A Wild Awakening: the 1893 Banking Crisis and the Theatrical Narratives of the Castlereagh Street Radicals

By: Mark Hearn

The Active Service Brigade (ASB) agitated on behalf of the Sydney unemployed during 1893–1894, in the wake of the 1893 banking crisis which heralded the onset of the colonial depression of the 1890s. The ASB declared its emergence in the working class districts of East Sydney in street theatrical marches and meetings. The Brigade and the anti-bank journal Hard Cash employed a melodramatic rhetoric of class conflict. Banker and free trade politician William McMillan was a symbolic villain of these theatrical narratives for his role in facilitating bank reconstruction and resistance to labour mobilisation, forcing his political withdrawal from East Sydney, and the labour precinct of Castlereagh Street. ACTIVE SERVICE BRIGADE (‘A’ Division) — Church Parade, St. Andrews Cathedral, SUNDAY MORNING, 11; to hear of ‘Him who has been murdered by the Law’. Countersign, ‘Silence’. By order (7).¹	1
An advertisement placed by the Active Service Brigade (ASB) in the Sydney Daily Telegraph on 18 November 1893 expressed the essential elements of its challenge to prevailing authority, presented in code. The challenge might have been expressed plainly, but to have done so would have reduced it to just another ignored dissenting voice. The oblique instructions and the metaphor of suffering, as much as the advertised demonstration, transformed the Brigade’s protest into theatre. The Brigade’s code traded on mystery, hoping to incite supporters and a curious crowd. Few had heard of the Active Service Brigade, or the agitation by this fringe labour movement group on behalf of the unemployed; its demonstration, so obscurely explained, was unpredictable — how many protesters would participate? What would they do?	2
All that could be known for certain was that members of the Active Service Brigade’s ‘A’ Division would parade to St Andrews Cathedral, the principal home in Sydney of the Church of England; they would enter during the traditional Sunday morning service and symbolically claim the spirit of Jesus for their cause, highlighting his fate before an unjust law. By subverting the highly regulated ‘anti-theatre’ of the religious service, the Brigade might provide the worshippers with an insight into what was happening outside as the colonial economy collapsed into the economic depression and mass unemployment that followed the banking crisis of early 1893. Greg Dening observed the dangers of uncovering the mask of authority: Allowing an audience to see what is happening rather than being told what is happening is disturbing to all sorts of authorities. So there is much anti-theatre. The church has always been anti-theatre … Those convinced by religion, politics or philosophy that realism is not of their own making find that representation is dangerous. Theatre suggests that things can be otherwise.²The Brigade’s advertised theatrical may have been dimly explained, and still much ignored, but it was loaded with meaning, and authority seemed to understand its potential power. On the day of the parade the thirty-odd ‘A’ Division demonstrators were almost outnumbered by the plain clothes police officers watching them.	3
The ethnographic, theatrical interpretations of experience of Dening, Isaac and others clarify both the human nature of apparently preordained authority structures, and that the theatrical representations of protest powerfully suggest ‘that things can be otherwise’.³ The Active Service Brigade and Arthur Desmond’s fiery scandal sheet, Hard Cash, attacked the banks as they struggled to recover from the panicked withdrawal of depositors’ funds in April 1893, a run prompted by bank and building society failures as British credit evaporated, and property values and commodity prices collapsed. Radical display and discourse offered an alternative to the power of private capital and organised religion, exposing ‘the formalities that govern so much of social life’, the roles that constrained individuals and regulated social communication.⁴ The Sydney banker and free trade politician William McMillan unwittingly played a role in stimulating radical performance by personifying the formal and predatory regulation of capital and state. In 1893 McMillan brought this representation into the contested space of southern Castlereagh Street, the radical centre of the city, as the member for East Sydney in the New South Wales Parliament and as a leading advocate of the Bank Issue Act, the instrument by which parliament allowed the banks to restore their security and authority. Southern Castlereagh Street formed a distinctive ‘labour precinct’ in the 1890s — defined by Irving and Taksa as a site for organising and education, not simply a place where workers lived. A precinct in which collective and individual labour identities could be rehearsed and developed, expressing their lives, rights and grievances.⁵	4
Theories of narrative identity draw us further into the interplay of protest, personality and place. It is through narrative — the expression of self and aspiration in speech, dress, display or text — that we explain the social world and constitute our social identities.⁶ A time-based negotiation between the self and the social, ‘… embedded in an ongoing history’, most powerfully asserts itself in times of crisis.⁷ For many of the Castlereagh Street radicals, self-definition was disturbed by the clash of their personal and political aspirations with the rule of authority and the crisis of capital — a crisis that exacerbated the strains of their already marginal social and economic identities.	5
Historical interpretations have often settled on narrow and at times polarised interpretations of radical activism in the 1890s. There has also been a tendency to either overlook the radicals’ contribution or to idealise them without exploring the complexities of motive, action and belief. Burgmann’s In Our Time presented Arthur Desmond as a dashing radical while ignoring his ferocious racism (harsh even by contemporary standards), misogyny and fascination with violence — obsessions tediously consistent throughout Hard Cash and Desmond’s other writings.⁸ Burgmann’s aim in writing In Our Time was to offset the interpretive distortions of ‘conservative labour historians’ like Bede Nairn’s Civilising Capitalism. Nairn celebrated the gradual reformism of the late nineteenth century labour movement, overlooking the radicals who were often essential to stimulating and challenging that project. In Our Time restored the radicals to the historical picture, and marginalised the labourist tradition, replacing the conservatives’ ‘retrospective factionalism’ with its own limited critique.⁹ Bob James’ self-published Anarchism and State Violence in Sydney and Melbourne 1886–1896 examined the ASB and the Sydney radicals of the period from a sympathetic anarchist perspective, although alert to Desmond’s contradictions.¹⁰ Bruce Scates’ A New Australia opened up a number of ways of reflecting upon the radicals and labourites of the 1890s — the autodidactic culture of reading, gender issues, the development of a radical alternative. The theatrical narratives of the ASB and Hard Cash suggest further ways of reading ‘the “political vision” of the nineties’.¹¹ Scates suggested that the racism of late nineteenth century radicals flowed from the fact that they were ‘trapped within the discourse of European imperialism’. The radicals’ racism was not a slavish reproduction of a vaguely defined and transferred discourse, but a product of their own creative engagement — a kind of melodramatic hate-play — subverted, like so much else, from prevailing cultural narratives and adapted to their needs.¹² Focusing on the narratives that the Castlereagh Street radicals cultivated reveals the tension evident in late nineteenth radicalism, to at once seek to transform and assimilate prevailing narratives of power, class and race. Power, as Foucault observed, ‘makes people act and speak’, although not simply in gestures of defiance or claims for recognition. Radical action also reflects the complexities and contradictions of subjective experience, and ‘the action, in disorder, noise, and pain, of power on lives, and the discourse that comes of it’.¹³	6

ASB Organisation and Ideology
