“ 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,

In the autumn of 1885, an American immigrant from Rhode Island, Frederic Upham, delivered a lecture called “What is Anarchy?” to a gathering of freethinkers.2 Also at that time,

Melbourne-born David Alfred Andrade subscribes to , 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 to Australia, and John Arthur Andrews, born in

Bendigo, who broke with the club to become the spokesperson for communist-. 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 ) 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 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. 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 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-, so eloquently expounded by Peter Kropotkin, had become the dominant philosophy among anarchists in Europe and North America. Whereas individualists like Tucker and Andrade clung to the concept of private property and the idea that an able producer enjoys the full fruits of his labor, anarchist-communists believed that communal property (through expropriation if necessary) and distribution according to need constituted a true anarchist society.

The pugnacious Tucker had no stomach for communist-anarchists with whom he had been in bitter conflict in the United States.28

John Arthur Andrews, a talented journalist, theorist, and inventor, emerged as Australia’s leading voice of communist-anarchism. He had been influenced by Kropotkin’s French anarchist paper La Révolte, and engaged his club mates in vigorous debates, which led to a dramatic break in July 1888. He makes an eloquent case for Kropotkin’s theories in Liberty, explaining the principle “to each according to his needs,” and clarifying that “its [communist-anarchism] revolutionary aspect is howled at by some, but the is simply throwing off the yokes instead of waiting for them to rot off.”29 Andrews would eventually move to New South Wales and become a correspondent for a number of international anarchist publications, and in 1897, was offered a position with Firebrand in the United States, but was unable to pay for the voyage.30 The communist-anarchists would find a home with the Australian Socialist League when a Melbourne branch was founded in 1889 with the help of Andrews’ close friend John

“Chummy” Fleming.31

It is a mistake to see Australian anarchism, so far, as simply an indoor debating society.

Certainly, a club, lecture hall, or beerhall are essential components of an oppositional movement.32 However, several of the Melbourne anarchists made significant connections with the working classes, especially the growing number of unemployed in the urban centers. One of the loudest illustrations that anarchists were in fact part of the conversation were the large crowds at anarchist outdoor speeches. If Andrews was the intellectual, Chummy Fleming, the immigrant bootmaker, was the tireless agitator for free speech, workers’ rights, and against

Sunday closing laws (although Andrews also spoke to workers).

It all started in 1885 with the arrest in Melbourne of three unemployed protesters.

Fleming resolved to free them, and announced a meeting on the Queen’s Wharf, an open, public space on the Yarra River. Money collected there paid for the fine of one of the protesters.

Andrade and Upham also spoke, but abandoned these activities once the government, aided by the Harbor Trust, began cracking down. Fleming returned to the wharf despite harassment and beatings by thugs. “I have fought an uphill fight,” he wrote, “but dogged determination has crowned my labor with success.”33 In fact, he managed to attract thousands of listeners and sell anarchist literature. On August 17, 1890, a Sunday, five thousand people gathered around

Chummy Fleming’s “flaming flag of Anarchy,” and Sam Rosa’s “red flag of Revolution.”34

Samuel Albert Rosa had just returned as a journalist from the United States and, according to

Fleming, sought to take credit for the successful gatherings. Fleming called him “one thorough adventurer from America.”35

In this context of urban, seditious oratory by a handful of stubborn but popular anarchist speakers, another international dimension intrudes into our story. The year 1890 had been proclaimed by the Second International (in 1889) as the start of a global, annual celebration of labor to be held on May First (). This initiative was rooted in the much older campaign for an eight-hour workday that had galvanized broad sections of the American working and middle classes during the 1880s. In Australia, however, workers had been celebrating a Labour

Eight Hour Day since the 1850s but on different dates—in Victoria, on April 21.36 This traditional Labour Day was exclusively a celebration of the Australian craftsman—unskilled workers were excluded from the procession. This explains why on April 21, 1890 a group of unemployed disrupted the official procession in Melbourne, prompting Fleming to unfurled a banner that screamed “FEED ON OUR FLESH AND BLOOD YOU CAPITALIST HYENAS:

IT IS YOUR FUNERAL FEAST.37 One angry passerby promptly tore it to pieces.

