“Anarchy at the Antipodes:” Australian Anarchists and their American Connections Tom Goyens1 Salisbury University, Maryland Australian-US Comparative and Transnational Labour History Conference January 8-9, 2015 The University of Sydney, Australia In the autumn of 1885, an American immigrant from Rhode Island, Frederic Upham, delivered a lecture called “What is Anarchy?” to a gathering of Melbourne freethinkers.2 Also at that time, Melbourne-born David Alfred Andrade subscribes to Liberty, the Boston-based anarchist journal, and becomes a regular correspondent.3 These events would directly lead to the founding of Australia’s first anarchist group in 1886. This club also included the immigrant John William Fleming who in 1907 invited Emma Goldman to Australia, and John Arthur Andrews, born in Bendigo, who broke with the club to become the spokesperson for communist-anarchism. The focus of this paper is the connections between these Australian anarchists and the United States.4 I must, at the outset, briefly state two premises that will serve as my framework. First, while anarchists formed a small contingent within Australian radicalism, they were part of the conversation, just like the now-forgotten single-taxers or Knights of Labor. As the historian Bruce Scates has observed: “studying the losers is a way of opening up a wider field of possibilities, of escaping a view of the past that is often narrow and teleological.”5 Second, anarchists during the 1880s and 1890s rarely operated within a single ideological camp. They cherished principles, but their ideas were often in flux, and they easily engaged in a variety of campaigns and alliances. Ideological differences—even splits—did emerge, but slowly and somewhat later than in the United States where immigrant communist-anarchism began to overshadow the native, individualist tradition. There is a strong local and regional appeal to the Australian anarchists who were concentrated in Melbourne and Sydney, but the American (and European) transnational connections were vital. We need a multi-layered approach to put Australian anarchism on the map. The founding of the Melbourne Anarchist Club on May 1, 1886 at first glance may seem like a local, isolated story.6 The immediate context, however, reveals not only a local, but a colonial and transnational dimension. The turbulent decades of the 1880s and 1890s witnessed a search for national identity when politics was often oppositional and fragmented. The Australian colonies bustled with numerous reform and radical movements responding to economic uncertainty and depression.7 The Workingmen’s Political Reform Association, for example, would see half of its members become anarchists.8 A much more significant home for closeted anarchists was the Victorian branch of the Australasian Secular Association (ASA), led by the combative immigrant Joseph Symes. Here freethinkers of all stripes battled against a hostile community and a colonial government that sought to enforce a rather puritan “code of respectability” with the help of churches and the press.9 There are parallels with the United States, although, as the historian Robin Archer has documented, Australian society was far less religious than American society.10 Soon, a rupture between the anarchists and Symes led the former to create, in May 1886, their own debating club as an offshoot of the ASA. The leading members were David Andrade and his brother Will, Fred Upham, Fleming, and Andrews among others.11 What united them was a deep commitment to individual liberty and a hostility to Church and State. For them, connecting atheism to anarchism was easy, or as Andrade declared in 1886: “Anarchy, in short, is to politics what atheism is to theology.”12 The state must disappear and stop interfering in the lives of the people. He railed against the Victorian government’s tariff policy, its role in education, the economy, the postal service, temperance, and health policies (Andrade was particularly active in the anti-compulsory vaccination movement).13 The club met regularly until 1889 and welcomed all radicals although not all members agreed on all issues. The club acted as a sponge absorbing a variety of activists who later went their own way. In April 1887, club members launched their own newspaper, Honesty, of which copies were sent to America, specifically to Boston. Even before the club was founded, David Andrade established contact with Benjamin Tucker, editor of Liberty, since 1881 the foremost exponent of individualist anarchism in the United States.14 Throughout 1886 and 1887, from his home in South Yarra, David Andrade sent five reports to Boston, in which he sketched the state of anarchism in Australia with comments on colonial (mostly in Victoria) legislation and philosophical issues.15 Connections like this make sense. It allowes both sides to be “plugged into” a global or transnational community. It provides support and legitimacy for the Australians. Local issues could now be part of a wider debate about human