There has been a convention to blame the demise of the theatre of the Palmers and the Essons, and that of other ‘national theatre’ attempts, on the limited talents of participants. But the Irish had established their national theatre above all on the shoulders of Yeats, a great poet but questionable playwright, whose plays primarily survive today not in their own right but as obligatory relatives of his poetry, and on one overriding dramatic genius, Synge, and indeed one overriding play, The Playboy of the Western World, booed off the stage when first performed in Dublin. Though there arose no Australian Synge, the Essons and the Palmers deserve to be seen as figures in Australian mythologies of brave defeat similar to that associated with Ned Kelly, Burke and Wills, Gallipoli, and failed prospectors and ruined selectors.
THE OGRE IS BORN
To the ultimate and excessive horror of the general populace, but without anyone particularly noticing at the time, the Australian Communist Party was founded by a modest group of radicals, many of them in drastic disagreement with their brethren, in Sydney on a Saturday in October 1920, while much of the city’s populace was distracted by the spring racing season at Randwick.
On the streets of Sydney and other Australian cities that Saturday, despite often tragic unemployment amongst returned soldiers, despite the slums, the landlords, the urban and industrial squalor, there was a gleam of consumerism in the eyes of young people. Only the Broken Hill miners were pursuing industrial action at the time. The Labor Party, out of office at the federal level, Hughes having become a National Party prime minister, was devoting itself to reform within the capitalist system, and the majority of workers were happy with that proposition and did not look beyond an improvement of wages and a guarantee of dignity, preferring that to the overthrow of the state.
So it was a small number of interested parties who gathered in a grim hall in Liverpool Street. The group carried within the seeds of the doctrinal splits soon to occur in Russia itself, and in all the European and American Communist parties. But as yet, all was fraternity. It was the Australian Socialist Party (ASP) of Liverpool Street, Sydney, who sent out some sixty invitations to create a party that would be a home for all those ‘who stand for the emancipation of the working masses’. Since the ASP would be playing on their home ground, they hoped they could dominate the strands of opinion and organisational concepts people would bring. The potential inner rebels came from the breakaway Victorian Socialist Party, the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World, now in decline since some of them had set sabotaging fires in Sydney during the war), the Trades Hall Reds (radical trade unionists) from Sydney, and so on. The triumvirate who ran the Australian socialists, the chief bloc, were Arthur Reardon, a blacksmith intellectual who trained apprentices at Sydney’s Clyde railway works; his wife Marcia Reardon, who could make vivid speeches full of outrage at specific examples of the human misery of Australian households; and the ASP’s newspaper editor, Ray Everitt.
There were a number of other remarkable attendees, but none more so than Tom Walsh, Irish rebel, head of the seamen’s union, whose followers were called ‘the Walsheviks’, and his gentrified wife, Adela Pankhurst Walsh, the five-foot-tall daughter of Emmeline, famous founder of the British suffragette movement. Before coming to Australia, Adela Pankhurst had worked as an organiser for her mother’s movement in Yorkshire. Despite being an asthmatic, she had been imprisoned a number of times for suffragist protests. She had then split with her mother and her sister Christabel over doctrine and more personal matters, and had sailed to Australia in 1914, distressed by her mother’s growing conventional patriotism as war drew near. At the Melbourne home of her friends the Rosses—who had raised Tom Walsh’s two children since his first wife had died—she met her future husband. Adela’s belief was in communal kitchens, architect-designed workers’ housing, free books. While Adela was on remand at the time of her marriage, Hughes made an offer to her that she would be released on the condition she no longer spoke in public, but Adela refused and was sent to gaol in October 1917 to serve four months. She and Walsh were intellectual but not social equals, and there is a story that she married Tom as a way to avoid deportation by Hughes for her opposition to the war. Even so, by the time she and Walsh attended that first meeting they had five children; indeed, at that first meeting in 1920 she was nursing their infant daughter, Sylvia, and had to leave when the baby started crying.
