By: John McLaren
The 1959 Australian and New Zealand International Congress for Peace and Disarmament, held in Melbourne, was the first major public event for the left in Australia after the splits in the ALP and the CPA that had occurred between 1955 and 1958. It was notable not so much for its success in attracting large numbers of delegates and for the declarations that came from it as for the brawling that took place during it, particularly over the issue of freedom of speech and the gaoling or execution of dissidents in the Soviet Union and Hungary. The Congress for Cultural Freedom and its allies had prior to the Congress organised groups to support the dissidents, but the members of these groups were seen by the Congress organisers as right-wing disrupters trying to destroy the unity of the Congress and to divert it from its primary objective. Although the organisers secured the numbers on the floor of the Congress and at its constituent special interest meetings, the conflict revealed new divisions on the left, between former Communists and younger members of a new left on the one hand, and the continuing leadership of the CPA and of the Victorian ALP on the other. This paper challenges the view that the Congress achieved a unity on the left in support of its aims. It shows how new alliances cut across old divisions between a left aligned with the Communist party and a right aligned with Catholic Action. The new divisions helped to paralyse Labor as a political force for another decade.
| The 1959 Australian and New Zealand International Congress for Peace and Disarmament, held in Melbourne in 1959, was notable for the wars it provoked. It opened amidst public controversy and internal division. Its organisers intended it to be one of the biggest of its kind. The invasions of Hungary and the Suez in 1956 stood as warnings of the consequences of armed aggression. Khrushchev had revived the doctrine of peaceful co-existence. In Australia, however, the Cold War forces were ready to engage. The enemies of the Congress saw it as an instrument of Soviet foreign policy designed to move Australia towards a neutral foreign policy. Its supporters saw it as an attempt to further in Australia a popular movement for peace and freedom that would strengthen the international peace movement in its efforts to avert the imminent danger of the Cold War generating a major war that could lead to nuclear destruction. The government and the press saw it as another Communist move to weaken the resolve of the western democracies. Many participants on the left agreed with them, but intended to turn the occasion against the organisers and demand freedom in the Soviet bloc as a condition of peace in the world. | 1 |
| Previous studies of this Congress have placed it firmly in this Cold War context. They contend that the peaceful aims of the Congress were blunted by Cold War rhetoric directed at it from outside, and that it successfully succeeded in containing conflicts among the participants so as to broaden the base of the movement beyond the Communists and their allies. This paper contends that these interpretations miss the significance of the new alliances and divisions revealed within the Congress, and so fail to see that consensus of this Congress, as at earlier ones, was achieved only by excluding any criticism of the Soviet Union. Rather than broadening the peace movement, the participation of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) served only to ensure that the Congress, like its predecessors, remained under monolithic control. | 2 |
| In The Australian Peace Movement: A Short History , Malcolm Saunders and Ralph Summy argue that the Australian peace movement has always enjoyed a broad base of support, and has never been under the control of any one party. 1 They agree that the Australian Peace Council (APC) arose from the establishment in 1949 by the Cominform of ‘Partisans for Peace’ renamed the World Peace Council in November, 1950. They argue that nevertheless it was independent of the Communist Party. Although the first three secretaries—Ian Turner, Alec Robertson and Stephen Murray-Smith—were all members of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), they argue that known members of the Party were always in a minority. They do not point out that these secretaries were effectively appointed by the Party.2 | 3 |
| Saunders and Summy admit that there were suspicions that the Peace Movement was Communist-controlled, but claim that after 1956 these were allayed when pacifists condemned the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the subsequent execution of Imre Nagy: | 4 |
| such objectivity was especially appealing to the young people now entering the movement, as their formative experiences lay outside the origins of the Cold War and the doctrinal rigidity that marked some aspects of the Left’s history. 3 | |
| The same authors extend this interpretation of the peace movement in a later article, The 1959 Melbourne Peace Congress: Culmination of Anti-Communism in Australia in the 1950s . The organisation of such major congresses had become the major activity of the APC, which convened five between 1950 and 1964. Summy and Saunders claim that these congresses came to be seen as ‘the main forum for disagreement to [sic] the anti-communist consensus ‘. On the contrary, the continuing control exercised over them by the Party, and demonstrated in the 1959 Congress, ensured that they did not effectively challenge this consensus. 4 | |
