RECORDER RecorderOfficial newsletter of the Melbourne Labour History Society (ISSN 0155-8722) Issue No. 298—July 2020 • From Sicily to St Lucia (Review), Ken Mansell, pp. 9-10 IN THIS EDITION: • Oil under Troubled Water (Review), by Michael Leach, pp. 10-11 • Extreme and Dangerous (Review), by Phillip Deery, p. 1 • The Yalta Conference (Review), by Laurence W Maher, pp. 11-12 • The Fatal Lure of Politics (Review), Verity Burgmann, p. 2 • The Boys Who Said NO!, p. 12 • Becoming John Curtin and James Scullin (Review), by Nick Dyrenfurth, pp. 3-4 • NIBS Online, p. 12 • Dorothy Day in Australia, p. 4 • Union Education History Project, by Max Ogden, p. 12 • Tribute to Jack Mundey, by Verity Burgmann, pp. 5-6 • Graham Berry, Democratic Adventurer, p. 12 • Vale Jack Mundey, by Brian Smiddy, p. 7 • Tribune Photographs Online, p. 12 • Batman By-Election, 1962, by Carolyn Allan Smart & Lyle Allan, pp. 7-8 • Melbourne Branch Contacts, p. 12 • Without Bosses (Review), by Brendan McGloin, p. 8 Extreme and Dangerous: The Curious Case of Dr Ian Macdonald Phillip Deery His case parallels that of another medical doctor, Paul Reuben James, who was dismissed by the Department of Although there are numerous memoirs of British and Repatriation in 1950 for opposing the Communist Party American communists written by their children, Dissolution Bill. James was attached to the Reserve Australian communists have attracted far fewer Officers of Command and, to the consternation of ASIO, accounts. We have Ric Throssell’s Wild Weeds and would most certainly have been mobilised for active Wildflowers: The Life and Letters of Katherine Susannah military service were World War III to eventuate, as Pritchard, Roger Milliss’ Serpent’s Tooth, Mark Aarons’ many believed. There is another parallel. The chairman The Family File, and John Docker’s 'Troubled reflections of the Repatriation Commission, Major General G.F. on my father’ in What Did You Do in the Cold War, Daddy?, Wootten, instrumental in James’ dismissal, was a but little else. Extreme and Dangerous is the prominent leader of the anti-communist, latest addition to this genre. It concerns a para-military Old Guard. So too was Major daughter’s attempt to discover why her W.J.R. Scott, who played a key role in father, a medical officer stationed in Darwin Macdonald’s removal. This book, then, at the outbreak of World War II and who unravels some of the connections, normally advanced knowledge of malaria, was hidden, between the military and the removed from his post in 1941. security services. Ian Macdonald has also been hidden from history, and this book Through a meticulous examination of affectionately rescues him from obscurity. Macdonald’s security files, both military intelligence and Investigation Branch (later Kate Hutchinson, a speech pathologist, has bequeathed to ASIO), Kate Hutchinson chosen not to write a conventional learnt that, as a member of the Communist academic biography, but a more filial and Party since 1932, he was designated as both conversational book. It ranges back and 'extreme' and 'dangerous'. Concern about forth between secret armies in the 1930s communists in the Army sowing and the Lowe Royal Commission into disaffection among soldiers was intense; Communism in 1949-50, but at its heart is this was especially during the Nazi-Soviet the question of wartime security and why Pact period when the Party opposed involvement in the her father was then considered 'extreme and dangerous'. war. Surveillance of alleged 'subversives' was not curious That Dr Macdonald was a member of the Communist but commonplace. Macdonald enlisted in 1940 as a Party was not, she rightly judges, sufficient basis to be captain and for a time carried out medical examinations considered a subversive, yet to historians of domestic of defence force recruits. When the Communist Party security services and readers of Recorder, his was banned in 1940, Macdonald’s Darwin home was victimisation should come as little surprise. raided and his case reached the Cabinet level. Although politically engaged, she concludes, her father’s actions Kate Hutchinson, Extreme and Dangerous: The Curious and beliefs did not represent any threat to national Case of Dr Ian Macdonald (Melbourne: Australian security. Scholarly Publishing, 2020). pp. 195. $39.95. 1 Recorder no. 298 RECORDER believed that labour or social-democratic governments The Fatal Lure of Politics could abolish exploitation by getting the numbers in Parliament. Childe was well placed to write the world’s first explanation for the decades of disappointment to follow. Verity Burgmann Childe’s book examined the excruciating process by Why did Europeans move from hunting and gathering to which Labor MPs cease to be representative of those stationary food production? Why do Australian Labor they represent; how they become parliamentarians MPs rat? These questions seem unrelated but are rather than tribunes of the working-class; players of the amongst those interrogated by world-renowned games of liberal democracy instead of participants in the archaeologist and prehistorian Vere Gordon Childe— class struggle. The result: betrayal, to varying degrees. ‘To author of dozens of ground-breaking books, such as The avoid giving offence to middle supporters,’ Childe Dawn of European Civilization (1925) and What observed, ‘Labour Governments have followed a Happened in History (1942), and hundreds of important vacillating policy and have tried to govern in the interests papers. Terry Irving’s extraordinary, investigative of all classes instead of standing up boldly in defence of scholarship has provided an enlightening the one class which put them in power.’ and enthralling account of the life and thought of Australia’s most famous socialist How Labour Governs is not just a study of intellectual. Irving’s treatment is nuanced Labor in government but an astute and sophisticated, producing perceptive assessment of the labour movement historical and philosophical analysis, as well generally. The Industrial Workers of the as a compelling narrative. World earns plaudits from Childe as ‘the first body to offer effectively to the Australian Childe was born in Sydney in 1892 and grew workers an ideal of emancipation alternative up in North Sydney. In 1914 at Sydney to the somewhat threadbare Fabianism of University he obtained First Class Honours the Labour Party.’ Australian unionists, in Latin, Greek and Philosophy, and the according to Childe, seized upon the IWW’s University Medal in Classics. With a point about the futility of the ‘organised travelling scholarship he spent most of the scabbery’ of craft unionism, which divided Great War years in England, returning home the workers up into small sections, each out late in 1917 with outstanding for their own hands and regardless of their undergraduate and research degrees from mates. Irving identifies themes in Childe’s Oxford. Having campaigned with fellow anti- approach to labour history, including: the war socialist activists such as Rajani Palme Dutt, G.D.H. criticism that labour has lost its ideals; contempt for Cole and Raymond Postgate, he earned an MI5 file and political traitors; belief that a new form of trade British universities failed to offer him sanctuary when unionism might save the movement’s idealism; and authorities started hounding him homeward. disdain for workers who lack class-consciousness. Australian universities then discriminated against him Childe explains he departed Australia in 1921 to ‘escape for his Marxism and anti-militarism, despite his dazzling the fatal lure’ of parliamentary politics. A prolific degrees and publication record. Upon his return home researcher, in his mid-30s he became professor of Childe had joined the Labor Party and began writing for prehistoric archaeology at the University of Edinburgh in The WorKer, teaching political philosophy for the 1927, then at the University of London in 1946. In this Workers’ Educational Association, and helping Trades brilliant academic career, as Irving reveals, Childe treated and Labour Council delegates oppose the federal archaeology as a branch of history, transcending the government’s attempt to boost military recruitment. narrow ‘tools and pottery’ specialism of the field, and Unable to enter the academy, Childe increasingly reaching audiences far beyond the academy with his inhabited the turbulent world of labour movement Marxist approach to explaining the past. politics in Sydney and Brisbane, becoming a well-known figure on the Labor Party’s left. Despite Childe’s fame, or perhaps because of it, political surveillance continued after his retirement back home to Shunned by university selection committees, Childe Australia in April 1957, where he reconnected with old found employment from August 1919 to October 1921 as associates such as long-time close friend Bert Evatt and private secretary to NSW Labor Party leader John Storey, visited Russel Ward and Robin Gollan. On 19 October who was Premier for most of that period. During this 1957, he died falling off a cliff in the Blue Mountains. Was time Childe crafted his monumental work of immense it accident or suicide or was he pushed by ASIO? interest to labour historians: How Labour Governs. A Sensitive to the heart and soul as well as the mind of this Study of Workers’ Representation in Australia (1923). This exceptional man, Irving’s important book is biography at was the historical moment when Australia was its very best. considered a ‘social laboratory’ and led the world in parliamentary representation of working-class electors, Terry Irving, The Fatal Lure of Politics. The Life and producing the world’s first majority national Labor Thought of Vere Gordon Childe (Melbourne: Monash government in 1910. At home and abroad, reformers University Publishing, 2020). pp. xxiv+419. $39.95. 2 Recorder no. 298 RECORDER finished secondary schooling. Both the religious, teetotal Becoming John Curtin and James Scullin Scullin and professing atheist, alcoholic Curtin eventually moved to Melbourne (and to Perth in the latter’s case), immersing themselves in the unique political culture of Nick Dyrenfurth the Victorian labour movement.