Melissa Bellanta | Transcending Class? Australia's Single Taxers in the Early 1890s | Labour History, 92

Transcending Class? Australia's Single Taxers in the Early 1890s

Melissa Bellanta^*

Australia's single taxers had a chequered relationship with the labour movement during the 1890s. Many collaborated with Labor at the beginning of the decade, but later broke from it in favour of the conservative free trade lobby. Largely because of this, labour historians have interpreted the single taxers' relationship to class in different ways. This endeavour has been misconceived, because the single taxers renounced class as the key to their politics. They presented themselves as 'above class' and adopted a populist worldview. I explore the single taxers' self-representation here, detailing the ways in which they rejected class through their rhetoric, modes of dress, eclectic friendships, eccentric manners and millennial religiosity. However, the fact that single taxers rejected class does not mean that the material realm had no influence over their politics. Single tax men's presentation of themselves as 'above class' was indeed informed by their uncertain material circumstances during the 1890s. Recognising this allows a critical engagement with the work of Patrick Joyce, Gareth Stedman Jones and Joan Scott to take place in this paper.

The single taxer John Farrell first met Bridget Gulson behind the bar of the Turk's Head Hotel, Albury, in 1883. At least that is how his daughter Olivia described it decades later, after her father had been dead 50 years and Bridget Gulson had become one of her oldest friends. Farrell had come to Albury to apply for a manager's job at the brewery, and he was looking for a room to board. Bridget took one look at his 'dapper clothes' and narrowed her eyes. She did not want 'a real gussy' like him, she told Farrell; they did not take 'that kind of boarders at the Hotel, but just plain working men'. Undeterred, Farrell pleaded to be given a chance. If Bridget let him stay, in the morning she would see him in his 'working togs', and he was sure he would pass the test. And sure enough, in the morning he had discarded his fancy clothes and appeared before her in bloucher boots, 'dungaree trousers hitched up with a cord', and 'for effect a coloured hanky round his neck'. Bridget Gulson evidently approved, as she not only let him stay, but went on to become close to Farrell and his family.¹

John Farrell died in the last days of 1903. Soon after his death, Labor member George Black wrote a memoir of their friendship for the Worker. In the early 1890s, he said, Farrell was appointed editor of the Daily Telegraph. Having landed this prestigious job, some of his friends suggested it was no longer appropriate to go about in 'the clothes of Bohemia'. Farrell agreed, and went out and bought himself the uniform they wore at the high end of town. 'For some weeks', Black remembered, 'King-street chuckled as John Farrell rolled down its sidewalks beneath a glossy belltopper', sporting a frock-coat that always seemed to get in his way. Every ten paces or so he stopped and struggled to remove matches from his trouser pockets, swearing in an Irish brogue which detracted from the patrician effect of his clothes. Farrell 'did not fit the editorial chair and it did not fit him', Black concluded affectionately. After a short time he quit and went back to his old job as leader-writer, allowing him to spend more time with his family, his garden, his poetry, and his advocacy of the single tax.²

John Farrell is sometimes seen as Australia's foremost single taxer in the early nineties. The single tax movement was based on the ideas of Henry George, the American land reformer, who conducted a sensational lecture-tour of Australasia in 1890. He called for all taxes to be abolished except for one – a single tax – on the unimproved value of land. This would do away with injustice, he claimed, because it got to the cause of all social ills: the fact that land was treated as a commodity. There was no need to restrain the competition generated by free trade, nor to interfere with the relationship between employer and employee. Simply prevent people from profiting from land investment, and a utopian transformation of society would follow. These claims incited strong feelings in colonial society, and were avidly reported in the press. They were taken up excitedly by those in unorthodox church circles, adopted enthusiastically by sections of the labour movement, and regarded with a horror sometimes bordering on the fanatical by big landowners and die-hard protectionists.³

Throughout his involvement with the single tax movement, Farrell presented himself as someone who transcended class. He believed his activism allowed him to be all things to all people. Moving between workshops and offices, drawing-rooms and factories, between small-town Albury and busy downtown King-street, was for him a matter of pride. In this, Farrell is representative of Australia's single tax movement in the early 1890s, particularly of Australia's single tax men. He highlights the fact that Georgism was a populist movement in Patrick Joyce's sense of the term. Broadly speaking, that is, the single taxers were inspired by visions of social reconciliation and harmony. At least in the early years of the nineties, they pitched themselves at 'the people' rather than a single class, and they refused to see capitalism as the primary cause of poverty and social inequality.⁴

Recognising Georgism as a populist movement is important, because those historians who have failed to do so have misrepresented its character and aims. Over time, the single tax has often been characterised as 'a plea for the working-classes', or else as the expression of a 'fundamentally middle-class' vision of society – something I will show in the literature review below.⁵ In each case, what's been overlooked is the fact that the movement opposed class as the basis of its politics. What is also glossed over is the fact that the single taxers came from 'an indeterminate social strata'. As Bruce Scates observes, the single taxers' social position was for the most part difficult to categorise in class terms. As I will make clear in this paper, too, the single taxers' representation of their movement as one which transcended class was an important feature of the Australian campaign in the early 1890s.⁶

