Nick Dyrenfurth and Marian Quartly | Fat Man v. 'the People': Labour Intellectuals and the Making of Oppositional Identities, 1890–1901 | Labour History, 92

Fat Man v. 'the People': Labour Intellectuals and the Making of Oppositional Identities, 1890–1901

Nick Dyrenfurth and Marian Quartly^*

Scholarly interest in the role of labour movement intellectuals and institutions in the formation of social and political identities is currently high. Yet the dominant historiography has not considered the role of labour intellectuals in narrating and manipulating the symbolic forms of oppositional identities. This article considers the origins, purpose and effect of perhaps the most famous labour villain, the capitalist 'Fat Man'. A key symbolic tool in the making of a more homogeneous and assertive working class, 'Fat' was repeatedly painted as the enemy of 'the People'; itself a collective identity drawn upon and moulded to the practical and ideological purposes of antipodean class mobilisation. Fat embodied the conscious opposite of the identity which labour intellectuals were constructing for the ideal masculine Australian 'worker', and threatened not only 'the People's' material well-being, but the gender and racial social orders in which they typically located their identities.

Discourses, Intellectuals and Class Identity

On 18 August 1890 readers of the then radical Bulletin magazine were presented with the American-born cartoonist Livingstone Hopkins' image of 'Capital' and 'Labor' confronting each other in the opening phases of the calamitous Australasian Maritime Strike (Figure 1).¹ The two men stand on a narrow plank above a wide canyon, with the 'Fat' capitalist proposing: '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?' Hop's image is deservedly well known in that it captures for the first time so many elements of the oppositional symbolism that 'Fat Man' would carry into the twentieth century: greed read as exploitation, strength read as social and political power, arrogance understood as class dominance and linked here to British imperialism. Interestingly Capital and Labor appear equally matched (rhetorically and, despite Fat's size, also physically), though Fat's posture and rhetoric suggests his aggressive instincts, and perhaps latent power. That the opposition is within gender is significant - Labor is manly (muscular), attractive and dignified, versus Capital as obese, bullying and sexually unappealing – a theme to which we shall return in depth. A few days later Tom Durkin in the Melbourne-based Bull Ant made a similarly gendered (though more optimistic and, with hindsight, less realistic) comment on the oppositions embodied in the strike, setting a manly young worker against an ageing, unfit, and unscrupulous employer in the boxing ring (Figure 2).² Physically outweighed (read onto labour's body as numerical and moral strength), the red-nosed employer's manipulation of political power is encapsulated by his outlandish offer: 'Here, tie your hands behind you with this, and I'll fight you!' Images such as Hop's and Durkin's would become the staple iconography of the early twentieth century as the Fat Man became symbolic of predatory capitalism and class conflict the world over. Yet, as this article posits, the creation of Fat was a complex and in many ways peculiarly antipodean endeavour.

Figure 1. Livingstone Hopkins, 'And that is now the question',
Bulletin, 16 August 1890.
Courtesy of the Monash University Library

Figure 2. Tom Durkin, 'Toe the Scratch',
Bull Ant, 9 October 1890.
Courtesy of the State Library of Victoria

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the iconography, visual and verbal, of the capitalist 'Fat Man', or 'Fat', was a central part of the cultural politics of Australian radical and labour intellectuals. Fat was symbolic of, and bound up within, the call to collective action, signifying as he did the dichotomy of interest between the idealised masculine 'worker' and the capitalist enemy 'Other'. Constructions of Fat Man and his counterpart, the muscular heroic worker, are however more than figurative. Politico-cultural productions such as Fat were essential to the 'making' of a more 'positive'³ working class (and claimed egalitarian national) identity. Just as images of muscular workers took on a classed meaning, so too did images of employers and capitalists. It is not that oppositions such as Fat were intrinsically necessary or, as we shall see, desirable for the development of class identity and consciousness, but that they formed part of the historically demonstrable Australian development of a (constitutive) language of class. Moreover, given the overlap between Australian radicalisms and nationalism, such cultural interventions also assisted (while ultimately limiting) those proselytising for socialism and a popularly understood class analysis.

In his analysis of the Australian labourist tradition, Sean Scalmer suggests that early labour intellectuals spoke contextualised and consciously reflexive languages to appeal to and shape class identities. For instance, the discourse of practicality, of 'being practical', was a key means by which labour intellectuals and institutions communicated with their working-class constituencies, producing knowledge and manipulating symbols and rhetoric. Speaking the language of 'practical' politics meant that Labor politicians refracted themselves in the image of the working-class voter. In Scalmer's words:

Labor intellectuals proved themselves successful by attacking abstract philosophies in the name of practical realities ... [it was] by acting out the part of anti-intellectualism that Labor party intellectuals could best secure their goals.

