Marian Quartly | Making Working-Class Heroes : Labor Cartoonists and the Australian Worker, 1903–16 | Labour History, 89

Making Working-Class Heroes : Labor Cartoonists and the Australian Worker, 1903–16

Marian Quartly^*

The establishment of union-based papers in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Australia created a base for professional cartoonists whose sympathies (and mostly origins) were strongly working class, though their mode of employment placed them as intellectuals. The paper looks at cartoons published in Tocsin, Labor Call, and the Australian Worker, notably those of Claude Marquet. Marquet and his fellows created a populist representation of organised labour which shaped class imaginings of the ideal Australian worker as male, muscular, and white. The homoerotic aspect of these representations is read here as generating the desire which moves the images towards the mythic.

On 28 December 1916 a cartoon captioned 'The Phoenix' appeared in the Australian Worker, a weekly paper published by the union movement in New South Wales. It shows a naked man, handsomely built, labelled 'Labor' across his upper back, walking away from the smouldering 'Ashes of 1916' towards the rising sun of 1917. The cartoonist, Claude Marquet, presented this image to his readers to mark the birth of a new Labor party from the wreck of the old, torn apart by debates over conscription.¹

Claude Marquet, 'The Phoenix', Australian Worker, 28 December 1916, p. 10
Courtesy of W. & F. Pascoe

This article takes as its subject matter the images of workers that appeared in cartoons published in the early twentieth century in the labour papers Tocsin and Labor Call in Victoria, and the Australian Worker in New South Wales. In this context the muscular male body almost always represents some aspect of the classed worker: the archetypal ideal, exploited labour, unionised labour, political Labor, and often enough democracy, understood as the voice of the workers. The article sets out to read these bodies in two ways: through the art historians' spectacles of aesthetics and desire; and through the labour historians' mirrors of class. The object is understand something of the everyday assumptions — about gendered bodies, about work, about political friends and enemies — which the cartoonists shared with their audience, and which they helped shape into desire-driven abstractions like class and nation. I also venture to interrogate the origins of that desire in the way that the cartoonists — specifically Claude Marquet — found themselves situated in terms of class and gender.

The rich visual material contained in the early labour press has been little investigated by labour historians concerned with issues of class and gender, but there are some useful leads to follow. Andrew Reeves and Margaret Anderson reproduce and discuss some striking images of female allegory from the labour papers in their 1998 exhibition catalogue When Australia was a Woman.² June Senyard has produced a collection of cartoons from the Victorian Labor press, and its introduction identifies the characteristic forms of the genre: the whiteness, maleness and blue-collarness of 'the Worker', and the invariable dichotomies — 'Labour and Capital, worker and boss, poverty and wealth, right and wrong, government and opposition, Left and Right, good and bad'.³ Lenore Layman includes labour cartoons in a stimulating study of the 'labour discourse on federation', which locates the ideas and images marshalled against 'fetteration' within older traditions of religion and politics, and new notions of 'modernist progressivism'.⁴

My approach here follows Layman and Senyard in understanding the images used in labour cartoons as an aspect of the language of class developing within the labour movement in the early twentieth century — more precisely perhaps a language of class located within a tradition of labourism. In the last two decades, historians of the Australian Labor Party and the labour movement have identified a recurring 'labourist' tradition, frequently condemned as 'not socialist', or just as pejoratively as 'populist'.⁵

Common elements have included idealisation of 'the people' against corrupt 'monopolists', though not against capitalism as such; identification of 'the people' with the nation and the nation with the 'Australian race'; a rejection of those racial others whose difference threatens that 'Australian race'; a conceptualisation of the ideal Australian as the strong, self-reliant, manly bushworker; and a concomitant stress upon the womanly wife, ideally out of the work force and dependent upon her worker husband.⁶

Sean Scalmer is amongst those theorists who understand the labourist tradition as strategic, theorised and consciously reflective of class.⁷ Scalmer's interest in the 'commonsense' discourse of labourism is nicely congruent with the concerns of this paper. He proposes that 'if we are to understand labour discourse, then we need also to understand labour intellectuals, labour movement institutions, and the broader class structure'.⁸ This paper reads the cartoonists as labour intellectuals and the labour weeklies as labour movement institutions, and tries to understand how these intellectuals and these institutions functioned within and against a range of class structures: their own, as working-class intellectuals; those of the unionists of Victoria and New South Wales; and those of their increasingly national readership. But there are cultural imperatives in play here that go beyond Scalmer's set of interactions. Layman demonstrates the range of 'customary practices' — from street protest to secular sermons — which fuelled what she calls 'Labour's counter-discourse'.⁹ This contains but does not determine the discourse of the cartoonists — the graphic images which gave content to abstractions like worker and voter, union and nation, solidarity and democracy, socialism and capitalism. The cartoonists' lexicon was also shaped by artistic conventions, and by the action of gender, of which more hereafter.

Historians of journalism have sketched the story of the labour presses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and glanced at the journalists. Most agree with Dennis Cryle in seeing nineteenth century journalism as a 'disreputable profession', at best as an ambiguous one in a class sense.¹⁰ Connell and Irving write dismissively of 'the businessmen-journalists who initiated the "new journalism" in Australia, in search of profit through a mass working-class circulation'.¹¹ Bruce Scates has given us the most extensive study of the social positioning of the radical editors, journalists, and by implication, cartoonists of late nineteenth century Melbourne and Sydney. Following Graeme Davison's discovery of the origins of the 'Australian Legend' not in the bush but amongst the journalists and artists living in Sydney's seedy boarding-house district, Scates describes the 'world apart', the 'indeterminate social strata' of déclassé intellectuals and artisan aristocrats of labour as constituting the heart of radical culture in turn of the century Australia. It is within this context that the class experience of Marquet and his fellow cartoonists must be understood.¹²

Historians — labour historians and feminists — have recently asked how the experience of gender meshes with that of class at this period. They have discovered high levels of male anxiety — and concomitant misogyny — in the contemporary labour movement: artisanal anxieties raised by the movement of women and technology into previously 'skilled' employment; and 'unrespectable' working-class anxieties raised by feminist moral assertiveness. Labour historians have noted that in the mid-1890s the adoption of mechanical typesetting machines by the large metropolitan dailies caused massive unemployment amongst compositors. As workplaces whose heart was the print-room, the labour journals must have inherited some of the traditional misogyny and hierarchical masculinity of the printing trades. Feminist scholars have recently waxed indignant at the mockery of respectable feminism indulged in by labour journalists and cartoonists, who were as ready as their fellows on Truth and the Bulletin to castigate moralistic kill-joys intent on restraining the lusts of men. But at the same time, the radicalism of the pressmen made them sympathetic to feminist claims for equal citizenship. And a further ambiguity lurks within Scalmer's characterisation of the pressmen as 'Labour intellectuals'. Journalists and cartoonists, men of the pen, related uneasily to the labour movement's glorification of the masculinity of manual labour; they celebrated the tradition but were not of it.¹³

As I suggested above, I want to raise the issue of gender in another context which does not sit easily with Australian labour historiography — using the spectacles of the art historian, and the tool of desire. In the 1980s Andrew Reeves began reading cartoons and banners to make sense of the 'complex legacy of symbolism and allegory' which feeds 'Australian labour's aspirations and future vision',¹⁴ but his lead has been little followed. To make sense of an image like Marquet's 'Phoenix' one must turn to a long tradition of art history and criticism, recently enlivened by theories of sexuality which deny the 'naturalness' of heterosexual masculinity.

