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Frank Anstey : From Heroic Persona to Embattled Identity
Peter Love*
Frank Anstey's political career in the Victorian and Commonwealth parliaments (1902–34) centred around his reputation as a working-class hero and harbinger of revolution in the 1917–21 'red dawn'. The volatile energy that drove his indefatigable organising, passionate oratory and dramatic writing was such that the public persona it fuelled gradually suffused his private identity. But when political Labor surrendered to the strictures of orthodox economics and the people acquiesced in the wretched compromises of 1930–31, his public persona collapsed into an embittered cynicism and, as death approached, his personal identity retreated in time to a smaller, private world through a romantic reconstruction of childhood.
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| During his 32 years in the Victorian and Commonwealth parliaments Frank Anstey (1865–1940) came to personify Labor's left populist tradition. In the course of an active and occasionally tempestuous career he developed a popular political economy that identified and deplored the role of plutocratic elites in depriving ordinary people of their rights to political democracy and economic justice. Whether it be his grand plan for the 'closer settlement' of rural Victoria by small farmers in Monopoly and Democracy (1906), his exposure of the sinister 'behind the scenes' role of the Money Power (1921) as the driving force in modern capitalism or his dramatic narrative on the fate of reactionary privilege at the hands of an insurgent proletariat in Red Europe (1919), his underlying theme was the same. The tides of history were sweeping the common people closer to their destiny in a more just and equitable world. During three decades of committed writing and passionate oratory he had crafted a Promethean role for himself in this inevitable process of long-term social transformation. Although he did not publicly claim any such role, he was nevertheless driven by an abiding conviction that he had identified the 'trend of the ages'. At the height of his powers during the 1919–21 'red dawn', his left-wing audiences thrilled to his ominous predictions of a seismic shift of power to the working class. But when, at the end of his long parliamentary career, he contemplated the political wreckage of the Scullin government and Labor's 1931 electoral disaster, he had to accommodate that long-standing conviction to the desolate landscape confronting him. Most of his later years were spent coming to terms with the prospect that all his exertions had come to nothing. The Promethean fire had been extinguished by the cold indifference of an anxiously insecure electorate and the pusillanimity of his Labor colleagues. Towards the end, as he raged against the closing of his life, he struggled to reconcile his dismal outlook with the history he had contrived for himself and the working class. |
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Francis George Anstey was born at Lambeth, London on 18 August 1865, the only son of the recently deceased Samuel Anstey, a master shoemaker, and his wife Caroline née Gamble. He had an unsettled childhood. At three he was sent to live with the Ansteys near Witheridge in Devon, an area that left an enduring impression on his childish imagination, which he recalled, selectively, during old age in his memoirs. After his widowed mother married labourer John Lank in September 1869 she reclaimed young Frank and the new family commenced a precarious working life on the Settle to Carlisle railway extension, tramping through the North and Midlands until finally settling at Silvertown, London. During this period Caroline bore two more sons, Thomas at Settle in January 1871 and William at London in April 1877. Soon after, in an act of youthful rebellion, Frank stowed away in the Blackwall clipper Melbourne at the Victoria Docks, eventually jumping ship at Sydney from where he worked as a cabin boy throughout the South Pacific and, later, as a seaman along the east coast of Australia.1 |
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The earliest surviving documents that Anstey wrote come from this period and offer tantalising reflections of an heroic, Romantic imaginative life. As a young seaman, he kept a commonplace book where he transcribed passages of prose and verse that attracted his restless curiosity. It presents an illuminating chronicle of his adolescent preoccupations, encompassing bawdy doggerel, erotic verse, Romantic poetry and satirical sketches, along with biographical portraits of revolutionary political figures from eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe. Towards the end of his seafaring years, as he spent more time in his home port of Sydney, he copied several pieces of the Bulletin's social satire, irreverent anti-clericalism and truculent nationalism.2 Not surprisingly for a young seaman in the mid-1880s, many entries dealt with women and sex; from the generous-spirited humanism of Robbie Burns' 'Ye Virtuous Ladies' and a careful selection of the more erotic stanzas from Shakespeare's 'Venus and Adonis' to biting denunciations of women's faithless perfidy. These latter entries register a volatile ambivalence towards women as objects of admiration, lust or exasperation, while he steered a tempestuous adolescent course towards a more mature sexual identity. |
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The most consistent theme in his transcriptions, however, was a fascination with literature heralding a rising tide of popular resistance to oppressive toil, the tyranny of kings and clergy or the arrogance of plutocratic privilege. Among many such entries, he copied, and probably recited, Shelley's 'Song to the Men of England':
Men of England, wherefore plough
For Lords who lay ye low?
Wherefore weave with toil and care
The rich robes your tyrants wear?3
He heard 'The Voice of Toil' and its exhortation:
When earth was younger, midst toil and hunger,
In hope we strove and our heads were strong.
Then great men led us, with words they fed us,
And bade us right the earthly wrong
...
Come shoulder to shoulder 'ere the world grows older,
The cause spread over land and sea.
Now the world shaketh and fear awaketh,
And there's joy at last for thee and me.4
He imagined that as working people came to realise their common destiny, they might presume to make their own history:
Kingcraft, priestcraft, black oppression
Cannot bear our scrutiny.
We have learned this startling lesson
If we will — we can be free.5
In keeping with the contemporary popularity of simple, sweeping panaceas for complex 'social problems', Anstey thought the democratisation of land ownership a plausible solution.
T'is a curse that burns and blights,
And t'will burn and blight till the People rise,
And swear while they break their hands,
That the hands will henceforth have acres,
And the acres henceforth have hands.6
Indeed, land monopolisation was a matter he later returned to during his State parliamentary career.7 In addition to verse of this kind, he selected idealist passages of prose such as Giuseppe Mazzini's 'Duties of Man', the more programmatic 'Manifesto of the Knights of Labor' and other declarations of an insurgent secular humanism.8 At the end of the commonplace book he toyed with the idea that, 'The tree of liberty only grows when watered by the blood of tyrants,' and contemplated the spectre of Robespierre.9 As he turned his back on the Sydney waterfront and began his journey to Melbourne in early 1887, a little steel had begun to temper his heroic political imagination. |
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Frank Anstey addresses the camera in the back yard of his home - 22 Howard St, East Brunswick, Victoria, c 1910
Frank Anstey Papers MS966 By permission National Library of Australia
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At different stages of his political career he recast this period of his life into a series of 'ripping yarns' that owed as much to his friend Louis Becke's South Seas adventure novels as they did to his actual maritime experience. There were several copies of well-thumbed Becke novels in the remnants of Anstey's library, and in 1912 he wrote an extravagant hymn of praise to Louis Becke, with the ringing peroration,
Hail to the men who personify the powers by which men emerge from the rut, and new nations rise out of the dust of things that are narrow and sordid and mean. Hail to Australian Louis Becke!10
While taking a turn as editor of Labor Call in 1909, perhaps inspired by Becke, he wrote a racy parable, with himself as participant narrator, about a shipwreck followed by a second perilous voyage in an unseaworthy vessel owned by the same ruthless profiteer. It was a dramatic narrative of foul weather, towering waves, a dismasting and terrible privation for the crew who promptly deserted at the next landfall. It was a desperate affair where they were only saved by the determination of the ship's master to make 'a port or perish'. Their once resolute captain had since retired to a secure, sedentary life ashore. That, said Anstey, was the trouble with the Labor Party. There were too many comfortable old time-servers and not enough 'port or perish' men. It was left to readers to decide who was who in his little parable, but there was no mistaking the role he had cast for himself.11 |
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Anstey had also contrived for himself a place in the final days of 'Bully' Hayes, the 'Last of the Pirates'. He gave a lecture on the subject for the Victorian Socialist Party at the Gaiety Theatre on 3 July 1910.12 On another occasion he claimed that Hayes had taken him on as 'cupbearer and punkah wallah to his last love Jennie Ford'.13 In 1913 he told A.T. Saunders, a journalist with the Adelaide Mail, that he was with Hayes aboard the Lotus on the pirate's last voyage to the Marshall Islands where he was killed.14 Taking care not to claim that he had actually witnessed Hayes' murder, he told Saunders:
The Lotus anchored, and I was sent ashore with one of the coloured crew in the only boat the Lotus had, leaving Hayes, Peters and Mrs Ford aboard. This was the day Hayes was killed; but I did not see him killed. The first I knew about it was hearing Mrs Ford screaming after we had arrived a couple of hours. Then the Lotus drifted on the reef at Jaluit, and was wrecked.15
He wrote similar direct, descriptive accounts of action adventures at sea in his memoirs of 'A Life on the Ocean wave' more than 20 years later.16 Stories such as these illustrate how he had developed the persona of the knock-about, larger-than-life character of whom it was said, 'Anstey and adventure cannot be separated'. It did not matter that the story about being with Hayes was untrue. When Hayes was killed, Anstey was an 11-year-old who, 16 months later, was given an inscribed book as a Sunday school prize for Bible recitation at Silvertown, a dockside suburb of London where he lived with his family until he stowed away on a ship to Australia as a 14-year-old.17 The audiences who read and heard his stories willingly suspended disbelief at these engagingly vivid tales that conformed so closely to familiar narrative conventions, were consonant with the developing persona of the story-teller and plausible in what was becoming, in his public speeches at least, the Anstey theatre. For Anstey, this was all part of a continuing dialogue between public persona and private identity. Like many story-tellers, he never kept a particularly tight rein on the truth. Given the choice, he preferred galloping hyperbole to pedestrian veracity. Indeed, the significance of the Hayes story is not so much that it was a complete fabrication; rather, it is important for what it suggests about how Anstey was coming to see himself. Beginning with the heroic romanticism of some of the material in his commonplace book, supplemented by the reading of numerous adventure yarns, his fertile imagination combined them with direct experience in such a way as to blur the edges of fact and fiction. By this process he gradually reshaped his seafaring years into increasingly exciting stories that gathered momentum as they became more and more part of his public persona. His extravagant praise for Louis Becke suggested how sea stories, and those who created them, acquired heroic, almost epic stature. Through the distorting mirrors of memory and graduated self-deception some of that glory was reflected onto his own experience so that stories like the Hayes killing were imagined, crafted and allowed to take on a life of their own. They were certainly untrue and in part conceived with cynical intent at popular aggrandisement, but in the telling and re-telling over the years as he constantly recreated his past, they began to colonise his sense of self, less in matters of detail than in a more general heroic discourse that progressively suffused his identity. |
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By the late 1890s Anstey had married, settled in Melbourne and established a family.18 At that stage he had begun to emerge as an activist in union and political affairs. He played a small role in the Maritime strike, was a Seamen's Union delegate to Trades Hall Council and a branch member of the Labor Party. Like many of his contemporaries, he was impatient at the slow progress of the labour movement in Victoria. He was attracted to more radical, transformative ideas and projects that explicitly shunned the liberal-pluralist reformism of the older generation of labour leaders. Anstey's involvement in the establishment of the labour weekly Tocsin in 1897 and the Victorian Labour Federation a year later gave ample scope for his expansive imagination and dynamic, expressive personality.19 |
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According to its founding editor Bernard O'Dowd, the Tocsin co-operative would take a broad, humanist view of its role and its readership. They did not intend to 'pander to a mere class of labour'. The interests of 'Labour are the interests of all who labour'. They would not make the same mistake as others who 'divorce Labour from Life'. Workers were more than mere operatives or 'the sexless automaton of the political economy books', they were fully rounded humans with 'hopes, emotions, wrestlings with faith and with reason'.20 In many respects, their first editorial read like a passage from Anstey's earlier commonplace book, with the same generous, expansive humanism that characterised so many of its entries. Anstey certainly proclaimed the Tocsin gospel of labour renewal with alacrity. Honing his soap-box skills on each occasion, he was one of the most enthusiastic speakers for the Tocsin Clubs that were formed throughout the inner suburbs. Addressing subjects such as 'The Labour Movement and the Labour Party' or 'The Organisation of Labour: Old Methods and New', he appeared frequently at regular spots such as Smith Street, Collingwood and the Richmond Market Reserve.21 |
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In 1898 Anstey was even more prominent as a co-founder, with George Elmslie and Tom Tunnecliffe, of the Victorian Labour Federation (VLF), a short-lived cooperative modelled on the Belgian Workers' Party. It was a direct challenge to what they considered the moribund labour institutions in Victoria. According to its manifesto, the Federation would provide the kind of integrated organisation that Victorian workers needed to free themselves from capitalist exploitation and the grinding toil of wage labour. It would become a syndicated union, a production and distribution co-operative, a friendly society and, as its strength grew, a political force capable of transforming the social and economic conditions of working people.22 However, like most visionary schemes of its time, after a brief flourish, it collapsed in 1900 amid political bickering and personal recriminations. It did, nevertheless, provide a platform for many of the skills that were to be the hallmarks of Anstey's political persona for much of his public career. Although it was far from unique in the 1890s, the VLF's vision of itself as an agent of social transformation was entirely consistent with the broad, dramatic sweep of Anstey's political imagination. The indefatigable energy with which he proselytised its promise, the urgent, dramatic style of his presentation and the intense sincerity of his message were apparent during the initial campaign to establish the VLF. |
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The meetings to set up branches of the Federation were conducted as 'Nights of Song and Speech' designed to engage and persuade converts to the cause with a judicious blend of music hall entertainment and political recruitment. The one held in the Hibernian Hall, Swanston Street on 20 September 1898 was typical. The Federation orchestra opened proceedings with a rollicking performance of 'The Fatman's March' to the amusement of all present. The audience, having warmed to the spirit of the occasion, were then treated to a selection of light-hearted, sentimental and patriotic songs, which provided neatly-judged changes of mood. After a little comic relief, the first half of the program concluded with a stirring recitation of Byron's poignant 'Waterloo'. During the interval the orchestra provided a selection of popular tunes. The second half got off to a bouncy start with 'an acrobatic song and dance by Mr. Menzies'. After two more songs, the audience was judged to be in a receptive state of mind for the main event of the evening. With the VLF banner draped behind him, Anstey strode to centre stage and delivered 'a powerful appeal for support'. His usual format was to follow the Federation's manifesto fairly closely in reminding them of the parlous state of workers in Victoria, the iniquities of the capitalist system and the bright hopes for the future contained in the VLF's scheme to rejuvenate and elevate the working class to a higher state of social being. His peroration 'roused the audience to a pitch of enthusiasm' such that the building, which was 'packed to overflowing', resounded to a communal rendering of 'Auld Lang Syne', and the evening ended noisily with 'cheers for the Labour Federation'.23 It was significant that Anstey made the case for the Federation. Both his co-founders Elmslie and Tunnecliffe were competent speakers. But it was Anstey, with his insistent, staccato delivery, his variations in pace and mood with easy modulations from a cerebral to an emotional pitch, who had the capacity to engage, amuse and persuade audiences. As the centrepiece in a familiar theatrical format, he was becoming more of a public figure who expressed, and partly personified, the energetic vitality of a younger, transformative generation of labour activists. |
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After the failure of the VLF, in which the more tempestuous aspects of Anstey's personality were publicly displayed for the first time, he decided to energise the Labor Party from within rather than criticise it from the fringe. Despite some wry comment on his speedy conversion to parliamentary politics, he stood as a Labor candidate at the 1900 election for the State seat of East Bourke Boroughs, and lost. As Secretary of the Tocsin Co-operative, he campaigned in defence of Ted Findley who was expelled from the Victorian Parliament for Tocsin's 'libel on the King'.24 In 1902, against the electoral tide, he won the seat at his second attempt and promptly gave the Legislative Assemble a sample of his fiery invective in denouncing Malcolm Kenneth McKenzie, a Minister for Lands who was found to have acted corruptly in the administration of his Department. Angered by the Government's decision to allow McKenzie to resign without any further penalty, compared to Findley's expulsion for his tangential association with Tocsin's reprint of an article critical of the King, Anstey gave vent to deeply-felt personal and class animosity.