Class and the Single Taxers: A Literature Review

The height of the single tax's popularity in Australia was in the first years of the nineties, during and immediately following George's lecture tour. There were at most 500 Australians who attended meetings of Single Tax Leagues in 1890, but George's work and ideas were read and/or debated by many more than that. Indeed, the press coverage of George's ideas meant he was a household name in the colonies (not to mention in other western locations). George was also admired within the labour movement at this time, ensuring that his proposal was supported by other groups besides the Single Tax Leagues.⁷

The relationship between class and the late-nineteenth century single tax movement has been the subject of a bewildering array of opinions. Old Left historians writing up to about the 1960s tended to highlight George's popularity within the labour movement from the late 1880s. Robin Gollan pointed out that the Fifth International Trades Union Congress of 1888 adopted the single tax as one of its resolutions. Lloyd Churchward observed that in the early nineties, many leading figures of the Labor Parties in South Australia and New South Wales were single taxers. There was some variation among historians as to whether the movement's support-base came more from bush unionists or from city-based Labor members. In most cases, however, there was a consensus that George's work appealed to the labour movement on the basis that it made 'an eloquent plea on behalf of the working classes'.⁸ There was also the general sense that the ideology of the movement was radical in nature. It appealed to unionists and Labor members (the argument went) because it sought a significant redistribution of wealth through the nationalisation of land values.⁹

In the 1970s, when New Left historians began commenting on the single tax movement, they tended to portray it as middle-class – either in its constituency, its values, or both. Like Gollan, Humphrey McQueen highlighted the close relationship between Labor and Georgism in the early 1890s. Labor continued to support a Georgist-inspired land tax well into the twentieth century, he noted. (Incidentally, Labor members continued to support Georgist principles in local government. Their influence survives today in the calculation of council rates on the basis of a property's unimproved value). As far as McQueen was concerned, however, Georgism's influence on Labor attested to the petit-bourgeois nature of both movements. Verity Burgmann also viewed the single taxers as middle-class, adding that their movement was liberal in outlook. George's ideas 'appealed to the liberal middle classes in the cities', she said. His supporters were never fundamentally opposed to 'the worldview of the rich and the powerful'.¹⁰

Burgmann's view of the close link between liberalism and Georgism was shared by Airlie Worrall in a 1979 thesis, the most detailed study of Australian single tax groups to date. Worrall drew attention to the fact that single taxers formed alliances with a range of labour and non-labour free trade bodies in the early nineties. They wanted to agitate for George's ideas within the Trades and Labour Councils and the early Labor Parties, and at the same time to work with free trade campaigners outside the labour movement. To this end, single taxers infiltrated the variety of free trade lobby groups associated with Henry Parkes in New South Wales and Victoria, emphasising a shared commitment to laissez-faire policy and liberal values.¹¹

It was hard not to be confused after wading through these various accounts. Were the single taxers and/or their politics to be understood as rural or urban, working-class or middle-class, radical or liberal, more entwined with labour activism or the free trade campaign? Bruce Scates' A New Australia (1994) represents the first comprehensive attempt to answer these questions. The best way to understand the composition of the single tax movement in the early 1890s, he argued, is to recognise that its constituency was highly difficult to categorise according to class. True, the most prominent Australian Georgists were professionals, businessmen and politicians, notably including the South Australian Governor, George Grey. During the depression of the nineties, however, most of the Georgist salary-earners or businessmen were at risk of downward social mobility. Far more belonged to a loose group who moved between wage labour and self-employment, or who were what we might call the members of the 'middling' class. These included the tobacconist, Max Lewin, who ran a tiny shop in central Adelaide; the stonemason and respectable unionist, John Grant; the bootmaker-turned-preacher, W T Carter. And while most Georgists lived in the cities, the single tax did enjoy a brief popularity among Shearers' Unionists in the early to mid-1890s. Many of these unionists were small landholders as well as shearers. This meant they occupied a similarly indeterminate class status to the movements' urban members.¹²

Another important thing to remember about the single tax movement, Scates said, was that its political tenor changed over the course of the 1890s. It began as a radical campaign with close links to Labor at the beginning of the decade, and ended it as a free-trade lobby group which opposed the labour movement. This change was accompanied by a political shift within the Labor Party itself. In the early nineties, single taxers and other radicals from a range of class backgrounds had existed in uneasy alliance within the Labor Party. By the mid-nineties, this fluidity had come to an end. With the creation of party pledges and the expulsion of non-workers from industrial labour bodies, Labor became far more rigid in its organisation and more wedded to the language of class. This development ensured that a steady drift to the right took place within the single tax movement. Once the alliance with the labour movement was over, the most conservative Georgists came to the fore. As a consequence, the campaign became far less radical in its aims and tone in the last years of the century.¹³

Scates' emphasis on the social and political diversity of Labor in the early 1890s was part of a broader concern among labour historians of the late-twentieth century. Many historians of this period wanted to move away from reductive approaches to the relationship between class and politics. To call early Labor either 'working-class' or 'petit-bourgeois', Scates suggested, was to reduce the complexity of views and of people involved. 'From the outset', he insisted, 'the Labor Party was a populist rather than a workers' party'.¹⁴

Scates' complex view of the relationship between class and labour politics was complemented by work produced by other labour historians in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1994, for example, Terry Irving edited a thoughtful collection of essays challenging the simplicity of many old perspectives on class. Some years before this, Frank Bongiorno, Ray Markey and Peter Love had all drawn attention to the influence of populist ideas on labour politics at the turn of the twentieth century. They showed that labour activists of this period often believed that society's key division was between 'the people' and 'the money power', rather than between capitalists and the working-class.¹⁵ The overall effect of this scholarship was to underline the diversity of labour and radical movements in Australia. It showed that class was not the only identity available to labour activists in the late-nineteenth century, and that even those who did identify themselves with a class sometimes changed this over the course of their lives.

