Book Review

Beverley Symons (compiler) with the assistance of Stuart Macintyre, Communism in Australia: a Supplementary Resource Bibliography, c. 1994-2001, Sydney Branch, Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, El Faro, 2002. pp. viii + 85. $14.95 paper.

Australian labour history owes much to Australian communism. Many of its foremost writers and researchers have been, in Len Fox's phrase, 'broad and narrow' communists. Without them, labour history would be the poorer, lacking impetus or direction. Remarkably, few of their contributions have been didactic or doctrinaire. Most have been broad and deep in interpretation and scope.	1
Beverley Symons and Barrie Blears are comrades whose work is broad. Both are stalwarts of Labour History's Sydney branch. With Stuart Macintyre's assistance, Bev Symons has compiled a supplementary bibliography of communism in Australia to be used alongside the first massive tome. This supplement spans the years 1994-2001. Its references to new writings, and primary and secondary resources will prove indispensable to researchers and writers interested in that phenomenon which still challenges the fundamental tenets of global corporate capitalism. The listed manuscript collections and oral history archives, for all of their limitations, allow us to delve into the context and meaning of what has become a lost world of Australian communism.	2
Despite the wealth of records preserved, we might only despair at those which have been deliberately destroyed for political or personal reasons and would, if any record, written or spoken, could convey or capture the temper or authenticity of a struggle, a movement, an organisation, an issue, a faction, or an individual. Some of the records which this reviewer has read give a more nuanced understanding of what communism was seen as by both its proponents and adversaries in Australia. Despite their revolutionary rhetoric and often lifelong dedication to the cause by Australian communists and their parties, revolutionary change proved a mirage. Throughout the twentieth century Australian capitalism never appeared to be in its last days. Australian communism, conversely, only grew in popularity when the State assumed greater control over most spheres of life during World War II. It seems that the advocacy of communism itself became a way of life when its possibilities of fruition were increasingly remote. Similarly, perhaps from the Warwick egg incident in 1917 until the end of the Cold War, the secret political police maintained their careers in spying on and disrupting communist organisations. Symons could have cited the thousands of dossiers on individual communists and their organisations held in Australian Archives as testimony of the work of the spooks. Would these 'intelligence records' help us understand the culture and nature of communism as it was lived in Australia? Whatever records this supplementary guide notes it is unlikely that our knowledge of the subject will deepen over time. Instead, communism in Australia will become a specialist study probably within labour history.	3
Barrie Blears' 'personal glimpse of the Eureka Youth League' (EYL), like other recent publications on Australian communism, is a model in the specialist study. Blears' EYL membership (1953–67) spanned the most difficult years of the Cold War. The EYL's most influential period was behind it when Blears joined in 1953. As he notes, the EYL's 'heady years' were the 1940s when its national membership numbered in the thousands (p. 234).	4
During the war against fascism, an isolated Australian communism adopted an Australianist outlook, especially after Pearl Harbor in December 1941. For some young Australian workers the EYL, as a front organisation of the Communist Party, expressed their commitment to democratic liberty. But the EYL was more than that. Unlike other youth organisations, the EYL held the best dances in the darkest of times. Blears adopts a far too scholarly approach to the EYL in his stentorian exploration of its concern for internationalism, art and education, and women in the labour movement. While these issues may have been crucial in the debates and discussions at EYL annual conferences and impressed party officials with the EYL's seriousness, the EYL, for a section of politicised youth, was a vibrant cultural entity which organised netball and athletic teams, sponsored dances, concerts and discussions, and held bush camps in scenic settings. Blears sees the EYL's decline beginning with its 'tendency towards narrowness' (that is, following the Communist Party's ideological dictates in the early 1950s) and through its emphasis on world peace (instead of the concerns of Australian youth). The social death of the EYL occurred when communists in the EYL followed the rigid Party line. The EYL once could inspire and help organise the successful mass campaign for apprentices to gain a day off to study at technical colleges. But the relative 'generalised affluence' of the long post-war boom would leave the EYL in its wake. The EYL gained momentum and purpose in the last years of the Great 1930s Depression and the war years: a time of privation, sacrifice, and growing labour movement strength. In contrast, Menzies' Australia could offer youth jobs, cars and homes in suburbia, not class politics, bush walks, tug-o-war, and songs from Reedy River. Increasingly, the EYL became estranged to its times. These cultural shifts are alluded to but not explored by Blears as he dwells on the organisation bereft of a changing context.	5
When the American war in Vietnam brought middle-class youth protest to the streets, the EYL found that they could not connect to a new generation attracted to the political romance of Che, Trotsky, or Mao. The Communist Party too, in its late-1960s left embrace of youth and its discontents, found the affinity difficult to sustain. Women's liberation, gay liberation, the struggles of the Third World, racism, the radical chic of rock culture, and the environmental crisis were given space in the Party newspaper and in the enthusiasms of youthful inner-city communist communes. These gestures by the Party were belated, failing to convince anyone of its political relevance and only led to deeper inter-generational divisions within the Party. In spite of its earlier ideological splits, the Party, like the defunct EYL, could not hold radicalised youth's attention. Whitlam's coming left the Party with no constituency among the youth. No sober communist was to seek a hearing amongst the youthful tribes at the Aquarius Festival. Australian capitalism, following the American Way, created a youth market and made 'revolutionary change' a matter of commodity fetishism often mistaken for individual identity.	6
University of Western Sydney DREW COTTLE

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