The Active Service Brigade organised from late 1893 until mid-1894, ‘a perfectly natural product of the depression’, as a journalist shrewdly observed of the Brigade’s brief and dramatic flourish.¹⁴ The ASB was stirred into life by widespread job losses and harsh government reaction to striking workers and trade unions during industrial disputes in the maritime and pastoral industries. By 1893, as the colonial economy slid into depression, at least 10 per cent of the male workforce was unemployed, although the real figure was probably much higher. By the end of 1892 the recently established NSW Government Labour Bureau had registered 13,447 unemployed men; it could find work, of either a permanent or temporary nature, for only 5,867 of them. The Bureau’s reports continued to report ‘widespread’ unemployment between 1893–95.¹⁵	7
In response to industrial division and gathering economic decline the NSW trade union movement organised the Labor Electoral League (LEL) in 1891. The LEL preached the benefits of the ballot box and parliamentary action. The Active Service Brigade took to the streets, distributing handbills, pasting up cheap posters around the city, mobilising to fight the forces of political reaction and to assist Labor candidates in elections — ‘to surround thoroughgoing democratic champions and defend them from illegal intimidation and violence’. Disrupting the election meetings of Labor’s opponents and preventing ‘the manufacture of spurious public opinion’ was said to be another task of the ASB’s ‘A’ Division.¹⁶	8
John Dwyer enrolled as a member of the Brigade around September 1893.¹⁷ Dwyer worked his passage to Australia as a ships’ cook in 1888, a 32 year old former London docks foreman and Social Democratic Federation (SDF) activist trying to make a better life for his family and struggling to find expression for his iconoclastic blend of socialism, temperance and spiritualism. An experiment as a market gardener and labour activist in Mittagong, a rural settlement south of Sydney, had already failed. As the ASB’s ‘Business Manager’ Dwyer took on the grind of running the Brigade’s barracks, a doss-house for unemployed men in Castlereagh Street, immediately behind the radical bookshop maintained by William and Bertha McNamara.¹⁸	9
A young Jack Lang — the future NSW Labor Premier — began frequenting McNamara’s in 1893 and claimed to have helped Arthur Desmond ‘turn the mangle’ to print Hard Cash. An itinerant agitator from New Zealand, Desmond’s strident interjections at political rallies inspired the Brigade’s provocative stirring.¹⁹ Many years later Lang recalled the wild radicals of Castlereagh Street: Harry Holland, a recent convert to socialism from the Salvation Army, and John Arthur Andrews, publisher of the Anarchist and other hand-made tracts (he couldn’t afford a metal type printing press); there was also Henry Douglas, a seafaring man, a former captain of a ‘Port Line’ ship who became the Brigade’s treasurer.²⁰	10
Brigade secretary Tommy Dodd was described as 24 or 25, thin and delicate but with pleasant features, a small moustache and ‘a very little’ closed cropped side-whiskers. He was poorly dressed. ‘But the Brigade do not go much for tailor-made men’²¹ – a description confirmed by a photograph published in the Bulletin in March 1894, of Dodd, ‘the NSW political agitator’, a slight young man standing in a bowler hat and dark suit with a swag over one shoulder, self-consciously clutching two makeshift bags, one a simple bundle tied with string. The photo was presumably supplied by Dodd himself, an advertisement for THOMAS DODD, WHOLESALE TOBACCONIST, as the white hand-written lettering at the bottom of the photo indicated.²² Not a tailor-made man, but an identity in the making, striving for something more from life than the enervating struggles and humiliations of the travelling salesman. Cocksure and obstinate in argument, with a leaning to socialism, ‘Tommy is the mastermind and has a natural bent for organising’. He could hold his own amongst ‘the big lumps of fellows who are in the Brigade’. Dodd struck one correspondent as a little conceited, but ‘not without brains’; he ‘… may be heard of later on. He will find in a few years that the world cannot be upended in a few months’.²³	11
Castlereagh Street ran south from an intersection in Hunter Street. Near its northern end, in the legal and business heart of the city, were lined the imposing offices of Mutual Life insurance and the Daily Telegraph, prominent solicitors’ chambers and the Atheneaum Club. Walking Castlereagh Street’s two kilometre length in 1893 provided its own kind of narrative journey, crossing Sydney’s class divide as you paced south to its terminus at Belmore Park and the bustle of the nearby markets.²⁴ The Brigade organised in a densely populated working class district — some 30,000 of Sydney’s 100,000 population.²⁵ The Brigade’s headquarters and barracks were at 221½— up a lane that ran off the street, between McNamara’s and Leigh House at 233, the home of the Australian Socialist League, a competitor for worker hearts and minds which the Brigade derided as a ‘wordy’ debating society.²⁶ The barracks were physically connected to McNamara’s, with the bookshop taking the street-front premises in the block bound by Bathurst and Liverpool Streets. The Carrington, New Masonic and Protestant Halls, organising centres and meeting places of radicals and labourites, were also in southern Castlereagh Street, forming the structure of a distinctive labour precinct.²⁷ The barracks had been leased to provide for the large numbers of unemployed men unable to afford good board and lodgings at ‘ordinary charges’, and to encourage recruits: ‘every unemployed man should be an aggressive agitator’, the Brigade demanded.²⁸ The traditional charities exploited the opportunities provided by unemployment relief to preach Christianity; the ASB hoped that the barracks would facilitate the radicalisation of the Sydney unemployed, providing them with access to radical literature and debate, and the techniques of organised protest. Bed or meals were advertised at 3d each. The ASB was hoping soon to provide beds for 300 men, and sought donations of cash or furniture to achieve this aim.²⁹ The building was a large and ramshackle two-story structure which also housed William Mason’s printery. Mason was another founding ASB member and printer of the Brigade’s newspaper, Justice.³⁰	12
An 1893 ASB manifesto proclaimed the necessity of defeating ‘fiscalism, commercialism, and churchianity’ to establish ‘a free, social, and democratic republic or commonwealth of free communities’, in the best interests of the Australian people.³¹ The ASB’s ‘A’ Division membership card also declared that ‘this strictly disciplined organisation’ was dedicated ‘to work upon purely business principles and in grim earnest, for the resumption of the People’s Landed Inheritance and other property’.³² The creation of a democratic republic was certainly a radical ideal in a society still to come to terms with the notion of colonial federation under the Crown.³³ The ASB favoured a decentralised, democratic ‘co-operative and social system’ of government. The ASB advocated an impressive range of democratic rights — universal suffrage, free education and a free legal system, election of ‘administrative and legislative officers’, plebiscites to approve legislation and tax measures, but the nature of their reformed economic system was vaguely explained. Clause 9 stated that ‘Production’ should be controlled by ‘the democracy’; clause 8 argued that commodities should be for ‘community use’, not individual or speculative profit. Clause 11 suggested that ‘Peaceful social reform and economic progress’ was ‘desirable’.³⁴ The ASB’s ideology was a blend of competing ideas — an impulse for radical change, but some uncertainty about what a new society should look like. The populism of Henry George’s single tax, loaded with attacks on the banks as a symbol of capitalism, and the pastoral companies who denied ‘the people’s landed inheritance’, mixed with socialist prescriptions.³⁵	13
Burgmann was impressed with the ASB’s ‘socialism’, its ‘centralised and secretive’ organisation, noting the solemn declaration to new members from the ASB’s Supreme Directing Council ‘to obey their lawful commands — without question’.³⁶ Like the ‘A’ Division, the Supreme Directing Council was largely a fantasy of organisation entertained by a handful of activists. Markey argues that the ASB confused ‘radical rhetoric or the grand gesture with radicalism per se’.³⁷ A confusion, or perhaps over-compensation, produced by their marginality. Through titles suggesting purpose, command and professionalism, ASB hierarchies were a way of legitimising the Brigade’s campaigns in the eyes of its activists and the eyes of others. Categorising themselves on active service, with an ethos of quasi-military structure and discipline, they appealed to be taken seriously.	14
