press, better known as the publisher of Virginia Woolf's novels. However, Virginia's husband, Leonard was a radical and published much left-wing material.

Early in the war Postgate became the editor of Tribune but was removed for his impatience and belligerence, being described by a friend as "one of nature's dissenters, a man with a talent to annoy, fond of argument but immovable once he had taken up a position". He was also known as a man who, from his love of argument, would advance quite moderate issues with extreme passion. (see his DNB entry)

Although he remained a socialist, after the war he became famous as the instigator and editor of the Good Food Guide, which he published from 1951 to 1962.
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General Strike

In 1920 the TUC and radical labour leaders had threatened a general strike unless Britain ceased to support the opposition to the new Russian state. The Communist Party had been successful in working within the Miners' unions, particularly through the National Minority Movement.

The General Strike took place in Britain from 4^th to 12^th May 1926. It was the result of a dispute over miners' wages. The TUC (Trades Union Congress) called out members of other major unions and the country came to a halt. The Baldwin government enrolled special constables. Troops and volunteers ensured that essential services continued to function and after nine days the TUC called the strike off, much to the disgust of the miners who continued to strike until August.

28. The British gazette. (London : His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1926)

This was published by the British government for the duration of the general strike, May 1926. No. 1 (May 5, 1926)-no. 8 (May 13, 1926). It is accompanied by a collection of newspapers, which came out in Britain at that time.
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29. Fyfe, Hamilton, 1869-1951.
               Behind scenes of the Great Strike / by Hamilton Fyfe. (London : Labour Publishing Co., 1926)

Hamilton Fyfe was the radical editor of the Daily Herald. The editorial board was dominated by Trades Union Congress members. Fyfe was sympathetic to their cause and believed that socialism was the way of the future. During the strike he edited a paper called the British Worker. The cover of his book on the strike carries the statement, "For every 100 copies sold the Author gives a child's keep for two weeks to the Miners' Fund."

30. Postgate, Raymond, 1896-1971.
               A worker's history of the great strike : written from material supplied by Plebs correspondents in all parts of the country / by R.W. Postgate, Ellen Wilkinson, and J.F. Horrabin. (London : Plebs League, 1927)

As noted above, Raymond Postgate was a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. In addition, he was, like Fyfe, a Daily Herald journalist. He also contributed articles to the journal Plebs, published by the Plebs League, a workers' educational association. The value of his account is that it draws information from workers involved in the strike around the country.
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Communist Youth

The Party was always conscious of the need to engage the interest of young people. In Australia this took the form of the Eureka Youth League. This group had originated in the 1930s as the Young Communist League, which had changed its name to the less-transparent League of Young Democrats. In 1941 it became the Eureka Youth League, appropriating the radical tradition of the Eureka Rebellion of 1854.

31. The Red corner book for children. (London : Martin Lawrence, [ca. 1930])

This English children's book is presented as an annual, along the lines of Eagle or the Tip-top Book for Boys. It includes the usual mixture of adventure stories, comic strips, games and facts.

The "Editor's Note reads,

The Red Corner Book is a departure from the ordinary run of children's books. It endeavours to spur their minds to the real issues life holds out  - instead of drugging them with a false glamour over ugly things.

Two great social forces are in conflict: they have the children in their grip. This book designs to stir in them an understanding of the workers' life, the social struggles and the goal, which the workers have set themselves.

It includes "Stories of Lenin", as well as a piece on Wat Tyler. Another group of articles, on Russia, is entitled, "Stories of socialist construction." The volume begins with a poem, "A look at the world" illustrated by cartoons. A typical stanza reads,

Russia is the first great land
Where bosses and loungers have all been banned,
A land of the working class victorious;
Where a worker's life is free and glorious. (p. 14)

It is hard to imagine any child having their interest stirred by such overt propaganda, and The Red Corner Book seems not to have appeared again.
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32. Young, Richard.
            The story of the Eureka Youth League / by Richard Young. [Sydney?] : Eureka Youth League, [1944]

The connection between the organization and the Eureka uprising is put forward using the convention of mates yarning around a camp-fire. This is meant to place the Youth League firmly in the Australian nationalist tradition. The predominantly red cover illustration of men firing on other men from behind logs is meant to portray the rebellion in the nineteenth-century, but with the boy looking towards us in the foreground it has a modern feel to it which is strangely unsettling. It is as if we are looking at a scene from the Australian Revolution.

This pamphlet carefully avoids any admission that the Eureka Youth League is connected to the Communist Party.

We are not affiliated to nor do we pledge allegiance to any political Party. We do not raise the question of parties amongst ourselves or with new members. …

But we do regard ourselves as part of the great Labor Movement, which is not only the Labor Party, but also the Trade Unions, Consumers' Co-operatives and the Communist Party. Many of us are Trade unionists and some of our clubs are connected with factories and Trade unions. …

Some people believe that there should be no politics in the Youth Movement. We don't, because if you are not satisfied with the pay many young workers have to live on  - and we aren't  - to do something about it you've got to enter into politics. (p. 18)

The pamphlet has interesting details of the resistance the League encountered from the media and the Catholic Church.

We find big business newspapers like the "Sydney Morning Herald" attacking the League. This is part of the general attack on democracy in Australia by big business. The millionaires are very worried about the hundreds of young people now joining the League and are attempting to frighten them away. Despite the fact that there are hundreds of young Catholics in our League, some Church leaders are also on the hunt. In Victoria and New South Wales these people have used the Catholic Church to organise squads of young Catholics into basher gangs against the League. We know that the majority of young Catholics have a high regard for the work that our League does, and some have nothing but contempt for these people. The work of these Church leaders in poisoning the minds of some young Catholics is not much different from Hitler's poisoning of the whole generation and the organisation of them into basher gangs  - it boils down to the fact that they are helping Hitler and Tojo to create disunity. (p. 19)
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33. Target : magazine of the Eureka Youth League. (Sydney : Eureka Youth League of Australia, 1962-1968)

The issue on display, for June 1964, has a photograph of the Beatles on the cover and an article on "Beatles and Beatlemania." The article stresses the working class backgrounds of the individual Beatles, and ends with a reference to the then British Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas Home, a Conservative, and the Labour Party leader Harold Wilson,

Sir Alec Home promptly claimed credit for them [i.e. the Beatles] and was as promptly accused of political clothes-stealing by Mr. Wilson. Conservative candidates have been officially advised to mention them wherever possible in their speeches. (p. 3)

Communist Icons

We are used to seeing Che Guevara's face promoting everything from the International Socialists to tissues, but Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky have also been appropriated for their radical chic.

