The People's Champion — Fred Paterson, Australia's Only Communist Party Member of Parliament
By Ross Fitzgerald
University of Queensland Press, 1997.
312 pp., $26.95 (pb)
Review by John Nebauer
In 1944, Fred Paterson was elected as the member for Bowen in the Queensland parliament. He is the only Communist to have held a state or federal parliamentary seat in Australia.
Fitzgerald has chronicled an extraordinary life. The People's Champion not only describes Paterson's experiences as a Communist Party activist but also outlines the rise of the CPA in the 1930s, particularly in north Queensland, where Paterson lived most of his adult years.
Paterson, born in 1897, forsook a potentially brilliant career in law to become known as "the people's champion" because of his legal work for the poor and underprivileged.
One of 11 children of a small farmer in Gladstone, Paterson proceeded by way of scholarships through grammar school, entering the University of Queensland in 1916.
Religious in his youth, Paterson studied classics and theology with the intention of entering the priesthood. He interrupted his studies to serve in France in World War I. Although at that stage he saw himself as a supporter of the established order, Paterson became involved in two separate disputes over rations.
Returning to Australia after the war, Paterson completed his degree and won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford at the end of 1919. It was then he developed doubts about Christianity, and saw first hand the dreadful poverty of London's East End and in Ireland.
The contradictions between the teachings of Christ and the practice and position of the church drove him from religion permanently. Soon after he returned to Australia, he joined the CPA and by 1924 was giving introductory lectures in Marxist economics.
Paterson completed his law degree and was admitted to the bar in 1931. Between cases, which he often undertook without payment, he did an enormous amount of work for the CPA. A talented orator, he often addressed public meetings on a wide variety of topics.
The CPA grew rapidly during the Great Depression of the '30s, in particular in north Queensland. A number of important struggles, especially the sugar workers' strike of 1935 (which CPA writer Jean Devanny immortalised in the socialist-realist novel Sugar Heaven) widened the CPA's influence in the north.
A strong and militant labour force (canecutters and miners), leavened by strong migrant communities (in particular the Italians, many of whom came to Australia to escape fascism) helped to create "the red north". During the mid-1930s, CPA branches were established in most towns across north Queensland.
The main weakness in Fitzgerald's book is his failure to explain adequately aspects of Marxist theory and strategy. For example, he does not explore the consequences of the CPA's adoption of the popular front approach in the mid-1930s. Fitzgerald does mention that CPA leader Lance Sharkey, upon his return from the 1936 Comintern congress, toured north Queensland to promote the line that the CPA should unite with the ALP to overcome war and fascism.
Fitzgerald does not explain that the popular front was distinct from a united front in which organisations unite to fight around specific issues and demands but retain their own political program and the ability to criticise each other. Yet the distinction was crucial.
Applied internationally, the popular front resulted in CPs becoming less and less critical of their social democratic "allies" — including in Australia where, despite a proud history of struggle, by the 1970s, the CPA had succumbed totally to the disease of tail-ending the ALP.
In general, Fitzgerald's biography is light in the area of political analysis. This may be because: "[Paterson] seems throughout to have been perfunctory in his interest in Marxism-Leninism as a formal system, and much more interested in adapting communism to practical idealist ends".
Nevertheless, the book's description of Paterson's successful election campaign and the personal glimpses into the character of a man both scholarly and humane are fascinating.
Paterson and his family often found it hard to make ends meet, but rarely was his political work affected. However, at a demonstration on St Patrick's Day in 1948, Paterson was bashed so severely by a policeman's baton that he was unable to work for many months and never regained his enormous political energy.
Paterson's bashing seemed to herald the vast unpleasantness of the Cold War years. Sharkey was convicted of sedition; the 1949 miners' strike was broken using the army as scab labour; trade union funds were frozen and union leaders jailed; the Menzies government attempted to destroy the CPA; and the Soviet Union was once more treated as the enemy. Through it all, Fred Paterson remained calm, hard working and loyal to the party.
Paterson died in 1977. In an interview in the mid-1970s, he said, "As an ardent communist I have been motivated by a much higher and more noble vision: the vision of a world where ... the fear of want is banished and the law of the forest is no more".
This book should be in every activist's library. It summarises Paterson's legacy: "As the 20th century closes, much of the pattern and shape of Paterson's politics deserves emulation in Australia". Amen to that.