Isaiah Berlin observed that marginalised social groups in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries often found expression for their ‘craving for recognition’ in a pride in armies, discipline and uniforms … Men who feel lost and defenceless in their original condition are transformed into brave and disciplined fighters when they are given a brand new cause to fight for.³⁸John Dwyer had already tried to sate that craving with five years service in the Rifle Volunteer Corps in London, his own participation in a family tradition of military service. These ancestors fought in the War of the Austrian Succession, at Waterloo and the Union cause in the American Civil War, as he documented.³⁹ The Active Service Brigade represented another expression of this craving for recognition, an instrument of personal transformation for Tommy Dodd, wholesale tobacconist, and John Dwyer, the ex-foreman in search of himself. Intervention in the public sphere allowed the marginalised workers of the Brigade’s leadership not only to proclaim themselves provocative ‘political agitators’, but also to assume roles as editors, business managers and professional activists. These claims reflected their alienated identities, sliding between the outsider’s status of radical agitator, and the prestige and authority of recognised social and professional roles.	15
With no access to the press, mainstream political parties or parliament the ASB invented its own media and organisation; through the barracks the Brigade invented an audience. The ASB appropriated both traditional and radical structures and narratives, declaring its emergence in rallies, meetings, revolutionary songs (chiefly a frequent singing of the Marseillaise) and through Justice. The ASB borrowed not only the title of the London SDF’s journal and its by-line, ‘an organ of social democracy’, but also the SDF’s theatrical street protest style complete with red flags.⁴⁰ On 19 November 1893 this ‘warpath’, as they characterised their confrontation with state and capital, led to St. Andrews Cathedral, where many of the young brigadeers sat through the service with barely suppressed mirth, and later to a ‘blasphemous’ procession through the city, with 250 marchers following a ‘huge’ crucifix to the astonishment of onlookers. Nailed to the cross was an effigy of ‘a down trodden man’ in tattered rags, smeared with red paint. Texts on the crucifix read ‘humanity crucified’ and ‘murdered by the rich’. They paused for speeches outside the Hotel Australia and the Grand Central Coffee Palace, where the well-heeled had gathered for the evening. The marchers concluded with an abortive attempt, led by Dodd, to appropriate a service in the Methodist Centenary Hall in York Street. Dodd the transgressive preacher invoked biblical metaphors to condemn the exploitation of the poor by the rich, only to be drowned out by vigorous interjection from the Church choir.⁴¹	16
In February 1894 the Brigade organised a meeting at the Queen’s Statue. The Statue of Her Majesty Queen Victoria at the intersection of King and Macquarie Streets was a social space, like the nearby Domain, that the radicals claimed as sites of dissent, and where they might provocatively conceive of an alternative social system — in the shadow of the Supreme Court immediately to the south and Parliament House, a short way down Macquarie Street.⁴² The Statue was also a meeting place for the unemployed, the idle and the rabble-rouser, and a reasonable audience — of the curious if not always the committed — could be expected for a rally. Dwyer, Justice claimed, made ‘a powerful speech denunciatory of the Government’ to a crowd of ‘3–4,000’. Douglas followed, warning of the presence of an estimated 20–30 police detectives in the crowd, with another 50 said to be lurking ‘in ambush’ within the nearby government Mint building. Douglas invited the crowd to ‘treat these paid mercenaries of oppression as they would a leprous Chinaman’.⁴³ These performances were literally melodrama, a play which ‘… intensifies sentiment and exaggerates passion’, stirred with blasphemy and denunciation, lurking danger and lurid villains.⁴⁴	17
The Brigade believed the financial crisis provided its moment: ‘truly desperate is the condition of many of the financial institutions of the country’.⁴⁵ Several major banks suspended payments to panicking depositors in early 1893 and reconstructed their operations in order to alleviate the panic and pay off the mounting debts that careless lending regimes generated, exacerbated by the sudden and sharp contraction of credit from the London banking houses, themselves victims of a global financial crisis. The suspended Australian banks had low reserves and many bad loans, mortgaged with ‘illiquid’ assets — in the grossly over-supplied urban commercial and residential property market, and high exposure to once lucrative pastoral businesses, now plagued by falling commodity prices, drought and industrial conflict.⁴⁶	18
The NSW Government had been forced to an unprecedented intervention in the financial system, implementing the Bank Issue Act to make the banks’ paper notes legal tender — to carry the same value and credibility as gold sovereigns.⁴⁷ The banks could meet a run on deposits with an issue of paper money, preserving their gold reserves for the year-long life of the Act, and so restore confidence. The Bank Issue Act stemmed public panic, but Justice claimed the seed sown by the ASB was bearing fruit. Through the Brigade’s efforts, the fierce search-light of public opinion is now being concentrated on the actions and lives of those human devils who, betraying their sacred trust, have brought this magnificent country to the verge of bankruptcy, and plunged her workers in degradation and poverty.⁴⁸	19

Hard Cash and the Banking Crisis
Hard Cash was the most potent expression of the anti-‘money power’ populism stirred amongst radicals and across the labour movement by the banking crisis — the ‘terror of 1893’. ⁴⁹ Its revelations of financial duplicity and board-room self-interest emerged from the raw radicalism of lower Castlereagh Street and spread across Sydney just as the suspended banks were recommending their schemes of reconstruction to their creditors and the courts. Hard Cash may have had some assistance from the ASB, and even an impressionable Jack Lang, but it was essentially a project of editor Arthur Desmond. Desmond made a name for himself in April 1893 by scrawling ‘going bung’ across a Bank Issue Act notice pasted to the door of the Government Savings Bank in Barrack Street. He was jailed for two months. ⁵⁰ Hard Cash lashed Australian bankers as ‘the greatest deceivers on earth’, ⁵¹ and scornfully dismissed the Act as the ‘paper money proclamation’. ⁵² The banks held the capitalist system together; Hard Cash strove to expose their weaknesses, and reveal finance not as an omnipotent system that demanded blind loyalty but a network of self-serving human relationships, ‘built upon spurious values or commercial make believe’, which could be mocked and discarded. ⁵³	20
A favourite target was the Commercial Bank. The Commercial was a ‘mirage’, according to Hard Cash, a bank attempting to report advances made to its branches as assets. Hard Cash had little sympathy with the Commercial’s shareholders. ‘The shareholders have been receiving 25 per cent for years. As long as they got the cash regularly they were blind to the glaring mismanagement of their Directors’. ⁵⁴ Most shareholders were called upon to inject fresh capital into the struggling banks; the Commercial’s reconstruction required £400,000 from shareholders, a ‘colossal amount’ for the day. ⁵⁵ Hard Cash believed the banks’ self-interest was replicated in government, church and the press: the NSW Government of Premier George Dibbs was ‘a cabal of bank shareholders and insolvent overdrafters’; bank shareholding clergy were ‘blasphemous hypocrites’. Hard Cash named the directors of the Daily Telegraph, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Star as directors or major shareholders in banks and as ‘political frauds and financial spielers’. ‘No wonder the people of New South Wales are deluded and robbed, when their daily mental pabulum of sophistry and lies is controlled by a family of wealthy, avaricious, and insatiable usurers’. ⁵⁶	21