This self-glorified and modern Pharisee was tried by his peers, and no sooner was he tried than it was shown that this sanctimonious sniveller who was always sniffing for other men's sins was the greatest liar, thief, and poltroon that ever controlled an administrative department of this State.25
It was an early indication of the passionate intensity that would often erupt during his parliamentary speeches. It was occasions such as this that Frederick Eggleston had in mind when he suggested that Anstey was a 'consummate mob orator' whose speeches in the Assembly had 'a rough force, a demoniac energy of invective that is extraordinary. In them we feel some strange force drawn from the depths of working-class feeling that is primitive and elemental'.26 While his apparent emotional volatility was curious to some observers, to others it fuelled the rough eloquence of a workers' champion. His contribution to the debate on Irvine's Strike Suppression Bill that proposed to treat Victorian railway workers as mutineers rather than simply workers on strike was a case in point.27 It was his view that the error of equating an industrial dispute with a direct challenge to constitutional authority had led to the 'usurpation of the rights, liberty and privileges of the people'. The Bill before the House was a vile abuse of authority, not a defence of it. Besides, the Government's parsimony and class hostility had forced the men into a position where, at great cost to themselves and their families, they had to take direct action to defend their livelihood and their liberties as common citizens. Nothing would be achieved by the ruthless provisions contained in the Bill. As the dispute had now come to a crisis, some means must be found so that both sides could retreat with dignity because, he told the Assembly in a ringing peroration, by brutal suppression:
You may impose the silence of peace, but beware that you do not spread abroad like a pestilence hatred and revenge, for which the country is inevitably bound to pay. ... Instead of promoting differences of classes, we should seek by what means the opposing forces may be brought together, and the agencies of government may be used for the common well-being. There is a curse upon the legislation that breeds hatred. Every man worthy to be a representative of the people, and who loves his country, will use every legitimate means to prevent that hatred from becoming part and parcel of the politics of this sunny south.28
It mattered little that the Bill was never passed. The workers capitulated to Irvine's terms and the Bill was not necessary to punish the strike leaders. The Government simply refused to re-employ them. While the strike was a disaster for the railway workers, for Anstey it was a triumph. With that speech he had moved from a local hero in labour circles to wider public prominence. The Melbourne Punch said, 'There was a rude eloquence, a depth of pathos in it'.29 The Sydney Bulletin began to notice him too.
Nobody's reputation was more enhanced by Vic. Railway men's strike than that of Frank Anstey, Labor M.P. for East Bourke Boroughs. Unlike Dr. Maloney, he didn't stonewall Irvine's Bill: he analysed it — and that was the cruellest thing that anybody could do to it. His speech then got very close to oratory.30
The Arena-Sun was more succinct. 'Mr. F. Anstey threatens to become leader of the Victorian Labour Party.31 For reasons that became better known as his career developed, State Caucus did not agree. |
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While his reputation as a vigorous Labor orator grew, Anstey was also building his expertise in his shadow portfolio. In a series of organising tours throughout country Victoria with people like Tom Mann, Lillian Locke, Tom Tunnecliffe and Charlie McGrath he studied the pattern of land development and listened to the views of small farmers and rural workers. Supplementing this with detailed research in the Parliamentary Library, he wrote several articles for the Labor Call, which were subsequently consolidated into a 1906 book, Monopoly and Democracy. Essentially, he presented a case in line with Labor policy proposing that large pastoral estates be broken up by a progressive tax on unimproved land values to encourage closer settlement of rural Victoria by small-holder, yeoman farmers.32 It was the first in a succession of publications, beginning as articles and ending as pamphlets or books, which became the basis for his subsequent reputation as a popular political theorist. |
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Anstey's public role as one of Victorian Labor's most colourful personalities was exemplified in a series of tussles with the Christian social reformers in 1906–7. On 13 May 1906 an expectant crowd gathered at the Melbourne Wesley Church to hear the prominent Methodist lay preacher William Henry Judkins declare righteous war on that embodiment of social evil, John Wren. Denouncing Wren's role in boxing, horse racing and other sports, Judkins claimed that Wren's gambling interests corrupted all manner of popular sports. 'It was one of the curses of today that they could scarcely have any sport without gambling.33 There was, of course, nothing new in this. Christian social reformers, or 'Wowsers' as less virtuous citizens were wont to call them, had campaigned for many years against the 'evils' inherent in sport and gambling, smoking and drinking, dancing, the theatre, 'impure thoughts' and 'demoralising literature'. Judkins was simply the latest in a long line of evangelical preachers who believed that 'clean living', as an outward sign of Christian virtue, was the community's only defence against social degeneration. There were many poor souls who, tempted by a multitude of social evils, had slid from the path of righteousness into the pit of sin and ruin. It was the duty of all true Christians to protect them from such a fate. Where evangelical persuasion had failed to secure religious conversion and moral regeneration, the state would have to step in to save people from their own weakness by eliminating the abundant opportunities for sin. Thus, in the last resort, the state rather than individual conscience would become the community's moral guardian. Judkins' declaration of war on Wren came on top of George Swinburne's revival of the campaign to reform the liquor trade in 1905. A series of events including the bombing of Detective Sergeant O'Donnell's house and the death of 'Big Mick' McLeod, a defaulting bookmaker, at the hand of an irate mob of Flemington punters, fuelled an atmosphere of moral panic in which the Licensing Bill and the Gaming Suppression Bill were debated in the Victorian parliament. Anstey, a boxing fan, moderate drinker, occasional punter and friend of John Wren resolutely opposed the Wowser campaign which, in turn, led Judkins to oppose him in the 1907 election for the seat of Brunswick. |
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The Licensing Bill, with its proposals to close down many smaller clubs and hotels, according to Anstey, would simply encourage monopolisation of the drink trade, with fewer little pubs and workingmen's clubs available for the common man. On closer inspection, he alleged, it revealed a bias against the working class since they drank in public houses while the rich took their tipple in private. Characteristically, he resorted to verse:
The rich man is invisible
In the crowd of his gay society;
But the poor man's delight
Is a sore in the sight,
And a stench in the nose of piety.34
The temperance literature, he suggested, presumed that the more money and time workers had, the more they would spend on leisure, drink and other debilitating pastimes.
Therefore, the best way, according to this literature, to diminish lunacy and to diminish crime is to keep the workingmen working many hours, and give them very little for it, so that they may have very little to spend.35
It was not the want of moral fibre among the working class that led them to drink, crime and insanity.
The facts of history ... show ... that all efforts to improve the sobriety of the people by restrictions have failed so long as Governments and communities have failed to improve the social conditions of the people — the conditions under which they have worked and lived and had their being.36
These basic issues — employment, housing and education — were at the heart of Labor's program to raise the working class to a higher level of social existence. That program offered the only real hope of improving sobriety, health and morality. As such, Labor policy arose from 'an unspoken temperance movement based really on social and political reform'.37 Not only was this class legislation, he declared in a bluntly secularist conclusion that echoed his commonplace book, but 'Woe betide the democracy of any country if the Church is to once more rule the destinies of nations'.38 |
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Sir Samuel Gillott's Gaming Suppression Bill proposed extensive powers to prohibit all manner of gambling, including some charitable raffles and even, Anstey alleged at the committee stage of the Bill, the traditional trade union 'Christmas Goose' club.39 Nobody, however, was under any illusion about its primary purpose. It was intended to shut down John Wren's extensive gambling and racing interests.40 Labor Members denounced the Bill as 'class legislation' and were, in reply, accused of being 'in Wren's pocket'. Anstey argued the party line with customary flourish.
In one week, suicides, embezzlements, murder, crime, insanity, and poverty are supposed to flow from drink; in another week the case of all those evils is the gambling of the poor, and at another time, it is their boxing proclivities.
The causes were the same as before.