The celebration of another day of labor on May First, about a week after the traditional one, therefore became an alternative statement about the solidarity of labor. Not well-groomed craftsmen but Queensland shearers and squatters at the Barcaldine camp inaugurated the first

May Day march in Australia in 1891.38 In Melbourne, it was Chummy Fleming who after rejecting the parochial Labour Day, instead founded May Day in 1892 (a Sunday) as a provocative proclamation of the unity of all workers everywhere. His friend Andrews agreed:

May Day was more “a protest,” “a warning to tyrant[s].”39 All this unfolded in the midst of an economic depression accompanied by a wave of strikes by shearers, maritime workers, and miners from 1890 to 1894.40 Depression also crippled the United States, but again, as Robin

Archer shows by comparing the Maritime and Pullman strikes, “state repression was greater in the United States than it was in Australia.”41 Furthermore, Emma Goldman addressed crowds of up to three thousand unemployed New Yorkers during August 1893 defending the hungry person’s right to take bread—she was eventually arrested and briefly jailed. The international character of an alleged anarchist threat was also discussed in the press. In 1892, one newspaper told its readers that “special emissaries have been sent to these colonies from the head-quarters of the Socialists in America and England to rouse up the working class.”42 Years later, in 1907, Fleming invited Emma Goldman to come to Australia for an extended speaking tour to begin in 1909. Goldman, who was in the midst of a rocky love affair with the eccentric Ben Reitman, agreed. Large amounts of literature were sent to Australia in advance. “Comrades in Sydney and Adelaide are anxious for you to come,” wrote Fleming, “and are organizing into committees to raise funds and arrange meetings. You can look forward to a successful tour.”43 But at the last minute, Goldman canceled the trip for fear that the American authorities would not let her back into the country.44 Historian Candace Falk has argued that

Goldman was stricken by pessimism and indecisiveness due to Reitman’s influence. “I am strongly contemplating giving up everything and going to Australia, travelling a few years alone,” she wrote to Reitman.45 Fleming and Goldman would never meet; instead Goldman was deported from the United States in 1919. Fleming held true to his anarchism until his death in

1950—the last of the Australian pioneers.46

In conclusion, this brief sketch of the formative years of Australian anarchism shows, I believe, that despite its modest size, a number of key figures in the movement—Andrade,

Andrews, Fleming, and Rosa—consciously engaged with and cultivated a transnational dimension of anarchism. Their connections with Americans and American events were not incidental or trivial. Instead, these links deeply affected and informed their words and action within their Australian habitat—on a local as well as a colonial level.

1 Comments or feedback can be sent to [email protected] 2 Liberty (Boston), February 20, 1886. 3 Liberty (Boston), November 14, 1885 and February 20, 1886. 4 I would like to thank Bob James for making available his own and others’ work on Australian anarchism at http://www.takver.com/history/indexbj.htm. All citations from James’ work come from this site. I also want to thank Shawn P. Wilbur who has made available the journal Liberty online at http://travellinginliberty.blogspot.com/2007/08/index-of-liberty-site.html, and Wendy McElroy who created an invaluable index to Liberty at https://web.archive.org/web/20060903022232/http://tmh.floonet.net/articles/ind_int2.html. Lastly, I thank the