Recent scholarship in art history has demonstrated that the body Marquet gave to the new Labor party — the well muscled back, broad chest, taut buttocks and strong legs — has a history in European art and popular culture dating from classical sculpture through Renaissance neoclassicism and fascist idealism to male models in the advertisements of Calvin Klein. The positioning of this hyper-masculine body as an object of the public gaze has been seen as inviting contradictory readings. Both men and women viewers — Bordo for example — have read these desirable bodes as at once powerful and submissive, asexual and erotic, heterosexual and anti-phallic. This approach through gender asks useful questions about the making of meaning in these representations, and about the generation of desire which moves that meaning towards the heroic.¹⁵

Historians in the United States have used this approach with striking effect. Melissa Dabakis has shown how bourgeois painters and sculptors celebrated the beautiful muscles of manual worker — what she calls 'the erotics of the labouring body';¹⁶ their loving representations romanticised the labour of anonymous workers, reading strength as a component of a mighty industrial machine. Australian art historians like Leigh Astbury make a similar reading of late nineteenth century paintings of Australian workers; the muscular bodies in depictions like Tom Robert's 'Shearing the Rams', painted in 1893, are understood as simultaneously glorifying a passing way of life, establishing an iconic 'Australianness' and binding the workers to an emerging world capitalism. Astbury's investigations of the homoerotic in Australian painting and sculpture are almost the only Australian model for my reading of the play of gender in labour cartoons.¹⁷

The meaning of muscular bodies in the labour press has to be understood within the history of Australian cartooning. In a somewhat neglected field Marguerite Mahood's history of nineteenth century political caricature and Joan Kerr's two century survey of Australian cartooning are indispensable starting places. Kerr tells us that the conventions governing the meaning of bodies within political cartoons were imported unchanged from Britain, and reproduced from the 1860s in illustrated comic journals very much like those of the metropolis. Colonial cartoonists born and trained in Britain liked to affect the grand allegorical style, in which male heroes identified by their perfect bodies battled mythological monsters for control of the body of the state (usually female). These heroes were governors and politicians, not working men.¹⁸ When the labour movement began making political and industrial claims in the late 1880s, it was first cast in the monster role. Cartoonists in the Melbourne Punch created 'King Working Man', who grew from a tyrant who overturned legitimate political power to a monstrous ogre, the 'embodiment of ignorant force'.¹⁹

The Australian worker as industrial hero first appeared in August 1890 in a now famous cartoon, 'The Labour Crisis', in the then radical magazine the Bulletin. Historians have long celebrated the force of this cartoon, but have not appreciated its originality; workers as heroes do not appear in British and American papers before 1900. The artist was the American born cartoonist Livingstone Hopkins, the occasion the strike called by the shearers' union against the pastoralists' association. Hop's depiction of organised Labour and organised Capital introduced binary stereotypes which were to have a long history. The bodies speak volumes: the trim, muscular Worker represents the proper exercise of social power; the Fatman Capitalist the inappropriate pursuit of monopoly. The union man's moleskin trousers and bowyangs give him a rural look, appropriate for a shearer; he also stands as Australian against the landowner's British clothing and accents: 'See here my man, one of us must either go back, or else lie down and let the other walk over him. Now, which of us shall it be?' For more than two decades the Bulletin's workers and unionists were to be characterised by muscles, and also by bowyangs.²⁰

The Macquarie Dictionary defines bowyang as an Australian and New Zealand term denoting 'a string or strap round the trouser leg to prevent the turn-up from dragging and to allow freedom of movement when crouching or bending'.²¹ It could also have noted that bowyangs were worn with off-the-peg trousers, especially heavy-duty moleskins, and that their use seems to have been limited to rural manual labour. Bowyangs were certainly not universally worn even by rural workers in late nineteenth century Australia; Charles Kerry's iconic postcards of Victorian and New South Wales shearers do not feature bowyangs. But these markers rapidly became part of the code for 'manual worker' in cartoons both sympathetic and hostile to working-class solidarity. A satirical image from Melbourne Punch in 1902 sends up 'The Trades-Dudes Union' — a proposal by a white-collar union to join the Trades Hall — by showing the unthinkable mateship between a bowyanged, muscular bushworker and an effete bowler-hatted monocled clerk.²²

When the labour weeklies began featuring cartoons at the turn of the century, their cartoonists inevitably worked within the conventions established by the nationalist school of art and the illustrated journals. Most were already publishing cartoons in established journals like Punch and the Bulletin. For those strongly committed to the labour cause, there did exist within the labour movement a traditional way of representing working men, in the banners carried by unionists in the annual Eight Hour Day celebrations. But these huge standards pictured the craftsmen who marched behind them as the proud possessors of particular skills, not as the heroes of political and industrial struggle. In their study of the few surviving banners, Badges of Labour, Banners of Pride, Ann Stephens and Andrew Reeves reproduce only one image which presents muscular strength as the symbol of labour solidarity, and this banner, especially made to celebrate the federation in 1912 of the coalmining and goldmining unions, dresses its two hand-clasped miners in clothing deliberately evocative of the nineteenth century — including bowyangs.²³

Over time the labour journals more distinctively reflected the needs of political and industrial labour, and their journalists and cartoonists spoke more directly to a labour audience. I will explore this interaction between intellectuals and institutions both in the process of becoming labour by examining the output of the most prolific and accomplished of the labour cartoonists, Claude Marquet. Where possible I will include the lives and works of his colleagues on the labour papers, but their biographical record is painfully thin. It is a particular difficulty for this research that the cartoons are in most cases the only evidence that we have of these cartoonists; we must read their discourse without hearing their words. But Marquet's forms and metaphors can stand as representative of the output of his fellows in all ways but one — his imagination was not fuelled by overt racism.