34. "Joseph Stalin", cover illustration for The Australian Women's Weekly, 12 May 1945.

This was not a case of "radical chic" rather it was to promote an image of an avuncular "Uncle Joe" our powerful ally during the final days of the war. There was no article about Stalin in the magazine.
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35. "Joseph Stalin", cover illustration for Fantastic adventures, vol. 14, no. 3, March 1952.

Here we see Stalin alongside a space-suited alien. The issue of the magazine has the headline, "Flying saucers: Russia's secret weapon?" The story is "He fell among thieves" by Milton Lesser. This has the promotional line, "When this Martian crashed the Iron Curtain … He fell among thieves."

The incidence of UFO sightings in the US in the 1950s was unbelievably high and this story puts forward a reason: Russia had captured a Martian who had helped them build flying saucers, and these were now being used to spy on the US.
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36. "Che Guevara", cover illustration for Electric : Juan Atkins, Detroit USA, Friday Oct 17. [Melbourne : Electric, 1997]

Here we see Che Guevara being used to promote a dance party in Melbourne, "The first anniversary of the Electric Revolution", to mark the venue being open for twelve months. Also on display is a pack of Che Guevara "designer tissues", made by Sniff, Meckenheim, Germany.

37. "Lenin", back cover illustration of The Age (Melbourne) Magazine, issue #4, February 2005.

This is an advertisement for Bigpond music, with the slogan, "Join the revolution." It appeared most notably as giant posters put up around the city. The image is of Lenin wearing a pair of silver head-phones.

38. "Lenin", illustration on a post-card for Subversion.

 Subversion is a night-club, with the slogan, "Everyone if revolutionary." The portrait of Lenin accompanies a "5 week plan" which gives details of performances over the coming weeks, all described in revolutionary language, e.g. "July 15: Anarchy in the U.K. Punk it up for some serious 3-chord nihilism. Tartan, Mohawks etc."

39. Herald Press Cuttings

When the Melbourne Herald closed to amalgamate with its morning equivalent the Sun, Monash acquired their press cuttings volumes from the 1950s. The Herald was famously anti-Communist but these volumes reflect a range of different views. They are arranged in volumes according to subject, e.g. the Communist Party Dissolution Bill, the Petrov Case, Spies and Sputnik. One of the Sputnik volumes is on display. Sputnik I was the first man-made satellite to orbit the Earth. It was launched on 4 October 1957. Sputnik II was launched a month later, on 3 November 1957, and carried a dog, Laika, the first creature to enter space. This caused embarrassment for the Americans and in 1958 Eisenhower approved the formation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Wall Case 1
The Petrov Affair

Vladimir Petrov, the Third Secretary in the Soviet Embassy in Canberra defected on 3^rd April 1954 and was granted asylum. He was, he told ASIO, in charge of non-military espionage at the Embassy and held the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in the Soviet secret police, the MVD. He brought with him many documents, some of which implicated Australians in espionage activities. Having become fond of the Australian life-style in the three years of his stay in Canberra, and being afraid to return to Russia, as he was part of the now-discredited "Beria faction", Petrov had decided to defect. ASIO granted him £5000 to cover his expenses.

His wife, Evdokia, was ostensibly an accountant and secretary in the Embassy but was in fact a Captain in the MVD, engaged in coding and de-coding espionage messages. Apparently she was unaware of her husband's intention to defect and when, by 6^th April her husband failed to return from a visit to Sydney she was told he had been kidnapped by ASIO, and that for her own safety she was to be sent back to Russia. On 19April she was put on a plane at Mascot, Sydney airport, en route to Moscow. There was a large anti-Communist demonstration during which the famous photos were taken of Mrs. Petrov flanked by two Russian bodyguards. In the scuffle she lost her shoe. When the plane landed next morning at Darwin to re-fuel, her two bodyguards were disarmed and Mrs. Petrov was informed of her husband's defection. It is likely that during these altercations Evdokia still thought that the Australians were trying to kidnap her, as she believed they had done to her husband. Now she was able to phone and speak to him, as a result of which she sought asylum herself.

The Soviet Government recalled its Embassy and expelled the Australian Consular staff from Moscow.

There was a Federal election scheduled for 29 May, and the "Petrov Affair" as it became known inevitably favoured the sitting Liberal government. Menzies duly won and the leader of the Opposition, Dr. Evatt, felt aggrieved at the role he believed Menzies had played in manipulating the defection of the Petrovs.

On 3 May 1954 a Royal Commission was appointed to enquire into Soviet espionage in Australia. They met from 17 May 1954 to 31 March 1955. The hearings implicated members of the Communist Party of Australia as well as three of Evatt's staff. One of the key exhibits became known as "Document J". This included a list of contacts friendly with the Soviet cause, and was the source of the accusations against Evatt's staff. It had been written inside the Russian Embassy by the Communist journalist Rupert Lockwood. Evatt, against all advice, appeared at the Royal Commission to represent two of his staff (the other, Fergan O'Sullivan, he had sacked as a traitor, when it was found that he had written "Document H" also brought across by Petrov)

Evatt's cross-examination and comments to the press did much to destroy his reputation as a credible alternative leader of the country. His behaviour was such that the Commissioners withdrew permission for him to appear. He then wrote directly to the Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov, naively asking him to assure the Commissioners that the documents revealed by Petrov were false. When this indiscretion became known, Menzies was able to complete the destruction of the Opposition leader's credibility.

The Royal Commission found that the Petrovs were spies, their documents were genuine, and the Soviet embassy had been used by the USSR to operate espionage activities in Australia. Commenting on the local support provided to the Russians, the Commissioners found that, "without Communism, Soviet espionage could have no hope of success in Australia."

The Petrov Affair had serious repercussions for the Left in Australia. The Labor Party split over attitudes to Communism soon after, and they were unable to regain federal office until 1975. The Australian public, faced with proof of Soviet espionage in Australia, became even more distrustful of the Communist Party.