I will affirm that the evil of gambling that you propose to cure is a partial reflex of the society to which we all belong — rotten and reeking with the gambling of its people, based upon speculation and upon corruption, based upon making something out of some other man.41
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In a move that caught Premier Tommy Bent and his government napping, Anstey moved an amendment to outlaw all betting.42 His point was to show that the Bill was not really concerned with eliminating a social evil but was intended 'to give a monopoly of the gambling to one particular set of institutions', meaning the exclusive Victoria Racing Club. As such, 'It is nothing but putrid hypocrisy and cant'.43 Without realising what the amendment meant, Bent accepted it, to the great consternation of all concerned with the Spring Racing Carnival that was then at its height. In the end, a compromise Bill was passed, which allowed charity raffles, made some concessions to Wren's pony track and trotting interests but closed his Tote, forcing him to change the emphasis of this business activities. The biggest casualty, however, was Gillott, the reforming Attorney-General who proposed the Bill. Using leaked information, both Judkins and his journalistic arch-critic, John Norton of the Truth, revealed that Gillott had inadvertently loaned money to Melbourne's most notorious brothel-keeper, Madame Brussels. He promptly resigned and departed for London.44 |
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One of the first people to acknowledge Anstey's role in Labor's confrontation with the Wowsers was Judkins, who stood against him in Brunswick when Bent called an election for 15 March 1907.45 In one of the most boisterous campaigns for some years, Judkins was backed by the Victorian Alliance and the Social Reform Movement, with assistance from the Protestant Electors' Committee and the Scripture Instruction Election Campaign Council who pressed for Bible teaching in government schools. The Salvation Army leadership backed Judkins, as did the Rechabites. Anstey, one of Labor's more vociferous secularists, was seen to embody all that was pernicious about the allegedly corrupt Wren-Catholic-ALP alliance. He confirmed their view by issuing a provocative pamphlet denouncing religious instruction in state schools and the Protestant Churches' attitude to working-class reform.46 In addition to his Labor Party and trade union network in the electorate, Anstey drew support from the Brunswick Football Club, where John Curtin and Frank Hyett, two of his protégés played; the League of Sportsmen, which was said to enjoy Wren's patronage; and the Licensed Victuallers' Association, which was alleged to have arranged an unusually large fleet of cars to take Anstey supporters to the polls on election day. After a campaign of increasingly vitriolic accusations about sectarian hostility and class enmity or moral degeneracy and political corruption at indoor and street-corner meetings, some of which descended into pugilistic persuasion, the electors of Brunswick chose 'Mr Anstey, the workingman's friend' with 60 per cent of their votes.47 |
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By this stage of his career Anstey had built a public profile as a vigorous, resolute and entertaining politician. All the elements of the Anstey theatre were displayed in his public meetings during the election campaign; dramatic rhetorical flourishes, slashing wit and ironic humour providing colour and movement on a platform of strong, sincere views about the underlying issues. In the flashes of anger and the biting irony about the Wowsers, the churches and their class hypocrisy during parliamentary debates and the election campaign, there were signs of a deep and abiding resentment at the hostility and condescension towards the working class implicit in the reformers' proposals. Although he was quick to acknowledge the tragic consequences of excessive gambling and alcohol abuse on working-class families, particularly women and children, he detected an underlying hostility to the popular diversions of workingmen and a sneeringly condescending assumption that it arose from an inherent want of moral fibre. The social problems that so agitated the Wowsers were not the result of feckless, self-indulgent workingmen shirking their family responsibilities but the clear and logical outcome of the poverty, insecurity and misery inherent in the system of wage labour that the Wowsers and their middle-class political allies so strongly supported. Along with his Labor colleagues, Anstey argued very forcefully in defence of gambling and drinking as a workingman's right and a legitimate part of customary, male working-class culture. If this was in happy convergence with Wren's commercial interests, then so be it, but that was not the point. What was distinctive about Anstey's contribution to the 1906–7 debates was that he, better than anyone else on his side, detected the gratuitous, condescending insult at the core of the Wowser assault on working-class culture. It was a point that resonated very clearly with his supporters who began to see him as a working-class hero. |
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There was clear evidence that at least some saw it that way. Although Anstey said that he had 'never enjoyed a contest so much in my life', he had been exhausted by it and his doctor advised a long rest. A group of friends including Ted Findley, George Carter and George Elmslie organised an appeal to send him on a health trip to 'see his mother in England'.48 Within two weeks they had raised enough to purchase a saloon, return ticket to England and a purse containing 175 sovereigns. The purse of sovereigns, alone, was worth more than six months parliamentary salary, suggesting that his admirers were not only among the impecunious working class of Brunswick. A 'smoke night' attended by some 500 of his local supporters, Labor colleagues and civic worthies, including the mayor who had supported Judkins, was held at the Town Hall on the evening before he sailed for England. Findley, on behalf of the Citizens' Presentation Committee, presented him with the ticket and the purse and Anstey responded with obvious sincerity.
I am going to realise the dream of my life, for it will be the joy of my life to meet my mother once again, and be able to tell her that the boy who left in poverty and ignorance has, after a hard battle, obtained the position of a member of Parliament of his adopted country.
The following day, he was given an 'enthusiastic farewell' by a 'large assemblage of public men'.49 He had also, it seems, left an enduring impression on his political opponents in Brunswick who considered his local support so strong as to allow him to be returned unopposed at the 1908 Victorian elections.50 |
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In England Anstey visited his mother, returning to the north Devon of his paternal ancestors where he spend some of his early childhood, campaigned with his British Labour comrades in the Jarrow by-election and reported from England on the Stuttgart Congress of the Socialist Second International for the Labor Call. After returning from his sabbatical he lectured and wrote on the need for class solidarity rather than socialist sectarianism, resumed the arduous and largely unrewarding work of country organising and helped the tramway workers in his electorate become members of the union, against management resistance. He was a delegate to the 1908 ALP Commonwealth Conference but took little significant part in its deliberations. He was interested in, but said nothing about O'Malley's scheme for a Commonwealth Bank. During his last term in the Victorian Parliament he made regular, if rather routine contributions to debates and, in 1909 seemed to be spending more time preparing for a move to the Commonwealth Parliament. His final speech in the Legislative Assembly, however, was significant for what it revealed about the kind of class culture he championed so vigorously. Speaking on a local government amendment bill that would allow local councils to place restrictions on Wren's boxing matches, he declared, 'This Bill is pandering to an effeminate class, who want to womanise the community, and to rob it of all that is manly'.51 |
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Building on his strong base in Brunswick, Anstey contested and won the federal seat of Bourke at the 1910 election, and was almost elected to the Fisher Ministry. His maiden speech was on the Australian Notes Bill, which signalled his growing interest in finance and banking. In his first term, however, there were some further signs of the volatile, rather tempestuous dimensions of his exuberant personality. In March 1912 he predicted that, in its commitment to seek constitutional powers by referenda to legislate more decisively in a number of areas, the Labor Party was courting electoral defeat. This put him at odds with the Party leadership and marked him as a difficult colleague.52 It only made things worse when he was proved right at the 1913 election. During that campaign he published a pamphlet that attacked Deakin with the kind of unforgiving vituperation he had heaped on opponents in the Victorian Parliament.53 When Labor returned to the Opposition benches he only won two votes in the Caucus shadow ministry election. While he was clearly one of Labor's shock troops in the class war, only one other Caucus member thought him officer material. |
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During and immediately after World War I, Anstey took a radical, oppositional path to national political prominence that transformed his persona from local hero defending masculinist working-class culture to harbinger of revolutionary insurrection. It began shortly before the 1914 election. Drawing extensively on English socialist works, he denounced the War Trust that consisted of politicians, army and navy officers, senior clergymen and newspaper people who were linked by a network of financial and social connections. All had a part to play in stimulating hatreds, planning and conducting hostilities, sanctifying the slaughter and maintaining jingoistic hysteria.
The moneyed capitalist class interested in the sale of material, and the military section interested in the maintenance of an exclusive caste, are astute enough to trade on the racial pride and upon the sentimental traditions of the multitude. To this pride and those traditions they address themselves, whether from press or platform, whether to German or British, and by these means nations are kept apart, industries crippled, multitudes kept poor, that a non-productive class my be created, and the makers of war material grow richer and more powerful.
The contemporary political lesson was obvious.