Claude Arthur Marquet was born in 1869 in Moonta, in country South Australia, the son of a 'workman painter of French descent'. His first job was labouring in the mines at Wallaroo, but he progressed to an apprenticeship as a compositor, and seems also to have learned something of lithography — the craft of reproducing line-drawings for publication. His skills as a black and white artist were apparently self-taught. In 1897 he was employed as staff cartoonist by the Adelaide Quiz, a radical journal with links to the trade union movement and a strong inclination to the literary; its editor was the poet C.J. Dennis. Marquet's talent and ambition extended beyond Adelaide. In 1900 the Sydney Bulletin began printing his cartoons, and by 1902 he had moved to Melbourne where he worked in a printing shop, submitting cartoons to radical and socialist papers on the side. The political journal Tocsin— loosely associated with the United Labor Party — was a focus for Melbourne's radical poets and intellectuals; its editor was the socialist Bernard O'Dowd, its first cartoonist the self-styled bohemian Norman Lindsay. In 1903 Tocsin accepted one of Marquet's cartoons, and then as Frank Anstey remembered it, 'another, and another, and the last was better than the one before'.²⁴

Claude Marquet, 'How It was Done!', Tocsin, 21 May 1903, cover
Courtesy of the Newspaper Collection, State Library of Victoria

Marquet's first Tocsin cartoon in May 1903 broke distinctively with the Bulletinbowyang tradition. It introduced a figure original to Marquet — the worker as witness to the events of the day, passive but promising powerful intervention. This is a modern urban worker, marked as such by his collarless shirt (labelled 'STRIKER'), and his ready-made trousers; he represents the state's civil servants, who were striking against the government's intention to remove them from the electoral rolls. He watches while the premier of the day, in stiff collar and suit, urges a policeman to arrest him. The point of conflict is civic, the 'Traditional Liberty of the Subject' which the premier treads under-foot. But the force of the cartoon is industrial; the muscular power of the worker in contrast to the diminutive policeman proclaims that for the strikers unity is strength. Two months later Marquet confirmed his urban viewpoint with a cartoon picturing a family of rural selectors as the degraded, spiritless victims of the grasping hand of 'Mortgage'. This understanding was already well-established within the labour press; Peter Love cites a report from the 1893 Sydney Worker declaring that 'mortgage means 'death pledge', and to the plundered settler of Australia it is in literal fact a graveyard grip. The farmer hangs himself, but the banker laughs and grows fat'.²⁵

Claude Marquet, 'Symeism Versus Democracy' (extract), Tocsin electoral supplement, 26 November, 1903
Courtesy of the Newspaper Collection, State Library of Victoria

Marquet's worker-striker is very much a man of the future, his selector a man whom history has passed by. He drew also on the trope of classical allusion, universalising his subject and taking it beyond time. The 1903 federal election inspired him to produce a series of heroes in the classical semi-naked style, all representing 'Democracy'. Two were pictured in double page spreads issued as electoral supplements in early December. The reproduction of these towering figures called for a high level of lithographic skill; both are proudly inscribed: 'Drawn on zinc and etched by Claude Marquet'. In both cartoons a giant marked 'United Democracy' — and by inference, also representing Tocsin itself — confronts the imperial power of the Age newspaper. One giant angrily calls up his massed phalanxes of voters; the second waits contemptuously, resting on his axe 'Truth'. A third image in late December celebrates Labor's electoral success. In a pose reminiscent of Perseus with the Gorgon's head a beautiful youth, 'Australian Democracy', displays in one hand the severed head of a monster labelled 'Unscrupulous Press Domination', and in the other a bloody dagger, 'The Labour Vote'.²⁶ Layman notes that within labour discourse 'Democracy meant popular power, sometimes in the socialist and sometimes in the liberal sense',²⁷ here in good populist style the workers' vote becomes the people's voice.

Claude Marquet, 'Democracy Triumphant', Tocsin, 24 December 1903, cover
Courtesy of the Newspaper Collection, State Library of Victoria

Marquet drew on Christian symbolism to make a working-class hero in April 1905, when he illustrated J.K. McDougall's 'Labour "Recessional"', a rewrite of Kipling's jingoistic battle hymn. McDougall's poem addressed a benevolent God whose chosen people were the workers. Marquet chose to illustrate the verse most strongly coloured with Christian Socialism:

Pre-imaged by a bleeding Christ,
The worker, crucified and priced,
Cries loudly unto Thee
And wilt Thou scruple, Lord, to save?
Wilt thou not lift the trodden slave?
Or art Thou careless as the grave
Of human agony?

His worker figure — strongly and simply drawn — looks to a crucified Christ (and a mysterious divine hand) to free him from the chains that bind him, but do not pull him down. And in this archetypal moment Marquet gives his hero bowyangs.²⁸

Claude Marquet, 'Labour "Recessional"', Tocsin, 6 April 1905, p. 8.
Courtesy of the Newspaper Collection, State Library of Victoria

One other of Marquet's images needs special mention here. In late 1904 he drew and printed a union Christmas card for the skilled compositors employed by the Argus and Australasian newspapers, a collective greeting which they could send to printers working in other establishments. It carried an image clearly intended to be humorous, though in the words of the historian of the Australian printing unions, 'a large number of unemployed compositors would not have been able to see much humour' in it. The image showed a diminutive and somewhat cowed compositor turning from his type frame to shake hands with a powerfully anthropomorphic Linotype press, the machine whose introduction had put four out of five newspaper 'comps' in Melbourne out of work. Perhaps the compositors who were still employed could see the joke. Whatever the politics of the image, its force comes largely from the contrast between the muscular bulk of the machine and the diminished manliness of the hand compositor.²⁹

Claude Marquet, Union Christmas card, 1904, reproduced from Joan Kerr, Artists and Cartoonists in Black and White: The Most Public Art, figure 2.21
Courtesy of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

The years 1905 and 1906 saw a flowering of new talent in journals dedicated to the labour cause. A new generation of cartoonists was coming of age, like Marquet native-born and largely self taught. The union movement was prospering in the buoyant economic climate, and political labor was preparing to fight the 1906 federal election; both wings of the movement gave generous funding to the labour papers. In Sydney the Australian Worker, originally the news-sheet of the Australian Workers Association, became the 'Official Organ of the Trade Unions and Labour Organizations', carrying national and local news, reports of parliamentary debates and labour conferences, short stories and a variety of cartoons; in mid-1905 the Australian Worker moved into a handsome new building. In Melbourne in November 1906 the Tocsin became Labor Call, 'The Official Organ of the Political Labor Council of Victoria'. From 1904 Claude Marquet contributed cartoons to both Tocsin and the Australian Worker, increasingly to the latter. In 1906 he moved permanently to Sydney as the regular cartoonist for the Australian Worker, a position he held until his premature death — by drowning while on a fishing trip — in 1920.³⁰

During this period Marquet drew a prodigious number of cartoons, often at least four a week for the Australian Worker and more for other publications. Contemporaries judged him the best known cartoonist in Australia. His line became stronger and his hand more assured, but the content of his cartoons hardly changed from the patterns established in Melbourne: workers as muscular, heroic, generally urban and always male; their enemies as fat-men, monopolists, and monsters; the bound and suffering worker as noble sacrifice; and the armed and sometimes bloody worker as victor. But the new workplace produced some different emphases.