These critical developments took place from within the labour history discipline. Obviously, there were also plenty of critiques of class produced outside the labour history fold. The most telling of these came from those who had begun their training as labour or social historians, but later rejected this identification – usually as a result of an encounter with loosely-defined postmodern ideas. Among these were Marilyn Lake in Australia, and Joan W Scott, Gareth Stedman Jones and Patrick Joyce overseas. None of these historians took an identical approach to labour history, but they were alike in rejecting the notion that a movement's politics might be explained by its members' social background. They looked at the way the language of a given movement created its constituency, rather than the other way around. They also placed a more radical emphasis on the fractured nature of identity than that then offered by labour historians in Australia. Class and populist identities were always provisional and unstable, they suggested, always competing and overlapping with other forms of identity (gender, sexuality, religion, geographic locality, nationality, race).¹⁶

When I first became interested in the late nineteenth-century single taxers, I was struck by how much they appeared to demonstrate the postmodern ideas just outlined. The single taxers insisted on the multiplicity of their own social identities. They appealed to 'the people' in a way highly redolent of the groups discussed by Joyce, Stedman Jones and others. A consciousness of these similarities convinced me that it was misguided to characterise Georgist politics according to a class-based schema – that Joyce's notion of populism was a far more instructive way to understand the movement. But at the same time, I found it difficult to accept that the Georgists' social background was irrelevant to understanding their movement. I could not accept the basic premise on which the work of Jones and Scott was based: that is, that a movement's social composition had nothing to do with its emergence or decline. Like Scates, I was convinced that the single taxers' indeterminate status did help to explain the emergence of their movement. The rest of this paper is thus an attempt to come to terms with this dilemma. I intend firstly to underline the populist nature of Australian Georgism and to demonstrate how much the work of postmodern historians like Joyce illuminates their politics. I then intend to critique some of the issues raised by that postmodern work.

The Single Tax 'Everyman'

A series of photographs of John Farrell exists in Mitchell Library, each undated and without commentary. In one, he appears in flamboyant poet's guise, his hair tousled and a flower in his lapel, perhaps similar to the way he looked on arrival to the Turk's Head Hotel. In another, he looks plainer, far more like a working-man, no doubt as he would have appeared to Bridget Gulson the next day on his way to work. In yet another he appears as Farrell the Respectable, dressed in a suit with his hair and moustaches fastidiously oiled. These photographs of Farrell are significant, because they underline the chameleon-like identity which he cultivated in the 1880s and 1890s, the period in which he became an avid exponent of George's ideas.

The use of dress as a sign of class is evident in many late nineteenth-century accounts. Labourers were frequently referred to in the press by their rolled-up shirt sleeves in the 1880–90s. Capitalists and squatters were portrayed as gentlemen dressed in frock-coats and belltoppers, while so-called white collar workers were sometimes referred to as 'the broadcloth section of society'. Traitors to the labour cause were labelled 'turncoats', indicating that they had chosen the dress of the enemy rather than that of their own class.¹⁷ This symbolism attached to dress is important, because it allows us to see that Farrell's adoption of different costumes helped him to present himself as 'above class'.

The many faces of John Farrell
Photographs reproduced courtesy of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

A similar self-representation to that of Farrell was maintained by Frank Cotton, one of New South Wales' most prominent single taxers. As a journalist and influential member of the Labor Party, he made ample use of the fact that he had once worked as a rural labourer. Cotton wore the old shearing-calluses on his hands as badges of his familiarity with labour, proof that he was capable of representing workingmen and their concerns. At the same time, however, he never fully identified with the labour cause. In other forums, Cotton described himself as a member of the 'classes ... out of which the average M.P's and J.P's and a host of other little Ps are made'. He was also a Methodist lay-preacher, and thus figuratively put on the clothes of the evangelical minister whenever he spoke in this capacity.¹⁸

Harry Taylor was a South Australian journalist who went to William Lane's cooperative colony in Paraguay during his early twenties. After three years, he returned to Australia to try his hand first at fruit-growing and then as the proprietor of a newspaper in the Murray Riverland. After his death in the 1920s, he was remembered for the eccentricity of his appearance. Taylor had habitually worn clothes aimed at exempting him from certain social norms: a cream tussore silk suit teamed with shabby sandshoes, 'the laces undone and trailing', and a long bushy beard long well after such things had ceased to be fashionable.¹⁹

As a Primitive Methodist clergyman in Adelaide during the late 1880s and early 1890s, it was less acceptable for Reverend Hugh Gilmore to dress in strange or various attire. Nonetheless, he presented himself as exempt from class categories in other ways, notably producing a memoir which drew attention to his time as a homeless orphan on the mean streets of Glasgow. Gilmore was renowned for the number of workers in his congregation, and for his belief in unionism. Before his death in late 1891, he attended and held rallies in support of the unions during the Maritime Strike. He had also held a rally to support the London Dockworkers during their strike of 1889.²⁰