National Library of Australia for creating the Trove digitized newspaper database at https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper 5 Bruce Scates, “’Millennium or Pandemonium?’: Radicalism in the , Sydney, 1889-1899,” Labour History, No. 50 (May 1986): 72. 6 Announcements for its discussion meetings were placed in local papers, including the conservative The Argus on June 5 and 19, for example. 7 See Bruce Scates, A New Australia: Citizenship, Radicalism and the First Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 8 Sam Merrifield, “The Melbourne Anarchist Club, 1886-1891,” Bulletin of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, No. 3 (Nov., 1962), 32. See also Merrifield, “The Formation of the Melbourne Anarchist Club,” Recorder (Labour History, Melbourne), No 1 (July 1964). 9 See F.B. Smith, “Joseph Symes and the Australasian Secular Association,” Labour History, No. 5 (Nov., 1963), 34. 10 Robin Archer, Why is There No Labor Party in the United States? (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), 177. 11 See entries for “Andrade, David Alfred,” “Andrade, William Charles (Will),” “Fleming, John William,” “Andrews, John Arthur” in the Australian Dictionary of Biography at http://adb.anu.edu.au/; See also Sam Merrifield, “David Alfred Andrade,” Recorder, No 5 (March 1965). 12 David Andrade, “What is Anarchy?” Liberty (Boston), May 28, 1887. This was originally a lecture given in May 1886 in Melbourne. 13 Interestingly, the German socialist (later anarchist) Johann Most also played an active role as MP in 1874 to defeat a compulsory vaccination bill that eventually passed the German Reichstag. The argument used by both Most and Andrade was that vaccination against smallpox remained unproven and could lead to blood poisoning. That the state could mandate it was particularly loathsome to Andrade who in 1891 became one of the principal lecturers of the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination Society. See The Bendigo Advertiser, May 15, 1891. 14 The cosmopolitan Tucker had always promoted international anarchism through the press and his translations of Mikhail Bakunin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Wendy McElroy, “, Liberty, and Individualist Anarchism,” The Independent Review, Vol. II, No. 3 (Winter 1998), 421-434. See also James J. Martin, Men Against the State: The Expositors of Individualist Anarchism, 1827-1908 (Ralph Myles Publisher, 1970); Frank H. Brooks, The Individualist Anarchists: An Anthology of Liberty (1881–1908) (Transaction Publishers, 1994), and Carl Watner, “Benjamin Tucker and His Periodical, Liberty,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 1, No. 4 (1977), 307-318. 15 These reports appeared in Liberty as “Anarchy in Australia” (February 20, 1886), “Anarchy in Australia” (September 18, 1886), “The Melbourne Anarchists’ Club” (October 30, 1886), “Australian Notes” (March 26, 1887), and “What is Anarchy?” (May 28, 1887). The last piece by Andrade to be published in Liberty was called “The Gospel in Australia” (October 6, 1894). 16 Bob James, Anarchism and State Violence in Sydney and Melbourne, 1886-1896, chapter four, no pagination. http://www.takver.com/history/aasv/aasv04.htm 17 James, Anarchism and State Violence. Chapter Four. 18 Liberty (Boston), July 2, 1887. 19 Benjamin Tucker, “Anarchy’s Growth in Australia,” Liberty (Boston), September 15, 1888. 20 Andrade, “The Melbourne Anarchists’ Club,” Liberty (Boston), October 30, 1886. He also spots a hopeful sign in New Zealand in the figure of Joseph Evison, editor of The Rationalist. 21 Benjamin Tucker, “Anarchy’s Growth in Australia,” Liberty (Boston), September 15, 1888. 22 Andrade, “Anarchy in Australia,” Liberty (Boston), February 20, 1886. 23 Quoted in Michael Vandelaar, “The ‘Down Under’,” in Haymarket Scrapbook, edited by Dave Roediger and Franklin Rosemont (Chicago: Charles Kerr Publishing Co., 1986), 233. 24 Andrade, “What is Anarchy?” Liberty (Boston), May 28, 1887. Benjamin Tucker penned his views as “Liberty and Violence” in Liberty, May 22, 1886. 25 Quoted in Vandelaar, “The Haymarket Affair ‘Down Under’,” 234. 26 “A Protest from Australia,” Liberty (Boston), April 9, 1887. 27 Quoted in Vandelaar, “The Haymarket Affair ‘Down Under’,” 234. 28 Friends and foes remember his style as cold and argumentative with “a glittering icicle of logic.” Lizzie Holmes discerned “intolerance, severity, and invective” in Tucker’s opinions. All quoted in Paul Avrich, “Benjamin Tucker and His Daughter,” in: Anarchist Portraits (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 146. 29 John Arthur Andrews, “Communism and Communist-Anarchism,” Liberty (Boston), May 18, 1889.