| As its title suggests, Summy and Saunders’ article argues that the Congress was at the time unfairly interpreted in terms of Cold War politics, and its effectiveness blunted by external attacks on it that concentrated on its supposed links to international Communism rather than on the issues debated at its sessions. Yet, if we analyse what happened in the Congress, particularly in the Artists’ and Writers’ and the Citizens Commission, which Summy and Saunders identify as the most controversial, we can see that, rather than the Congress building a broad consensus of the left around the issues of peace, its refusal to accept any criticism of the Soviet Union led only to the emergence of new lines of division on the left. This article argues that, rather than seeing the Congress simply in the context of the Cold War, it should be seen in the light of the splits in the Australian left that had occurred between 1955 and 1958. Moreover, participants like Barry Jones, James Jupp, Bill Thomas and Philip Knight, who led much of the dissent, belonged to the precise group of younger people whose fears of Communist control were supposed to have been allayed by the criticism of Soviet actions in Hungary that the Congress now refused to endorse in any form. Rather than finding a consensus that would take the peace movement beyond Cold War polarities, the Congress gave them a new lease of life by polarising the ALP itself between soft and hard lines towards the CPA. | 5 |
| Barbara Carter argues that that the peace movement was always broader than the Communist Party, and claims that its critics have ignored the role of churches. 5 However, the church leaders failed to contest effectively the leadership of the Communist Party in the movement and its congresses because so many held as firmly as the Party to the view that the Soviet Union was in favour of peace and the United States the main threat to it. 6 Summy and Saunders show the wide basis of support, from churches, academics, trade unions and youth organisations, on which the 1959 Congress drew, but they fail to give proper weight to the evidence from dissenting participants like Barry Jones, Vincent Buckley, James Jupp, Bill Thomas and Bernard Barrett, that the convenors of individual sessions and the organising committee refused to allow this range of voices to be effective. 7 This refusal played into the hands of the external forces—the Liberal-Country Party government, the Democratic Labor Party (DLP), and the media—that had opposed the Congress from the outset, giving substance to their contention, that the Congress was no more than a Communist front, and its non-Communist supporters merely dupes. The Summy and Saunders account fails to show how the Congress was itself split by the refusal of the organisers to allow any criticism of the Soviet Union or its allies, and so strengthened the public impression that it was nothing more than an extension of Soviet foreign policy. In fact, they justify this refusal by arguing that independent participants like Macmahon Ball did not realise the seriousness of US threats to peace, and that the silence of the final declaration on the suppression of freedom in Communist states was merely a consequence of the need for unanimity. The authors explain that this requirement had been adopted by the organising committee at the behest of one of the clergymen on the committee, and claim that there was only one known member of the CPA among the organisers. 8 The accounts of the independent participants show how the principle of unanimity was in fact imposed on the several conferences by their individual chairs and organising committees. 9 The truth was that the Congress was not, at best neutral towards the Soviet Union and hostile towards the United States, and was therefore a contributor to the Cold War, not its last casualty. | 6 |
| Apart from the churchmen and independents, the main groups represented at the conference were the Victorian ALP, supplemented by the NSW ALP left, the Victorian Fabian Society, the Peace with Freedom Group, and the Communists. The Peace with Freedom Group included some of the ex-Communists and some supporters of the DLP, and overlapped with the Fabians, some of whom in turn allied themselves with the Victorian ALP. The presence of these four broad groupings enabled organisers and their later apologists to claim that the Congress was broader and more objective than any of its predecessors. The fact was that the alliance of the ALP with the Communists, which would have been impossible before the Labor split, allowed the Communists to maintain a control that would otherwise have been jeopardised by the split in their own ranks and the defection of many of their former members to the internal opposition within the Congress. Similarly, the presence within this opposition of the ex-Communists, Fabians and ALP members who were constituting a new left prevented the opposition from being discredited as simply a DLP front. 10 Not the least irony of the 1959 Congress was that the emergence of this group in opposition to the rigidities of the ALP and the CPA saw it thrown into alliance with those on the right it distrusted equally—particularly the supporters of the DLP and the Congress of Culttural Freedom. | 7 |
