REVIEW BY SIMON BUTLER
The Red North: Queensland's History of Struggle
By Jim McIlroy
Resistance Books, Sydney 2001
29 pages, $3.50
Communist parliamentarians, armed rural uprisings, revolutionary soviets — this is hardly the history of Queensland that has been presented in mainstream Australian history books or high school curricula. All these, and more, are revealed in Jim McIlroy's marvellous little book.
With the success of the May 1 stock exchange blockades, activists are justifiably confident that the movement for global justice has a future. But it is also necessary that activists of this burgeoning movement understand its connection to a radical past that has been hidden, neglected and belittled by ruling class historians and politicians.
In his new pamphlet, The Red North: Queensland's History of Struggle, McIlroy explains that "the radical history of Queensland is not well known to most Australians. We are better acquainted with the image of the reactionary Joh Bjelke-Petersen regime and Pauline Hanson's racist One Nation party as the symbols of Queensland politics in the national consciousness. But there is another history of Queensland, one in which some of the most important class struggles and social upheavals in Australia have occurred."
The first of the upheavals that McIlroy documents is the great shearers' strikes that raged through the 1890s. By the mid-19th century, Australian capitalism had developed to the point where the demands of economic growth called for the replacement of convict labour with so-called "free" wage labour. In this transitional period chronic labour shortages enabled the young Australian workers' movement to win some impressive victories, including the world's first eight-hour day.
Australian capitalism experienced relative boom conditions between 1870 and 1890. But when this boom inevitably came to a close, it sparked a new phase in the class struggle.
The first major battle was the maritime strike of 1890. The strike spread nationally from the wharves to the pastoral industry and to the miners and transport workers.
Responding to the Brisbane-based Australian Labour Federation's call for a general strike in September 1890, the Brisbane Courier ranted: "The ALF has thrown off the mask and boldly raised the flag of national communism."
The unions suffered from a lack of experience and coordination and the strike was defeated by October.
Then in 1891, the pastoralists went on the offensive in Queensland, drawing up a proposed agreement for the 1891 shearing season that abandoned the eight-hour day and did not recognise unions. Queensland shearer's rejected this on January 6, 1891, and the first great shearers' strike began. The scale of the confrontation and the organisation of the strikers was unprecedented.
According to McIlroy, "confrontations occurred all over western Queensland, with armed bush cavalry riding to confront train loads of scabs, escorted by police and troops (heavily armed, with weapons including Gatling guns and even cannons)".
The strikers established huge bush camps. These served to house and organise the strikers throughout the campaign and were run by elected committees. The strikers' resolve was strengthened as a result of the persecution and imprisonment of key strike leaders. The high point of the struggle occurred on May 1, 1891, when 1500 armed strikers marched through the town of Barcaldine. It was Australia's first May Day demonstration.
Ultimately, however, the union's funds and resources were depleted and the strike ended in June 1891. The defeat of this almost insurrection (and also the later 1894 strike) has had political consequences that have shaped Australian politics to this day.
Correctly concluding that the working-class movement required a political expression, trade union leaders decided to form a political party. But unfortunately, the party they eventually formed, the Australian Labor Party, pursued a reformist and class collaborationist agenda from its inception.
Another radical flare-up occurred in Brisbane in 1919. A number of different factors contributed to a highly volatile political atmosphere in the city at the time.
The struggle against conscription during the first world war had been fought most fiercely in Queensland. The leaders of that struggle, the Industrial Workers of the World, were still an expanding radical influence in Queensland although they had been severely repressed in other states.
Also, the dramatic impact of the 1917 Russian Revolution had the effect of sharpening class tensions in Brisbane, as it did across the world.
But the unique and decisive element was the 4000 Russian, mostly pro-Bolshevik, exiles who had fled the political repression of post-1905 Tsarist Russia. Congregating mainly in the boarding houses of South Brisbane and organised in the Union of Russian Workers (URW), the exiles played a major role in what became known as the "red flag riots".
After the conclusion of the first world war, the federal government declared the flying of red flags a criminal offence. Meanwhile in Queensland, the Returned Servicemen's League began to organise and even arm ex-soldiers as reactionary Australian "loyalists".
The URW's weekly paper was suppressed in November 1918 after it declared, "We are all brothers fighting the one enemy, capitalism... fighting for liberty and the Red Flag".
Soon, the URW re-constituted itself as the "Southern Soviet of Russian Workers" after Australian military intelligence raided their South Brisbane office.
The tension reached its height in March 1919 when as many as 8000 "loyalists" were organised to march from the city across Victoria Bridge to attack the soviet's headquarters in Merivale Street. Around the same time show trials were conducted by the government for the crime of carrying a red flag. Fifteen radicals were found guilty and sentenced.
After this period of repression, the left began to revive and many "red flag" organisers and supporters became founding members of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) in August 1920. This laid the foundations for the next significant period in Queensland's radical history, the CPA-inspired "Red North" of the 1930s and 1940s.
The Communist Party grew and spread its influence in North Queensland more than in any other part of the country. The CPA played a crucial role in the sugar workers' campaign for the burning of cane in the northern fields. Caneworkers demanded this in order to avoid Weil's disease, a plague-like fever spread by rats. But burning represented a reduction in sugar yield so the employers insisted on a reduced rate of pay.
Caneworkers finally won the right to burn cane after a fierce campaign in 1936. The dispute highlighted a struggle for leadership of the sugar workers between the CPA and the conservative officials of the Australian Workers Union (AWU). The CPA successfully led the sugar workers, gaining much credibility and support, in the face of hostility from both the greedy employers and the AWU officials who constantly sought to restrain the militancy of the campaign.
McIlroy points to two other factors explain the CPA's growth in the north. The party built a strong base among non-Anglo (especially Italian) workers, and it was part of a remarkably strong and independent women's rights movement that grew up in the 1930s.
These were features peculiar to the CPA in north Queensland. Elsewhere, the CPA had largely succumbed to the Stalinist ideology of subordinating the question of women's liberation to the "class struggle in general".
The CPA's influence culminated with the election to state parliament of Fred Paterson for the seat of Bowen in 1944, and again in 1947. This is the only time a Communist has been elected to any Australian parliament.
In 1950, the ALP government cynically gerrymandered the Bowen electorate to split the strong CPA centre in two. This resulted in Paterson's defeat in the 1950 election.
The period of the "Red North" declined from this point on as the process of Stalinisation within the CPA and the Cold War anti-Communist crusade rolled back most of the gains and popular support won by the CPA in the 1930s and 1940s.
While not an exhaustive account of Queensland's radical history, McIlroy's The Red North is a significant contribution to the reclaiming of some of the anti-capitalist struggles of the past. For anti-capitalists today, the pamphlet provides valuable lessons and examples for the upheavals to come.