Constructions of the Fat Man, like the masculinist tropes of mateship and scabs, should be understood within this broad framework. While discourses surrounding Fat Man were ostensibly anti-intellectual, following Scalmer the cartoonists who created Fat Man should in fact be seen as 'acting out' the possibilities of these discourses, given that the medium of cartoon caricature was ideally suited to the didactic purpose of evoking binary oppositions.⁴

Analysing the role of labour movement intellectuals and institutions in the formation of social and political identities has been the source of sustained recent interest.⁵ Even defiantly materialist historians admit that language is a significant part of the process by which people perceive and seek to make sense of reality.⁶ Australian practitioners of labour and social history are either explicitly applying or implicitly incorporating such insights. Yet the dominant historiography has not considered the role of labour intellectuals in narrating and manipulating the symbolic forms of oppositional identities.⁷ Despite attention to the construction of (often heroic) worker identity, their villainous counterparts have been sadly neglected. For identities do not exist in a vacuum, but as E.P. Thompson famously recommended, as an 'experience' and 'relationship'.⁸ Unfortunately Australian historiography, in spite of infinite approbations towards Thompsonian social history, has neglected to explore his stress upon the relational aspect of the class identities which abound within the labour discourse of the 1890s. 'Fat Capitalists', parliamentary 'Boodlers', and the conspiratorial 'Money Power' were regularly characterised as external enemies (in league with internal villains such as Scabs or the racially defined Kanakas and Chinese); and set against the positivist 'producers', 'the People' or more negative constructions of the 'struggling masses'. In looking at the construction of such classed identities, visual and language analyses have been uneasily detached. Cartoonists in particular have not been regarded as creative intellectuals. Their role has been seen as merely reflecting popular culture. June Senyard makes a rare plea for the creativity of the cartoonist when she argues that:

the establishment of the Australian Labor Party occurred at a time when the cartoon and the caricature had assumed importance in the communication of ideas ... cartoonists reiterated shared values and interpreted new events to an audience who, it was assumed, understood the language and found support for their beliefs.⁹

We will argue here that labour intellectuals actively created both heroes and villains in a discourse which critiqued, popularised and shaped the 'new' social relations of Australian capitalism. The invariable dichotomies and abstractions of cartooning and other symbolic discourse formed an important part of the emergent and increasingly naturalised language of 'class'.¹⁰ Central and indeed perhaps foundational to this conspiratorial narrative was the malevolent Fat Man.

Making 'Fat Man': Context, Purpose and Effect

Though his choice as villain seems natural to later actors and historians, why did labourites choose Fat? There is a sense in which Fat's history within the long traditions of popular protest against social inequality made his appearance on the stage of class inevitable – but the economic, political and cultural circumstances of the 1890s shaped his form and his significance.

Fat has a long history as the embodiment of social greed. The figure of Gluttony, one of the 'Deadly Sins', carried readily over into moral condemnation of the abuse of power by kings and civic leaders. Bakhtin's studies of Rabelais have alerted scholars to his forceful representation of popular cultural forms, not least in Pantagruel the 'people-eater'.¹¹ In eighteenth-century England print-makers read the stock figures of fat master and skinny servant to capture the oppression that bound the pair, the belly's curve establishing the curve of the burdened back.¹² Nineteenth-century journals like the London Punch multiplied the oppressed, picturing fat employers dominating workshops of skeletal employees.¹³ As we shall discuss below, Australian cartoonists drew on both British and American forms of this iconic tradition to establish Fat Man as a political category available to the word-spinners of the emerging labour movement. But the identification and narration of 'bad' individuals as embodying predatory capitalism owed much to the material and social changes of the previous decade. During the 1880s, as Rickard points out, the employer and employee relationship became increasingly abstract. Workers and bosses often no longer knew each other – they lived separately and the owner was increasingly physically invisible. This material distance opened a space for more sinister representations. For instance, the unity achieved by the employers in the 1890 Maritime dispute was, according to Rickard, somewhat 'ad hoc',¹⁴ but to labour it was 'real enough' and discursively represented and experienced as such: the large scale employer would quickly become the conspiratorial and gluttonous Fat Man.