This is not the way to 'defend civilization'. The Labor movement functioned to make war upon hunger, disease, dirt, destitution, ignorance, unemployment and slums, not upon imaginary enemies — enemies that no man can tell you who they are or what they are.54
It was a view, of course, not far from the Hardie-Vaillant resolution adopted by the Second International in its tragically ineffective declaration of 'war against war'.55 It was, however, a long way from Fisher's campaign declaration on 31 July that Australia would stand beside Britain 'to our last man and our last shilling'. Despite being at odds with the patriotic fervour that accompanied the declaration of war, Anstey was returned with an increased majority. For the next two years he was a constant critical irritation to the Fisher, then Hughes governments, most notably in debate on the War Precautions Bill in April 1915.56 However, his increasingly strident opposition to the war appeared in print rather than on the floor of the House. |
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Between 1915 and 1921 Anstey developed an elaborate, left populist political economy of finance capital that drew on the British radical tradition and added his distinctive analysis of Australian capitalist elites. Building on the War Trust articles, he wrote another series for Labor Call that emphasised the role of financial institutions in wartime mobilisation. These were expanded into the pamphlets War and Finance, then The Kingdom of Shylock which was revised and expanded under the same title in 1917, and finally as the book Money Power in 1921.57 As the war ground on with its pay freeze and domestic shortages, with ever mounting casualty lists that touched more and more families, the deepening class, national and sectarian divisions that accompanied the 1916–17 conscription referenda and the 17 general strike, there was a growing audience for Anstey's denunciations of plutocratic avarice.
This war will put a millstone of debt around the necks of the producing classes of every country. It will grind them to degrading slavery. It will make the monetary power more powerful and opulent than ever. All who remain alive from the slaughter will toil to pay the parasitical classes annual tribute for the money invested in blood. All wars — all international wars — are the instruments by which iniquities re-establish their crumbling thrones, by dissipating on battlefields the human virility that threatened their existence.58
The effect of this would be to enhance the strength of finance capital within the modern capitalist system.
The 'Money Power' is something more than Capitalism. It is its product, and yet its master. 'Capitalism', in its control of the great agencies of production, is observable and understandable. The other lurks in vaults and banking chambers, masquerading its operations in language that mystifies or dazzles. ... Modern Capitalism throws ever-increasing power into the hands of men who operate the monetary machine. These men constitute 'The Financial Oligarchy'.59
No matter who claimed victory in the war, in the long run the Money Power would win.
Men may die but Money makes no sacrifice. It looks upon bloody war as a rich gold mine yielding fat dividends for ever and ever without end. Human bloodsuckers, who risk neither life nor limb nor penny, wax fat on Armageddon.60
Only after these sinister parasites have been exposed and deposed would it be possible for the toiling masses to seek a truly socialist solution through the agencies of the democratic state.
It is not a question of class or of class interests. The class struggle will disappear with the exterminated interests of the predatory cliques. It is a question of the capacity of the State to meet the rising tide of its responsibilities.61
Although these were not original views, Anstey was among the first Australian political figures to express them, consistently argue and then put them together into an extended argument in book form as Money Power. Moreover, as support for the war diminished in the labour movement, especially after 1916–17, many others joined the chorus to sing a similar song.62 |
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Although Anstey had emerged as one of Labor's leading popular theorists on the relationship between capitalism and war, he became equally prominent in the various campaigns against the Hughes government after 1916. In 1915 he had already fallen out with the party leadership and the State Executive of the ALP over policy issues. His bitter fight with Hughes, before the 1916 split, over the War Precautions Act was one of the set-piece parliamentary battles of 1915. His support for Tom Barker of the IWW over the suppression of his anti-recruiting poster plainly identified him as one of the most 'left' Caucus members. This was confirmed in the numerous cases he fought over Hughes's draconian use of the War Precautions Act and the censorship powers it gave officials to suppress dissent. His profile as a leader of the parliamentary left was confirmed in the anti-conscription campaigns when the Trade Union Anti-Conscription committee put him up as lead speaker at large meeting in places as diverse as Sydney and Hobart.63 On both platform and in print, he had become one of the most passionately forthright and controversial figures on the left of the Labor Party. Although there is no direct evidence at this stage of his career to indicate how he saw himself, there is a parliamentary speech that is clear about how he wanted to be seen, as a politician at least. Looking back over his childhood and the present condition of England he was not well pleased.
I would refuse to fight or to shed another drop of blood for the maintenance of an England such as has been dominated by the moneyed powers for the last fifty years, by those who have made the slums and destroyed the people. They have crushed out their souls, they have plunged them into horrible misery, and they are now throwing them into the battle lines.
It was not country or parliament or party that held his allegiance.
Do honourable members desire to know what I live for? I have come out of the bowels of the working class, as others on this side have done. I have been put into a position in the Parliament of this country. I try to be as true as I can to the class to which I belong — not because it is a class, but because it constitutes the great mass of the people. By its very numbers it constitutes the Democracy, the Demos, the great mass of the people.
He had long since rejected the Empire. The nation, ruled by profiteers and apostate politicians, had surrendered all just claims to his loyalty. The party he had helped to build had retreated in abject cowardice from its principles and its responsibility to those who had trusted it to defend them. All that was left was the class from which he had come, the common people.
So it is today that the hope of the world — the hope of peace — comes from the rising revolutionary spirit of the people. The revolutionary movement in Russia is spreading to all the countries, and we have seen from the cables that have recently appeared that the controlling powers in Germany dread more the spread of revolutionary doctrines than they do the bayonets of the enemy.64
The future he had longed for all his life was unfolding on the other side of the world and he wanted to see it. |
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In February 1918 Anstey abruptly left for Europe via the USA.65 After arriving in England he was credentialed to a press delegation that visited the Western Front and Ireland. In addition to numerous parts of England, he also visited Switzerland, Scandinavia and France where he observed some of the Peace Conference proceedings, all the while gathering material for a book on the Russian Revolution. He arrived home in May 1919 and in September Red Europe was published.66 It provided a dramatic narrative of events leading up to the February revolution, the formation and demise of Kerenski's Provisional Government, the October revolution, the ensuing intervention and civil war. Given the limited sources available to him, it was not surprising that the book only had 16 pages about the October Revolution. Most of the text concerned the intervention, reactions to the revolution and the horrors of the civil war. It told the story of a seismic historical uprising and its brutal aftershocks across the vast expanse of Eurasia. It was written in the same direct, passionate and engaging style that had made him famous as a parliamentary orator and had drawn large audiences to his public addresses. One of the more interesting dimensions to his account of the revolution was the moral drama that drove the narrative. For Anstey, it was more than the long-awaited revolution of the toiling masses, which many on the left had been predicting must eventually come. It was a desperate struggle between the terrible majesty of righteous insurrection and the barbarity of reactionary privilege. It was not only a great moral drama sprawling across the Eurasian continent towards its bloody resolution. Around the globe it fanned a smouldering working-class grievance and delivered symbolic redress of every systemic injustice, gratuitous slight or petty tyranny embedded in the wage labour relationship. It was that great historical moment when centuries of oppression were finally beginning to crumble against the invincible power of an insurgent humanity. Heralding a 'red dawn', he warned ominously:
The impatient world will wait no longer. The frailties of men, the soul-pawning for the prestige of an hour, the desertions of the timid, of the Iscariots for cash, will furnish no despondency. They will all count as part of the inevitable loss in the battle line. Capitalism listens with quaking soul to the drum-beats of the Armies of Revolution. Those beats grow louder and louder — they draw nearer and nearer.67