nature, natural rights, and the role of the state. After all, if an anarchist philosophy speaks to universal aspects of the human condition it would be good to see movements spring up in all corners of the world. This same aspiration was true for the freethought movement, and it is not surprising that already in 1884-1885, the ASA received literature, including anarchist, from abroad.16 The English secularist and anarchist Henry Seymour was another figure connecting both Tucker and the Australians. Seymour edited The Anarchist, and published Bakunin’s God and the State, translated by Tucker. All three individualist anarchist papers were eventually exchanged among Tucker, Seymour and Andrade and their readers largely based on the popularity of the writings of Bakunin, Proudhon, Spencer, and Stirner. Each editor printed advertisements for the other papers. Andrade read aloud the manifesto of the English Anarchist Circle (around Seymour) at the second meeting of the Melbourne Anarchist Club.17 In 1887, Tucker could write that “it is sufficient description of Honesty’s principles to say that they are substantially the same as those championed by Liberty in America.”18 In 1888, more than one- eighth of Liberty’s book and pamphlet patronage came from Melbourne.19 It is clear from the exchanges between Tucker and Andrade that both men reveled in the spread of “their” version of anarchism. The Melbourne anarchists imagined their audience as wide as possible, even though geography often interferred. The club prospectus was addressed to “the People of Australasia,” for example. An excited Andrade told Tucker about the prospect of having anarchist clubs spring up all over the continent, all federated in an imaginary “Australasian Association of Anarchists.”20 Tucker was equally enthusiastic: “Anarchism is nowhere more active than in Australia,” which he called “that little continent.”21 Periodicals and a functioning global postal service thus provide one of the enduring connecting tissue for any far-flung, transnational radical movement. Another common connector in diasporic movements is the traveling lecturer who is invited to speak abroad. Not only can such an occasion invigorate an embattled or deflated branch of a larger movement, it also brings the smaller group together around fundraising efforts to make the voyage possible. This was the case with the tiny Social-Revolutionary Club in New York in 1882 when they invited the famous Johann Most for a lecture tour. Peter Kropotkin twice visited the United States to the excitement of local anarchists, and in 1894, the British anarchist C.W. Mowbray went on an American speaking tour. It was in this spirit that Andrade suggested to Tucker that the anarchist editor Edwin Cox Walker come to Australia to reform the “law-ridden Australasians,” as he put.22 Walker was editor of Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, one of the leading papers on free love and birth control. He never made it to Australia. Three days after the founding of the Melbourne Anarchist Club, the Haymarket bombing in Chicago shocked the United States and reverberated around the world. The first reports appeared in Australia’s mainstream newspapers on May 6 and 7, 1886, most of them condemning the anarchists. Melbourne anarchists immediately criticized those press accounts and expressed sympathy for the Chicago anarchists accused of a criminal conspiracy that led to the bloodshed. Andrade, in fact, had addressed revolutionary violence even before Haymarket. In April 1886, he stated that if peaceable means were ineffective in obtaining “social liberty,” then “physical force must be employed to secure it.” “Dynamite,” he added, echoing Johann Most, “is one of the best friends of toiling humanity.”23 In a May lecture unrelated to Haymarket he talked about the “new Terrorism” that would overturn Christian humility and slavery because “Tyrannicide becomes a virtue and slavery a crime.”24 Andrade later abandoned those views. After the conviction and sentencing to death of eight Haymarket defendants in August 1886, the Melbourne anarchists stepped up their protests against police, the state, and the press. They condemned the “base intrigue of the authorities as they stained [with blood] that memorable meeting held in Chicago last May.”25 They adopted a resolution, published in Liberty and directed at the Governor of Illinois, in which they called the trial a “legal murder.”26 After the day of execution, November 11, 1887, Andrade called this ghastly event “one of the foulest crimes that ever stained the bloodiest pages of American history.”27 Haymarket deeply affected a broad segment of Australian radicals, including socialists. In 1888, a split occurred among the anarchists in Australia, not so much over the issue of violence, but rather over the role of property and the fruits of labor in a future anarchist society. Anarchist-communism, so eloquently expounded by Peter Kropotkin, had become the dominant philosophy among anarchists in Europe and North America.