Millennialism and Maverick Belief

The figure of the rebel minister or lay-preacher loomed large within Australian Georgism. As Scates says, the movement was so heavily populated by lay-preachers and ministers that it was dubbed a 'little gospel emporium'.²¹ Some of the most well-known Georgists were Primitive Methodist or Congregationalist lay-preachers: not just Frank Cotton, but also Harry Taylor, John Napier Birks, William Webster, and Catherine Helen Spence. Others were unorthodox clergymen: the Adelaide-based Hugh Gilmore, J. Reed Glasson and Charles Marson, and the Brisbane-based Osborne Lilley. While not card-carrying single taxers, the renegade ministers Charles Strong, J Day Thompson, and Archibald Turnbull all moved on the margins of the movement and mixed closely with its devotees.²²

The fact that so many single taxers were unorthodox clergymen or lay-preachers added to their sense of social indeterminacy. Many lay-preachers and maverick clergymen saw themselves as existing outside the Church. Some launched stinging attacks against the corruption of the established church hierarchies and the limitations of religious dogma. At the same time, they pitted themselves against irreligion, seeing themselves as go-betweens with regard to the Church and secular society. This was certainly the case for many single taxers. George himself had been inspired by a millennial sense of mission, claiming that his campaign was part of a broader movement to create the Kingdom of God on earth. His Australian supporters reiterated this belief. They cast the single tax as a key means through which society would become more Christlike, dissolving the distinction between the religious and the secular.²³

There were perhaps a hundred women actively associated with Georgism in the early to mid-1890s. Few if any of these women were concerned with the fantasy of class transcendence indulged in by the men just described. They were mostly progressive housewives who came to Georgism through the suffrage and temperance campaigns. Even if they had wanted to do so, these women could not aspire to 'everyman' status – to moving seamlessly between country pubs, city offices and workshops. Their childrearing responsibilities also obstructed their mobility. Farrell's ability to roam about the countryside in the 1880s was made possible by the fact that his wife Elizabeth stayed put in Victoria in order to care for their children. Catherine Helen Spence, the most well-known female Georgist, only achieved her own considerable mobility in the absence of a husband and children.²⁴

One thing female single taxers did share with their male counterparts was a sense of millennial crusade. They believed George's reforms served a similar end to that of temperance and women's suffrage. All three campaigns (so they thought) would help to build the Christlike society of the future. As Spence put it in one of her utopian fictions, these campaigns would help create a future in which 'woman would take 'her equal place in all relations of life', all children would be happy and well-cared for, and distinctions of 'caste' were finally at an end.²⁵

A Classless Language: The Single Taxers and Populism

The single taxers promoted a sense of classlessness (or 'castelessness') in their formal rhetoric as well as their appearance and maverick religiosity. Sometimes, their most radical members appealed specifically to labour or the working-class. This was the case for Hugh Gilmore when he stood on a unionist platform and claimed that labour needed to fight for its share in the means of production. In the overwhelming majority of cases, however, the single taxers insisted that their movement was neither middle-class nor working-class. Striving to extinguish these categories, they looked instead to the people or a universal brotherhood. 'I do not want to talk to a class. I would like to talk to the whole people', was one of George's refrains. If people recognised their 'common birthright as the children of the All Father', said Frank Cotton, the world would no longer resound with 'the clamour and din of class and creed'. Even Gilmore segued into this language at other times during his advocacy of George's ideas. 'If any section of the community is allowed to control the land it controls the life, the labour, and the liberty of the people', he announced in a Georgist speech. Since a small section of the community did in fact control the land, 'the people are kept in involuntary idleness and want, and the producers are robbed of a large share of the produce of their labour' [my emphasis].²⁶

The single taxers' description of their constituency as 'the people' makes them redolent of the members of older radical movements such as Chartism in mid-century England. The Chartists also appealed to 'the people'. So did a great many of the socialists, unionists, and English Liberals described in Patrick Joyce's appropriately entitled work, Visions of the People (1991). For such activists, 'the people' generally referred to a hotchpotch of occupational categories: farmers, small businessmen, shopkeepers, self-employed tradesmen, some journalists (depending on who they wrote for) and, of course, manual labourers. It was precisely this motley of occupations which was invoked by the Victorian single taxer, Max Hirsch. There was 'solidarity between all who labour', Hirsch intoned. It existed whether they manned machinery, cultivated turnips, wrote for a newspaper, or managed a bank, offering itself as 'a living burning truth' between 'all... mankind'.²⁷

When Jones published his controversial essay, 'Rethinking Chartism' (1983), his aim was to draw attention to the populist nature of Chartist language in order to criticise those historians who described the movement as 'working-class'. This characterisation of Chartism had generally been made, he observed, on the basis that the majority of its member were labourers. The Chartists did not oppose employers per se, however, and nor did they see themselves primarily as workers. They regarded themselves as a movement of the politically unrepresented against the represented, rather than of the economically oppressed against the owners of capital. As a result, it was inaccurate to view Chartism as a working-class campaign.²⁸