40. Brown, W. J. (Wilton John), 1917  -
            The Petrov conspiracy unmasked / edited and compiled by W.J. Brown. (Sydney : Current Book Distributors, [1956])

Brown's thesis is that the Petrov affair was engineered by Menzies to discredit the Labor Party and the Communist party. The graphic on the cover makes this point clear. We see Menzies and the mask of Petrov's face.
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41. Australia. Royal Commission on Espionage.
               Report of the Royal Commission on Espionage 22nd August 1955. (Sydney : N.S.W. Government Printer, 1955)

On display is the copy from the Herald office, with various annotations on the cover and throughout the text. For example there is a note on the cover, "$25,000, p. 102" which refers us to the details of the "Moscow Gold" allegation that Sharkey was paid $25,000 as a donation to the Party. Also from the Herald Library we have the interim report, the five volumes of transcripts, and several indexes.

42. Petrov cross-examined : evidence and statements before Menzies' Royal Commission. (Melbourne : printed by G. Wheeler : [1954])

As is made clear from the cover, this is an attempt to show that Petrov's evidence was coloured by the ASIO payment to him of £5000. The dialogue box reads, "First I got the £5000 then I handed over the Documents."
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43. Lockwood, Rupert, 1908-1997.
               What is in Document "J" / [by Rupert Lockwood] ("The Everglades", Canberra : Freedom Press, [1954])

Reference has been made above to the significance of "Document J" and its contents. Here Lockwood admits to having written it but in seeking to recall what is in it, refers mainly to the material concerning Japanese espionage during the war and to the activities of anti-Communists such as the politician, W. C. Wentworth and the Sydney newspaper columnist Frank Browne, "a former dog-racing writer from the Norton press" [i.e. The Truth]
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44. Petrov, Vladimir Mikhailovich, 1907-1991.
               Empire of fear, by Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov. (New York : Praeger, 1956)

This is the ghost-written account of the experiences of the Petrovs in Russia and Australia. Michael Thwaites was engaged to write the book. This is the American edition. The defection of the Petrovs was international news, as can be seen partly from the fact that the photographs reproduced in this case are from the Saturday Evening Post.
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Wall Case 2
Vietnam

Perhaps the most significant political issue in the 1960s and early 1970s was the Vietnam War. Communist groups had been influencing the Vietnamese nationalist movement since the 1930s and this influence was strengthened by their leadership of the resistance during Japanese control in World War II. When the French returned after the war the struggle continued, leading to defeat for the Colonial power at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

However, in the context of the rise of Communism in China and Korea, the United States felt it was important to contain its spread southwards, and they began to provide support to the South Vietnamese under Ngo Din Diem. The Geneva Accord of 1954 had divided the country at the 16th parallel. The Communist North, under Ho Chi Minh, had their capital at Hanoi. The Southern capital was at Saigon.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s there was a cease-fire but guerrilla warfare gradually increased, and by 1962 there were 10,000 U.S. "advisers" in Vietnam assisting the South. The same year, Australia began to send advisers as well. Diem was assassinated in 1963, to be replaced by Marshall Ky, and in 1964 the Viet Cong stepped-up their offensive against the South. President Johnson began openly to commit US troops, and Australia also sent soldiers.

Conscription was the issue, which had immediate impact on young people in America and in Australia. It was the trigger which set-off a groundswell of demonstrations, particularly on campuses. Public dissatisfaction at the war was fed by the TV coverage; especially the stories of atrocities such as the My Lai massacre. Moratorium marches led by such prominent political figures as the ALP's Dr. Jim Cairns became a feature of the Australian cities.

The growing unpopularity of the war eventually led to the withdrawal of US and Australian troops in 1972. Gough Whitlam had made it a plank of his election platform in that year. A cease-fire was signed on 28 January 1973 and by 1975 the Communist government ruled all of Vietnam.

The Communist Party of Australia naturally wished to support the North and oppose the war. As a result of involvement in anti-Vietnam activities, a new generation of students became interested in the CPA.

45. Hò· Chí Minh, 1890-1969.
               Prison diary / Ho Chi Minh ; translated by Aileen Palmer. Hanoi : Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962.

Ho Chi Minh was the founder of the Communist Party in Vietnam and was the leader of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) from 1945 to his death in 1969. His Prison Diary is a collection of poems written in a Chinese jail where he had been imprisoned for eighteen months by Chiang Kai-shek during World War II. Aileen Palmer, the daughter of the Melbourne left-wing writers Vance and Nettie Palmer, translated the poems published in this edition.
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46. The People of Viet Nam will triumph! : U.S. aggressors will be defeated! The heroic struggle of the South Vietnamese people. (Peking : Foreign Languages Press, 1964-1966)

This was an annual publication. On display is the issue for 1965, showing an American airman sitting on the wing of his plane, which has been shot-down, being guarded by Viet Cong soldiers.
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47. Viet protest news : bulletin of the Vietnam Day Committee (Vic.) (Parkville, Vic. : The Committee, 1966-1969) From the collection of N. W. Saffin.

We see vol. 1, issue no. 8 with its cover photograph of Vietnamese women and children. Some of the most famous images from the Vietnam War featured the plight of the innocent victims. As well as giving details of anti-war demonstrations this newsletter provided excerpts from other anti-war publications and articles such as, "Influencing the young: pro-war propaganda in schools", by David Hudson, v.1, no. 7, p. 3-4.
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48. Burchett, Wilfred G., 1911-1983
            North of the seventeenth parallel / by Wilfred Burchett. (Hanoi : The Author, 1955)

49. Burchett, Wilfred G., 1911-1983.
               My visit to the liberated zones of South Vietnam / Wilfred Burchett. 2nd ed. (Hanoi : Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1964)
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50. Transcript of an interview between Bui Cong Tuong and Nguyen Van Quy in Studio B of the Joint US Public Affairs Office, Saigon, 15 July 1971. (from the Denis Warner papers)

Wilfred Burchett was an Australian journalist who had been working in Korea, covering the War. His books and articles were openly pro-Communist, to the point where he was accused of being a traitor. He justified his actions as support for countries seeking self-determination, and being able to report from within the "enemy" lines gave him an advantage as a journalist. From Korea he proceeded to cover the situation in Vietnam, basing himself in the North.