Ray Markey has characterised the politics of the Australian Worker before 1900 as populism based in a racially exclusive nationalism, a vision of a racially pure, classless nation whose 'backbone was the strong, self-reliant, manly and morally upright bushworker/selector', and whose enemy was not capitalism as such, but 'monopolists' and 'the money power'.³¹ By 1906 the paper's support base had widened, but the influence of the rural Australian Workers Union (AWU) was still strong, and Marquet was open to some elements of rural populism. It must be said that he was not an enthusiastic racist. Some of the Australian Worker's cartoonists regularly produced images of 'other' races — Chinese, Japanese and Jews — whose casual brutality takes the breath away. Marquet produced just one anti-Chinese cartoon in December 1904, and seems to have avoided the topic thereafter.³²

He was more responsive to the manly bush-worker. His generalised 'worker' sometimes takes on a rural look with battered hat, boots and bowyangs, and this outfit also characterises the hero as miner. And his villains are those Fatman 'monopolists' identified by Markey with rural populism, and here drawn as monstrous: greedy mine-owners, bloated land owners, usurers and the ubiquitous 'combines'. A cartoon in January 1905 pits a stalwart miner against a truly monstrous dragon-mine-owner and a harpy-like 'capitalistic press'; the dragon's teeth are already tearing at a young mine-worker trapped under his claws.³³ But Marquet also continued to represent the labour/Labor movement in the image of the urban manual worker which he brought from Melbourne, in fitted trousers and collarless shirt.³⁴

Claude Marquet, 'Oh, for Nationalization', Australian Worker, 23 January 1905, p. 5
Courtesy of W. & F. Pascoe

Marquet's Sydney heroines are different from those he drew in Melbourne. The subject is a large one, requiring separate treatment, but briefly it can be said that his Melbourne corpus either presents women as classically draped icons — proud Democracy, injured Liberty — or mocks them in bohemian style. Thus in September 1903 he included in a full-page cartoon the little figure of a cartoonist being propelled downstairs by a big boot; the caption reads 'The Tocsin artist was here fired into the night for sketching Mrs. Fatman in the semi-nude'.³⁵ In Sydney Marquet put away his bohemianism, and cast his heroines almost exclusively as wives or sweethearts. The archetypal image is his 'Labor Year', published on the last day of December 1908. Australia and Labor are drawn hand in hand, a courting couple gazing into the rising sun of 1909, he dressed in the customary trousers and collarless shirt (and closely resembling the ALP leader Andrew Fisher), she demure in blouse and skirt — while below them bloated 'Capital' slinks away with the words; 'Great Pluto, I'm jilted'.³⁶ Ray Markey does not mention gender relations in his catalogue of rural populism, but other writers have presented the AWU as a major promoter of the ideal of manly independence and domesticated womanhood.³⁷.

In the years before World War I, the gallery of cartoonists at the Australian Worker fell away, and by 1912 nearly all the local cartoons in the paper were drawn by Marquet and his colleague Mick Paul. Paul was perhaps 20 years younger than Marquet, the son of Emily Paul, a painter and a well-known speaker in the socialist cause. Herbert Boote, the leader-writer for the Australian Worker from 1911 and its editor from 1914, was also a committed socialist (and a poet and novelist, with some academic training in drawing).³⁸ Boote's editorial page, a weekly over-view of the state of socialism world-wide, often carried cartoons from the British labour press with heavy revolutionary messages: Socialism as a heroic naked youth (apart from his cap of liberty) astride the white horse Progress and slaying the dragon Capitalism- Competition-Individualism-Vice; the Worker as heroic naked youth freeing himself from the chains of Tradition with the file of Socialism. Mick Paul sometimes ventured into this symbolic territory.A cover image in December 1912 showed 'the workers of the world' —or more precisely the mostly male white workers of Europe — celebrating the victory of their cannons, hammers and pick-axes.³⁹

Marquet considered himself to be a socialist, but he overtly rejected these revolutionary models, and in doing so probably aligned himself with majority opinion in the labour movement. His idea of socialism was captured in the loving cup which he presented to the Australian Worker readers at Christmas: SOCIALISM was spelt out on the cup by linking the middle letters of the words⁴⁰

CONSISTENCY
BENEVOLENCE
DEMOCRACY
UNITY
PEACE
KNOWLEDGE
HAPPINESS
KINSHIP
REFORMATION

He continued to draw images that celebrated (and indeed conflated) 'political and industrial unionism' in the form of a muscular urban manual worker. The enemies of his workers continued to be not capital per se, but greedy capitalists, pictured most graphically in a cartoon in which the sharks of monopoly literally walk the land , threatening to devour the stalwart worker as well as his wages. And Fatman is joined by a new enemy — workers opposed to unionism, and depicted as fly-blown 'scabs'. In April 1912 Marquet drew a cartoon which referred directly back to Hop's archetypal 1890 image of Fatman and worker confronting each other across the divide — but this time the employer is led across the chasm of Industrial Chaos by a wizened, weaselly bush worker, and the plank is breaking under his weight.⁴¹

The war years were bitter ones for Australian labour. Any hope of unity against Fatman was lost in the battles over whether of not Australians should be conscripted for overseas war service. The battle, fought out across two referenda, split both the industrial and the political movements beyond repair. Claude Marquet and his editor Henry Boote were absolutely committed to the fight against conscription, and their cartoons and editorials were potent weapons in the cause. Marquet became famous — or infamous — for his poster 'The Blood Vote', which shows a mother appalled at the thought that her vote for conscription has condemned a man to death. Feminist studies of the iconography of the war have shown how both sides in the conscription debate exploited and confirmed the stereotype of woman as citizen-mother, and Marquet certainly contributed to this. As we have seen, it coincided with his usual depiction of the proper order of things.⁴²