A decisive role in galvanising support for the Dibbs Government’s Bank Issue Act fell to William McMillan, a partner with trading firm McArthur and Co. and a director of the National Bank of Australasia who recognised the urgent need to revive confidence in the financial system.⁵⁷ A laissez-faire free trade member of parliament and a former treasurer in the Parkes Government, McMillan’s support for an Act proposed by a protectionist government lent the legislation credibility. McMillan confirmed this impression by stressing that supporting the Act involved government intervention, a violation of ‘the principles of my life’. Circumstances had forced him to recognise the banks as ‘a network of ramifications affecting the social and industrial life of the country’. These ramifications were not based on gleaming stockpiles of gold or intimidating temples of stone: urging the Legislative Assembly to adopt the bill, McMillan told his fellow parliamentarians that ‘we must disabuse our minds’ of any idea that banking consists of storing enormous quantities of coin ‘which may be got at any moment by anyone who has transactions with a bank’. McMillan insisted that ‘the great superstructure of British commerce depends at the present time, not on this or the other security, but on the faith of man in man’. The Bank Issue bill would restore the transactions of faith, encouraging men and women to believe that the paper in their hands was as secure as the gold they wanted to believe lay safely waiting in a bank vault.⁵⁸	22
Testing opinion on the bill, McMillan had interviewed ‘nearly every man of financial position in this country’, and found that he was often talking to himself —men reluctant to accept the intervention of government in commercial life.⁵⁹ Most banks preferred suspension because it allowed the directors and senior managers to retain control — few were forced from office as a result of the suspensions; the reconstructed National Bank of Australasia retained its directors and general manager.⁶⁰ McMillan laboured to persuade his peers that without the revival of confidence provided by the Bank Issue bill, commercial life could vanish. Before Parliament he conjured an image of a ‘reasonable, practical man’, a man who could not stand by while ‘the huge business of the Government of this country, amounting to £25,000,000, stopped, and all the currency entirely dissipated?’⁶¹ McMillan wanted to hold to his principles, but the crisis had simply made the symbiotic relationship between government and commerce obvious to all. In its usual blunt style, the Bulletin doubted that McMillan had, despite his lament, renounced the principles of a lifetime in supporting the legislation: ‘Not at all. When state interference is contrary to the interests of his class, he’s against it; when it’s in favour of those interests, he’s for it. He is a cash and class legislator’.⁶²	23
Responding to McMillan’s prominent role in reviving the banking system, Hard Cash reserved a special category of vilification for the Methodist and Irish-born McMillan. He was a ‘north of Ireland Jew’, a ‘sordid-minded Jew’, one of the ‘shent per shent’ politicians, ‘murdering the people with their foul usance’. Hard Cash believed that banking and business was dominated by grasping Jews. Hard Cash wondered if the persecuted Jews of Russia ‘are as insatiable and extortionate as the Jews of Sydney and Melbourne’; if so, little surprise that ‘the infuriated and fleeced peasantry’ rose against them, ‘tearing them limb from limb’. In Australia, workman, selector and squatter, we are all grinding up bone and brain to feed the greed of the Jew. There is no blinking the fact that this despotic Money Power must back down — must be MADE to back down, if our national liberties are not to be destroyed. Far better civil war, and blood and brains splashing our saddle-girths, than that their diabolic usurpations, their arrogance, extortion and insolence should continue unchecked.⁶³Hard Cash longed for a cleansing cataclysm to overthrow the reign of corrupt Jew-ridden money power. Significantly, the threat posed by the money power apparently struck across the class divide, as a struggle uniting workman, selector and squatter in a defence of national liberties: the greedy Jew was an enemy they could all hate together. As Love notes, populism could lead to the left, in radical or labourist solutions. As an appeal to nationalism and a defence of the interests of the man on the land, the small scale producer, the dispossessed worker, populism could also find a home in racist scapegoating.⁶⁴	24
Hard Cash found scheming Jews everywhere. They stacked the share register of the Bank of New South Wales (‘Nathans, Cohens, Levys, Abrahams, Phillips, Gothiefs [a crude play on Gotthelf] and Moses, Solomons and Jacobs by the score’), and dominated the Joint Stock Bank — ‘a junta of Loan and Discount Jews’, one of whom, Sir Saul Samuel, was also the NSW Agent-General in London.⁶⁵ Samuel was, according to Hard Cash, ‘an avaricious, unscrupulous old pawnbroker (a Jew by both breed and disposition)’.⁶⁶ In order to complete his symbolic vilification, the gentile McMillan was cast by his own behaviour, according to Hard Cash, into the ranks of this loathed other — a Jew if not by breeding certainly by disposition. McMillan delivered ‘hypnotic speeches’ at reconstruction meetings, to deceive the public and enrich himself. In olden days, Hard Cash darkly recorded, such pillagers were hunted like bandits. ‘Some day, some time, there will be a wild awakening.’⁶⁷	25
Some feared a wild awakening might occur sooner than later. Preserved in the papers of Louis Phillips are two copies of the Standard Bearer, a brief successor in 1893–94 to Hard Cash that Desmond produced, repeating the same formula of bank bashing and anti-Semitism.⁶⁸ Merchant, shareholder in the Australian Joint Stock Bank and several times President of Sydney’s Great Synagogue, anxiety apparently led Phillips to collect these publications that defamed him, his friends and his religion. Moritz Gotthelf was a friend and business associate — the man Desmond dubbed ‘Gothief’. In the early 1890s the Jewish community in Australia was concerned about an outbreak of anti-Semitism in the colonies, provoked by rumours that Jewish refugees of the Russian pogroms might flood into the local economy as cheap labour.⁶⁹ Desmond played up this speculation, stirring it with the traditional stereotypes of Jews as grasping moneylenders and merchants. Phillips’ concern may have reflected his business interests, but he also had an extended family in Sydney and a protective attitude to the community in which he was closely involved.⁷⁰ If inciting fear was Arthur Desmond’s aim, it appears he had some success.	26
Many articles in Hard Cash predicted ‘a terrible future’.⁷¹ It was unclear whether this was a future in which the world’s ‘Old Order’ drowned its people in blood or if an awakened citizenry overthrew the yoke of oppression: Hard Cash seemed torn between instincts of fatalistic annihilation and bold release. Looking into the future, aHard Cash poet saw human brutes re-enslaved by emperors, and ‘multitudes are ground to gold by blood and iron law’.⁷² Perhaps Hard Cash’s conflict flowed from a belief that ‘everything upon this earth is for the strong’, who trampled down the ‘dumb and servile mob’. In Australia, the mob ‘drudged’ in mines and woolsheds, and chanted through the city streets ‘that song of slaves in a land of plenty, “we’ve got no work to do”‘. Neither the ballot box nor Parliament provided relief from oppression: men had to back up their vote ‘with their strong right hand’. There would be no liberation ‘without facing the music of death’. What would an apocalypse deliver? Hard cash. ‘The object of all revolutions … is “hard cash”, that is to say, Leisure, Land, Food and Clothing — FOR THOSE WHO COME OUT ON TOP.’⁷³	27
To be one of those who ruthlessly came out on top probably required more pain than most Australian workers were prepared to endure. Hard Cash constructed a code by which men and women might condemn but could not live. Yet there was a way to mimic, however briefly, the wild awakening of Hard Cash in life: in the street theatre of Sydney politics, in the public meetings which characterised the discourse of colonial politics. To play the villain at such meetings there was no actor better suited for the role than that north of Ireland Jew, William McMillan. In September 1893 Hard Cash warned readers that ‘the Sydney robbers of the people, headed by McMillan’, intended to enforce an ‘acquiescent silence’ at election meetings by the use of ‘hired bullies’. Hard Cash urged Sydney workers to defy this control, to speak out at McMillan’s meetings ‘determined to cheer or to hiss or to move amendments … just as they feel inclined’. If necessary workers should come armed, ‘as your forefathers did in the clearing of the Danubian forests’. The workers did not bring weapons to the meetings, but they did bring their voices.⁷⁴	28

William McMillan Loses his Balance