Anstey repeated the message to large and enthusiastic audiences in Melbourne and further afield. The book was banned in New Zealand. The 1921 Glasgow edition was said to have sold 'hundreds of thousands of copies in Canada and America'. It became part of the required reading for the generation of young socialist radicals who were, at the time, founding the Australian Communist Party.68 Anstey was at the peak of his powers. He had achieved something of the heroic stature among his radical and working-class constituency that he had imagined as a young seaman. He had, on the platform and in print, become the tribune of the people, a harbinger of their destiny. |
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But despite the portents of 1917–21, Australian workers did not rise in righteous revolution against the iniquities of capitalist exploitation. Instead, they clung in sullen acquiescence to liberal parliamentary democracy, the Labor Party, to their unions and arbitration and the hope of frugal comfort in a home of their own. Despite occasional moments of political excitement, the 1920s were largely a decade of unrewarding prospects for Anstey. In January 1922 he was elected Assistant Leader of the ALP in the House of Representatives but, citing ill health, he resigned from the position in March 1927 in disgust at factional intrigue and distaste for the grinding, mundane work of parliamentary leadership. There were particular issues that excited his pugnacious instincts such as periodic industrial relations fights or the 1924 Commonwealth Bank Bill that prompted the pamphlet Money Power Strangles Australia, which denounced the creation of a Board of businessmen to oversee the Bank.69 His now renowned, theatrical oratory was principally directed at Stanley Melbourne Bruce who, despite a sneaking regard for Anstey, treated it with patrician condescension. There were occasions where it seemed that Anstey was still living in the revolutionary ferment of 1917–21 and, that moment gone, was frustrated by its passing. Earle Page observed him with an eye accustomed to medical case notes:
He burst into debates like a tempest. His torrent of biting sarcasm and devastating wit was supplemented by a wealth of facial expressions and emphatic gestures, which brought a dramatic quality to the debates in which he joined. He was, however, extremely temperamental and, having worked himself into a positive frenzy on the floor of the House, was likely to subside into a deep depression and terminate his speech after an unwelcome interjection.70
Some of this volatile energy was revived during the debates over industrial relations and arbitration that dominated federal politics in 1928–29. Anstey was particularly enlivened by the prospect of Hughes taking revenge on Bruce, his successor in the Nationalist Party leadership and hence Prime Ministership, over the future of federal arbitration.71 |
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When Bruce so grievously miscalculated the electoral mood in 1929 Anstey promptly found himself Minister for Health and Repatriation in the Scullin Government, a portfolio he proceeded to oversee with perfunctory, if undistinguished competence. Anstey said little in public about the early months of the Government. He was presumably silenced by the principle of Cabinet confidentiality, but he did claim in his memoirs that, after hearing Commonwealth Bank Chairman Sir Robert Gibson's gloomy outlook for the economy, he advised the Government to force a double dissolution to win the Senate because the Bank would surely obstruct them.72 He also suggested that on economic policy issues, 'Cabinet discussion drifted into a debate between Theodore and myself'.73 After the Government accepted the orthodox, deflationary advice of Sir Otto Niemeyer in August 1930 Anstey could no longer restrain himself. In September — October he wrote a series of articles, subsequently published as the pamphlet Facts and Theories of Finance, which denounced professional economists and orthodox theory.74
In Parliament, on the platform, in the Press, their books and their doctrines were quoted as Holy Writ to prove that the worker was the pre-destined victim of forces over which he had no control.75
Given that Niemeyer had prescribed a cessation of borrowing, cuts in expenditure and balanced budgets without any equivalent reduction in interest rates on the loans that were crippling government finances, he declared:
the efforts to raise wages, to reduce hours, to improve social conditions must be a fruitless task while increasing interest (and taxation to meet the bill) consumes more and more of the substance of human toil. WHAT GOES TO THE PAWNBROKERS CANNOT GO INTO THE HOME.76
During the New South Wales election campaign in which the NSW Labor Party's slogan was 'Men versus Money', Anstey joined Jack Lang at a Queanbeyan rally and denounced the Niemeyer Mission, telling the audience that, 'These people do not want government [of] the people, by the people for the people, but government by finance for finance'.77 Addressing a rally of some ten thousand in the Sydney Domain, he indirectly referred to his Labor colleagues who supported the Niemeyer Plan, 'Whosoever at this hour seeks to solve the problems and difficulties that beset us by the degradation of the masses is no longer with us and is not of us'.78 In the widening division between Lang's NSW Branch of the ALP and Federal Labor, there was little doubt about Anstey's position. In early January 1931 he put it beyond doubt, saying that Australia should tell foreign creditors that it could not pay, suggesting that the Government should 'Default and be damned'.79 When the State Premiers met in February to consider the Federal Government's Theodore Plan, Lang tabled his provocative plan that effectively called for the repudiation of foreign debt and declared factional war on Theodore.80 In a Caucus spill of positions on 2 March Anstey was dumped from Cabinet for his support of the Lang Plan. Behind the cheerily ironic barbs in his parting statement to the press there were signs of a slide from his usual truculent defiance to a more despondent mood.
The Theodore-Scullin Cabinet tolerated me and my absurdities much longer than I would have tolerated them and their wisdom. They were, and they are, a Cabinet of the unctuous, the righteous, ... and when a group of honest men like that permit me to escape with my life I am very thankful. ... My disappearance from the Cabinet means the restoration of public confidence, the squaring of Budgets, the supply of unlimited credit, and the associated banks and the general public will now have a confidence in the honesty of Mr Theodore and his associates which they never had in me, and so I am truly grateful. Good-bye.81
He retreated to the backbench, rising only to berate the Government for what it was doing to the unemployed and the pensioners in the Premiers' Plan, declaring that, 'this Government is crucifying the very people who raised its members from obscurity and placed them in power. I am appalled that they should even contemplate doing this contemptible thing'.82 He did not, however, vote against the Government when the Lang Labor faction brought it down on 25 November 1931. |
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The ALP lost the December election in a landslide.83 In Bourke, Anstey went from 77.4 per cent in 1929 to 51.1 per cent in 1931. He confided his bitterness in a letter to his old friend J. K. McDougall.
It is not the enemy that scares me. It is the hopeless, spineless mob you try to save. The educated democracy is a myth. The Government of the people is a delusion. As much as ever, they worship images of rags, and wood and stone. They will perish for a king, or a priest, as in the days of old, and see their children starve without a kick. They are hopeless — they have only the instincts of slaves, and in them there is no hope — and I am finished.84
That last sentence suggests that he had invested more than just his parliamentary career in the 'spineless mob'. Between 1932 and the 1934 election at which he retired from parliament he made only four inconsequential speeches. |
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After retiring in 1934, Anstey moved to Sydney and bought a block of flats on Campbell Parade, Bondi. There, with his ailing wife Kate, he settled into the daily routines of life in a city that had been part of his youth. He supervised the flats, enjoyed an occasional drink in his local pub, attended Labor Party branch meetings and walked on the beach. He seemed, at last, to have reached a point in life where he might be able to cope with Kate's illnesses and enjoy some modest repose in his declining years. But his yarns at the pub and branch meetings, even the quiet moments contemplating the sea reminded him of unfinished business with his past. In an effort to make peace with himself, he wrote his memoirs. |
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He started with the Scullin government. The memoir began in his customary polemical style recounting significant moments in the Scullin government's progress to political oblivion.85 There was a jaunty irony in the early passages along with a certain generosity to old adversaries like Stanley Melbourne Bruce and Ted Theodore, but with each episode in the government's disintegration his voice modulated to a querulous, then increasingly bitter tone. Towards the end his language turned to rage, declaring that, among its numerous acts of political apostasy, in shifting its policy from inflation to deflation between November 1930 and August 1931, the government had 'swallowed its vomit', and that Scullin was 'never anything more than [a] "pitiable cipher", a mere jumping jack to the Bank Board'.86 By then, coming to terms with his past had become a settling of old scores, and he was not taking prisoners. Finally, railing against the ungrateful 'crowds' in his near defeat at the 1931 electoral landslide, his emotional roller coaster came to a halt in a mire of maudlin resignation.