By 1925, Adela and Walsh would have abandoned the Communist Party, in part over doctrine, in part for its ineffectuality. Communism had to be a force for sexual purity, Adela argued, which would liberate women from the tyranny of lust and the degradation of labour. Communism had given no priority to that. She had always been suspected in any case for ‘talking posh’, at least by Australian standards, and thus for being a bourgeois in disguise. But at that first meeting in 1920, they were hopeful devotees.
Another notable attendee was a former clergyman of the Church of Christ, the Scots-born Jock Garden, teetotal and anti-gambling, who did not see Marxism as very different from the teachings of ‘the lowly Nazarene’, that is, Christ. He remained a deacon of the Church even after being elected to the Labor Council and becoming leader of the Trades Hall Reds. His style of oratory was as coruscating as that of John Knox, founder of Presbyterianism.
William Earsman, the eccentric Scot from Melbourne (who wore spats, just as Stanley Melbourne Bruce did), was a member of the Victorian Socialist Party who attended the Sydney meeting that first day along with a notable group of Melbourne radicals. Within a short time he was already disparaging the ASP bloc within the party and saw its three members elected to the provisional executive as ‘dangerous individuals’.
The ASP faction in the new party felt precisely the same way about Earsman and the Victorian Socialist Party. They felt threatened by strident Victorians like Earsman’s lover Christian Jollie Smith, one of the earliest women lawyers in Victoria and, according to her friend Adela, in her spare time the first woman taxi-driver in Melbourne. (Adela felt great gratitude to Smith because she had stolen the prosecutor’s files for the wartime deportation case against Adela.) Earsman and Smith wanted to take over the ASP’s weekly newspaper and make it into the organ of the new Communist Party. But the ASP was only willing to agree if it had greater representation on the Communist Party council. As well as the Liverpool Street hall where that first meeting took place, the ASP owned the printing press, and did not want to hand control of its assets over to a new organisation represented by only three ASP members.
After the founding of the Australian Communist Party that October day, three years after the Bolsheviks had seized power in St Petersburg, branches were endorsed in Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane, Townsville, Newcastle, and Newtown and Balmain in Sydney. Earsman, and Garden from the Trades Hall Reds, found they had a minority of followers amongst the various small branches, compared to former ASP members, but more power on the council. Tom Glynn was on Earsman’s side. He was a former Wobblies man who had done time in Pentridge for conspiracy, and was now appointed editor of the proposed newspaper to be printed on the ASP press. The ASP group, feeling threatened in its ownership of its own resources, condemned that dominant section of the executive who, as Arthur Reardon said, ‘represented no one but themselves’ and were trying to destroy unity.
One night in 1921 the ASP withdrew its representatives, denouncing Garden and the Trades Hall group, packed up the press and other property, and moved it all to new premises in Sussex Street. The tiny Communist movement now had rival newspapers and executives, each believing they were the genuine inheritors of Marxism, and dressed up their quarrels, personal and territorial, in accusations that the other side did not have a proper grasp of Marxist doctrine. The ASP men and women in Sussex Street immediately adopted the title ‘United Communist Party of Australia (the Australian Section of the Third International)’, and printed on its own press a newspaper, the International Communist. From the office in Liverpool Street, Earsman produced a rival newspaper called Aus
tralian Communist. Would Liverpool Street or Sussex Street inherit the revolution and achieve anointment from Russia? It was no small question for the participants. World revolution was imminent, they were sure, and ultimate power over Australia’s Marxist identity, and it was all happening for now in the white-hot ardour of a small number of people in close-by, unfashionable streets in Sydney.