After 'Rethinking Chartism' was published, Jones was criticised by a number of influential historians. This critique was levelled firstly at his assumption that Chartist language could be understood by attending literally to the words spoken by its leaders. He had overlooked the fact that the meaning of Chartist rhetoric was generated contextually, and was affected by the gestures and other activities in which its members were involved. The critique of 'Rethinking Chartism' was secondly directed at Jones' assumption that Chartism added up to a coherent whole, offering a singular agenda and social vision. According to Robert Gray, the Chartists used their movement to pursue the righting of many different wrongs, including economic ones. This made room for class identities and class-based agendas to be assumed at different points within the Chartist campaign. Joan Scott further observed that Chartists often spoke of workingmen as a group with a special identity. Even though most believed that workers had much in common with other disenfranchised social groups, this reference to their special qualities made it clear that class was being developed as a form of collective identity within the Chartist campaign.²⁹

The work of Jones, Gray and Scott is all relevant to our understanding of Australia's single taxers. Australian Georgists believed their movement would benefit everyone except those who invested in land, or who corrupted the political system in the interests of land monopoly. True, they wanted workers to be free from exploitation – but they did not believe that workers were exploited as a result of their relationship to the means of production. They also believed that other groups besides workers were exploited by the current system. This meant that while there was room for class identity to be articulated within Georgism, the movement resists being slotted into a class-based schema.³⁰

Single tax politics can not be adequately explained as a movement in which workers campaigned in their own interests, or on the other hand as a movement to support employers and the middle classes against workers' attacks. The majority of Australia's Georgists instead moved between class-based and radical languages in the early nineties. Sometimes they did offer 'an eloquent plea for the working-classes'. Some of the more conservative among them also attacked working-class activism per se. As Scates has pointed out, these people became more influential within the movement towards the end of the 1890s.³¹ In the early nineties, however, single taxers most often appealed to 'the people'. They prized themselves on their ability to change their vocabulary and mode of identification as one might a suit of clothes. This indeterminate and unstable nature of their politics suggests the movement can be seen as 'populist'.

Indeterminacy of Image and Fact: A Relationship Between the Two?

So far I have drawn attention the fact that the single taxers represented themselves as socially indeterminate. This representation was accompanied by a rhetoric which targeted 'the people'. I now want to reiterate the fact that the single taxers were in fact drawn largely from a socially indeterminate strata. John Farrell did not just create an image of himself as classless by tying a coloured hanky around his neck or by changing his coat when it suited him. His whole adult life was instead marked by movement between wage-earning, managerial positions, and self-employment, as also by constant changes of job and geographic location.

Before he took his managerial job in Albury, Farrell worked as a small farmer, miner, drover, timber-cutter, and then as a brewer in Victoria. In the mid-eighties, he embarked on his own brewery venture in Goulburn, New South Wales, and was then employed in a Queanbeyan brewery, during which time he regularly published poetry in the Bulletin. Before moving to Sydney to work for the Telegraph, he spent a short time in the mining-town of Lithgow as co-proprietor and editor of the cash-strapped Lithgow Enterprise. His friendships reflected this diversity. They included bohemians such as William Astley, the writers Barbara Baynton and Mary Gilmore, the Laborite George Black, and conservative members of the pro-free trade community.³²

Evidence of chequered careers may be found among other male single taxers. In Victoria, the 'amiable rogue' Charles Jones was variously a tailor, amateur inventor, politician, librarian, land agent, journalist and owner of a populist paper, the People's Tribune, around the time he became attracted to George's ideas. In New South Wales, Ignatius Bell worked as a bootmaker in Windsor, Orange, Bathurst and Forbes, with a stint spent in 'the back country, with a few loads of merchandise, hawking'. Other Georgists such as George Napier Birks had held respected positions as small businessmen during the 1880s, but were at risk of bankruptcy and social disgrace during the depression of the 1890s.³³

Each of these observations beg the question: was there a relationship between the single taxers' socially indeterminate position and the political value they placed on indeterminacy? This question is pertinent because the postmodern scholarship I have just discussed rejects the idea that a movement's social composition explains its politics. As both Scott and Jones see it, we get nowhere trying to explain a movement's 'emergence or decline' by referring to its members' 'backgrounds, interests, and structural positions'. Class or populist identities do not arise out of a common experience of exploitation, or a shared relationship to the means of production. They are instead created by language; by 'a complex rhetoric of metaphorical associations, causal inferences and imaginative constructions'.³⁴

The theoretical claim that no social reality exists outside or prior to language is one we have all heard before. It was this claim that Joyce sought to make, but failed to make coherently, in Visions of the People. In that work, he made it clear that industrialisation was an uneven process. Even at the beginning of the twentieth century in Britain, it was far from uniform or complete. The same was true of class. Class-based understandings of the world were not uniformly held across Britain at the end of the century. It was tempting given this, Joyce said, to conclude that the unevenness of industrialisation was responsible for the unevenness of class-based identities. Joyce refused to draw this conclusion, however, on the grounds that it would contradict his basic theoretical stance. He wrote:

As I argue ... for the need to take serious the role of language and ideas in the formation of attitudes to the social order, I can hardly regress by treading again the path of 'economism' by explaining populist visions in terms of the heterogeneous, ambiguous path of so much labour experience.³⁵