30 Andrew Reeves, “Andrews, John Arthur,” in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 7 (1979): http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/andrews-john-arthur-5028 31 The Australian Dictionary of Biography lists Fleming’s birth year as “1863?” However, FamilySearch reveals that John William Fleming was born in Derby, England on April 4, 1864, and christened at St. Werburgh, Derby on March 31, 1867. His father was John Fleming, his mother was Mary. See "England Births and Christenings, 1538- 1975," index, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/NYWF-RQB : accessed 23 Nov 2014), John William Fleming, 31 Mar 1867; FHL microfilm 1041158, 1041168. 32 See Bruce Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs: A Social History of Chicago's Anarchists, 1870-1900 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), and Tom Goyens, Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880-1914 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007) 33 John W. Fleming, “Progress of Anarchism at the Melbourne Wharf,” Honesty (Melbourne), February 1889. Thanks to Bob James for providing access to this article at http://takver.com/history/aia/aia00003.htm 34 Table Talk (Melbourne), August 29, 1890. 35 Fleming, “Progress of Anarchism at the Melbourne Wharf.” For Rosa, see entry “Rosa, Samuel Albert (Sam)” in the Australian Dictionary of Biography: http://adb.anu.edu.au/. See also S. A. Rosa, The Truth About the Unemployed Agitation of 1890 (Melbourne, 1890). 36 The historian Len Fox has observed that “since May Day arose as an Eight Hour Day, Australia can claim a proud place in the pioneering of May Day, since the Australian workers were pioneers in the Eight Hour movement, particularly in 1855 and 1856.” See Len Fox, “Early Australian May Days,” Bulletin of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, No. 2 (May 1962), 38 note 4. 37 Scates, A New Australia, 32-33. 38 Fox, “Early Australian May Days.” Some 1340 men marched in Barcaldine. 39 Scates, A New Australia, 33. 40 In 1913, at age 49, Fleming could still be seen setting up his booth adorned with his red flag addressing the crowd, but this time, he noted, “I was not mobbed nor interrupted.” See Paul Avrich, “An Australian Anarchist: J.W. Fleming,” in Anarchist Portraits, 265. During World War I, when Australia participated on the side of the British, Fleming continued his orations. He sent a short report to Alexander Berkman’s paper The Blast, based in San Francisco: “Recently I addressed an out-of-door meeting. There were present about ten thousand people. You can see by the enclosed newspaper clippings how brutally the soldiers attacked me, smashed the platform, burned the red flag and injured my back.” See The Blast (San Francisco), March 4, 1916, reprinted in Alexander Berkman, The Blast. Introduction by Barry Pateman (Edinburgh & Oakland: AK Press, 2005), 172. 41 Archer, Why is There No Labor Party, 117. 42 “Amongst the Anarchists,” Table Talk (Melbourne), May 20, 1892. Perhaps a reference to Fleming and Rosa. 43 Quoted in Bob James, “Emma Goldman: The Australian Connection.” (1986), accessed at http://www.takver.com/history/aia/aia00011.htm 44 The U.S. government had unexpectedly revoked the citizenship of her ex-husband, which jeopardized her own status; it appeared as if the authorities were planning to expell her from the country. 45 Quoted in James, “Emma Goldman: The Australian Connection.” 46 Fleming died in his home in Carlton (Melbourne) and was cremated. Andrews died a bachelor in 1903 in Melbourne, and was buried at Boroondara (just east of Melbourne). David Andrade died in 1928 in Wendouree (just north of Ballarat) and was buried in St Kilda cemetery in Melbourne. His brother Will died in a surfing accident in 1939. He visiting Europe several times, and the United States in 1910. Rosa died in 1940 and was also cremated.