While many Russian exiles supported Earsman’s Liverpool Street party, Peter Simonoff, Soviet Russia’s representative in Australia, formerly a Tsarist prisoner who had escaped to Brisbane then moved south to be more effective, approved of the Sussex Street group. However, in 1921, Simonoff had been moved out of Sydney by police harassment to settle in Brisbane, and was so closely watched by police there that he could now do very little. A new emissary from Moscow arrived in Australia, perhaps American-born, possibly Hungarian, Paul Freeman, alias Cox. Expelled from Australia earlier as an illegal alien, he had gone to Russia where he met up with Artem Sergeiev, a personable Bolshevik who, like Simonoff, had also spent some years as an exile in Brisbane, and who had now risen to power in the Central Committee.
In rivalry with British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, who as a youth visited the goldfields, and with William Smith O’Brien, Irish nobleman and political prisoner in Van Diemen’s Land, Sergeiev might have been one of the most powerful political figures to spend time in Australia. He was a handsome and likeable fellow in his thirties, a former rail worker and devoted Bolshevik, who had been in trouble with the Tsar not least for leading the strikers of 1905 in Kharkov before the strikers’ final stand was blown apart by Russian army artillery. After radical organisation of railway workers led to his further arrest in 1907, he made an extraordinary escape from Siberia and reached Japan and then Shanghai, where he drew expat European anger for doing ‘coolie work’—delivering bread to houses in the French Quarter. In Brisbane he had involved himself in the general strike of 1911, when the Brisbane Tramways Company had begun sacking drivers and conductors who wore their union badges to work. He had sent for publication in a St Petersburg socialist magazine a warning to Russian intellectuals that Australia, despite Queensland’s having had the first Labor Party government in the world, was not the ‘Lucky Country’. He complained, like other Marxists, that the Labor Party and most of the trade unions were only interested in improving workers’ conditions by small increments, rather than by overthrowing the whole rotten edifice. To him the existence of an Australian militia had bespoken British militarism. Yet in his Brisbane days he had been very fraternal towards the Australians, and above all to any of his fellow Russian exiles, whatever their politics—Agrarian Socialists, Social Revolutionaries, Anarchists, Mensheviks or Social Democrats. He had created a Russian newspaper, a lending library, and a Russia House in South Brisbane for those cane cutters and railway workers who came to town for Russian Christmas and other reasons. He had also campaigned for freedom of assembly, and against conscription, and spent time in Boggo Road Gaol for deliberately involving himself in illegal assembly and other purported crimes.
After the fall of the Tsar, Sergeiev had returned to Russia in time to be elected to the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks in their St Petersburg headquarters at the Smolny Institute, and to take an active part in the overthrow of the provisional government and the achievement of a Bolshevik revolution. By 1921, Sergeiev had campaigned as a leading political commissar in the ferocious civil war with the Whites, and had been allied with the young Koba, soon to adopt the name Stalin, in the defence of the crucial city of Tsarytsin (the future Stalingrad) on the Volga. The civil war ended, the Third Communist International Congress was to meet in Moscow. Sergeiev was living a settled life in the Kremlin with his young intellectual wife and baby son, but was anxious to get some of the Australian radicals he had met to attend this Communist International (Comintern for short). It was for that reason that he had recruited Paul Freeman to go to Australia carrying the Central Committee’s mandate to invite Australian delegates to the Third Comintern in mid-1921. Freeman was also to recruit trade union representatives for the Red International of Labor Unions which was to follow the Comintern.
Freeman landed in Adelaide with a false passport, and on reaching Sydney wrote articles for the International Communist. At once, Arthur Reardon of Sussex Street wrote to the executive of the Comintern, of which Sergeiev was the chairman, pushing for recognition of Sussex Street as the true Australian Communist Party. Sussex Street, he said, met all the criteria; all that was needed to begin the revolution in Australia was a grant of £3000. Similar letters were being written by fledgling, divided Communist parties all over the world, asking for Moscow’s blessing as the true heirs. The French Communist Party had split; so had the German, the Italian, the American. Often the split was over the matter of whether trade unions should be the focus of Communist endeavour and whether they would need to exist after the revolution. But there were other divisive and obscure nuances of difference as well.