| Peace with Freedom had been organised by Frank Knopfelmacher and supported by Richard Krygier, secretary of the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom (AACF). Richard Krygier had long been worried about the peace movement and the possibility that it might move Australia’s foreign policy away from its Cold War commitments to the ‘free world’ and the American alliance and towards neutralism . In 1956 he had wanted to combat the ‘terrible weakness among some sections of the Protestant clergy’ by bringing out Bishop Dibelius, President of the World Council of Churches, to give an address on ‘The Impossibility of Compromise between Christians and Totalitarians ‘, but was vetoed by the Association president, Sir John Latham. Latham, a veteran rationalist, refused to allow the association to have anything to do with any churches. 11 Krygier had more success in 1958 when, through the Association, he was able to sponsor a tour by Tibor Meray, a writer and former communist from Hungary. Meray had been imprisoned after the uprising, and was now in exile and an outspoken critic of the new regime in his homeland. In Melbourne, Knopfelmacher arranged for him to meet a number of former communists, including Ken Gott, who had known him in Budapest. 12 Meray found their company congenial, and their discussions sometimes went on all night. The public meeting was less successful, due, according to Knopfelmacher, to the failure of the chairman to exercise firm control. 13 | 8 |
| Krygier and Knopfelmacher held firmly to the Cold War view that the peace movement was nothing more than an instrument of Soviet foreign policy. Krygier obtained funds from the international Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) in Switzerland, and ultimately from the CIA, to disrupt the conference. Through Knopfelmacher, he set up Peace with Freedom for this purpose, but the members of this group did not necessarily share the Cold War dogma of its organisers. 14 Many of them, like Vincent Buckley and a number of others at the University of Melbourne, were ALP members or supporters who had become disgusted with the authoritarian and Leninist control of the Victorian ALP executive. These younger activists worked with such veterans and ex-Communists as Ken Gott and Dave Bearlin, who had an insider’s knowledge of how the Party manipulated these occasions. 15 Summy and Saunders pass over these activities merely incidental to the propaganda campaign that preceded the Congress, 16 but they were fundamental to the events that occurred within the specialist conferences that constituted the Congress. 17 These events arose from the Cold War in its latest hot phase the invasion of Hungary but it was the organisers and their right-wing critics who during the Congress itself colluded to prevent the attempt by the new left to respond in a way that would move beyond the polarities of the Cold War. | 9 |
| Before the Congress, Ken Gott had already been active in canvassing individuals, forecasting the tactics of the Communist leadership, and organising support for the dissidents. 18 This put him at first into direct conflict with many of his former comrades in the Party and the peace movement, including Murray-Smith. Their dispute shows the conflict between the hope of peace and the belief in freedom. For Murray-Smith, a secure peace would be achieved only if the peoples of the world united in demanding that their governments abandon war and the policies that led to war. The dissidents were a threat to a Congress that could, in his opinion, further this unity. Gott, he wrote, was ‘off his rocker,’ trying to get Sir Marcus Oliphant to withdraw his sponsorship of the Congress. Oliphant eventually did so, not because he disagreed with its aims, but because he was persuaded that his support for it would jeopardise his research at the ANU. Nevertheless, the conference organisers attracted a distinguished panel of overseas dignitaries, headed by the English novelist J.B. Priestley and his wife, the anthropologist Jacquetta Hawkes. Many of the dissidents welcomed a wide sponsorship as a way of challenging the narrow control of the organisers, but their efforts were to be stymied. 19 | 10 |
| The controversy beforehand ensured that that the Congress was open to vigorous debate. In a report he later wrote for his sponsors in the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Tibor Meray noted that few peace conferences had begun in as belligerent an atmosphere, although the government attacks on it had served only to strengthen its support. 20 The organisers then lost this support through their blunders in attempting to exclude dissent. Members of the Labor Party lined up against those who believed that freedom in the Soviet bloc was a major issue. Against these, Vincent Buckley worked not only with former Communists like Gott, but also with people like Barry Jones, who in 1950 had joined Buckley in challenging the Communist leadership of the Labour Club and had helped to form an independent ALP Club. Once the Congress began, Murray-Smith lined up with younger ALP members against many former colleagues who at the university had been to his right: ‘Jupp and myself ‘, he wrote, ‘and quite a few of the shop [university] people found ourselves fighting the platform — which included Bennett, McNolty and Cairns.’ 21 | 11 |