William McMillan first stood for Parliament in 1887, for the then multi-member constituency of East Sydney. McMillan had served as the President of the Sydney Chamber of Commerce and had helped organise the Free Trade Association as NSW politics divided over the tariff issue. His principles were firm: to his East Sydney electors McMillan described himself as ‘an absolute and uncompromising free trader’, although he expressed a refusal to represent sectional or sectarian interests in the Parliament. ‘He believed in no distinctions of society; the mechanic was quite as good a man to study political subjects as the merchant or squatter.’ McMillan’s candidature was supported by the Chamber of Commerce and most of the ‘leading commercial houses’ declared a partial holiday to allow their employees to vote. Apparently, they did their duty for this sagacious liberal poised in perfect political disinterest: McMillan was elected on the Free Trade ticket.⁷⁵	29
McMillan was soon confronted with the contested class terrain of politics. After the 1889 election McMillan entered the ministry of Sir Henry Parkes as deputy leader and treasurer.⁷⁶ The implications of this prominent role became clear on 19 September 1890, in the climax of the maritime strike. Industrial unrest in the pastoral industry had prompted Sydney wharf labourers to refuse to handle wool shorn by non-unionists.⁷⁷ The wool owners, tired of a dispute that had dragged on two months, led a procession of waggons loaded with bales of fleece to the Circular Quay wharfs, where mounted police charged an angry crowd of strikers, scattering them into the city streets.⁷⁸ The strike was effectively broken, although McMillan, deputising for a convalescent Parkes, feared continuing ‘disorder and anarchy’. To a rattled delegation from the stock exchange he rashly declared that the Government would ‘take such steps to secure the liberty of the subjects of this country, that will be absolutely successful’. McMillan failed to specify — and probably did not know — what these ‘steps’ might involve, allowing speculation to run unchecked. Parkes quickly overruled him: ‘the Government cannot defend the interests of one class to the neglect of another’. Presented with public humiliation in the press McMillan promptly offered his resignation, although Parkes soon talked him around.⁷⁹	30
McMillan’s intemperate remarks isolated him as a ritual villain in public discourse. A week after the Quay confrontation, the Bulletin repeated a rumour circulating around Sydney which became settled fact amongst Sydney’s radicals. ‘When Treasurer McMillan intimated to the Sydney Exchange deputation that his Government was determined to take drastic measures with regard to all strike disturbances, the wink passed around that there was an arrangement for the landing of blue-jackets from the British war-ships in harbour’. The Bulletin also claimed that recently erected barricades at the Quay were to facilitate their landing. Such a ‘foreign invasion’ would be an invitation to begin sewing ‘the Australian Republican flag’.⁸⁰	31
Thereafter McMillan’s name was rarely mentioned in the labour press without the formula being repeated. In March 1893 the Worker featured a ‘platform sketch’ of McMillan addressing a Saturday night crowd on the tariff issue. The McMillan who appeared on the stage was, according to the Worker ‘the veneered and civilised barbarian who wheeled the machine guns and secretly conspired to land foreign troops in Australia for the deliberate purpose of shooting down the people.’ McMillan’s personality and body were subsumed into a legend of ugly tyranny. McMillan delivered a speech ‘of bitter abuse of political opponents and nauseous self-laudation’, in a ‘harsh and repellent voice’, which the Worker correspondent likened to a vertical saw grinding through an ironbark log. McMillan’s looks were equally ‘repellent’, those of a man who would do any mortal thing to attain his object; … self-seeking is engrained in every fibre of his body. The words ‘tyrant’ and ‘nigger-driver’ are branded deep on his unlovely physiognomy.McMillan was described as having a ‘jerry-built frame, narrow temples, hyena-like eyes’. The ‘rapacious’ McArthur and Co was described as a firm of ‘kanaka drivers, usurers, and land speculators’. McMillan passed himself off as a ‘financial pontiff’, yet this was just a feeble static of figures and ‘stock exchange argot’, designed to fool ‘the gaping crowd’.⁸¹ McMillan was an object of the Worker correspondent’s creative hate-play, a focus not of cringing resentment, but of a transforming aggression. Through representations of McMillan as a totem of capitalist evil a new and more assertive working class voice could emerge in public discourse, diametrically in opposition to his own.	32
In September 1893 McMillan provided the Active Service Brigade with a dramatic introduction to the Sydney crowd. McMillan organised a meeting at the New Masonic Hall to establish a branch of the Free Trade and Liberal Association in East Sydney: instead he was shouted down, and confronted with ‘a decisive vote of no-confidence’. McMillan and his supporters were forced from the hall ‘to a storm of hoots’. The Australian Workman declared that the ‘Fiscalomaniacs’ had been routed. It was all McMillan’s own fault: ‘he is of the type of men who are continually exciting antagonism’. The workers did not want his Association or his representation in Parliament.⁸² The motion carried against McMillan at his own — albeit hijacked —meeting noted his opposition to the payment of members and the eight hour day, his advocacy of the Bank Issue Act and his closeness to ‘land mortgage companies’, failings which ‘render him peculiarly unfit to sympathise or legislate for the multitude of his fellow men’.⁸³ It became clear during the meeting that McMillan shared these sentiments; agitated by the hectoring crowd, McMillan ‘lost his balance’, and for once ‘told the workers the truth, by telling them that he did not intend to lead them to believe that he was a true champion of the poor working man’.⁸⁴ Unintentionally, McMillan performed his role on cue and left the stage to the grateful derision of the mob.	33
Harry Holland, a recent ASB recruit who moved the anti-McMillan motion with Henry Douglas, said McMillan set off the disruption with his ‘screechy voice’, ‘prating’ on about freedom and the brotherhood of man: ‘no wonder the hall was transformed into a very Hades alive with human demons’.⁸⁵ They stirred the truth out of him, and McMillan had to admit that he had never been in politics for them. Truth drove the point home, reminding McMillan that East Sydney was no longer a free-trade ‘rotten borough’.⁸⁶ Labor pressure in Parliament had forced through the 1893 Electoral Act which abolished multi-member constituencies and provided for voting on a public holiday — allowing working men time to vote (not just a loyal or intimidated staff employed in commercial houses). McMillan and other non-Labor MPs also lost the advantage of plural voting — property owners and businessmen had been able to vote in the electorates where they resided and where their office or factory was located. The Act, and the working class hostility to his candidature stirred by the radicals, forced McMillan to withdraw from the new King electorate and instead contest the less unruly seat of Burwood, in Sydney’s west, at the 1894 election.⁸⁷	34
The meeting and its spectacular disintegration seemed to have had a significant impact on Workman readers, judging by the amount of coverage it generated.⁸⁸ H.C. Cato rehearsed the McMillan myth: McMillan attracted hostility during the Maritime Strike because he had ‘advocated the bringing ashore of marines from the men-of-war in the harbour’. Only Parkes’ intervention prevented Sydney workers from being treated like ‘the poor ignorant savages of the south seas’.⁸⁹ Curiously, there is no mention in the major Workman reports of the role of the ASB at the meeting; a month later a small item noted the Brigade had ‘disrupted McMillan’s meeting’.⁹⁰ In February 1894 the Workman noted that the ASB had ‘sprung rapidly to prominence by persistent self-advertisement’. ‘Disorderly meetings’ in the Protestant Hall ‘may have assisted its rise’.⁹¹	35
The ambiguity about the ASB’s role at McMillan’s meeting highlights its inchoate origins. In a sense the Brigade existed before its history, a charivari stirred by Desmond’s exhortations in Hard Cash and shaped by Dodd and Dwyer into organisation.⁹² Significantly, McMillan chose the New Masonic Hall for his last East Sydney intervention, on the corner of Castlereagh and Goulburn streets, little more than a block south of the ASB barracks. McMillan transgressed the Brigade’s space to preach his message — and made it easy for the radicals to draw a crowd. McMillan provided the Brigade’s opportunity to emerge from the conflicts of depression Sydney, insisting, through persistent self-advertisement, on recognition, on the right to speak out as Desmond demanded, ‘determined to cheer or to hiss or to move amendments … just as they feel inclined.’ Little matter that the ‘hired bullies’ Hard Cash warned McMillan would bring to the meeting failed to materialise and enforce an ‘acquiescent silence’: they were present in spirit, an imagined and necessary trigger of defiance.	36