Joyce was not actually arguing that no relationship existed between material factors and discursive ones in Visions of the People. Instead, he was arguing that there was not a simple causal relationship between the two. This made it necessary to avoid saying much about the 'character of the economic in relation to non-class models of the social' in his work. Joyce has since moved to a more hard-line linguistic determinist position, however, in which he effectively rules out any discussion of the role played by 'the economic' in the emergence of political identities. And not surprisingly, this hard-line position has attracted criticism by many commentators over the last decade or so.³⁶

The most compelling critique of the postmodern position just outlined accepts that material reality is not something that can be comprehended in unmediated form. It is not possible to experience something free of language. As Kathleen Canning acknowledges, experience always involves creating meaning about an event while it is taking place. This does not mean that material things have no existence. It means that human understandings of the material are necessarily constituted by language (an important distinction). And it follows from this that human meaning may be affected by the material realm. Just as experience is a composite of the material and the discursive – the creation of meaning in response to events as they happen – so too is all historical phenomena. The material realm acts as a pressure on the discursive one, influencing the human creation of meaning over time.³⁷

The postmodern historians cited here make it clear that you can not just assume social causation. You can not assume that the political values of a movement are caused by its members' structural position or characteristics. Single tax politics was not determined in any simplistic or direct way by its members' structural position or the economic upheaval caused by the depression. The Georgists' religious beliefs and their subscription to millennial narratives, for example, had an important influence over their agenda. So did individual choice. John Farrell could have chosen to keep his bell-topper after becoming editor of the Telegraph, identifying from then on with the capitalist class. Instead, he chose to take it off again, and to return to his identification with a more ambiguous social group.

Georgist politics also drew meaning from its context. So long as the colonial labour movement spoke a mélange of populist and class-based languages, Georgists could exist in a more or less cooperative arrangement with labour activists. But once Labor moved to identify more specifically as a party for 'plain workingmen', Georgists and labour activists were forced into an adversarial relationship. This context is highly important in explaining the drift to the right which took place within Georgism during the 1890s. Being forced into an adversarial relationship with labour ensured that Georgism acquired a more conservative inflection than had earlier been the case.

Suggesting that the single taxers' background did not cause their politics in any direct or simple way does not mean that socioeconomic factors played no part in the movement. Given the close correspondence between the Georgists' 'classlessness' and their interest in class transcendence, it would be counterintuitive to argue this. Because of their indeterminate social position, the Georgists stood to lose both from the rise of anti-labour sentiment during the industrial upheaval of the early nineties, and by the emergence of class-based activism in that period. In some cases on the brink of penury themselves, they had little reason to be attracted to classic liberal attitudes towards poverty, and yet their respectable evangelicism revolted against the concept of a workers' uprising. In these circumstances, it seems not just tempting but necessary to conclude that these people's material circumstances and personal histories had an influence on their Georgism. Such things were a factor in their attraction to a populist worldview, and influenced the construction they gave to it.

By 1903, the year John Farrell died, Australia's single taxers placed little emphasis on the idea of class transcendence. Indeed, when a Single Tax League was re-formed after a few years' hiatus in Sydney, its members were overwhelmingly city-based men with an antithetical approach to labour. Once again, there appears to have been an interdependent relationship here between the movement's politics and the social position of its participants: between the bourgeois identity of the new League's members and the liberal inflection they gave to George's ideas. Perhaps this was the reason that New Left historians later characterised Georgism as 'middle class', emphasising its inadequacy from 'a working-class point of view'.³⁸ As I have shown throughout this paper, however, you can not characterise the overall movement in this way. The single taxers of the early 1890s offered a populist vision of society. They claimed to represent 'the people' rather than a single social group. The men among them also represented themselves as 'trans-class' through a range of sartorial, linguistic and cultural means.

The single taxers of the early nineties were committed to profound social change. They spoke constantly of 'striving for a juster state', and of creating God's Kingdom on earth.³⁹ Their movement thus shows that it is possible to oppose the status quo without opposing capitalism per se. A range of 'dis-integrative' possibilities were available to activists in early 1890s Australia, as indeed they are today. Some of these political possibilities resisted categorisation according to class, and all drew their impetus from the complex interplay between political language and the material realm.⁴⁰

Melissa Bellanta received her doctorate from the University of Sydney in 2006, and currently has a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Queensland. Her PhD thesis explored radical land politics in 1880–90s Australia. A selection of her other work on the single tax movement is soon to appear in History Australia, Australian Cultural History, and the Journal of Religious Studies.
<melissabellanta@hotmail.com>

Endnotes

^*. This article has been peer-reviewed for Labour History by two anonymous referees.

^1. Olivia Macinante to Wat Fielder, 17 January 1952, John Farrell Papers (hereafter Farrell Papers), ML MSS 1522/1 Item 1, Mitchell Library, NSW.

^2. George Black, 'John Farrell: a memory', Worker, 16 January 1904, p. 42.

^3. For good summaries of George's ideas, see Frank Stilwell and Kirrily Jordan, 'The political economy of land: putting Henry George in his place', Journal of Australian Political Economy, vol. 54, December 2004, pp. 199–34; John L. Thomas, Alternative America: Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry Demarest Lloyd and the Adversary Tradition, Belknap, Cambridge, Mass., 1983, pp. 102–31.