| The Writers and Artists’ section of the Congress was always going to be a major site of dissent, both because it was the section most concerned with freedom of speech and because the AACF had again sponsored Tibor Meray to come to Australia to attend the Congress. Vincent Buckley had fanned the flame of freedom beforehand by setting up an Appeal Committee of Australian Writers and writing to Janos Kadar, the head of the new Hungarian government, urging him to release writers who remained imprisoned. 22 Meray and his supporters attempted to strengthen the otherwise anodyne declaration of the Conference by moving a motion to condemn the suppression of free speech wherever it occurred. When they were defeated he went public with a declaration that ‘the liberation of writers who had been imprisoned, segregated and persecuted in some countries should be one of the first concerns of Congress ‘. He noted that he himself had been sentenced, at the age of 65 years, to nine years gaol ‘for reasons of state security,’ and that another seven Hungarian writers had been executed and 25 imprisoned. 23 The Conference eventually agreed to a motion claiming freedom ‘for every true artist to express and communicate his vision of life and its delights and complexities ‘, but refused to note that ‘many writers in a number of countries do not yet have this freedom ‘. 24 Frank Hardy rejected these words because they could have been taken as ‘a reference to Hungary ‘. The dissenters, who had now been joined by Murray-Smith and the novelist David Martin, another who had left the Party after 1956, succeeded in having the amendment put into a minority report, only to have the organising committee refuse to include this in their report to the full Congress. 25 J.B. Priestley, who commented that ‘too much fanaticism existed in Australia’, expressed his regret that the Writers’ and Artists’ Conference had | 12 |
| found itself unable to respond to the appeal of Mr. Tibor Meray, personally delivered to the commission, in which he asked for a protest to be made on behalf of the distinguished Hungarian writer, Tibor Dery, now in prison. 26 | |
| The divisions and intransigence that had marked the meetings of the Writers’ and Artists’ Commission emerged also at the Youth Conference. A report written for the Melbourne University ALP Club by its delegates, Bill Thomas who had been active in campaigning among students to renew socialist ideas, and Bernard Barrett notes that, although meetings preceding the conference had attracted wide representation, including the Young Farmers, the Young Liberals and the Eureka Youth League (EYL), the Young Liberals had joined with the Communist EYL to prevent thorough discussion of political policies and majority voting, and had sought unanimity. According to Thomas, the EYL manipulated delegates to give them eight of 23 official delegates, and 35 of a total of 78 delegates. They achieved this result through the organising committee restricting church organisations to two from each, while allowing delegates from several state EYL organisations and from the national executive. Then, after the official closing date for registration, they recognised further contingent of individual delegates, mainly from North Queensland and mostly, according to Thomas and Barrett, Communists. Faced with this situation, the Presbyterian delegates withdrew. This left a majority that the Party supporters used to suppress minority reports and concrete resolutions calling for action on Hungary and Algeria, but not on China. 27 The conference finally rejected a motion calling for a press free from one-party or government control. This led to numbers of delegates walking out and joining with some 80 other delegates to hold breakaway conference. They also distributed a dissident Congress News , which carried reports of the gaoling of trade union leaders in Spain, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, and the restrictions imposed on workers in the Soviet Union, the suppression of the church in China and East Germany, the indoctrination of the young in East Germany, and statements made by military cadets during the Hungarian uprising. 28 | 13 |
| The intransigence of the organisers and their ALP supporters, including state ALP secretary Jack Tripovich and member of the federal parliament Jim Cairns, drew widespread condemnation, even from some who still sought to present a united front. Murray-Smith was among these. Although he had earlier rejected Gott’s methods, he now supported the minority report and shared the outrage at its suppression. In this he disagreed with Turner. His explanation shows clearly the painful realignments brought about by the abandoning of his earlier positions, and the opposition generated not just among former comrades, but from the newly ascendant hard left of the ALP. | 14 |