McMillan’s ritual vilification formed a vital element in John Dwyer’s initiation into active service. Having failed to establish social recognition or prosperity since his arrival in New South Wales in 1888, Dwyer felt that he had at last discovered, amongst like-minded comrades in southern Castlereagh Street, a chance to express his aspirations. At one of the 1893 Protestant Hall meetings Dwyer attended not long after joining the ASB he excitedly described the terms of the McMillan legend the ASB concocted and the unique form of Brigade action Dwyer hoped to help bring to life. In a pocket notebook Dwyer recorded a unanimous resolution condemning ‘the public plunderers’, the financial corporations and their friends in government, chief amongst whom was McMillan, ‘the incarnate representative and type’, the ‘fomentor [sic] of anarchy, disorder and civil strife’. It was ‘chartered marauders’ like McMillan who fostered disorder and anarchy, denying the working class the right to secure lives.⁹³	37
In the notebook Dwyer sketched a plan for ‘Labor Agents’ who would trade information about ‘blacklegs’ and Labor’s enemies, assist Labor during elections, and provide ‘information and intelligence of national importance’. Feeding on the drama of the Brigade’s meetings and their subversive appropriation of public discourse Dwyer imagined a new form of radical identity. Even as he conceived of transformation he instinctively responded to an urge to drive this identity underground, as if aware that its brazen display would attract reaction. Dwyer described the Labor agent’s ‘mode’ as ‘silence, secrecy, dispatch’, reflecting the mode of the ‘A’ Division, and its countersign, ‘silence’. Under the reign of anarchic marauders, active service, an apparently bold identity, was paradoxically driven into silence and secrecy. It was dangerous to share the truth; and perhaps some truths should only be shared amongst a select elite. Dwyer’s fascination with the secret trade of political intelligence, and the sense of self-importance it encouraged, continued after the Brigade had effectively collapsed, in attempts to share information about the labour movement and curry favour with non-Labor Premiers George Reid and Joseph Carruthers.⁹⁴ The brief opportunity the Brigade provided Dwyer to express a new identity dissipated in chronic economic and civic marginalisation, an insecure status that persisted into the new century, provoking Dwyer to fitful bursts of activism and desperate appeals to the same privileged political class that Dwyer felt denied him access to prestige and success.	38

Theatre and Anti-Theatre
Rhys Isaac has argued that ‘society is not primarily a material entity. It is rather to be understood as a dynamic product of the activities of its members — a product profoundly shaped by the images the participants have of their own and others’ performances.’⁹⁵ In the early 1890s William McMillan presided over dramas of order and revival, transforming crisis into renewal. What was the banking crisis? A loss of confidence between men and women, between depositors and bankers, a tribal surge of doubt, rejection and censure before which the banks yielded and reconstructed. McMillan emerged as the agent of reconstruction, possessive of the necessary metaphors of managed transfer — calm experience, expertise, a voice of respected authority — at least for his peers in the elite; for the radical sub-culture his intervention was another deceitful ritual of an illegitimate order and reaction to him intensified.	39
Rousing working class feeling against the social order, the radicals and the labour press were compelled to turn class enemies into the reviled other. They restructured McMillan’s public persona, exploiting his actions to justify their response to capital and the state, the system that drove white workers into competition with kanakas and ‘niggers’: or so they imagined their impoverished and racially assimilated fate, their familiar identities blurred beyond recognition. Desmond cast McMillan as a ‘north of Ireland Jew’; the Worker vilified him as a ‘nigger-driver’. Douglas condemned the police who enforced the social order as ‘leprous Chinamen’. They had to cast the class enemy into a feared category of the servile and diseased other before the enemy did it to them.	40
‘No wonder the hall was transformed into a very Hades alive with human demons.’ Harry Holland was gripped by the moment, the sudden rush of driving McMillan from the meeting, a brief intoxication of power as the crowd’s released energy forced McMillan from the stage and thrust Holland up there in place of the capitalist: a charivari that might permanently reverse the social order. The crowd reflected a larrikin spirit — resisting control, mocking, knocking off balance: and an imminent threat of violence. A playful, mercurial spirit sparked by random opportunities to deride and challenge — it was not an organisation, but the intrinsic spirit of the Active Service Brigade, itself emerging from the crowd, a ‘perfectly natural product of the depression’.	41
It was a play alive with aggression, as Peter Gay observed of Victorian values, a mechanism of outrage and change and a way of feeling alive.⁹⁶ ‘Everything that lives resists’: Sorel captured the spirit of ‘war-like France’ in the years before World War I, where, he believed, ‘the revolutionary and direct method’ of socialism lived.⁹⁷ Sorel’s 1906 Reflections on Violence exulted the human spirit, resisting the forces that would deny its ‘unique self-expression and reduce it to uniformity, impersonality, monotony, and, ultimately, extinction’.⁹⁸ Australian radicals also expressed a desire to escape from alienation and the tedium of industrial life. Would instinctive violence be channelled into social change, or simply into more violence? Aggression feeds on itself, and Arthur Desmond’s Nietzschean code was increasingly trapped in the repetition of its prejudices.	42
To justify his angry outbursts Desmond needed the crowd, an audience to be persuaded that the vilification of the wealthy and the Jew was legitimised by the usury and deception of the banks. McMillan and Desmond shared an acute perception of the banking system and the crisis besetting it — banking was a mirage called confidence. McMillan, trying to preserve the system, identified in Parliament the nature of banking and its crisis as plainly as any of the caustic barrages published in Hard Cash. Like McMillan, Desmond scorned the crowd; they were both elitists —one of class, the other of righteous will. The well-mannered McMillan bit his tongue, except when he was goaded into confession at the Masonic Hall; Desmond was less precious. Workers were the drudges of the shopfloor and the streets, the ‘dull and witless mob’ easily fooled by the clergy.⁹⁹ In the world’s ‘evolutionary’ struggle, he believed, those who wielded the sword ruled the world. Ironically, the banking crisis and reconstruction revealed the skill of the elite in maintaining its control through adaptation. Perhaps in frustration at preventing this renewal, Hard Cash proclaimed that ‘the majority of men are cowards — therefore they are slaves. That is heresy, but it’s true’.¹⁰⁰ Desmond revelled in heresy: it shocked and set him apart from others. The copies of the Standard Bearer in the Phillips papers are a faint and troubled echo of the consequences of Desmond’s extravagant hate play, expending its energy on derision, light on solutions. In Hard Cash Desmond admitted that he was not a socialist.¹⁰¹ His iconoclasm was ultimately the voice of a railing individual, unbound to common cause.	43