^4. Joyce uses 'populism' as a generic term to refer to a range of worldviews and identities not grounded in class. It is in this sense that I characterise the single tax movement as populist here. Note, however, that a more specific meaning is given to 'populism' in the work of Gollan, Markey, Love and Roe in Australia, and by the range of international commentators in Ionescu and Gellner's Populism (1969). Gollan uses the term to refer to the 'set of ideas and... political programmes which in the early 1890s produced a political party with a mass following in the ... USA'. In the work of Love, Markey, Roe, Ionescu and Gellner, the term refers to a collection of ideas in which 'the people' and small-scale enterprise are idealised, and conspiratorial theories of political rule are emphasised. Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–1914, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991, pp. 5–6, 10–11; cf James Epstein, 'The Populist Turn', [rev. art.] Journal of British Studies, vol. 32, no. 2, April 1993, pp. 177–88); Robin Gollan, 'American populism and Australian Utopianism', Labour History, vol. 9, November 1965, p. 15; Ray Markey, The Making of the Labor Party in New South Wales, 1880–1900, New South Wales University Press, Kensington, 1988, pp. 13–14; Peter Love, Labour and the Money Power: Australian labour populism 1890–1950, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1984, pp. 1–19; Michael Roe, Kenealy and the Tichborne Cause: A Study in Mid-Victorian Populism, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1974, pp. 163–97; Ghita Ionescu and Ernest Gellner (eds), Populism: Its Meanings and National Characteristics, Weidenfield and Nicolson, London, 1970.

^5. H. Picard, 'Henry George and the Labour Split of 1891', Historical Studies, vol. 6, no. 21, 1953, p. 45; Ian Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods: Californian: Australian Environmental Reform, 1860–1930, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1999, p. 39.

^6. Stanley Pierson, cited in Bruce Scates, A New Australia: Citizenship, Radicalism and the First Republic, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997, p. 17.

^7. Airlie Worrall lists a total of 290 people who were members of single tax bodies in New South Wales, Tasmanian, Queensland, South Australian and Victorian single tax bodies during 1890. (There was also a West Australian single tax campaign, but these numbers – if available at all – are not included here). This list is an underestimation of those involved in single tax bodies, as it includes only 'the public, conspicuous people' with some corroborated form of involvement in the movement, 'not the rank and file who merely paid their dues and attended meetings'. Nor does it include those unionists and others who believed in the single tax, but who were not actual members of a Single Tax League. Airlie Worrall, The New Crusade: the Origins, Activities, and Influence of the Single Tax Leagues, 1889–1895, Masters Thesis, University of Melbourne, 1978, pp. 109–110 and Appendix I.

^8. Picard, 'Henry George', p. 45.

^9. Robin Gollan, Radical and Working Class Politics: A Study of Eastern Australia, 1850–1910, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1970, pp. 105–6; Lloyd Churchward, 'The American Influence on the Australian Labour Movement', Historical Studies, vol. 5, no. 19, November 1951, p. 262; Picard, 'Henry George', pp. 45–65; Vance Palmer, The Legend of the Nineties, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1966, p. 75.

^10. Humphrey McQueen, A New Britannia: An Argument Concerning the Social Origins of Australian Radicalism and Nationalism, Penguin, Ringwood, 1986, pp. 169–73; D. Clark, '"Roasting the landowner before a slow fire": The Origins of Rating on Unimproved Land Values', in Jill Roe (ed.), Twentieth Century Sydney: Studies in Urban and Social History, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1980, pp. 134–147; Verity Burgmann, 'In Our Time': Socialism and the Rise of Labor, 1885–1905, George Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1985, pp. 7, 1.

^11. Worrall, New Crusade, pp. 10, 30–41.

^12. Scates, New Australia, pp. 16–18, 78. Note that the PhD thesis on which A New Australia was based was co-supervised by John Rickard. He had also sought to move away from reductionist approaches to class in the mid-1970s: John Rickard, Class and Politics: New South Wales, Victoria and the early Commonwealth, 1890–1910, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1976.

^13. Scates, New Australia, pp. 74–116; cf Scates, '"Wobblers": Single Taxers in the Labour Movement, Melbourne 1889–1899', Historical Studies, vol. 2, no. 83, October 1984, pp. 174–96; Scates, '"Millennium or pandemonium?": Radicalism in the Labour Movement, Sydney, 1889–1899', Labour History, vol. 50, May 1986, pp. 72–94. On Grant and Lewin, see Scates, New Australia, pp. 17, 18, 77–78; on Carter, see Worrall, New Crusade, p. 160.

^14. Scates, New Ausrtralia, pp. 8–9.

^15. Terry Irving (ed.), Challenges to Labour History, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 1994; Frank Bongiorno, 'Class, populism and labour politics in Victoria, 1890–1914', Labour History, vol. 66, May 1994, p. 17; and The People's Party: Victorian Labor and the Radical Tradition, 1875–1914, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1996, pp. 5, 193–200; Markey, Making of the Labor Party, pp. 13–14, and 'Populism and the Formation of a Labor Party in New South Wales, 1890–1900', Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 20, May 1987, pp. 38–48; Love, Labour, pp. 1–19.