| By the time we got [the] letter, saying that he and you thought it perhaps better to withdraw the minority report, it was too late to do anything about it: it had already been incorporated in the document from the commission which was issued. … Of course we re more flexible than [the organisers] because we re more in touch with reality. So of course we will ‘give’ here and there. But the case in point was far from being one for give . They ran a whacking majority block into the commission, ignored their own chairmen and plenary delegates (ignoring not only the minority nominees but even the one ‘broad’ there, Nancy Cato), and conducted the whole meeting in disgracefully sectarian manner. It was they, not Meray or the rest of us, who kept spluttering and spitting about the evil crimes of the Hungarian writers. They wiped our arguments for the release of the writers on the basis of reducing international tension, and they deliberately strove to confuse the issue by knocking back an addendum which is was [sic] politically important to pass, because without it the commission seemed the phony it was, by claiming it referred to Hungary when it left the question of the cap fitting for each to decide. 29 | |
| Murray-Smith went on to tell Turner that he had welcomed the stand taken by Priestley, who, he said, had exploded with rage when he rang him about what the Commission had done. Priestley had originally taken a neutral stand towards the rival rallies conducted against the Congress, but he now withdrew from any activities directly connected with it, including a reception given by the Sydney Fellowship of Australian Writers (FAW), which he was told was dominated by Communists, and the final Congress rally. Murray-Smith believed that some honour had been saved by those who had taken a principled stand, and Meray was delighted that for the first time the issue of Soviet repression had been raised at a Peace Congress, but their attempts to have this recognised in the final statement had failed. | 15 |
| Meray, however, felt deeply the burden of his failure to win his over section of the conference to a general endorsement of the freedom of speech he had always sought. He explained the causes of his disillusion in a letter to J.B. Priestley: | 16 |
| I am one of those Communist writers who participated in the intellectual movement against Stalinism and was lucky or cowardly enough to leave the country after the revolution. A close friend of Tibor Dery, who stayed back and spent his days in prison near to Budapest, I tried to do whatever I could to ask the writers’ and artists’ section of the present Peace Congress to support the cause of this 60-years-old and seriously ill writer, the nine years imprisonment of whom equals a death sentence and of the more than twenty other writers, journalists, professors now in gaol in Hungary. I have failed. The two speeches I made to the section meeting seemingly could not move the heart or convince the brain of the majority of the participants. I could say that if there is any need to prove that this Congress is controlled by one political party, here is the proof, but I am not asking you to walk out. I am asking you to walk in. 30 | |
| Murray-Smith said that he had wanted Priestley to take a public stand, but Priestley chose silence and withdrawal. His conversation to Murray-Smith casts doubt on the claim, repeated by Saunders and Summy, that he was upset by press reports that his actions were taken in protest against the conference itself. 31 It seems rather that he did not want to be seen to oppose the aims of the Congress and its Declaration of Hope, but that he could not countenance its methods. | |
| While the right viewed the Congress in simple terms of Cold War oppositions, 32 Murray-Smith believed that it had achieved some measure of success in going beyond these. | 17 |
| The Congress was varyingly successful. Of course the saccharine-titled ‘Charter of Hope’ was a ‘good’ document. Those commissions not tightly controlled from above, like the churchmen’s and to some extent the scientists , were useful, even very useful indeed. The trade unionists’ [commission] was marked, George Petersen claims, by a frightful mealy-mouthed ‘moderatism’ between the communists and the right-wingers, but that is a complex question. The educationists had a solid Party bloc and some non-Party support that was consolidated by Knopfelmacher’s success at identifying himself with the principled minority: nevertheless some good resolutions, e.g. on copyright, went through. The youth commission was a bit of a shambles. The opposition (revisionists, Catholics, SCM, one report has it) walked out when the commission refused to allow minority opinion to be recorded. Nita [Murray-Smith] went to the citizens’ commission, predisposed to be well-disposed, but said later she was sickened by the unending run of Party speakers with sentimental phrases and nothing more. The writers’ commission was the most effectively ‘packed’ and inanely ‘steered’ of any … [T]hroughout the whole congress Party manipulation was evident in a host of ways –cables suppressed, speakers not given the floor, etc etc etc. 33 | |