Marquet has been accused of a more devious manipulation of stereotypes in the campaign against conscription. John Hirst has argued that in order to appeal to the nation at large, the industrial wing of the labour movement deliberately shifted the anti-conscriptionist argument from one based on class — that the war was a capitalist war, and workers were its special victims — to 'the radical libertarian claim that the state had no right to compel a man to fight'. Hirst lays the blame for this duplicity squarely upon Henry Boote and the Australian Worker— 'the key propaganda organ for the No case'. And Marquet is directly implicated: 'The move from class to liberty in the anti-conscriptionist case can be followed in Claude Marquet's cartoons in the Worker', in a move from 'fat capitalists and heroic workers' to Australia as the victim oppressed by 'a jack-booted militarism or William Morris Hughes'.⁴³

Certainly Marquet did picture archetypal victims oppressed by the forces of conscription; in a typical gesture in January 1916 he presented Australian Democracy as a classically draped young woman rejecting the advances of a caveman Conscription. But the case was often more complex than this. In October 1915 he drew a dishevelled angel of Peace slumped in a muddy gutter whilst Civilisation and Christianity pass with skirts lifted and faces averted, but Civilisation has the ample figure and the feathered hat which Marquet usually bestows upon Mrs Fatman. In October 1916 he pictured a muscular Jesus bearing a cross labelled 'Conscription' and led towards Calvary by William Morris Hughes, followed by a braying crowd of conscriptionists. But class is not absent; Jesus represents the Australian Labour Movement and Mr Fatman is at the head of the crowd. If any shift is visible in Marquet's ideological position, it is not towards the suppression of a class interpretation; rather his cartoons tend to confirm Boote's anti-capitalist position by eliding the figure of the worker with the anti-conscription cause, and Mr and Mrs Fatman with the conscriptionists.⁴⁴

Claude Marquet, 'It's a Long Way to Calvary', Labor Call, 26 October 1916, p. 3
Courtesy of the Newspaper Collection, State Library of Victoria

Manly sacrifice is central to recent accounts of the history of desire, sexuality and the generation of group feeling during the First World War. Historians like Paul Fussell, George Mosse, Joanna Bourke and most recently Allen Frantzen differ in their readings of chivalric and Christian traditions of sacrifice, but all agree on the potency within national imaginings of the figures of the avenging, triumphant hero, and the abject, self-sacrificing hero. The works of Marquet and his fellow cartoonists confirm the potency of these tropes within Australian imaginings of nation and, I argue, of class.⁴⁵

Labour cartoonists regularly drew on the image of Christ in the name of class; in October 1916 alone Labor Call presented the working class as twice crucified on the cross of conscription and once tempted by Hughes as the devil. The classical figure of the suffering Prometheus was also popular as a representation of the people's strength enchained. Marquet's suffering heroes are not particularly abject; his Prometheus appears to resist the vulture, and his muscular working-class Christ looks ready to swat Billy Hughes with the cross.⁴⁶

Marquet's avenging heroes are more iconically powerful. He celebrated the victory of the No-vote in the first referendum in November 1916 with an image of a heroic beautiful near-naked youth, True Democracy, who stands victorious, bloody sword marked No-Vote, over the helmeted and booted corpse of Conscription. Conscription carries chains with which he has failed to bind Democracy, and Democracy points to a placard that reads: 'Referendum Result: Australia Remains Free'. This cartoon is a replay of the image that Marquet published in Tocsin marking Labor's success in the 1903 federal election. In both cartoons he presents a near-naked youth, Democracy, armed with a bloody sword — the people's vote — and standing victorious over his dead enemy.Both of these beautiful youths avert their eyes from the viewer; they offer their bodies — and the bodies of their sacrificial victims — to the viewers' desiring gaze.⁴⁷

Claude Marquet, 'Prussianism Defeated', Australian Worker, 2 November 1916, p. 10
Courtesy of W. & F. Pascoe

Allen Frantzen explains the impact of images like these in terms of the ambiguous meaning of sacrifice within western traditions of thought and action. He locates 'heroic masculinity' — and the cultural sanctification of that masculinity — in the creative tension between sacrifice as violence committed in the name of a greater cause, and 'anti-sacrifice', a willingness to sacrifice one's life for that cause.⁴⁸ The image with which I began this paper, Marquet's 'Phoenix', evokes another enduring symbol of self-sacrifice — the bird which builds its own funeral pyre to hatch the egg from which it will be reborn. This image also calls the eye to linger on a beautiful body whose contours and associations evoke the eternal, the universal. In each case the celebration of masculine beauty is intended to carry a political meaning for the group represented — of victory over impossible odds, of liberation from the past, of potential new strength.

It is impossible at this distance to judge the effectiveness of images like the Phoenix in creating and confirming the experience of class for the readers of the labour press. But it seems to me that the public fantasies played out here had for contemporaries the power to invest imagined entities — the working class, the Australian people — with the heroic potential to overcome history. Bernard O'Dowd, founder of the Tocsin, wrote that 'in every age of human progress the poet has been the most authentic and effective creator of gods and of the mythologies that give them blood and bone and power'.⁴⁹ O'Dowd was thinking of the mythologies of nationalism, rather than class, and his notion of the poet would not have stretched to include the cartoonist — but perhaps it should have.

Today responses to these images are necessarily more complex. We understand that the democratic inclusiveness of Marquet's white worker-socialist-citizen excludes all but Anglo-Saxons, that his maleness excludes women, and his identification as a manual worker excludes the less manly men who work with their pens. One reading of Marquet's body of work is to see it as a powerful support of hegemonic masculinity. And yet many of his images clearly take their charge from their play upon the homoerotic.

Historians have recognised the ambiguity of the class position of radical intellectuals, able to act only within a culture whose material base they seek to deny. Their ambiguous position in the gender order has been less remarked upon. It seems to me that Marquet's sense of his class identity is coloured by his recognition that the work he does is not truly manly. This is nicely captured in a full-page cartoon which he drew to mark the move of the Australian Worker into new premises in early 1916. He pictures the members of the various 'departments' as humorous stereotypes; the lady editor of the women's page is armed with a broom, the general manager with a large spanner. The male editors and journalists appear to be obsessed with their work, writing crouched on the floor while powerful arms lift furniture over their heads, or swing them downstairs in a basket; Marquet pictures himself finishing the cartoon kneeling on the pavement outside. The strongest comment is reserved for the editor Henry Boote; he is drawn as a diminutive jester, carried out in his office chair by a huge pair of muscular arms.⁵⁰

Recall the strange image on the Argus compositors' Christmas card: the powerful stance of the anthropomorphic Linotype machine set against the timid stoop of the hand compositor. The same kind of self-deprecation is at work within the humour here. Clearly the force of the machine carried meanings of diminished manliness for the workers which it replaced, and I would argue that this meaning was shared by the artist-intellectual (and ex-compositor) who drew the image.