There were many men in Parliament older than myself but I decided I was finished — not again would I be a candidate. The worldly hopes I had set my heart upon had turned to ashes and everything was sour in the mouth. There was no prospect that if Labor returned to office, with all-requisite power, it would be any different to its competitors. It was only the difference between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Both sides, when out of power, promised what they never meant to perform when in power — nothing fundamental was changed. It was time to go. I had become an annoyance to all sane, sensible Labor men, so I selected obscurity and left the limelight and dollars to wiser and more saintly men.87
There was, after all, nothing that 'an honest man' could do but wait for the day 'when forces more powerful than himself make for change' because:
The forces of the world do not threaten — they operate. The great tides of the world do not give notice that they are going to rise and run — they rise in their might and those who stand in their way are overwhelmed.88
But it was not just Anstey. It was ever the melancholy fate of mortals to be swept along on the tides of calamity. An heroic conception of his role in bringing a Promethean message to Australian workers had defined his persona, given meaning and purpose to his exertions and compensated for all the miserable defeats and sordid compromises of a life in parliamentary politics. But when the Labor Party so abjectly surrendered to the Money Power in 1931, and so many of his own people in Bourke at the December election had turned their backs on him, it was more than an electoral rout. It signified betrayal by a cowardly, selfish mob. After more than 30 years representing them, they had turned against him. It was not just a political reversal, or a personal disappointment; it signified the erosion of a faith and the crumbling of an identity. |
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At various times between 1935 and 1939 he scratched out a series of vignettes drawn from European history.89 Henry V's victory at Agincourt was not an heroic triumph, but a brutal slaughter where more men died from disease and pestilence than in combat. Joan of Arc and Savonarola were religious fanatics who eventually succumbed to the treachery of popes and princes. The Franciscans began as a religious order but soon grew into a ruthlessly efficient business enterprise. The great medieval universities were not dignified halls of learning but refuges for ruffians and criminals. Contemplation on the two statues of Charles I and Cromwell in London was the occasion for an essay on the blind, reactionary violence of the mob in history. In Anstey's usual way, these and all the other tendentious sketches that he wrote in the mid-1930s were constructed as political parables. At this stage of his life, however, they had lost the engaging didactic subtlety of his earlier works. The satire was rough and clumsy, the irony leaden, the wit bitter and raw. It was clear that his belief in the historical inevitability of social progress had slipped into a dystopian pessimism, and that his expansive humanism had given way to an acerbic misanthropy. Not all his ruminations, however, were suffused with unrelieved despondency. |
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As Anstey looked across the ocean from Campbell Parade, his thoughts drifted back to a youth at sea in the Pacific and, from there, to his childhood in England. He wrote a brief memoir of both.90 His recollections of childhood were particularly significant. There is an interesting interplay between the old man and the child in both the prose and the narrative structure of the memoir. Addressed to posterity under the title 'Now I am Dead', it began by locating his forebears in Devon with references to the origins of the family name in Roman times and, later, in the Domesday Book. It is there, in north Devon, near the town of Witheridge on a family farm that he recalled his first childish impressions of farms and family, animals and outings, of villages, landscapes bearing the eerie marks of antiquity and Anstey gravestones in the village churchyard. Although he was born in London, he had been given to relatives at an early age while his recently widowed mother re-established her life. When she reclaimed him after her marriage to a one-legged ostler he remembered the direct, sensory experiences of childhood during a trip north to join his new stepfather at a construction camp on the Settle to Carlisle railway extension. He recalled, in sharp, almost cinematic focus, episodic glimpses of childhood as the family walked from job to job throughout the North and Midlands. The rough life of railway navvies, the glories of the English landscape in summer, the privations and intimacies of working-class life in a mining village, stealing apples from a picturesque orchard and the tempestuous personality of his step-father were all relived through the acute eyes of the child. The old man's didactic, authorial voice, however, intruded more sombre allusions to the drab poverty and quiet desperation of itinerant working-class lives. In recalling his childhood as he contemplated his death, he thought of England in all its gentle beauty, and its squalid misery; of a 'green and pleasant land' and of 'dark satanic mills'. The old man who faced oblivion in the vast indifference of a secular universe contented himself with a memoir of childhood conjured by a romantic imagination.91 |
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After Kate died he returned to Melbourne and went to live with Harriet Middlecoat in her Brunswick house where, at last, he did appear to find some solace.92 But it was not to last. Somewhere around 1939 he developed bowel cancer. As his condition worsened, and old comrades and adversaries came to pay their respects, he penned his will and gave his son Daron instructions for his funeral.
When I am dead give my carcase to the undertaker with instructions to have it cremated. There are to be no followers or flowers or praise, prayers or preachers. No burial, death or other advertisement in any paper. Any person who by advertisement gives publicity to my death does so against my wishes and their authority to do so should be repudiated.93
In preparing for death, he took solace in a smaller, private history as his thoughts returned to the West Country of his ancestors where, with all the tragic resonances of Thomas Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge, his imagination finally came to rest.94 |
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Endnotes
* This article draws substantially on Peter Love, Frank Anstey: a Political Biography, PhD thesis, Department of History, Australian National University, 1990. I thank the two anonymous referees for their instructive comments.
1. Ibid., chs 1–2.
2. The commonplace book is in the Anstey papers, Manuscripts Collection, National Library of Australia (hereafter NLA) MS 512/3.
3. Ibid., p. 24.
4. Ibid., p. 18.
5. Ibid., p. 61.
6. Ibid., pp. 57–8.
7. See, for example, F. Anstey, Monopoly and Democracy: the Land Question of Victoria, Labor Call, Melbourne, 1906.
8. Commonplace book, p. 125 for Mazzini and p. 78 for the Knights of Labor.
9. Ibid., pp. 125–6.
10. Labor Call, 19 December 1912, p. 5. George Lewis (Louis) Becke (1855–1913) wrote 35- books, some with Walter Jeffery, and numerous short stories, most drawing on his episodic seafaring adventures in the Pacific over some 25 years. Among his novels found in the remnants of Anstey's library were By Reef and Palm and The Ebbing of the Tide. There is a remarkable resemblance between Becke's stories and the accounts that Anstey gave of his own years at sea. See the entry on Becke in William H. Wilde, Joy Hooton, Barry Andrews, The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, 2ndedn, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994. See too, Arthur Grove Day, Louis Becke, Twayne, New York, 1966.
11. Labor Call, 20 May 1909, p. 5.
12. Socialist, 8 July 1910, p. 1.
13. Labor Call, 19 December 1912, p. 5. He also claimed that Louis Becke had sailed with Hayes.
14. The first instalment of Saunders' story of Hayes appeared in the Adelaide Mail on 27 September 1913. They were the basis for a later book, A.T. Saunders, Bully Hayes: the Pirate: True History of the South Seas Buccaneer, the author, Adelaide, 1915.
15. Ibid., p. 12.
16. 'A Life on the Ocean Wave' is in the Anstey papers, NLA MS 4636 and is published under the same title, edited and with an introduction by David Potts, Overland, no.31, March 1965, pp. 36–37.
17. The book, an earnestly instructive collection of biographical sketches of Remarkable Men who personified mid-Victorian muscular Christian virtues, is in the E.W. Peters papers, University of Melbourne Archives. Brian R. Nugent, Frank Anstey in Victorian Politics, unpublished MA (Hons) thesis, University of New England, 1973, p. 25 was the first to point this out.
18. Anstey's marriage was one of the most frustrating aspects of researching his life. There is no formal record of their marriage with the Government Statist or in any relevant parish register. Despite active co-operation from the family, the only answers to questions were kind and vaguely patronising references to Kate being 'a quiet, private person', followed by a rapid change of subject. Records of her illness in later life and subsequent committal to the Gladesville Mental Hospital have been put beyond reach by privacy laws. Her death certificate simply records that she died of senility and 'exhaustion of acute mania'. This was compounded by a culture of defensive privacy about 'family matters' among interviewees.
19. For a detailed exploration of this see Love, Frank Anstey: a Political Biography, ch. 3 and Peter Love, 'Agents of Transformation: Frank Anstey, Tocsin and the Victorian Labour Federation' in Jim Hagan and Andrew Wells (eds), The Maritime Strike: a Centenary Retrospective: Essays in Honour of E.C. Fry, Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Sydney, 1992. See too, Frank Bongiorno, The People's Party: Victorian Labor and the Radical Tradition, 1875–1914, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1996, pp. 135–145.
20. Tocsin, 2 October 1897, p. 6.
21. Ibid., 3 March 1898, p. 5; 31 March 1898, pp. 5 & 7; 7 April 1898, p. 4; and 30 June 1898, p. 5.
22. Victorian Labour Federation, What is the Labour Federation? A Question for all those who believe in Unionism, VLF, Melbourne, nd [1898]. Copy in Dwyer papers, Mitchell Library, MS 3036.
23. Tocsin, 29 September 1898, p. 7. Anstey being a founding member of the Tocsin Co-operative, some allowance might be made for comradely hyperbole in the report of the meeting.
24. For a short account of the incident see Love, Frank Anstey: a political biography, pp. 108–109 and Victorian Parliamentary Debates (VPD), vol. 97, 25 June 1901, pp. 108–134.
25. For the full text of his speech see ibid., vol. 103, 24 February 1903, pp. 2493–97.
26. E.H. Sugden and F.W. Eggleston, George Swinburne: aBiography, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1931, pp. 60–61.
27. For a discussion of the 1903 Victorian Railway strike, see Lorraine Benham and John Rickard, 'Masters and Servants' in John Iremonger, John Merritt and Graeme Osborne (eds), Strikes: Studies in Twentieth Century Social History, Angus and Robertson in association with the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Sydney, 1973.