The interview comes from a large collection of material collected by the journalist Denis Warner while working as a foreign correspondent in South-East Asia during the 1960s and 1970s. Bui Cong Tuong was a Viet Cong defector who had been Chief of Propaganda, Culture, Education and Training in the Ben Tre (Kien Hoa) Province. Tuong tells of meeting Burchett and how impressed he was at Burchett's entourage and apparently unlimited access to the upper echelons of the North Vietnamese bureaucracy. He was told Burchett was only ever to be referred to as a "Neutralist", but that he was a "positive Neutralist." The privileges Burchett enjoyed were, Tuong was told, a result of the fact the he was a high-ranking Communist Party member, and industrious propagandist for the regime. Tuong makes particular mention of the fact that Burchett always insisted in wearing the Viet Cong uniform, the "black pyjamas", in which he can be seen on the cover of the copy of My visit to the liberated zones on display.

51. "Grandpa Nam and his bamboo spikes" and "Spikes of revenge", ink-brush paintings by Tung Chen-sheng; "Little Boi kills a tyrant", woodcut by Ksing An-Ju; "Human support for a Bridge", woodcut by Han Ko.

North Vietnam propaganda posters from the collection of Denis Warner.

The use of pits with bamboo spikes placed in the bottom was a feature of the Viet Cong guerrilla campaign.
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52. Liberal Party of Australia.
            It's your choice: where do you draw the line against Communist aggression? (Canberra : Liberal Party, [1966])

This was a piece of election propaganda distributed by the Liberal Party during the Federal election on 26 November 1966. The graphic shows the encroaching "red menace" coming southwards from China through South-east Asia towards Australia.
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Wall case 3
The New Left

This was the name used to describe groups of young radicals who wished to distinguish themselves from the "old" Left. They fiercely opposed the Vietnam War and believed in anti-Establishment issues under the broad banners of anarchism and utopianism. In the United States, one of the prominent New Left groups was the "Yippies" (the Youth International Party). This was formed in 1968 by Abbie Hoffmann and Jerry Rubin. In that year the Yippies disrupted the Democratic Convention at Chicago and both Hoffmann and Rubin were convicted of crossing state lines with intent to riot at the "Chicago Seven Trial" in 1969. Although this conviction was subsequently quashed, Hoffmann was later arrested on cocaine charges (1973) and served time. He spent the remainder of his life working for environmental causes and died in 1989.

Jerry Rubin became a promoter of human potential courses and ginseng products and died in 1994.

In France the equivalent movement among the young radicals resulted in the events of May 1968. A series of strikes by students, demanding a loosening of France's restrictive educational system and the right to demonstrate led to a general strike which quickly took on almost revolutionary proportions. The unrest subsided when the French Confederation of Trade Unions and the French Communist Party convinced the workers to return to their jobs. The left wing students saw the government of General de Gaulle as repressive and the Parti Communiste Francais reactionary. Their own ideas wre a mixture of anarchism, sexual liberation and anti-war sentiments. One of their most prominent leaders was Daniel Cohn-Bendit.

53. Hoffman, Abbie.
               Steal this book / by Abbie Hoffman ; co-conspirator, Izak Haber ; accessory after the fact, Bert Cohen. (New York, N.Y. : Pirate Editions : Distributed by Grove Press, 1971)

This is a guide to living cheaply, providing tips on how to obtain things for free or at a small cost. As could be predicted, most of the publishers approached declined to publish such a title, and Hoffman lists the 30 firms who rejected the book on the back cover.
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54. Neville, Richard, 1941  -
               Play power / Richard Neville. (London : Cape, 1970)

The English and Australian equivalent to Hoffman's book was Richard Neville's Play power. Richard Neville was the editor of Oz magazine and espoused hippie ideals of personal liberation and legalisation of marijuana. He later became the editor of the counter-culture newspaper, Living daylights; a talk-show personality and the biographer of the Asian murderer Charles Sobrahj. The first edition of Play Power on display comes with a board-game in the back pocket, "Headopoly". This encouraged drug use and was banned from sale with the book in Australia.
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55. Rubin, Jerry.
               Do it! : scenarios of the revolution / Jerry Rubin. [New York?] : Erectile Press, [1970?]
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56. Rubin, Jerry.
               We are everywhere / Jerry Rubin. (New York, Harper & Row 1971)

Do it is a Yippie manifesto. It is written in a prose style verging on hysteria, influenced by Walt Whitman and Jack Kerouac, pop music lyrics and drugs. It ends with "Scenarios for the Future/Yippieland",

           Every high school and college in the country will close with riots and sabotage and cops will circle the campuses, standing shoulder to shoulder. The schools belong to the pigs.
            Millions of young people will surge into the streets of every city, dancing, singing, smoking pot, fucking in the streets, tripping, burning draft cards, stopping traffic.
            The Pentagon will send troops to fight spreading guerrilla wars in Laos, Thailand, India, the Congo, Bolivia, South Africa, Brazil, France.
           High government officials will defect to the yippies.
           The State Department will discover its highest ranks infested with the yippie symps. Black cops will join the black-and-white liberation army in the streets.
           High school students will seize radio, TV and newspaper offices across the land.
           Police stations will blow up.
            Revolutionaries will break into jails and free all the prisoners.
            Clerical workers will ax their computers and put chewing gum into the machines.
           Army platoons and National Guard will desert to the revolution, bringing their guns with them.
           Workers will seize their factories and begin running them communally, without profit.
           Shorthairs will become longhairs over night.
positions with LSD gas.
           The Pentagon will strafe yippie bases, and we will shoot the planes out of the sky.
           Kids will lock their parents out of their suburban homes, and turn them into guerrilla bases, storing arms.
            We'll break into banks and join the bank tellers in taking all the money and burning it in gigantic bonfires in the middle of the city.
           Previous revolutions aimed at seizure of the state's highest authority, followed by the takeover of the means of production. The Youth International Revolution will begin with mass breakdown of authority, mass rebellion, total anarchy in every institution in the Western world. Tribes of longhair, blacks, armed women, workers, peasants and students will take over.
           The yippie dropout myth will infiltrate every structure of Amerika. The revolution will shock itself by discovering that it has friends everywhere, friends just waiting for the Moment.
           At community meetings all over the land, Bob Dylan will replace the National Anthem.
           There will be no more jails, courts or police.
           The White House will become a crash pad for anybody without a place to stay in Washington.
           The world will become one big commune with free food and housing, everything shared.
           All watches and clocks will be destroyed.
            Barbers will go to rehabilitation camps where they will grow their hair long.
           There will be no such crime as "stealing" because everything will be free.
           The Pentagon will be replaced by an LSD experimental farm.
           There will be no more schools or churches because the entire world will become one church and school.
           People will farm in the morning, make music in the afternoon, and fuck wherever and whenever they want to.
           The United States of Amerika will become a tiny yippie island in a vast sea of yippieland love.