The changing understanding of Fat sits also within a new appreciation of the physical body during these decades. Australian public culture – indeed public culture in the Anglo-European world – turned from shame and concealment of the masculine body¹⁵ to its celebration and display. Body-builders and gymnasts popularised an ideal male body-shape whose antecedents date from classical culture through Renaissance neo-classicism to contemporary military drills and the stage shows of the 'Perfect Man' Sandow and his imitators.¹⁶ European and American scholars like Mosse, Boscagli and Tamar have read this shift in class terms, as a co-option by the bourgeoisie of proletarian styles of masculinity.¹⁷ But in Australia at least the ideal male body was equally available to working-class intellectuals;¹⁸ the well muscled back, broad chest, taut buttocks and strong legs of the working-class hero were used to condemn the effete Fat Man both morally and politically. For the iconographical 'fatness' of the rich and powerful, where once celebrated as prosperity, status and strength, had begun to emerge as a negative signifier, through obesity, of the sickness of the (rulers of the) body politic.

For all these wider cultural developments, it was the ascent of the new dichotomous class politics which practically prepared the ground for Fat Man. Fat Man should primarily be understood in the context of labour's core intellectual practice: the struggle to build up the industrial and political unity of the working class.¹⁹ Yet within this endeavour labourites faced the interrelated problems of an 'unfamiliar' class politics (and identity) and socialist theory. Class did not make some triumphal and entirely natural entrance onto the social stage during the 1890s (though contemporaries of the period sought to portray it as such).²⁰ As mere consciousness of an identity of interests, class battled against a persistent mythology of antipodean or New World classlessness understood as 'upward social mobility',²¹ and was further obfuscated by more familiar social categories of race and gender working within a peculiar Australian populism. Enemies such as Fat were central to the unification of disparate colonial identities, of which class was often a secondary, if not illegitimate social expression. Labour intellectuals sought to imbue these more recognisable socio-political identities with classed meanings. After the failure of the first Shearers' strike of 1891 the Australian Labour Federation's General Council suggested that:

There is an organised attempt ... to break down unionism ... by the whole capitalistic force of the continent. It is backed by the unlimited funds of the banks and federated employers' associations, is endorsed by the Queensland Government, and is justified by the misrepresentations and misstatements which always accompany the attacks of Capitalism upon Labour.²²

This dystopian statement appears to be a classic example of the 'new' class discourse, invoking the inimical interests of Labour as against Capital. Yet it was directed not to some monolithic or pre-existing Marxist working class, but rather to an idealised and deliberately generalised populist subjectivity: 'to every sympathiser [who] strives earnestly to be honest and ... raise men to manhood and women to womanhood'.²³ It was conspiratorial enemies such as Fat Man who would bind together these identities as a popular class.

To read the discourse in this way is not to dismiss the generic racism,²⁴ masculinism and sexism, and the misogyny of particular leaders.²⁵ Rather, we seek to contextualise the conscious and unconscious acts of political intellectuals working to mould the social and political identities of both working people and a wider national constituency of democrats: often denoted as 'the People'.²⁶ In the Australian experience the populist category 'the People', was not necessarily a 'rival' to 'class', but a complementary and overlapping discursive tool or 'tendency' which was available to give the languages of class both justificatory continuity and wider popular or extra-class appeal.²⁷ 'The People' was shorthand for, and a far more emotive, accessible and popularly viable meaning of majority social class. In Labour and the Money Power, Peter Love argued that early Labour developed a theory of capitalistic money power along with 'ideas about nationalism and imperialism, monopoly and democracy, class and race, which were woven into an elaborate conspiracy theory'.²⁸ Much of this was premised and spoken of in terms of 'the People'. In labourite language 'the People' were constituted as the (now dispossessed) majority. Most importantly they were workers, but not necessarily proletarian in nature. Images of 'the People' were deeply romantic, reflected in imagery of pre-capitalist England and pre-industrial Australia. As Love claims, populist movements share a similar 'reductionist logic',²⁹ condensing complex social problems to an opposition of the majoritarian 'the People' versus powerful, though minority cliques. While this might be effective in terms of creating a unifying oppositional identity, it implies that nothing was wrong with past collective traditions and community. Hence structures and languages of racial and gender domination are allowed to persist unproblematically.

Such supra-class explanations were also related to the seeming foreignness of Old World socialist theories. While socialism in various forms became more popular amongst the labour intelligentsia of the late 1880s – as Verity Burgmann argues many, if not most ranged under the banner of 'Socialism in Our Time'³⁰– its often abstract and complicated teachings meant less to ordinary people. Even Harry Holland, militant socialist and later leader of the New Zealand Labour Party, allegedly suggested that 'To study Marx ... one requires a hard seat, a bare table, and a head swathed in wet ... ice-cold towels'.³¹ Reading Marx was downright difficult, and his ideas had to be mediated and explained within an Australian context. Australian labour intellectuals relied upon an eclectic mix of populist socialism such as the utopian fiction of American writer Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, or Laurence Gronlund's Co-operative Commonwealth, and fellow-traveller but single-taxer Henry George.³² Within this historical context, intellectuals came up with creative and humorous forms of popular protest and understanding which enlivened the socialist theories of exploitation, class power, corruption, and 'surplus value' theories of labour: of which the Fat Man is perhaps the most famous example.