28. VPD, vol. 104, 14 May 1903, pp. 126–139.
29. Punch (Melbourne), 21 May 1903, p. 657.
30. Bulletin, 6 June 1903, p. 15.
31. Arena-Sun, 4 June 1903, p. 6.
32. See F. Anstey, Monopoly and Democracy: the Land Question of Victoria, Labor Call, Melbourne, 1906 and Love, Frank Anstey: a Political Biography, ch. 4.
33. Age, 14 May 1906, p. 7. For a biographical sketch of Judkins see Keith Dunstan and Graeme Davison, 'William Henry Judkins' in Bede Nairn and Geoffrey Serle (eds), Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 9, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1983, pp. 527–528. For accounts of the 1906 campaigns, see Michael McKernan, 'An Incident of Social Reform, Melbourne, 1906', Journal of Religious History, vol. 10, no.1, June 1978 and Anthea Hyslop, The Social Reform Movement in Melbourne, 1890–1914, PhD thesis, La Trobe University, 1980, ch. 10. A more recent account sympathetic to Wren is in James Griffin, John Wren: a Life Reconsidered, Scribe Publications, Melbourne, 2004, ch. 5.
34. VPD, vol. 113, 30 August 1906, p. 1279.
35. Ibid., p. 1280.
36. Ibid., p. 1302.
37. Ibid., p. 1281.
38. Ibid., p. 1304.
39. Ibid., vol. 114, 31 October 1906, p. 2497.
40. For a general discussion of events surrounding debate on the Bill see Bongiorno, The People's Party, ch. 7, Griffin, John Wren, ch. 5 and, for the wider context of gambling in Australia, John O'Hara, A Mug's Game: a History of Gaming and Betting in Australia, University of New South Wales Press, Kensington, 1988, ch. 5, especially pp. 145–148.
41. VPD., vol. 114, 27 September 1906, 1780.
42. Ibid., p. 1783.
43. Ibid., pp. 1784–87.
44. See Griffin, John Wren, pp. 115–120.
45. For a detailed account of the 1907 Brunswick election campaign see Love, Frank Anstey: a political biography, pp. 171–178.
46. F. Anstey, Labour's Bible Lessons, Tocsin Office Print, Melbourne, nd [1906]
47. The turn-out of 72.73 per cent of enrolled electors was the third highest in this pre-compulsory voting election. See Colin A. Hughes and B.D. Graham, Voting for the Victorian Legislative Assembly, 1890–1964, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1975, p. 101.
48. Labor Call, 21 March 1907, p. 2 and 28 March 1907, p. 5.
49. Ibid., 25 April 1907, p. 7.
50. Hughes and Graham, Voting for the Victorian Legislative Assembly, p. 111.
51. VPD., vol. 122, 28 October 1909, p. 1915. For a detailed account of his trip and subsequent activity see Love, Frank Anstey: a political biography, pp. 180–200.
52. Ibid., pp. 208–211.
53. Frank Anstey MHR, Thirty Years of Deakin, Labor Call Print, Melbourne, 1913.
54. Labor Call, 9 April 1914, pp. 4–5. A slightly different version of this article appeared under the title 'War — What For?' in Tom Mann's short-lived Syndicalist Amalgamation News (London), July 1914, p. 3.
55. See Julius Braunthal, History of the Second International, 1864–1914, Nelson, London, 1966, ch. 21.
56. Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates (CPD), vol. 76, 28 April 1915, p. 2675 ff. See too, Love, Frank Anstey: a Political Biography, ch. 8.
57. The pamphlets were published in Melbourne by Labor Call Print and the book in Melbourne by Fraser and Jenkinson. For a detailed analysis of his political economy of finance capital see Love, Frank Anstey: a Political Biography, ch. 7.
58. Labor Call, 15 April 1915, pp. 4–5.
59. Frank Anstey, The Kingdom of Shylock, Labor Call Print, Melbourne, 1917, p. 2.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., p. vii.
62. Among the like-minded critics of the war were T.J. Ryan, Premier of Queensland, W.F. Finlayson MHR, J.K. McDougall, ex-MHR, A.W. Foster of the Victorian Socialist Party and later Arbitration Court judge, and Henry Boote, editor of the Worker. For a general discussion of this see Peter Love, Labour and the Money Power, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1984, ch. 3.
63. Love, Frank Anstey: a Political Biography, ch. 8.
64. CPD., vol. 83, 17 January 1918, pp. 3172.
65. For a detailed account of Anstey's 1918–19 trip to Europe and the book see, Love, Frank Anstey: a Political Biography, ch. 9.
66. Frank Anstey, Red Europe, Fraser and Jenkinson, Melbourne, 1919. The first edition of September quickly sold out and a second edition was published in November 1919. The Glasgow edition, published by the Socialist Labour Press in 1921, sold well in Britain, Canada and the USA.
67. Ibid., pp. 191–2.
68. See Love, Frank Anstey: a Political Biography, pp. 334–37.
69. Frank Anstey, Money Power Strangles Australia, Perth, Westralian Worker Print, nd [1925]. The Westralian Worker was then edited by his old protégé John Curtin. In his usual way, it was the substance of his speech on the Bill, turned into a newspaper article and then expanded into a pamphlet.
70. Sir Earle Page, Truant Surgeon: the Inside Story of Forty Years of Australian Political Life, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1963, p. 60.
71. CPD., vol. 121, 5 September 1929, p. 623.
72. See Peter Cook, 'Frank Anstey: Memoirs of the Scullin Government, 1929–1932', Historical Studies, vol. 18, no.72, April 1979, p. 388.
73. Ibid., p. 371.
74. Frank Anstey, Facts and Theories of Finance, Fraser and Jenkinson, Melbourne, nd [October 1930].
75. Ibid., p. 1.
76. Ibid., p. 8. Emphasis in the original.
77. Labor Daily, 2 October 1930, p. 1.
78. Ibid., 20 October 1930, p. 5.
79. Ibid., 7 January 1931, p. 1.
80. There are, in fact, some suggestions that he contributed to the discussions that preceded the announcement of the Lang Plan. On 4 September 1930 the Adelaide Advertiser reported that Anstey was behind Jock Garden's 'repudiation' motion at a NSW ALP — Union conference. Immediately after Lang announced his plan the Age, Argus and the Sydney Morning Herald all reported speculation that Anstey was involved in its formulation.
81. The statement was widely quoted in the press. See, for example, Sydney Morning Herald, 4 March 1931, p. 13;Age, 4 March 1931, p. 8; and Labor Call, 5 March 1931, p. 7.
82. CPD., vol. 130, 8 July 1931, p. 3565.
83. In the House of Representatives the United Australia Party won 38 seats, the Country Party 16, the Australian Labor Party 13, Lang Labor 5 and there were 3 Independents.
84. Quoted in Margaret Luers, Laureate of Labor: a Biography of J.K. McDougall, Socialist and Poet, Banyan Press, Sandy Bay, 1987, p. 101.
85. See Cook, 'Frank Anstey: Memoirs of the Scullin Government'. From internal evidence, they were written somewhere between August 1935 and August 1936.
86. Ibid., p. 389.
87. Ibid., p. 391.
88. Ibid., p. 392.
89. They are in the Lloyd Ross papers, NLA MS 3939, box added 21 February 1979, folder A.
90. The memoirs are in the Anstey papers, NLA MS4636 and were published, with an introduction by David Potts, in Overland, no.31, March 1965, pp. 31–37.
91. For a more detailed exploration of this memoir see Love, Frank Anstey: a Political Biography, ch. 1.
92. Finding details about Harriet Middlecoat and her relationship with Anstey encountered the same difficulties experienced in researching his wife Kate. Family members had nothing to say about her. Interviews with Clarrie O'Shea and Lloyd Edmonds, who both visited Anstey at the time, offered nothing more than vague references to the appearance of settled domesticity that surrounded 'old Frank and Harriet'. He did, however, offer a testimony to his regard for her by leaving half his estate to her.
93. Anstey file, Merrifield collection, Manuscripts, State Library of Victoria.
94. The wording of Michael Henchard's will can be found on the penultimate page in any edition of Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge.
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