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Wall Case 4
Student Activism

During the late 1960s and early 1970s University campuses around the world became centres for political unrest. In Australia, Monash University was one of the most active. Classes were disrupted; there were sit-ins and occupations of Administration offices. Albert Langer was the most prominent figure at Monash and came to symbolise student activism for the general public in Victoria. 

The issues began with the war in Vietnam but also included attacks on Capitalism and the Establishment in general. The Communist Party, often through front organizations, was active in encouraging the protests.

There is a continuing tradition of student protests, which can be seen in the large anti-globalisation demonstrations of the late 1990s.

57. "The Maoist from Melbourne", by Mungo MacCallum, Australian, 14 May 1969, p. 11.

This the first article in a series on "The student revolt". It profiles Albert Langer, who we see in the accompanying photograph in front of a Maoist poster.
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58. Lots Wife : Monash University students' newspaper, 13 May 1970.

The files of Lots Wife trace the activities of the student revolutionaries not only at Monash but also Australia-wide. The issue of Lots wife previous to this one was a combined publication with Rabelais (Latrobe University) and Farrago (Melbourne University). The Lots Wife front cover shows a scene from the Moratorium march of 7 May, while the back cover of the combined issue features the famous image of the Viet Cong guerrilla being executed in the streets of Saigon.
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59. Hansen, Soren.
            The little red school book / Soren Hansen and Jesper Jensen ; Translated from Danish by Berit Thornberry. (Adelaide : A. Taylor in association with Brolga Books, 1972)

This was first published in Denmark in 1969. The first Australian edition was 1972. The book was aimed at high school students. It begins with a chapter headed, "All grown-ups are paper tigers." Other chapters deal with child molesters, homosexuality, drugs and abortion. This book was often reprinted, in student newspapers for example, and widely distributed.
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Flat Case 1
The Depression

The great economic depression of the 1930s seemed like the fulfilment of the Communist rhetoric of the failure of Capitalism. The situation in Australia was widely seen as the result of Australia's dependence on overseas investors, the "British bond-holders." This caused a renewed interest among workers in alternative models such as socialism. The ALP was becoming more radical, but in accordance with the prevailing Comintern line the Communist Party of Australia was opposed to any co-operation with left-wing bourgeois parties and the CPA membership still numbered less than 3000.

60. Varga, Eugen, 1879-1964.
            The great crisis and its political consequences; economics and politics, 1928-1934, / by E. Varga. (London, Modern books limited [1935?])

Eugen Varga was the Director of the Institute of World Economy and Politics in Moscow.

61. Trinca, Frank.
            Science and democracy : adjusting the laws of advancing mechanization to the objectives of civilized policy / by Frank Trinca. (Melbourne : Brown, Prior, 1933)

During the depression many people put forward their own ideas for a solution to the economic crisis. Melbourne doctor, Frank Trinca published his proposals in this wide-ranging survey of "the origin and life history of boom and depression cycles in industrial and social evolution." (Foreword) This is a presentation copy to another Melbourne doctor, H. Boyd Graham. It includes Graham's manuscript annotations, including the following, commenting on one of Trinca's paragraphs in the Foreword,

Written in the trough of the world depression when chaos seemed inevitable, & some of us were members of a White army under one of Australia's greatest AIF leaders - just in case the restless communists revolted.

This is a reference to the right wing militia groups, which were a feature of the anti-communist movement in the early 1930s. The New Guard was the best-known.

Demonstrations against itinerant unemployed were organised mostly in country towns in New South Wales and Victoria. The most famous action of the New Guard was by Francis de Groot who cut the ribbon at the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge before the official ceremony with the Labor Premier Jack Lang. The White Army was supposedly led by General Blamey, presumably the "AIF leader" referred to by Graham. On the evening of 6 March 1931 they mobilised themselves across Victoria in readiness for a Communist revolution which did not eventuate.

62. Moore, Herbert.
            Australia and the world crisis : political report delivered to the Tenth Congress of the Communist Party of Australia, April 5, 1931 / by Herbert Moore. (Sydney, N.S.W. : Communist Party of Australia, 1931)

Herbert Moore was an American who was sent to Sydney by the Comintern to discipline the party and bring it back in line with Moscow. His real name was Harry Wicks. CPA leader, Jack Kavanagh, himself a Canadian who had arrived in Australian in 1925, claimed to recognise Moore from America as a Ku Klux Klan member. After the war Moore was expelled from the American Communist Party as a spy and it seems that he was an undercover anti-Communist agent throughout his career in the Party.
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63. "De-registration for employment and sustenance for various reasons." Central Unemployed Committee. Circular. Melbourne 5^th November 1936.

This is part of the collection of left-wing material put together by Norm Saffin. It gives details of offences and penalties for relief workers in labour camps, which incurred suspension of sustenance payments.
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64. Proletariat : organ of the Melbourne University Labour Club. ([Melbourne : The Club], 1932-1935) 4 v.

Contributors to Proletariat included Communist such as Ralph Gibson and Guido Baracchi. There were many articles on life in the Soviet Union, including one by Gibson in the first issue, "The depression and the five year plan." The issue for October 1933 on display has as its lead article, "The world economic crisis", by the editor, Ian C. Macdonald.