| Of all those who had left the Communist Party and who now sought new avenues to pursue their principles, Murray-Smith was the most determined to maintain common front with his old comrades, but equally he was determined that this must be inclusive of all points of view. He was adamant that the left must not let itself be imprisoned by dogma or defensiveness. | |
| Intransigence I grant we need not have; but in the long run, we can only win respect by saying, e.g., ‘The Hungarian writers must be released ‘, and by going on saying this if necessary for ten years. | |
| If, however, an inclusive left were to be built, he saw that the Labor Party would have to shed its delusion that critics of either the Communist Party or the left of the ALP were to be condemned as right-wingers. He encouraged Turner to write to the Victorian ALP Secretary, Jack Tripovich, in order to combat the view, promulgated by the CPA, that all the ex-members were nothing more than wreckers.. | |
| Turner was more sanguine about the success of the Congress, which he believed had at least arrived at a coherent set of values that differed from those put forward by the platform. He believed that the importance of the conference was that, for the first time, it had debated alternative views, even if in the end it had acquiesced in the Party’s evasions of unpleasant truths. The primary responsibility for this, he believed, lay with the ALP, which meekly accepted the official line rather than acknowledge division. ‘Cairns and Tripovich are quite wrong … had they exercised their own initiative at the Congress, the course of the Congress would have been different and better.’ Their ineffectiveness demonstrated the failure of the ALP to develop any foreign policy of its own, but for this he accepted a measure of responsibility himself: ‘we didn’t really develop our work with people in the ALP who feel much as we do on these matters ‘. 34 As events were to demonstrate, working with the ALP on any policy was not simple. Ideas, whether they came from the Fabians, the Socialist Forum or other elements of the new left, were a threat to the power structures that had been established after the split. 35 | 18 |
| Despite the divisions it had provoked, the Communist Party leadership was happy with the outcome of the Congress, which it insisted had attracted wide support. A Party report referred to ‘The wide support for the A.N.Z. Congress for International Co-operation and Disarmament ‘, and claimed that it had ‘swept aside the attack made upon it by the Menzies government and its backers ‘. The dissent merely revealed the perfidy of the enemies of peace and socialism. 36 | 19 |
| An article, headed ‘Lessons in the many-sided attack on Peace Congress ‘, disposed of the internal opposition by associating it with the attacks made beforehand by Cold Warriors from outside: | 20 |
| There was also an attack on the Congress from within, that bears all the hallmarks of being inspired from the same directing stream. … This attack was unquestionably long planned in advance. First there was the mysterious appearance and distribution of a series of leaflets at the opening rally variously entitled “Congress News” and “Peace Gazette”… Although each side denies the other, this leaflet was handed out by certain members of the revisionist group around “Outlook” and by some people from certain reactionary, clerical, fascist, catholic circles. … Meray the Hungarian emigre was flown out from Paris, and vigorous efforts to promote him and his disruptive cause in the Writers’ Conference were made by an alliance of S. Murray-Smith of the ‘Outlook’ group, and Buckley, the Right Wing Catholic writer. Meray and Co. were in discussion with a Mr. Krygier of the Congress for Cultural Freedom 37 | |
| Far from trying to build a wider coalition, the Party welcomed the suppression of dissidence within the Congress as another victory in its war against the enemies it had expelled from its ranks: | |
| the good thing that comes out of this miserable plot against peace, is the exposure of the real position of the main figures involved. Notable among them were the principal leaders of the so-called ‘Outlook’ group – S. Murray-Smith and K.D. Gott. | |
| The divisions that emerged at the Peace Congress continued to plague the Labor Party and the left until after federal intervention in 1970 opened up the Victorian branch to a variety of views, and even beyond, when the war in Vietnam had, after the introduction of conscription in 1965, displaced the threat of nuclear arms as an immediate political issue. 38 Activists on the left, trained to discern conspiracy, feared that the revisionists would weaken the party’s opposition to this war. As late as 1972, Ken Buckley, one of the group formed from former Communists and leftists around the Sydney journal Outlook , wrote to Turner about his suspicions of the activities of the new left that had emerged at the 1959 Congress, detailing the activities of the Fabian Society, Bill Thomas and the editors of Dissent , and of their supposed associations with allies of the DLP. 39 | |
| The dissension at the Peace Congress, far from opening the way to a new broad front—as Murray-Smith dreamed of and Summy and Saunders believed it had—merely generated further in-fighting. The right renewed their confidence, and the left saw their influence everywhere. | 21 |