Marquet's glorification of manual strength was a common trope amongst intellectuals sympathetic to the labour movement. The paintings of Roberts and Streeton, the poems of Lawson and Patterson, all expressed a frank admiration for the muscular male body which their authors understood as an innocent expression of manliness, and later critics have read as a form of homoerotic desire. Given the fierce feminist criticism of the masculinism of Australian labour, there is a nice irony in the suggestion that its heroes owe something at least of their ability to inspire devotion to the play of homoeroticism.

Endnotes

^* My thanks to Mark Peel, Nick Dyrenfurth, Kate Murphy and the two anonymous Labour History readers for their comments on this paper.

^1. Claude Marquet 'The Phoenix', Australian Worker, 28 December 1916, p .10. This paper in its early years was called the Worker; it became the Australian Worker from 1911. I have called it the Australian Worker throughout, which has the convenience of distinguishing it from the Worker published across the same period in Queensland.

^2. Margaret Anderson, Julia Clark, Andrew Reeves, When Australia was a Woman: Images of a Nation, Western Australian Museum, Perth, 1998. Joe Harris' compilation of visual sources demonstrates the richness of the field; see Joe Harris, The Bitter Fight: a Pictorial History of the Australian Labour Movement, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1970.

^3. June Senyard, Labor in Cartoons: Cartoons of the Australian Labor Party in Victoria, 1891–1991, Hyland House, Melbourne, 1991, pp. 9, 12.

^4. Lenore Layman, 'Fighting Fatman Fetteration: Labour Culture and Federation', in Mark Hearn and Greg Patmore (eds), Working the Nation: Working Life and Federation, Pluto Press, Sydney, 2001, pp. 48–49.

^5. See for example Tim Battin and Graham Maddox, 'Australian Labor and the Socialist Tradition', Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 26, 1991, pp. 181–196. My thanks to Nick Dyrenfurth for guiding me into this literature.

^6. See Peter Love's even-handed study of the long tradition of populism in Australian politics, Labour and the Money Power: Australian Labour Populism 1890–1950, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1984; and Ray Markey, 'Populism and the Formation of a Labor Party in New South Wales, 1890–1900', Journal of Australian Studies, no. 20, May 1987, pp. 38–48.

^7. Sean Scalmer, 'Being Practical in Early and Contemporary Labour Politics: a Labourist Critique', Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 43, no. 3, 1997, pp. 301–311. Neil Massey sees labourism as a 'strategic thread' spun out of the movement's continuing need to hold workers' industrial interests in creative tension with winning elections and civilising capitalism; see R. Neil Massey, 'A Century of Labourism, 1891–1993: an Historical Interpretation', Labour History, no. 66, May 1994, pp. 45–71.

^8. Sean Scalmer, 'Experience and Discourse: an Example of Recent Theoretical Approaches to Labour and Social History', Labour History, no.70, May 1996, p. 163.

^9. Layman, 'Fighting Fatman Fetteration', p. 48.

^10. R.B. Walker, The Newspaper Press in New South Wales 1803–1920, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1976; Dennis Cryle, Disreputable Profession: Journalists and Journalism in Colonial Australia, Central Queensland University Press, Rockhampton, 1997. See also H.J. Gibbney, Labor in Print: a Guide to the People who Created a Labor Press in Australia between 1850 and 1939, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1975, a useful compendium listing all labour newspapers, however ephemeral, and their editors and publishers; unfortunately it includes neither journalists nor cartoonists. D.J. Murphy noted in 1968 that 'The first thirty years of the labour movement in Australia are outstanding for their production of a standard of journalism and journalists that does not seem evident now'; the same might have been said of the cartoonists; D.J. Murphy, 'Henry Boote's Papers', Labour History, no. 15, November 1968, p. 71.

^11. R.H. Connell and T.H. Irving, Class Structure in Australian History, Longman Chesire, Melbourne, 1980, p. 201. The classic investigation of the class ambiguities inherent in the position of radical editor is Alan Martin's investigation of Henry Parkes' response to his typographers' strike in 1854; see A. Martin, 'Drink and deviance in Sydney: Investigating intemperance, 1854–5', Historical Studies, vol.17, no. 68, April 1977, pp. 342–360.

^12. Graeme Davison, 'Sydney and the Bush: an Urban Context', in John Carroll, Intruders in the Bush: the Australian Quest for Identity, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1982, pp. 109–130; Bruce Scates, A New Australia: Citizenship, Radicalism and the First Republic, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1997, ch. 1. See also Peter Kirkpatrick, The Sea Coast of Bohemia: Literary Life in Sydney's Roaring Twenties, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1992, chs 1 and 2.

^13. Raelene Frances, The Politics of Work: Gender and Labour in Victoria 1880–1939, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1993. Marilyn Lake,'The Politics of Respectability: Identifying the Masculinist Context', Historical Studies, vol. 22, no. 86, 1986, pp. 116–131; Susan Magarey et al. (eds), Debutante Nation: Feminism Contests the 1890s, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1993; J. Hagan, Printers and Politics: a History of the Australian Printing Unions, 1850–1950, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1966, p. 104. The contradictions inherent in the pressmen's attitude to women and feminism are explored in Marilyn Lake, 'Socialism and Manhood; the case of William Lane', Labour History, no. 60, 1986, pp. 114–120; Bruce Scates, 'Socialism, Feminism and the case of William Lane; a reply to Marilyn Lake', Labour History, no. 59, 1990, pp. 45–58; Patricia Grimshaw, 'The "Equals and Comrades of men"?: Tocsin and "the Woman Question"', in Susan Magarey et al. (eds), Debutante Nation, pp. 100–113; and Michael Leach, '"Manly, true and white": Masculine Identity and Australian Socialism', in Geoffrey Stokes (ed.), The Politics of Identity in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1997, pp. 63–77.

^14. Andrew Reeves, 'The Allegorical Side of the Banner: Women and Imagery in the Australian Labour Movement', in Anderson, Clark and Reeves, When Australia was a Woman, p. 32; Ann Stephens and Andrew Reeves, Badges of Labour, Banners of Pride: Aspects of Working Class Celebration, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences with George Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1984.