Part of the significance of the journal lies in its cover art. The issues on display feature art by Jack Maughan, showing a worker holding aloft the world, with the USSR high-lighted in red; George Finey showing workers toiling to lift the world; and, by an unidentified artist a representation of a worker with a pick striking a capitalist in a dinner suit, carrying a package which reads "Work for the dole".
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Flat Case 2
Egon Kisch

In 1934 Egon Kisch, a radical Czech journalist was invited to Australia to address an Anti-War Congress organised by the Movement against War and Fascism. This was a Communist Party front organization, formed in 1933 from their unsuccessful League against Imperialism. When Kisch reached Australia he was refused permission to land by the Immigration Department. Kisch jumped ship in Melbourne and broke his leg, but was put back on board. Although Kisch could speak many European languages, a dictation test in Gaelic was administered when the ship reached Sydney, to provide a pretext for formalising the ban. He failed the test, but the public outcry raised by the press and prominent Australians such as Vance and Nettie Palmer and Katherine Susannah Prichard made the Kisch case a cause celebre. Legal representation was arranged and he was allowed to speak at rallies, where he appeared on crutches, to loud public acclaim. He later wrote an account of his visit, Landung in Australien translated as Australian landfall (1937).

Part of the significance in organising the Anti-War Congress was to have it coincide with the 1934 Melbourne centenary celebrations, in particular, the opening of the Shrine of Remembrance in St. Kilda Road by the Duke of Gloucester.

65. Kisch, Egon Erwin, 1885-1948.
            Kisch's message from the World Committee to the Australian workers / issued by the National Council Against War and Fascism. (Sydney : The Council, [1934] (Sydney : Wright & Baker)

The illustration on the cover of this pamphlet shows Kisch waving from on board ship. His talk, which he was finally able to deliver, not to the Congress in Melbourne, but to a large rally in Sydney Domain on 18 November, tells of the persecution writers had to suffer in Nazi Germany.
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66. Kisch, Egon Erwin, 1885-1948.
            Landung in Australien / Egon Erwin Kisch. (Amsterdam : Verlag Allert de Lange, 1937)

This was Kisch's account of his visit to Australia. It was translated into English and published by Secker and Warburg in the same year. He visited to all the mainland states and his book is quite different from the usual traveller's account. He looked at Australia through the eyes of a European radical and saw inequalities and cruelties, which would have gone, unnoticed to an Englishman. He has for example a chapter on the treatment of the Aborigines, which gives detailed accounts of the various massacres.

67. Smith, Julian.
            Newspaper reporting and modern reportage : a lecture to the Writers' League / by Julian Smith, with notable examples from the works of Egon Erwin Kisch. (Sydney : Australian Writers' League, [1935])

Kisch was a charismatic figure and had captured the attention of the Australian public in general and Australian writers in particular. Therefore it was topical for Julian Smith to refer to him in his lecture on reporting. Kisch was well-known as a radical journalist in Europe, famous for his "reportage" style of engaging with the subject.

Included in this pamphlet was a report of the First National Writers' League Conference, with a statement of their principles. This includes an account of the Conference by Katherine Susannah Prichard and the Presidential address by Jean Devanny, both of whom were prominent Communist writers.

Flat Case 3
Spain

In 1936 there was a military coup against the Socialist Republican government of Spain. The coup was only partly successful and a Civil War ensued, lasting until 1939 when the Nationalists (Falangists) under General Franco gained control of the country. The Republicans were helped by the Soviet Union, while the Nationalists received aid in the form of troops and equipment from Germany and Italy.

The Comintern directed Communists to support the Republican cause and the International Brigade was formed. Left wing writers such as W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender wrote in favour of the Republicans while writers such as Roy Campbell took the opposing side. Hemingway and Orwell both wrote of their time fighting for the Left in Spain.

Australian left-wingers who served included Vance and Nettie Palmer's daughter, Aileen.

68. The Spanish people are fighting for you (Melbourne, Victorian Council Against War and Fascism [1937?]) 1 leaf. [from the collection of N. W. Saffin]

The Victorian Council Against War and Fascism, which published and circulated this single-leaf flier, was a Communist front organization. The Labor Party threatened any of their members who were also in the VCAWF with expulsion.

The flier has a graphic featuring the Spanish republican war-cry, "They shall not pass". Nettie Palmer is quoted on the virtues of the Spanish government, "It showed, in the words of Nettie Palmer, the Australian writer who was in Barcelona before and during the rebellion, 'complete toleration as regards the church.' "

Awareness of the denominational divide over the Spanish War is evident in the plea printed on the flier, "Australians! Protestants and Catholics! Men and women of all parties! You have a great tradition of liberty!"
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69. Spain: the Spanish people present their case : Australian nurses' response, with special article by Nettie Palmer (Camberwell, Vic. : Spanish Relief Committee, 1936)

This includes a first-hand account by Nettie Palmer of her experiences in Spain from which she had just returned. Her daughter Aileen was with her, and stayed for two years, working as an interpreter with a British medical unit.

The Spanish Relief Committee included Maurice Blackburn, a Federal Labour MP who was disciplined for his membership of the VCAWF, Nettie Palmer, and the Communist Len Fox.
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70. Albiston, Walter.
            The Spanish Civil War and the Roman Catholic Church : the press and Roman Catholic action / by Walter Albiston. (Melbourne : Victorian Protestant Federation, (1936?])

The Rev. Albiston begins with an extensive quote from Nettie Palmer's speech in Scots Hall, Melbourne on 15^th October 1936, where she emphasised that the Republicans had destroyed churches but only because the rebel forces had taken refuge in them, "using the towers to shoot from and using the building as dumps for ammunition." (p. 1)

Part of the thrust of the pamphlet is to encourage the ALP to ignore the calls from Rome for all Catholics to support Franco and the rebels against the Republicans in the Spanish war.