^16. Marilyn Lake, 'Labour History and the Constitution of Political Subjectivity', in Irving, Challenges, pp. 75–87; Joan W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, Princeton University Press, London, 1988; Gareth Stedman Jones, 'Rethinking Chartism', in Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class history, 1832–1982, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983, pp. 90–178; Joyce, Visions, pp. 10–12; Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth Century England, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1994, p. 154; cf. Stuart Macintyre, 'The Making of the Australian Working Class: An Historiographical Survey', in Penny Russell and Richard White (eds), Pastiche 1: Reflections on Nineteenth Century Australia, Allen and Unwin, St Leonards, 1994, p. 139.

^17. W.H. Traill in Rickard, Class and Politics, p. 31; Jacqueline Dickenson, Renegades and Rats: Betrayal and the Remaking of Radical Organisations, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2004, pp. 93, 96, 114, 117–18.

^18. Australian Standard, 28 February 1890, p. 10; Worrall, New Crusade, p. 175.

^19. Malcolm Saunders, 'Harry Samuel Taylor (1873–1932)', Australian Dictionary of Biography (hereafter ADB), Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1969, vol. 12, pp. 179–80; Merridy Howie, 'Harry Taylor', and Walter Crocker, 'Harry Taylor of The Murray Pioneer, Australian Broadcasting Commission: Personalities Remembered, nos 38 and 78, ABC, Adelaide, 1971(both audio recordings).

^20. Hugh Gilmore, 'My Intellectual Quickening', Pioneer, 14 December 1891, pp. 25–26; Adelaide Observer, 31 October 1891; R.B. Walker, 'Hugh Gilmore (1842–1891)', ADB, vol. 4, pp. 252–3.

^21. Scates, New Australia, p. 17.

^22. Worrall, New Crusade, p. 93; Melissa Bellanta, An Ideal Synthesis: Agrarianism and the Utopian Imagination in Australia, 1884–1900, PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 2005, pp. 13, 120–21, 52 n. 47.

^23. Thomas, Alternative America, pp. 14–15, 320–21; cf Melissa Bellanta, 'Engineering the Kingdom of God: Irrigation, Science and the Social Christian Millennium, 1880–1914', Journal of Religious History, forthcoming.

^24. Scates, New Australia, p. 96; Worrall, 'The New Crusade', p. 116–18; B.G. Andrews, 'John Farrell (1851–1904)', ADB, vol. 4, pp. 156–7; Susan Eade, 'Catherine Helen Spence (1825–1910)', ADB, vol. 6, pp. 167–8.

^25. Bellanta, Ideal Synthesis, pp. 188–201; Scates, New Australia, p. 96; C.H. Spence, 'A week in the Future', Centennial Magazine, January-July 1889, pp. 907–8.

^26. Henry George, The Land for the People, Port Adelaide Taxation Reform League, Port Adelaide, 1889, p. 3; Frank Cotton, 'The Prophet of San Francisco', in The Prophet of San Francisco and Other Sketches, Sydney, 1888, p. 28; Gilmore in Pioneer, 16 May 1891, p. 13.

^27. Max Hirsch, The Solidarity of Labour, Land Values League, Melbourne, 1894, pp. 1–2; Weekly Herald, 4 September 1895, p. 3.

^28. Jones, Languages, pp. 90–178.

^29. Robert Gray, 'The Deconstructing of the English Working Class' [rev. art.], Social History, vol. 11, no. 3, October 1986, pp. 363–73, Scott, Gender, pp. 55–67.

^30. Percy Meggy, 'Land Nationalization: What is it?', Sydney Quarterly Magazine, December 1889, p. 315.

^31. Picard, 'Henry George', p. 45; Scates, New Austrlaia, p. 100; Scates, Faddists and Extremists: Radicalism and the Labour Movement, South-Eastern Australia, 1886–1898, PhD Thesis, Monash University, 1987, p. 1034.

^32. Bertram Stevens, 'About John Farrell', Mitchell Library, C327; Mary Gilmore, 'John Farrell', Farrell Papers; Farrell to Henry Parkes, 26 December 1890, Parkes Correspondence, vol. 13, Mitchell Library, p. 346; Andrews, 'John Farrell', pp. 188–201.

^33. Worrall, New Crusade, p. 82; Ignatius Bell, 'Ignatius Bell's Biographical Notes', Farrell Papers.

^34. Scott, Gender, p. 56; Jones, Languages, p. 102.

^35. Joyce, Visions, p. 6.

^36. Ibid.; Joyce, Democratic Subjects, pp. 10–11.

^37. Kathleen Canning, 'Feminist History after the Linguistic Turn: Historicising Discourse and Experience', Signs, vol. 19, no. 2, 1994, pp. 368–404; Gabrielle Spiegel, 'History, Historicism and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages', Speculum, vol. 65, 1990, pp. 59–86.

^38. Burgmann, In Our Time, .pp. 7, 1.

^39. Voice, 9 December 1892.

^40. Terry Irving, 'Labourism: A Political Genealogy', Labour History, vol. 66, May 1994, p. 6.

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Transcending Class? Australia's Single Taxers in the Early 1890s