^15. Relevant texts include: K. Adler and M. Pointon (eds), The Body Imaged: the Human Form and Visual Culture since the Renaissance, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993; Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body: a Cultural Study, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998; Susan Bordo, The Male Body: a New Look at Men in Public and in Private, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 1999; Maurizia Boscagli, Eye on the Flesh: Fashions of Masculinity in the Early Twentieth Century, Westview Press, Colorado, 1996; Tamar Garb, Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-de-Siecle France, Thames and Hudson, London 1998; George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: the Creation of Modern Masculinity, Oxford University Press, New York, 1996; Dorinda Outram, The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class and Political Culture, Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 1982.

^16. Melissa Dabakis, Visualizing Labor in American Sculpture: Monuments, Manliness, and the Work Ethic, 1880–1935, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1999, ch. 4.

^17. Leigh Astbury, '"Dressing up": Masquerade in the Heidelberg School', Australian Cultural History, no. 13, 1994, pp. 129–147; and chapters by Astbury and Ian Burn, Nigel Lendon, and Terry Smith in Anthony Bradley and Terry Smith (eds), Australian Art and Architecture, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1980. Leigh Astbury, 'Death and Eroticism in the Anzac Legend', in Leon Paroissien (ed.), Eroticism: Images of Sexuality in Australian Art, Sydney: Craftsman House in Association with Fine Arts Press, c. 1992; and see also Anna Alexandra Carden-Coyne, 'Classical Heroism and Modern Life: Bodybuilding and Masculinity in the Early Twentieth Century,' Journal of Australian Studies, December 1999, pp. 138–149.

^18. Marguerite Mahood, The Loaded Line: Australian Political Caricature 1788–1901, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1973; Joan Kerr, Artists and Cartoonists in Black and White: the Most Public Art, National Trust and the S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney, 1999, p. 30. Outram reads European representations of muscled men as 'political bodies', public statements of the power relations that constitute both the modern state and the modern citizen. Frank Farrell has identified a visual tradition of 'the practical working man' extending from the Victorian goldfields to the Amalgamated Miners' Association, the Australian Workers' Association, and 'the worker press of the early labour movement'; the proposal is suggestive, but insufficiently grounded; Frank Farrell, 'The Practical Politician', Australian Cultural History, no. 8, 1989, pp. 55, 58.

^19. Mahood, The Loaded Line, pp. 205–207, 225–227.

^20. Livingstone Hopkins, 'And That is Now the Question', Bulletin, 16 August 1890. Edward Dyson is credited with introducing the Australian duo of 'young, militant, triumphant' worker and gross Fatman to the English press from about 1910; Vance Palmer, 'Will Dyson', Meanjin Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 4, 1949, pp. 213–233.

^21. The derivation given is bowy-yanks, leather leggings. See Macquarie Concise Dictionary, 3^rd ed, Macquarie Library, McMahons Point, 1998.

^22. 'The Trades-Dudes Union', Melbourne Punch, 18 December 1902. The question of what real workers actually wore is too large to discuss here. Cultural historians of dress in Australia generally agree that by the 1890s male Australian workers affected a distinct style of clothing (apart from their work clothes): soft hats rather than bowlers, soft collars and collarless shirts rather than wing collars, knotted scarves rather than ties, and boots. See Marion Fletcher, Costume in Australia 1788–1901, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1984; Cedric Flower, Clothes in Australia 1788–1980s, Kangaroo Press, Sydney, 1984; and especially Margaret Maynard, Fashioned from Penury: Dress as Cultural Practice Colonial Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1994.

^23. Stephens and Reeves, Badges of Labour. See plate 38, p. 50 for the banner of Federated Mining Employees Association of Australia.

^24. Vane Lindesay, 'Claude Arthur Marquet (1869–1920)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 10, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1981. In its first form, lithography involved drawing in crayon on a limestone block to create an inverse image. This method was used in Australia until the 1880s, when a few presses introduced a process involving the creation of an engraved metal plate from a photographic negative. The Bulletin was the first to employ this method, in 1885. It allowed for the easy reproduction of complex line-drawings, but could not reproduce graduations in tone. Hagan, Printers and Politics, pp. 10, 143.

^25. Claude Marquet, 'How It was Done!' Tocsin, 21 May 1903, cover; Claude Marquet, 'Irvine's Freeholders', Tocsin, 9 July 1903, cover. The report from the Worker, 21 January 1893, is cited in Love, Labour and the Money Power, p. 24.

^26. Claude Marquet, 'Symeism Versus Democracy' and 'The Slump in Symeism', Tocsin, electoral supplements, 26 November and 10 December, 1903; Claude Marquet, 'Democracy Triumphant', Tocsin, 24 December 1903, cover.

^27. Layman, 'Fighting Fatman Fetteration', p. 97.

^28. Claude Marquet, 'A Labour "Recessional"', Tocsin, 6 April 1905, p. 8.

^29. The Christmas card is reproduced in Kerr, Artists and Cartoonists in Black and White, fig. 2.21. Hagan, Printers and Politics, pp. 141, 104.

^30. From 1905, Fred Brown, Will Donald, Hal Gye, Hugh Maclean, P. O'Sullivan, W. Riches and George Taylor all published prolifically in the Sydney Australian Worker, and from 1906 Clem Delande and 'A.J.M' in the Melbourne Labor Call. About these I can discover very little. Hal Gye was an artist and an associate of the Dysons and the Lindsays; Ross McMullin, Will Dyson, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1984. George Taylor was later a journalist on the Sydney Sun; Michael Cannon, 'Introduction' in Hold Page One: Memoirs of Monty Grover, Editor, Loch Haven Books, Melbourne, 1993; P. O'Sullivan seems to be the Patrick Sullivan who moved to America in 1909 and created the animated cartoon character Felix the Cat; H.J. Gibney and Ann G. Smith, A Biographical Register 1788–1939, Volume 2, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Canberra, 1987. The Special Double Moving In Number of the Australian Worker, 2 September 1905, celebrates the new building. Vane Lindsay, 'Marquet', dates the move to Sydney to 1906, but also writes that Marquet's first Australian Worker cartoon was published on 25 October 1906; the first that I have found was on 22 October 1904.

^31. Markey, 'Populism and the Formation of a Labor Party', p. 47.

^32. Ambrose Dyson and 'W.R.' are particularly racist. Although it seems to me as a non-quantified judgement that the Sydney Australian Worker was never as noisy or as virulent in its overt racism as the Queensland AWU paper the Hummer, nor as the radical journals the Bulletin and the Lone Hand. Marquet's anti-Chinese cartoon appeared in the Australian Worker, 3 December 1904, p. 5.