We are satisfied that the Labour Party, which has been dominated too long by Roman Catholic influence, will not, in the case of Spain allow the Church to dictate its policy. The time has come for Labour to shake itself free from the crippling hand of the Roman Catholic Church, and the situation in Spain may be the means of official Labour in Australia seeing clearly that the Roman Catholic Church has always been the enemy of the working people in every land and in all ages. …

We issue this pamphlet as a challenge to the attitude and claims of the Roman Catholic hierarchy throughout Australia, who have been endeavouring to pull the wool over the eyes of the community at large, and who have deliberately trailed a red herring across the situation, in the form of Communism. (p. 12)

71. De Blacam, Aodh, 1891-1951.
            For God and Spain : the truth about the Spanish war / [by Aodh de Blacam]. (Melbourne : A.C.T.S., 1936)

This Catholic Truth Society pamphlet put forward the Church's view on the war. The Foreword begins by quoting from the Pope's radio broadcast of 14 September 1936,

His Holiness, in words of such eloquence as seemed to come from the very soul of the Church, blessed those "who have taken upon them the difficult and dangerous task of restoring the law of God and the rights of conscience," and counselled them to do all things in charity and without wrath. (p. 1)

The author clearly warns his readers that "Godless Communism" is behind the conflict,

Let all remember that Spain is fighting for the cause of all Christendom, when its soldiers strive to hold back the atheistic materialism of Moscow, and the church-burning, culture-destroying fury. For the freedom of our Faith, and the life of our own grave Christian civilisation, the parties of the Right and their soldiers are waging the Last Crusade. (p. 1)

72. Auden, W. H. (Wystan Hugh), 1907-1973.
            Spain (London, Faber and Faber, 1937)

Most of the young writers in England were pro-Republican, and the most famous poem about the conflict was W. H. Auden's "Spain." Indeed it was one of Auden's most popular and widely-anthologised works, although he later refused to allow it to appear in his Collected Works. 

According to a note on the inside flap, "all the author's royalties from the sale of this poem go to Medical Aid for Spain."

Part of the poem's effectiveness relies on the stance of the man-of-feeling setting aside his pleasures in favour of urgent action,

To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs,
The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
                To-morrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle.

To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
                To-day the expending of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

TTo-day the makeshift consolations: the shared cigarette,
The cards in the candlelit barn, and the scraping concert,
                The masculine jokes; to-day the
Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting.

TThe stars are dead. The animals will not look.
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and
            History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help or pardon. (p. 11-12)

73. Programme of the new Spain (London, F. G. Sturrup, 1938)

This is a twenty-six point programme for the future of Spain under the Falange Espaniola Tradicionalista, or Nationalist regime.

In the section headed, "The State and the individual liberty", point 6 reads,

Our State will be a totalitarian instrument in the service of National integrity. All Spaniards will take part in it through their family, municipal and syndical functions. No one shall take part in it through any political party. The system of political parties will be implacably abolished, with all that flows from them - inorganic suffrage, representation by conflicting parties and parliament of the familiar type.

The section on "Economy, work, class-warfare" includes point 10,

We repudiate any capitalist system, which ignores popular necessities, dehumanises private property and huddles workers into shapeless masses ripe for misery and despair. Our spiritual and national sense also repudiates Marxism. We shall organise the impulses of the working-classes, led astray to-day by Marxism, by exacting their direct participation in the great task of the national State.

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74. Negrin Juan.
Spain desires her independence and freedom / [Juan Negrin]. (Barcelona : Ediciones Espanolas, 1938) [from the collection of N. W. Saffin]

"Declaration of Doctor Negrin, the Prime Minister, on April 30th, 1938".

Juan Negrin was the Prime Minister of Spain from 1937 to the end of the war in 1939. He was a Democratic Socialist but his dependence on the Communists alienated the other Western powers. The Soviet Union was the only ally the Republicans had, so they were forced to go to them for arms. Negrin oversaw the shipping of much of Spain's gold reserves to Russia. Even after the fall of Catalonia in January 1939 he tried to fight on, but had to accept defeat after an anti-Communist uprising in Madrid.

The cover title, "The thirteen points for which Spain is fighting", indicates that this manifesto was possibly drawn up, and published in April 1938, in answer to the Falangist's twenty-six points published in January of the same year.

Flat case 4
World War II

When the war started in September 1939 the Communists in the West were still trying to come to terms with the Soviet-German non-aggression pact which had, surprisingly been signed in the previous month. There was a general tendency on the Left to condemn the war as a capitalist-imperialist struggle in the same terms used during World War I.

However, in Australia, at least initially, the Communist Party was strongly supportive of the war, believing the Fascists were the natural enemies, and the workers of Poland must be defended. When it became obvious that German and Russian forces had in fact divided Poland, the rhetoric changed to reflect the supposed liberation of the Polish workers, at least in the east, by forces of the people's Soviet. Russia then proceeded to invade the Balkan states. Russia was, to many ordinary people, the enemy in the same way as Germany, and the Communist Party suffered a further decline in popularity.

During this first period of the war Communists were instructed by the Comintern to oppose their country's involvement; clearly an unpopular move when the countries were under threat from the Axis powers. In Australia the Party was banned under wartime emergency powers.

The official attitude of the Australian Communist party changed abruptly when, in June 1941, Hitler ordered an attack on the USSR. After this local Communist Parties world-wide were loud in their agitation for a "Second Front".

After Russia entered the war on the Allied side, Stalin disbanded the Comintern as a sop to the West. The local Communist Parties began to gain in popularity, and by 1945 in Australia they boasted a membership of 23,000. However, under peace-time conditions their appeal rapidly faded. Fifty per-cent of the Australian members had left by 1947 and by 1958 there were only 5850.

75. Communist Review : organ of theory and practice of the Communist Party of Australia (Sydney, Forward Press, 1934-1966)

This was the "Organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Australia." Publication was suspended from June, when the Party was banned, to December 1940, but re-commenced in January 1941. Copies were still being seized, as the ban on the Party was not lifted until December 1942.

On display are copies for May, September and November 1941. The May 1941 issue begins with "Notes of the month", the first of which refers to Dunkirk, and the threat of German invasion of Britain. The piece ends,

The further the war develops, the more the very stones cry out that it is an imperialist war and expose the hollow lies of the Labor Party leaders that this is a "war for democracy and a new order", that at the end of this war, the British capitalists, imperialists and fascists are politely going to commit suicide and allow the people to take control.

The September issue, in the aftermath of the German invasion of Russia, gives a different slant on the war. An article entitled, "For a people's war for the defeat of fascism" begins,

The aggression of the fascists against the land of Socialism has changed the nature and course of the war and presented the international labor movement with new and decisive tasks. The central issue now is to ensure at all costs, the victory over Hitlerism.