At Liverpool Street, Earsman, Glynn and Smith made the best they could of Freeman’s apparent approval of the people around the corner in Sussex Street, and Comrade Freeman had agreement to become the accredited Sussex Street representative in Moscow.
Assured that the Comintern would reimburse them for their travel expenses, delegates from both factions set out for the Communist Mecca to receive its blessing for their faction. Earsman departed Australia on the SS Themistocles, having been given a job on board as a stoker through the kind assistance of the Seamen’s Union. An Australian unionist named Jack Howie was also signed on as a crew member. Earsman found the rations appalling, the living quarters squalid, and the sailors they were forced to share with totally lacking in class consciousness and morality. Earsman told Howie, ‘Every one of these bastards should be taken out and shot.’ Howie fitted in with the seamen, however. Earsman’s consolation was reading Lenin’s Left Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder, an attack on the concept that unions would be unnecessary in the Soviet state. Upon his arrival at the British Communist headquarters in London, Earsman found the attention of the UK Communist executive riveted by a national lockout of coal miners. Earsman was brusquely told that his mode of hat, spats and other oddities of dress made him too conspicuous.
In the meantime, a Sussex Street delegate, Jim Quinton, was arrested at the docklands in Hull under the severe precautionary laws then in operation, and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment. One opponent gone for Earsman! Earsman and Howie travelled on to Germany, and then caught the train to Moscow. There it must have been apparent to them how harsh the new Russia was for most city-dwellers. But of course, the anti-revolutionary forces—the Whites—and the British, French and American governments, who had thrown their power behind the Whites, were considered largely to blame.
The Third Comintern Congress in June–July 1921, with five hundred delegates, was the largest formal gathering yet of international Communists. The delegates stayed in the Hotel Lux and were served good imported food. From the Politburo, Lenin called on them for an end to the splits that had reduced the Communist parties of the world into ineffectual little rumps. Nonetheless, Earsman immediately began lobbying for Liverpool Street. He introduced himself to the European Communists, heard Lenin speak, listened to Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife, to Zinoviev and Bukharin, wrote reports on the Australian situation, attended the Red Army parade to inaugurate the Congress, and had a chat with Trotsky himself. He wrote to his beloved Christian, but at the same time romanced a young German Communist. Smith’s polite background was however very useful. In fact, Moscow’s communications with Liverpool Street were to be delivered by way of Miss C.J. Smith, LLB, c/o Reverend T. Smith, The Manse, Coppin Street, East Malvern, Victoria. Earsman was disappointed, however, that others, including Freeman, managed to get full delegate mandates to the Congress. His own was a mere consultative one, and he had to work hard to get the Comintern executive to upgrade it.
Earsman felt threatened when Freeman began telling Sergeiev and othe
rs that the Scot was a mere anarchist syndicalist (that is, no more advanced than a Wobbly or trade unionist), and that Christian Jollie Smith was a bourgeois. Indeed, all Liverpool Street, Freeman reported, were merely a branch of the Wobblies, believers not in Marxism but in One Big Worldwide Union.
Earsman was even more worried when Freeman was elected an alternate member of the overall Comintern executive, that is, someone who would on occasion take his seat at the senior table and be able to speak publicly on resolutions. Earsman was saved from the threat of irrelevance when, on 24 July, Sergeiev, the tall former Queensland Russian, who had as a refugee helped build the railway to Warwick and had always had a political interest in railways, now dressed in white peasant smock, knee boots and cap, took a number of delegates for a ride in an experimental monorail train driven by a propeller. The train was boarded and moved off from the town of Tula, not far from Moscow. Rounding a bend, it jumped the tracks. In the smash, Sergeiev was killed and Freeman fatally injured. Sergeiev was buried beneath the Kremlin Wall with the full honours of the Soviet State, and Freeman was buried near him. Two other Sussex Street delegates were seriously injured in the crash. Suddenly, those who would resist Earsman’s legitimacy were decimated. He was elected to the executive committee of the Comintern.