| The 1959 Congress for Peace and Disarmament was not merely an episode in the Cold War, where well-rehearsed arguments were repeated by the usual partisans, but a theatre in which veteran and new players celebrated new convictions and alliances. Amid these theatricals, the peace movement and the left in general lost an opportunity to build a new consensus. In their anxiety to preserve unity, and their consequent refusal to face awkward truths about the nature of the Soviet bloc’s purported commitment to peace and freedom, the Congress majority failed to build a new alliance on the left. The results of this included sidelining from mainstream politics such experienced operators as Murray-Smith and Turner, as well as younger Fabian allies like Jupp and Mathews. The ‘peace parsons’ continued to be marginalised in their wider denominations. Vincent Buckley, formerly a dissident Catholic and social democrat, was driven into lasting alliances with Knopfelmacher and the anti-Communist right. The Victorian ALP, entrenched in its hatred of Catholicism, took this as further evidence of the unreliability of all Catholics, leaving itself bereft of allies outside the hardline rump in the continuing Communist Party. This informal alliance lasted until federal intervention in the branch in 1970, and was a major factor in keeping Labor out of office at both state and federal levels. | 22 |
| Endnotes 1. Saunders and Summy show that the peace movement in Australia has generally been wider than any particular organisation. To avoid confusion, this article will use the term peace movement to refer to all the formal organisations, including the Congresses, and APC to refer to the Australian Peace Council itself. The term ‘The Movement’ will be used only to refer to the organisation headed by B.A. Santamaria and operating under a variety of names, including the National Civic Council and the Movement. The formal title of the Australian and New Zealand International Congress for International Peace and Disarmament is generally shortened to the 1959 Australian Peace Congress. 2. Malcolm Saunders and Ralph Summy, The Australian Peace Movement: A Short History , Peace Research Centre, ANU, Canberra, 1986, particularly pp. 32, 33; Ian Turner, ‘My Long March ‘, in Stephen Murray-Smith and Leonie Sandercock (eds.), Room to Manoeuvre , Drummond, Richmond, 1982 p. 131; Stephen Murray-Smith, Indirections: a literary biography , Foundation for Australian Studies, Townsville, 1981, p. 28. Ian Turner had joined the CPA during the war, Stephen Murray-Smith in 1945; as students they were leading members of the Melbourne University Labour Club. Turner was national secretary of the Australian Peace Council from 1949 until the Party replaced him with Alec Robertson. He then worked in a Party-sponsored job as Secretary of the Australasian Book Society from 1954 to 1958, when he was expelled from the Party. Murray-Smith worked in Prague for the Czech newsagency Telepress from 1949 to 1951, and was national secretary of the Australian Peace Council until his resignation from the CPA in 1958. Murray-Smith, with the assistance of Turner and others, had founded the literary magazine Overland in 1954. 3. Saunders and Summy, p. 33. 4. Ralph Summy and Malcolm Saunders, ‘The 1959 Melbourne Peace Congress: culmination of anti-Communism in Australia in the 1950s ‘, in Ann Curthoys and John Merritt (eds), Australia’s First Cold War, Better Red Than Dead, vol 2 , Allen and Unwin, North Sydney, 1986, pp. 74-95. Amongst other merits, this article usefully summarises the Cold War propaganda launched against the Congress to discredit it as a mere tool of the Cominform, by way of the Stockholm Peace Congress of 1958. 5. Barbara Carter, The Peace Movement in the 1950s , in Curthoys and Merritt, Better Red than Dead , pp. 58-73. 6. The trust placed in Russia by the peace clergy is shown in Marion Hartley, The Truth Shall Prevail , a biography of the Rev. John Hartley, Spectrum, Melbourne, 1982, pp. 147-53, 165-66, 260-265. 7. Statements by Vincent Buckley, James Jupp, Philip Knight and Barry Jones reported in The Observer, Sydney, 26 December, 1959, pp. 26-29; see also Murray-Smith papers, State Library of Victoria (SLV) ms 8727, Box 196, file 8-1, Stephen-Murray-Smith to Ian Turner, 15 November 1959; typescript reports to Melbourne University ALP Club by its delegates and by James Jupp, recipient not identified, in Gott papers, SLV ms 13047, File 3. 8. Summy and Saunders, p. 91. The authors identify the Rev Frank Hartley as the member of the committee who insisted that the final ‘Charter of Hope’ be adopted unanimously.. It was this demand that prevented alternative viewpoints being included. 9. See reports in The Observer , above. 10. The term ‘new left’ is usually associated with the later generation of post–Marxists who emerged in America and Europe after 1968, but was earlier used of themselves by Australian left-wing activists who after 1956 were seeking a way beyond the rigidities of both the ALP and the CPA. It was this latter ‘new left’ who were involved in opposition to the organisers of the 1959 Congress.. 11. Report by Krygier, 22 December 1956, Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, National Library of Australia (NLA) ms 2031, Box 9. 