The November 1941 issue begins with an editorial, headed "Britain and the U.S. must act" which calls for a second front and for the entry of the United States into the war. On7^th December 1941 the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour and America entered the war, but it was not until 6^th June 1944 that the second front was opened with the Allied landings in Normandy. The editorial ends in a flourish of rhetoric,

The working class movement uniting its own ranks demands the ruthless prosecution of the sacred war of independence and freedom, for the defeat of the new barbarism that threatens all lands.
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76. Congress report on the work of the C.C. from the 12th to the 13th Party Congress / compiled by L.L. Sharkey. [Sydney : Communist Party of Australia, 1943] (Sydney : Dimitrov Press)

This is Sharkey's report on the work of the Central Committee of which he was General-Secretary.

The Party's attitude to the war was discussed and Sharkey reports on this in a section headed, "The war becomes a people's war". This includes mention of the apparent change of policy after the German attack on Russia,

The enemies of our Party allege that the Party "somersaulted" but the policy of alliance with the Soviet Union against the fascists is, and always has been, our policy. It was those who had opposed collective security, who fought the peace policy of the Soviet Government, who were compelled to somersault. In the end it was the pro-fascists, appeasers and isolationists who were defeated and compelled to accept the policy of Unity against the fascists. Certainly the Party changes its line, just as Marx, Lenin and the Bolsheviks frequently changed immediate policy, but never the ultimate aim, Socialism. It is true that our reformist critics never change their fundamental line, namely, support for whatever policy the bourgeoisie is following: class-collaboration.

77. Soviet-German non-aggression pact explained / by Molotov, Voroshilov, Zhdanov, with an introduction by E.W. Campbell. (Sydney : Central Committee, Communist Party of Australia, [1939])

Ernie Campbell had studied at the Lenin School in Moscow in 1934 and on his return was given responsibility for teaching new recruits the fundamentals of Marxist theory. In his introduction he begins by admitting that, "A great deal of confusion exists about the real nature and reasons for the conclusion of the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact." His intention, he says, is to dispel "the false impressions which have been created."

To clear things up, we are re-publishing statements by M. Zhdanov, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Supreme Soviet; V. M. Molotov, Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs; and Marshall Voroshilov, People's Commissar for Defence.

78. Second front. (Melbourne : Australia-Soviet Friendship League, 1941)
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79. The Red Army. (Melbourne : Australia-Soviet Friendship League, [1941])

The Australia-Soviet Friendship League was a Communist front organisation, which had originated in 1930 as the Friends of the Soviet Union. The Party used it to promote awareness among Australians of the need for Allied support for the Russian war effort.

The A.S.F.L feels that the possibility of opening of a second front is not being considered by many influential people in Britain, who are prejudiced against the Soviet Union - perhaps by some members of the British Cabinet - simply as a military question. Are some of these Cabinet members, for example, under the influence of the ideas expressed by the Minister for Aircraft Production, Lieut.-Col. Moore-Brabazon, when he said that the German and Russian armies would exterminate each other and that this would enable Britain to gain the dominating power in Europe? (see "Herald" September 11^th)

Anyone in Britain who dreams that Britain should stay more or less aloof and fully-armed while the Soviet Union and Germany weaken each other, leaving Britain safe, sound and unscathed, is a madman or a Nazi agent. (p. 3)

The Red Army begins with a sense of urgency, "As this is written, the calendar shows June 26^th 1941. Less than a week has passed since Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union." (p. 2) The message of the pamphlet is how well-trained and disciplined the Red Army is and how high their morale. 

The final section is an account of the Red army's invasion of Lithuania. This had taken place in 1940 after the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact had been signed. This had enabled Germany and Russia to divide Poland, and Russia to invade Finland and the Baltic States, including Lithuania. The ASFL pamphlet quotes Anna Louise Strong's account of the invasion. Miss Strong was a Communist journalist of long-standing, and had been a close friend of several senior Soviet officials. She lived in Russia and edited the Moscow News.  According to her account,

Lithuania became transformed, without the shedding of one drop of blood, into a people's Socialist Republic and a member-Republic of the U.S.S.R.

One thing only made this peaceful transformation possible - the presence of the Red Army inside Lithuania. (p. 19)

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80. Julius, M. N.
               The Truth about the Brisbane line / by M.N. Julius. (Brisbane : Queensland State Committee, Communist Party of Australia, 1943)

The "Brisbane Line" was notorious in Queensland as being a policy put forward by Menzies that stated that if Australia was to be invaded the troops would fall back to a line through Brisbane and defend Australia from there, ceding all areas to the north to the enemy.

The introduction to the pamphlet is by Fred Paterson, a radical barrister who later became the only Communist ever to be elected to Parliament in Australia; he was the member for Bowen in the Queensland Legislative Assembly from 1944 to 1950.

The graphic on the cover shows Menzies as a washerwoman washing his army tunic with the legend on the back reading, "Resigned Militia commission 1914". The clothes on the line, staked out across Australia from Adelaide to Brisbane, refer to the "scrap-iron that came back", a reference to the pig iron for Japan which Menzies insisted be shipped despite the protests from the Wharfies; "praise for Hitler"; "Munich" and "non-intervention to help Franco"; all of which refer to Menzies sympathies with right-wing totalitarian regimes and the policy of appeasement.
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81. The Communists were right! : Why was the second front delayed? Could the war have been prevented? (London : Communist Party of Great Britain, [1946])

This pamphlet arose from evidence presented at the Nuremberg trials, in particular by General Jodl who gave as his assessment that it was "totally incomprehensible that the Anglo-Americans should have avoided forming the Second Front in the West." (p. 5) The Communists blamed Churchill for his insistence that the campaign continue in the Mediterranean rather than mounting an invasion across the Channel. In the immediate aftermath of the war, they warned,

The Fascists are crawling out of their holes. Attempts are being made to break up our alliance with the Soviet Union.

Against all this, the Communists will fight, as they fought against the spirit of Munich. But they can do so a thousand times more effectively in their rightful place, as an affiliated organisation of the Labour Party. (p. 15)

The call was going out once again for a popular front with the other parties of the left, but as had been the case in the 1920s and 1930s the reformist parties were not interested.

Flat Case 5
Post-War Reconstruction

The proposals for changes in society after the war began to be put forward and considered from about 1943. In their striving for the reform of society, the Communists often had detailed schemes to promote.

Their Utopian inclinations are evident in such works as Ralph Gibson