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Book Review
| Kenneth Gee, Comrade Roberts: Recollections of a Trotskyite, Desert Pea Press, Leichhardt, 2006. pp. 207. $29.95 paper.
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| Memoir, as a literary genre, is forgiving of faulty chronology, misquotation, and selective recollection. Less structured, less chronological, less inclusive than autobiography, it is, as Gore Vidal once commented, the way a person remembers one's own life, subject to the reconstructive power and the slipperiness of memory. |
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In the opening pages of his memoir Comrade Roberts, Kenneth Gee alerts the reader to what is to follow. There are no personal records to fall back on, he explains, and 'there will be faults in this narrative, especially of chronology'; while a few names have been changed, all persons portrayed existed once, and the events did happen (p. 8). |
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Gee makes numerous errors of fact, like calling the IWW the International Workers of the World, misattributing quotations, confusing important historical figures when making significant points. Jeff Sparrow has listed a significant number of these errors in his review of Gee's book (Overland, no. 183, June 2006); a bit of research or firm editorial guidance would have avoided these. |
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Time is also a problem for Gee. He states that Comrade Roberts deals with the three years he spent as a Sydney Trotskyite (pp. 8, 192), but this is misleading. There are few dates in the book, so the reader has to work out 'when' by reference to internal cues and familiarity with labour history. Gee begins his immersion in the world of Trotskyism in the Sydney Domain 'one Sunday afternoon', apparently in 1941 (p. 33). Towards the end of the book, sometime near the end of World War II, Gee has become disenchanted with Trotskyism and is seriously questioning its tenets. He starts to miss important political meetings, but does not quit the Trotskyites, he explains, until after comrades Jim McClelland and Laurie Short quit (p. 182). If this recollection is correct, this moves the conclusion of the memoir to sometime during the period 1948–49; meaning Comrade Roberts is largely devoted to a few years of intense Trotskyite political activity, followed by some discussion regarding another period of Trotskyite Leftism, apparently at least equally long, in which the author doubted and questioned before making his decision to quit the company of his comrades. Gee deals with this period in less than ten pages. |
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On one hand Gee says he has no recriminations about his time with the Trotskyites, on the other his account conveys a feeling of having been betrayed by what he experienced; in later life he moved politically to the Right. The memoirs are coloured by this complexity, variously recounting what happened, to some extent trivializing the experience, and yet trying not to portray the author as victim of a wasted time. |
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The memoir is basically a linear series of anecdotes. Gee quickly sketches his middle-class origins, his schooling at Sydney's prestigious Fort Street Boys High School, his drift to the Left at Sydney University during the 1930s, his attraction to Marxism, spells in the ranks of the Christian Socialists and the Labor Party. Then comes the bulk of the book, concerning his time as a member of the small, semi-clandestine, Sydney cell of Trotsky's Fourth International, when Gee was in his twenties. Membership entailed adopting the name 'Comrade Roberts', abandoning his fledgling career as a solicitor, and divesting himself of middle-class accoutrements by variously working as a boilermaker's labourer on the Sydney waterfront, and as a milling machinist in Petersham and in Lidcombe. |
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The Trotskyite material is a mix of politics, personalities, industrial work experiences and work mates. Humour, wit, and genuine human warmth mix with an anti-Stalinist tone, as though Gee is still a Trotskyite, with venom reserved for members of the Communist Party of Australia. Sydney Trotskyite luminaries are on the receiving end of some caustic writing, particularly Nick Origlass and John Wishart. |
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In post-Trotskyite life Gee returned to his career in law, variously becoming a Crown Prosecutor, QC, district court judge, and inspector-general of prisons. He has written about 'Comrade Roberts' previously, in three Quadrant articles (1986), and in Sydney Papers (2006). I venture that in coming years, Gee will continue to be turned over by researchers and the footnote industry, not because of his long career in law, but because he was, for an interlude, 'Comrade Roberts'. Gee without 'Roberts' is like Frankenstein without the creature. |
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| University of Wollongong |
ROWAN CAHILL | |
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