^33. For bowyangs, the Australian Worker, 5 September 1907, p. 1; 22 August 1907, p. 13. For hero as miner, Australian Worker, 23 January 1905, p. 5; 4 November 1907, p. 1. For villains, Australian Worker, 26 November 1904, p. 5; 4 February 1905, p. 5; 29 March 1906, p. 5; 7 November 1907, p.1; though in the last of these the worker figure, 'Labor', prepares to rescue a diminutive fatman, representing misguided small-trading interests, from the many coils of a huge serpent labelled 'Combines'. For the unfortunate young mine-worker see Claude Marquet, 'Oh, for Nationalisation!', Australian Worker, 23 January 1905, p. 5; Marquet's first work was as a 'wheeler' in the Wallaroo mines.

^34. For political Labor, see Australian Worker, 7 January 1905, p. 5; 14 March 1905, p. 5; 7 November 1907, p. 2. In the first issues of Labor Call, Clem Delande pictured the new paper, and the political Labor movement, as a dapper young clerk in shiny shoes, matching pants and vest, and a very high collar; only his rolled-up sleeves suggest work; see Labor Call, 1 November 1906, cover; 8 November 1906, cover.

^35. Tocsin, 31 December 1903, p. 1; 14 June 1903, p. 1. See Claude Marquet, Tocsin, 10 September 1903, p. 1 for the big boot. See also Kerr, Artists and Cartoonists in Black and White, p. 33.

^36. Australian Worker, 31 December 1908, p. 1. Layman notes that labour images of Australia often 'represented her as a beautiful young woman looking for happiness ... her search for a new life suggests the potential girlfriend/fiancée/wife'; see Layman, 'Fighting Fatman Fetteration', p. 68.

^37. This issue is most thoroughly covered in Liza Dale, The Rural Context of Masculinity and the 'Woman Question': an Analysis of the Amalgamated Shearers' Union Support for Women's Equality, NSW, 1890–1895, Monash Publications in History, Melbourne, 1991. Dale argues that the productive role of rural women within the family unit both supported the ideal of manly independence, and predisposed the rural unions to support women's suffrage as an expression of domestic feminism.

^38. Presumably the paper stopped paying generous prices for single cartoons. Emily Letitia Paul, nee Mutton, was born in Bathurst, NSW; in 1866 she married Alfred P. Paul. She was an original member of the New South Wales Society of Artists, 1895; was influenced by US socialists; in 1914 she stood unsuccessfully for the federal seat of Cook; See Gibbney and Smith, A Biographical Register. For Boote see Frank Farrell, 'Henry Ernest Boote', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 8; Murphy, 'Henry Boote's Papers', p. 72; Ian Syson, 'Henry Ernest Boote: Putting the Boote into the Australian Literary Archive', Labour History, no. 70, May 1996, pp. 71–91; Clyde R. Cameron, 'Henry Ernest Boote: "It's Wrong to be Right"', Labour History, no. 80, May 2001, pp. 201–214.

^39. Australian Worker, 21 March 1912, p. 9; 16 May 1912, p. 21. Mick Paul, 'Workers of the World, March On!', Australian Worker, 3 December 1912, p. 1.

^40. Australian Worker, 26 November 1912, p. 3. In 1907 Marquet drew 'Revolution is Off', showing a crazed anarchist with a broken sword, about to be blown up by his own bomb; Australian Worker, 19 September 1907, p. 12. Boote was also no revolutionary; see Murphy, 'Henry Boote's Papers', p. 73; also Cameron, 'Henry Ernest Boote', pp. 201, 203–204; but he differed from Marquet in identifying capitalism itself as the enemy.

^41. For the muscular urban worker, see Australian Worker, 25 April 1912, p. 9; 14 November 1912, p. 3. For his enemies, see Australian Worker, 4 January 1912 p. 1; 1 February 1912, p. 23. For the revisiting of Hop 1890, see Australian Worker, 11 April 1912, p. 9.

^42. 'The Blood Vote' first appeared in the Australian Worker, October 12 1916, and was widely distributed as a poster. The classic analysis of the citizen mother is Carmel Shute, 'Heroines and Heroes: Sexual mythology in Australia 1914–18', in Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake (eds), Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1995, pp. 24–42.

^43. John Hirst, 'Australian Defence and Conscription: a Reassessment, Part 1', Australian Historical Studies, vol. 25, no. 101, October 1993, pp. 617–618.

^44. Australian Worker, 6 January 1916, p. 1; 7 October 1915, p. 5. 'It's a Long Way to Calvary', Labor Call, 26 October 1916, p. 3. For further examples of the worker identified with anti-conscription, see Australian Worker, 20 July 1916 and 3 August 1916. Mick Paul made the same point in a cartoon showing German Militarism being welcomed by Fatman as he steps onto Australian soil, only to be stopped in his tracks by an unmarked manly figure who stands equally well for the urban worker or the young Australia; see Australian Worker, 14 September 1916.

^45. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford University Press, New York, 1975; George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars, Oxford University Press, New York, 1990; Joanne Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face to Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare, Granta, London, 1999; Allen J. Frantzen, Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice and the Great War, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2004.

^46. For Jesus, see Labor Call, 12 October 1916, p. 5; 26 October 1916, p. 1, 5. In the Brisbane Worker, 20 February 1897, Montagu Scott presented an agonised 'Queensland Tax-payer' as Prometheus, a muscular figure whose entrails are being actively ripped out by a vulture labelled 'Q.N. Bank'; see Love, Labour and the Money Power, p. 25. Norman Lindsay's sensual, sulky Prometheus represented the Victorian labour movement in the Bulletin, 23 May 1903. Marquet's Prometheus in the Australian Worker, 19 December 1907, cover, shows the sufferings of employees at the hands of 'Private Enterprise'.

^47. Claude Marquet, 'Prussianism Defeated', Australian Worker, 2 November 1916, p. 10.

^48. Frantzen, Bloody Good, pp. 3–9 and passim.

^49. From O'Dowd's pamphlet, Poetry Militant, cited in Chris Wallace Crabb, 'Bernard Patrick O'Dowd, 1866–1953', Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 11, 1988.

^50. Claude Marquet, 'Moving Pictures', Australian Worker, 4 February 1916, cover.

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Making Working-Class Heroes : Labor Cartoonists and the Australian Worker, 1903–16

Marian Quartly*

Endnotes

Marian Quartly^*