The ASB had its own complex relationship with the crowd, the milling unemployed at the Statue or in the Domain. The Brigade’s declared public mission could only exist with the crowd’s co-operation — willing to be roused but also expecting to be entertained. Like the smirking young men in St. Andrews Cathedral, many workers were unwilling to take it all too seriously. It was fun taunting McMillan or leering at the startled diners in the Grand Central Coffee Palace. The ASB wanted to rein this theatre into a disciplined assault on state and capital. The ASB was ceremoniously structured like the respectable institutions of business, religion and the military — a borrowing of normalizing routines that reflected the Brigade’s craving for recognition as a legitimate voice of the unemployed. Dwyer was the self-appointed custodian of ASB discipline. Dwyer ran the barracks, enlisting an enforcer to exclude ‘bad characters’, casting a cool eye over his clientele, mentally sorting the industrious from the loafers. As Justice thundered, ‘those who refuse to work deserve to starve’.¹⁰² The Brigade’s disciplinary tendencies were instincts of anti-theatre, regulating rather than stimulating the self-expression of the unemployed. Kerby observes that as we struggle to construct narratives of self and negotiate the social world, ‘[w]e indeed find ourselves, collectively and individually, embedded in an ongoing history’.¹⁰³ Adapting prevailing narratives — of power, race — to their organisational and rhetorical needs the Brigade also found itself caught up in them.	44
Dwyer honoured the structures that he and his colleagues conceived — long after the others abandoned the Brigade by 1895, after Dodd, Dwyer, Mason and Douglas had served prison terms for a criminal libel of NSW Justice Minister Tom Slattery published in Justice. Lower Castlereagh Street proved a problematic site for the enactment of a radical transformation: just around the corner in Liverpool Street were the Central Police Court and the adjacent police barracks. In April 1894 police surveillance of the Brigade’s barracks, protests and texts resulted in its leadership being summonsed to the Court to answer the Slattery charge.¹⁰⁴ Desmond abandoned Australia in 1895, settling in Chicago for a number of years; Tommy Dodd returned to his trade in cigars and tobacco.¹⁰⁵ For Sydney’s unemployed it was probably just as well that Dwyer persisted with his dogged loyalty to the Brigade’s mission. With most banks locking up deposits and restricting credit until the late 1890s reconstruction prolonged the depression of the Australian economy and ensured that the barracks were well patronised for the rest of the decade.¹⁰⁶ The banks were a shadow looming over the public and private spheres, dominating life through the control of money, structuring almost every kind of transaction and relationship. McMillan’s acknowledgment of the ‘network of ramifications’ was a temporary concession. After the crisis, the gates could be swung shut, and business resumed: in 1895 a bankers’ conference rejected NSW government recommendations for increased industry controls and supervision.¹⁰⁷ The emotions which ruled commercial life — confidence, faith, fear — could again be blended into progress, however slowed and scarred by the lingering depression. Hard Cash and the Active Service Brigade struggled to subvert these transactions of faith, and replace them through a wild awakening with a new discourse of justice, the most revolutionary word, as the Brigade declared, in the English language.¹⁰⁸	45

Conclusion
John Dwyer’s papers are a vital source for the Active Service Brigade. A fragmented record of fin de siecle radicalism, Dwyer’s papers reflect the Brigade’s experience: in their errant gaps and no doubt wilful elisions Dwyer’s records resemble the shards of a broken mirror, clamouring images of humiliation and injustice, and the elusive possibilities of liberation. Stories, already elaborately formed, appear, and then vanish; the lives of his fellow radicals and family shuffle in a disjointed patchwork of correspondence, fliers and newspaper clippings.¹⁰⁹ Foucault found the seventeenth century lettres de cachet, and the regime of power they exercised over the criminal, unintentionally captured ‘the disarray and relentless energy’ of lives described in the terse, dark vignettes of indictment. A new discourse of power emerged from this dialectic: the most despised and marginalised were given a voice.¹¹⁰	46
Touched into life by power, the Active Service Brigade’s creative display flared, expressing its protests and its at times contradictory dialogue with the traditional formations of colonial discourse. At once action, at once history: from its earliest moments, the Brigade’s theatrical narratives were joined in dynamic engagement with Dwyer’s imagination and will to live. Dwyer’s commemoration of the Brigade reveals the link between narratives of action and identity; he gathered the Brigade’s records as memorialisation of its struggles and the demand for recognition that the Brigade’s leadership made on behalf of the working class and themselves.	47
Determined to preserve and hence to live, Dwyer carted the accumulating papers from one rough boarding house to another for over a decade, continuing to fitfully employ the Active Service Brigade as a device of his political and spiritual identity. In 1916 and 1917 he deposited the record of his exhausted quest with the NSW State Library. It is appropriate that many of the papers that passed through Dwyer’s inquisitive hands are scattered amongst the Library’s collections, uncertainly managed into disparate categories, and often linked only by his own name recorded by himself with a purple-inked rubber stamp. That stamped name is at times the only clue that the texts of the Brigade, or ‘anarchy’, ‘theosophical tracts’ or the ‘Political Labour League’ had anything to do with John Dwyer and his dreams. In his arch way Foucault described the subject dispersed into the discontinuities of its discourse.¹¹¹ If Foucault had read the Dwyer papers, he would have found a subject tormented into disconnection by power, but not a life emptied of all politics or humanity. In the shards of Dwyer’s radical archive the narratives of action and identity maintain a tense dialogue, compelling the engagement of its readers.	48
Endnotes^1.ï¿½Daily Telegraph (hereafter, DT), 18 November 1893.^2.ï¿½Greg Dening, ‘”Let my curiosity have its little day”: a reflection’, Australian Book Review, no. 180 May 1996, p. 41. See also Greg Dening, ‘The Theatricality of History Making and the Paradoxes of Acting’, in Greg Dening, Performances, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1996, p. 103.^3.ï¿½See the ‘Discourse on Method’, in Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790, W.W. Norton & Co., NY, 1988. See also Dening, Performances; Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, Vintage Books, NY, 1985; Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, Basic Books, NY, 1973.^4.ï¿½Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, pp. 350–1.^5.ï¿½Terry Irving and Lucy Taksa (eds.), Places, Protests and Memorabilia: the Labour Heritage Register of New South Wales, Industrial Relations Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2002, p. 5.^6.ï¿½Margaret R. Somers, ‘Deconstructing and Reconstructing Class Formation Theory: Narrativity, Relational Analysis, and Social Theory’ in John R. Hall (ed.), Reworking Class, Cornell University Press, NY, 1997, pp. 81–2.^7.ï¿½Anthony Paul Kerby, Narrative and the Self, Indiana University Press, Indiana, 1991 pp. 6–7.^8.ï¿½Verity Burgmann, In Our Time, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1985, pp. 64–5. Writing as ‘Ragnar Redbeard’ in 1896 Desmond exulted in man, ‘the fighting, roving, pillaging, lusting, cannibalistic animal, par excellence’, a ‘monarch’ who rules women, ‘frail beings at the best of times … for the welfare of the breed, and the security of descent, they must be held in thorough subjection’. Ragnar Redbeard, The Survival of the Fittest or the Philosophy of Power, Chicago, 1896, pp. 80, 98–99.^9.ï¿½Burgmann, In Our Time, pp. 15–16; Bede Nairn, Civilising Capitalism, the Labour Movement in New South Wales, 1870–1900, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1989. Ray Markey discusses the interpretive limits of Old v New Left critiques of Australian labour history. Ray Markey, The Making of the Labor Party in New South Wales, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 1988, p. 231.^10.ï¿½Bob James, Anarchism and State Violence in Sydney and Melbourne 1886–1896, Bob James, Newcastle, 1986.^11.ï¿½Bruce Scates, A New Australia, Citizenship Radicalism and the First Republic, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1997, p. 8.^12.ï¿½Ibid., p. 25. Scates does not define the ‘discourse of European imperialism’ or establish its relationship to Australian radicalism of the period.^13.ï¿½Michel Foucault, ‘Lives of Infamous Men’, in Michel Foucault, Power, Essential Works Vol.3, Allen Lane the Penguin Press, London, 2001, pp. 172, 174.^14.ï¿½Orange Leader, 3 February 1894. Extract in Dwyer Papers, ML MSS 2184/2. The Dwyer papers are held in the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.^15.