The Red North
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The Red North The Popular Front in North Queensland Diane Menghetti 2 THE RED NORTH Copyright James Cook University; reprinted with permission. First edition published by the History Department, James Cook University, 1981. This edition by Resistance Books published 2018. ISBN 978-1-876646-76-9 Resistance Books, resistancebooks.com Contents List of Abbreviations ..........................................................................4 Introduction to The Red North by Jim McIlroy...................................5 Chronology .........................................................................................17 Introduction ........................................................................................21 1.The Origins of the North Queensland Communist Party ....23 2.The Sugar Workers’ Strike of 1935 ..........................................32 3.Weil’s Disease & the Popular Front .........................................42 4.The Spanish Civil War.................................................................51 5.The Anti-Fascists .........................................................................60 6.Women in the Popular Front......................................................67 7.The Communist Party in North Queensland Society ............74 8.Public Meetings ...........................................................................80 9.The Popular Front & the Press .................................................88 10.The End of the Popular Front ...................................................94 Epilogue ............................................................................................100 Appendices A.Percentage of the Formal Vote Polled by Communist Candidates in North Queensland at State Elections Held Between 1935-1944............. 104 B.Constitution& Rules of the CPA 1935 and 1938......................................... 111 C.Communist Party Policy Statement for the By-Election for the State Seat of Townsville, 1939................................................................ 130 D.The Provisional Constitution of the Australian Association of Italian Democrats.................................................................................... 131 E. Rules & Constitution of the Women’s Progress Club of Townsville 1938........................................................................................ 132 4 THE RED NORTH F. Household Budget Kept by the Wife of a Skilled Meatworker (boner) 1941.................................................................................................. 136 G.Communist Newspapers in Queensland to 1940....................................... 137 Sources .............................................................................................138 Notes .................................................................................................146 Diane Menghetti ..............................................................................163 List of Abbreviations AEU..................................................................Amalgamated Engineering Union ALP.....................................................................................Australian Labor Party AMIEU...........................................Australian Meat Industry Employees’ Union ARU.............................................................................Australian Railways Union ASP.................................................................................Australian Socialist Party AWA...........................................................Amalgamated Workers’ Association AWU..........................................................................Australian Workers’ Union CPA.......................................................................Communist Party of Australia CPSU.........................................................Communist Party of the Soviet Union CSR..................................................................Colonial Sugar Refining Company ECCI.......................................................Executive Committee of the Comintern (Communist International) ILD.........................................................................International Labour Defence IWW..................................................................Industrial Workers of the World MAWF.......................................................Movement Against War and Fascism MMM......................................................................Militant Minority Movement OBU...............................................................................................One Big Union QSL............................................................................Queensland Socialist League RILU.............................................................Red International of Labour Unions SRC(F)..............................................................Spanish Relief Committee (Fund) UWM..............................................................Unemployed Workers Movement WPC................................................................................Women’s Progress Club WWF...................................................................Waterside Workers’ Federation Introduction to The Red North By Jim McIlroy Referring to North Queensland as the “Red North” might seem strange to most people in Australia right now. Queensland as a whole is better known in the South as the land of the reactionary Joh Bjelke-Petersen regime of the 1970s and 1980s, and more recently as the centre of Pauline Hanson’s racist One Nation Party — especially now that One Nation is making a comeback in Queensland state as well as federal politics. This identification continues despite the fact that, since the early 1990s and the fall of Joh and his National Party, the long run of predominantly Labor Party state governments in Queensland, interrupted by a short period under Liberal National Party Premier Rob Borbidge in the 1990s and a disastrous one-term LNP regime under former Premier Campbell Newman until 2015, means that Queensland has overall seen a majority period of ALP social-democratic reformist administrations in recent decades. Nevertheless, the identification persists in the national consciousness of Queensland as a right-wing stronghold in the country. This is particularly the popular image of central and northern Queensland, viewed from the “deep south”. However, there is another political side of Queensland, one which has seen a number of the most important class struggles and social upheavals in Australian history. Three particular special periods in Queensland's past come to mind: 1. The great shearers’ strikes of the early 1890s, the biggest industrial confrontations in the country’s history, and a turning point in the direction of the labour movement nationally. 2. The “Red Flag Riots” of 1919, in the aftermath of World War 1 and the Russian Revolution of 1917, when right-wing gangs attacked a community of Russian Bolshevik Jim McIlroy is the author of the pamphlet The Red North (Resistance Books, 2017) and a member of the Socialist Alliance. 6 THE RED NORTH refugees in Brisbane, and the Russians and their local labour movement allies fought back. 3. The era of the “Red North” in the 1930s and 1940s, when North Queensland (meaning the area north from Mackay to Cairns) developed as the single strongest base of the Communist Party of Australia in the country, and Fred Paterson became the only communist ever elected to an Australian parliament, as the member for the seat of Bowen in the Queensland state legislature from 1944 to 1950. It is this period of the “Red North” which is the theme of Diane Menghetti's pathbreaking book, The Red North: The Popular Front in North Queensland, originally published in 1981, by the James Cook University History Department. Resistance Books is re-publishing it precisely in order to help a contemporary national audience to understand the fact that northern Queensland has had a radical past, as well as a reactionary history. The above three periods are by no means the be-all and end-all of radical upheavals in Queensland. There have been many other progressive struggles and confrontations, including the anti-Vietnam War campaign of the 1960s and early 1970s; the Springbok anti-apartheid confrontation of 1970; the protests against Joh’s anti-street march laws in the 1970s; the SEQEB (South East Queensland Electricity Board) industrial dispute of the 1980s, which became a challenge to the Bjelke-Petersen government itself; the various campaigns protesting Aboriginal deaths in custody, in particular concerning Daniel Yock in the early 1990s and Mulrunji Doomadgee in the mid-2000s; and more recent environmental battles, especially to protect the Great Barrier Reef and against the Adani mega-coal mine in central Queensland. Overall, in studying the lessons of our past, the history of Queensland is especially instructive, as the contrast between radical struggle and right-wing reaction has nowhere been more glaringly displayed than in that state. Early days In her introduction to The Red North, Menghetti notes: The period chosen for the study, July 1935 to June 1940, did not constitute the period of maximum communist support in North Queensland; this occurred in the following decade. Nevertheless there is evidence that it was during this period that public distrust of the party was gradually eroded … The aspects chosen for examination: the Weil’s Disease strike, the Spanish Relief Campaign, the anti-fascist