12. Ken Gott was a journalist who had joined the CPA in 1940, and had worked with Turner and Murray-Smith in the Melbourne University Labor Club, and had later worked for the Cominform-sponsored International Union of Students in Prague. He was expelled from the CPA in 1956 for his fierce and vocal opposition to the Soviet invasion of Hungary. 13. Tibor Meray, ‘Report ‘, in ‘Forum Service ‘, directed by Melvin J. Lasky for Congress for Cultural Freedom, London, n.d., in Gott papers, SLV ms 13047, Box 3769 File 4. Cf. Meray, From My Australian Diary , Quadrant, vol. 11, Winter 1959, pp. 29-36; note, p. 96; Knopfelmacher to Krygier, 20 September 1958, Latham papers, NLA ms 1009, File 71/447-9. 14. Details of the relationship between the AACF, the ANZ Congress for International Cooperation and Disarmament and Peace with Freedom are contained in the AACF papers, NLA ms 2031, Box-12, various files. See also Krygier to John Hunt, 12 December 1957, reporting that Knopfelmacher, ‘one of our Melbourne members ‘, is recruiting dissident Communist intellectuals, AACF papers, NLA ms 2031, Box 9. Knopfelmacher was on the AACF payroll until 1963; it is not clear when payments began see Congress for Cultural Freedom to Krygier,, 17 October 1963, and reply from Krygier, conveying Knopfelmacher’s complaints, 22 October 1963, AACF papers, NLA ms 2031, Box 9. 15. Frank Knopfelmacher was a Czech emigrant who had become an influential teacher at Melbourne University and public commentator on the Cold War. Vincent Buckley, the poet, a former member of the Lay Apostolate and member of the editorial boards of Prospect and Catholic Worker , was also lecturing at Melbourne. David Bearlin was a former official of the Melbourne branch of the Waterside Workers Federation, now a high school teacher. 16. Summy and Saunders: ‘1959 Melbourne Peace Congress ‘, pp. 74-80. 17. The Congress met in specialist conferences or commissions, which prepared individual statements for incorporation endorsed by a final plenary session of Congress. See Observer articles above; Hartley, The Truth Shall Prevail , pp. 163-64, 167. 18. Vincent Buckley to Janos Kadar, Minister of State, Budapest, nd., Vincent Buckley papers, NLA ms 7289, series 1, Box 2, File 766. 19. S. Murray-Smith to I Turner, 23 October 1959, Stephen Murray-Smith papers, SLV ms 8272, Box-111, File 22. 20. Gott papers, SLV ms 13047, Box 3769, File 4, Tibor Meray, report in Forum Service , directed by Melvin J. Lasky for Congress for Cultural Freedom, London, n.d. 21. David Bennett, Fabian and former member of the MU Labour Club; Albert McNolty, officer of the Victorian ALP Central Executive and the Sheet Metal Workers Union, a leader of the trade unionist who had deposed the Grouper executive; J,F. Cairns, defeated Grouper S.M. Keon to become federal ALP member for Yarra, 1955, later federal Treasurer and Deputy Prime Minister in Whitlam government. 22. Buckley papers, NLA ms 7289, File 2/766, Buckley to Janos Kadar, on behalf of Appeal Committee of Australian Writers, n.d. 23. Gott papers, SLV ms 13047, Box 3769, File 2, Tibor Meray quoted in unsourced press clippings, apparently from Melbourne Herald or Sun . 24. Age , 13.11.59 clipping in Gott papers,, SLV ms 13047, Box 3769, Box 2. 25. Meray, ‘Report ‘, cited above. 26. Gott papers, SLV ms 13047, Box 3769, File 2, clippings from the Age , 13 November 1959 and (presumably) The Herald or The Sun , 13 November 1959. 27. Gott papers, SLV ms 13047, Box 3769, File 4, ‘Report’ of the delegates of the Melbourne University Australian Labor Party Club to the ANZ Congress – roneoed. Signed W.J. Thomas and B. Barrett. 28. Congress News , in Gott papers, SLV ms 13047, Box 3769, File 2, has details of Communist manipulation and its effects in the various conferences. 29. S. Murray-Smith to I. Turner, re minority report at Congress, 15 November 1959, Murray-Smith papers, SLV ms 8272, Box 196, File 8-1. 30. Copy of letter from Tibor Meray to J.B. Priestley: 11 November 1959 (from Oriental Hotel, Melbourne), Gott papers, SLV ms 13047, Box 3768, File 7. 31. Summy and Saunders, ‘1959 Melbourne Peace Congress,’ p.. 70, citing the report by a Rev. Brand of remarks made by Priestley’s wife, Jacquetta Hawkes, in Sydney. 32. See Buckley in Observer , above. 33. Stephen Murray-Smith to Ian Turner, 15 November 1959, Murray-Smith papers, SLV ms 8272, Box-196, File 8-1. 34. SMS papers, SLV ms 8272, Box 196, Turner to Murray-Smith, 19 December 1959. 35. The ALP may have had some reason for its doubts about the Socialist Forum, a body formed by former communists to debate socialist ideas. Like Dissent , it was financed by the AACF see report by Krygier to CCF, 14 November 1958, AACF papers, NLA ms 2031, Box 9. This report also gives details of Tibor Meray’s lecture tour. 36. Gott papers, SLV ms 13047, Box 3769, File 2. 37. Unsourced clipping, Gott papers, SLV ms 13047, Box 3769, File 2. 38. Australian troops were first involved in Vietnam in 1962; conscription was introduced in 1964; the first regular battalion was committed in 1965; the first conscripted troops were sent in 1966. 39. Turner papers, NLA ms 6206, Box 111, File 21, Ken Buckley to Ian Turner, 7 March 1972. | |