ï¿½The unprecedented levels of unemployment and underemployment of the 1890s were generally higher than official statistics; precise estimates are difficult, particularly given the lack of reliable figures for unskilled male workers, and female workers generally, in the period. Markey, The Making of the Labor Party, pp. 37–41; Annual Report of the Government Labour Bureau for 1892, NSW Legislative Assembly Votes and Proceedings (hereafter LA V&P;), 1892–93, vol. VIII, p. 957; Government Labour Bureau report for 1895, NSW LA V&P;, 1892–93, vol. VI, 1894–5, p. 455; See also Tony Endres and Malcolm Cook, ‘Administering “the unemployed difficulty”: the NSW Government Labour Bureau 1892–1912’, Australian Economic History Review, vol. XXVI, no. 1, March, 1986.^16.ï¿½Active Service Brigade (ASB) ‘A’ Division membership card c1893, Dwyer Papers, ML MSS 2184/2.^17.ï¿½ASB membership ticket, 1893 (unspecified date), Dwyer Papers, ML MSS 2184/2.^18.ï¿½Mark Hearn, Hard Cash: John Dwyer and his contemporaries 1890–1914, unpublished PhD thesis Department of History, University of Sydney, 2000, ch. 2. Available through the Australian Digital Thesis Program: http://adt.caul.edu.au/^19.ï¿½Chris Cunneen, ‘Arthur Desmond’, Australian Dictionary of Biography Vol. 8, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1981, p. 291.^20.ï¿½Jack Lang, I Remember, Invincible Press, Sydney, 1956, pp. 9–11.^21.ï¿½Orange Leader.^22.ï¿½Bulletin, 24 March 1894.^23.ï¿½Orange Leader.^24.ï¿½Charles Bertie, ‘Old Castlereagh Street’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, vol. XXII, part 1, 1936, pp. 42–66.^25.ï¿½Statistical Register of New South Wales for 1894, p. 588.^26.ï¿½Justice, 24 February 1894.^27.ï¿½Irving and Taksa, Places, Protests and Memorabilia, pp. 80–86.^28.ï¿½Justice, 17 February 1894.^29.ï¿½ASB flier re barracks, 1893, Dwyer Papers, ML MSS 2184/2.^30.ï¿½Justice, 3 February 1894; Orange Leader.^31.ï¿½’ASB social programme (adopted by Convention 1893)’, Dwyer Papers, ML MSS 2184/2.^32.ï¿½ASB ‘A’ Division membership card c1893, Dwyer Papers, ML MSS 2184/2.^33.ï¿½Scates argues that the republicanism of 1890s radicals envisioned an ‘open and participatory’ political life, not simply the removal of Queen Victoria as head of state. Scates, A New Australia, p. 207.^34.ï¿½’ASB social programme’.^35.ï¿½Peter Love, Labour and the Money Power, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1984, p. 14; Scates, A New Australia, pp. 64–67.^36.ï¿½Burgmann, In Our Time, p. 63.^37.ï¿½Markey, Making of the Labor Party, p. 256.^38.ï¿½Isaiah Berlin, ‘Benjamin Disraeli, Karl Marx and the Search for Identity’, in Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current, Pimlico, London, 1997, p. 259.^39.ï¿½’Family History of John Dwyer’, pp. 2, 11, 13, Dwyer Papers, ML MSS 290.^40.ï¿½Justice [London Social Democratic Federation], 19 January 1884. Tom Mann described a routine of SDF proselytising familiar to any ASB acolyte — two or three open-air and indoor Sunday meetings, afternoon and evening, around the East End, with additional evening meetings during the week. Tom Mann’s Memoirs, Labour Publishing Co. Ltd, London, 1923, pp. 38–39.^41.ï¿½DT, 20 November 1893; Sydney Morning Herald (hereafter SMH), 20 November 1893.^42.ï¿½Barrington Moore Jr, Injustice: the Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt, Macmillan, London, 1979, p. 482.^43.ï¿½Justice, 24 February 1894.^44.ï¿½Macquarie Dictionary, 3rd edition, Macquarie University, Sydney, 1997.^45.ï¿½Justice, 10 February 1894.^46.ï¿½N.G. Butlin, Investment in Australian Economic Development 1861–1900, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1964, pp. 424–5.^47.ï¿½No Australian government issued bank notes until the Commonwealth assumed responsibility in 1910. The full text of the Bank Issue Act 1893 was reprinted in the Australasian Insurance and Banking Record, May 1893, p. 317.^48.ï¿½Justice, 10 February 1894.^49.ï¿½Love, Labour and the Money Power, p. 40.^50.ï¿½Worker (Sydney), 29 April 1893.^51.ï¿½Hard Cash, September 1893.^52.ï¿½Ibid., July 1893.^53.ï¿½Ibid.^54.ï¿½Ibid.^55.ï¿½A Century of Banking, the Commercial Banking Co of Sydney Ltd., 1834–1934, W.C. Penfold, Sydney, 1934, p. 54.^56.ï¿½Hard Cash, July 1893; vol. 2, no. 3 (undated); September 1893.^57.ï¿½A. Martin, ‘William McMillan — A Merchant in Politics’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, vol. XL, part IV, 1954.^58.ï¿½NSW Parliamentary Debates, vol.65 27 April 1893, pp. 6612–13, 6616.^59.ï¿½Ibid., p. 6617.^60.ï¿½Geoffrey Blainey, Gold and Paper 1858–1982: a History of the National Bank of Australasia Ltd, Macmillan, South Melbourne, 1983, p. 110; A Century of Banking, p. 54.^61.ï¿½NSW PD, vol.65, no. 2, May 1893, p. 6616.^62.ï¿½Bulletin, 3 June 1893.^63.ï¿½Hard Cash, September 1893.^64.ï¿½Love, Labour and the Money Power, pp. 2, 6, 9–10.^65.ï¿½Hard Cash, July 1893.^66.ï¿½Ibid., September 1893.^67.ï¿½Ibid.^68.ï¿½Standard Bearer, 17 December 1893 and 21 January 1894, in Louis Phillips Papers, vol. 66 ‘Newscuttings and circulars, 1883–1912’, A4764 State Library of New South Wales (hereafter SLNSW).^69.ï¿½Hilary Rubenstein, Chosen: the Jews in Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1987, pp. 79–80.^70.ï¿½Phillips papers, ‘Newscuttings and circulars, 1883–1912’.^71.ï¿½Hard Cash, July 1893.^72.ï¿½Ibid., September 1893.^73.ï¿½Ibid.^74.ï¿½Ibid.^75.ï¿½Australian Men of Mark, Vol.1, Charles F. Maxwell, Melbourne, 1888, p. 140.^76.ï¿½Martin, ‘William McMillan — A Merchant in Politics’, pp. 202–209.^77.ï¿½Mark Hearn and Harry Knowles, One Big Union: a History of the Australian Workers Union 1886–1994, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1996 p. 43.^78.ï¿½SMH, 20 September 1890;DT, 20 September 1890.^79.ï¿½SMH, 20 & 23 September 1890; McMillan to Parkes, 20 September 1890, Parkes correspondence, vol. 24, p. 152. SLNSW.^80.ï¿½Bulletin, 27 September 1890.^81.ï¿½Worker (Sydney), 4 March 1893.^82.ï¿½Australian Workman, 9 September 1893.^83.ï¿½Ibid., 30 September 1893.^84.ï¿½Ibid., 9 September 1893.^85.ï¿½Truth, 10 September 1893.^86.ï¿½Ibid.^87.ï¿½G. N. Hawker, The Parliament of New South Wales 1865–1965, NSW Government Printer, Sydney, 1971, p. 183.^88.ï¿½Reports of the meeting and criticisms of McMillan continued for over a month. Australian Workman, 9, 16 & 30 September 1893, 14 October 1893.^89.ï¿½Ibid., 16 September 1893.^90.ï¿½Ibid., 14 October 1893; other press reports vaguely identified those the Herald characterised as ‘agents of disorder and apostles of anarchism’. SMH, 7 September 1893; Truth, 10 September 1893; DT, 7 September 1893.^91.ï¿½Australian Workman, February 1894.^92.ï¿½Charivari, ‘a burlesque procession with rough music’, was a feature of the carnivals which marked the changing cycles of the medieval year, when the social order was briefly reversed and mocked. Darnton links the notion of charivari to eighteenth century worker protest in France. Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, p. 83.^93.ï¿½John Dwyer, pocket notebook c1893, Dwyer papers, ML MSS 290.^94.ï¿½John Dwyer to George Reid, 5 September 1899, Dwyer papers, ML MSS 290; Mark Hearn, ‘Citizen Dwyer’, in Mark Hearn and Greg Patmore (eds.), Working the Nation: Working Life and Federation 1890–1914, Pluto Press, Sydney, 2001, p. 272.^95.ï¿½Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, p. 324.^96.ï¿½Peter Gay, The Cultivation of Hatred, Fontana Press, London, 1995, p. 4.^97.ï¿½Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, The Free Press, Glencoe, Ill., 1950, p. 90.^98.ï¿½Isaiah Berlin, ‘Georges Sorel’, in Berlin, Against the Current, p. 299.^99.ï¿½Hard Cash, July 1893.^100.ï¿½Ibid., vol.2, no.3 (undated).^101.ï¿½Ibid.^102.ï¿½Justice, 17 February 1894; Hearn, Hard Cash, pp. 126–7.^103.ï¿½Kerby, Narrative and the Self, p. 7.^104.ï¿½Hearn, Hard Cash, pp. 173–189.^105.ï¿½Chris Cunneen, ‘Arthur Desmond’; Hearn, Hard Cash, p. 204.^106.ï¿½The banks feared a renewed run when the deposits were finally released. Boehm concludes this ‘severe credit contraction’ persisted into the new century, delaying a revival of prosperity. Butlin, Investment in Australian Economic Development, p. 430; E.A. Boehm, Prosperity and Depression in Australia, 1887–1897, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1971, pp. 325–26.^107.ï¿½Timothy Coghlan, Labour & Industry in Australia, Vol. 4, Macmillan, Sydney, 1969, p. 2131.^108.ï¿½Justice, 10 February 1894.^109.ï¿½See the bibliographical note, ‘The Dwyer Collection in the State Library of New South Wales’, in Hearn, Hard Cash, p. 380.^110.ï¿½Foucault, Lives of Infamous Men, pp. 158, 167–169.^111.ï¿½Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Routledge Classics, London, 2003, p. 60.

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