'Fat Man'

Historians of the Old Left have been much enamoured of Livingstone Hopkins' trim 'Labor' and bloated 'Capital', capturing as they do the binary opposition fuelling socialist and conspiratorial populist readings of the Maritime Strike. This historiographic preference has obscured the fact that Hop's equally opposed Capital and Labor were not typical representations of employer and worker in journals sympathetic to the labour movement, either before or after 1890. In 1889 the Victorian Trades Hall's moderate Australian Trades and Labour Journal (Figure 3)³³ presented labour relations 'as they should be' with equally trim figures of Capital and Labour in an idyllic industrial embrace, a nostalgic hope which recurred across the next decade. Radical journals like the Bulletin, the Boomerang and the Bull Ant (later just Ant) were more likely to draw on the English populist tradition of a specific greedy Fat Man as the oppressor of the poor. London Punch– no longer a radical journal by the 1880s – continued to provide models in terms of both style and content; see for example its 1883 image of fat rent-collector and starving family of sweated workers (Figure 4).³⁴ Thus a malevolent employer is seen to have literally extracted fat from his female workers in Durkin's image of 'The Sweating Fiend in his Element' in the Bull Ant of 5 June 1890 (Figure 5).³⁵ In the context of progressive colonial liberalism in Victoria (signalled here by the poster advertising a Citizens' Protest Meeting), Durkin's demonic image specifically represents not the whole 'class of employers', but only those individuals who abused a system not inherently evil. His pronounced Semitic features suggest, however, a more generic (racially-based) understanding of economic oppression; we consider this aspect of Fat Man further below. Thus the image of the sweater is open to a broader reading; for instance, a Bull Ant editorial declared on the first day of the Maritime Strike that 'the bloated, wealthy, middle-orders ... have grown fat on the blood and sweat of the toilers'.³⁶

Figure 3. Anon., 'Capital and Labor: As it too often is - As it should be',
Australasian Trades and Labour Journal, 13 July 1889.
Courtesy of the State Library of Victoria

Figure 4. Tom Carrington, '"Mammon's Rents"!!',
London Punch, 10 November 1883.
Courtesy of Punch Limited

Figure 5. Tom Durkin, 'The Sweating Fiend in His Element',
Bull Ant, 5 June 1890.
Courtesy of the State Library of Victoria

Australian cartoonists also drew on American models. Phil May's 1887 sketch in the Bulletin of 'Poverty and Wealth: it all depends on the position of the bundle' (Figure 6)³⁷ clearly draws on the New York Life's image of the same year, 'The Difference Between Capital and Labor' (Figure 7).³⁸ The visual idea and the comic point (the position of the bundle) are identical in the two sketches, though subtle differences reflect the different material relations of labour in the two democracies: the American worker is black, and despite the verbal content of the captions, more clearly poverty-stricken; the white Australian worker is much less cowed by his burden.

Figure 6. Phil May 'Poverty and Wealth: it all depends on the position of the bundle',
Bulletin, 1887.
Courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales

Figure 7. Anon., 'The Difference Between Capital and Labor',
Life, 3 February 1887.
Courtesy of the Huntingdon Library, California

The comparison with English and American models suggests that Australian cartoonists were more ready to cast the opposition of Fat Man to worker in terms of a political economy as well as a moral one. In 1888 the Boomerang explained 'Why Labouring Doesn't Pay' by showing a bricklayer literally burdened with a fat, unproductive man who 'lives by his wits' (Figure 8).³⁹ In 1889 the same journal carried a cartoon by Montgomery (Monty) Scott (Figure 9)⁴⁰ showing an abject worker shining the shoes of an arrogant member of the ruling class whose opulence and corpulence pre-figures Hopkins' 'Capital', while the servility of the worker denotes that degradation of manhood and lack of independence which authors like William Lane were beginning to articulate in their populist critiques of capitalism.⁴¹

Figure 8. 'Why Labouring Doesn't Pay',
Boomerang, 3 March 1888.
Courtesy of the State Library of Victoria

Figure 9. Montague Scott, 'What Queensland is Coming To',
Boomerang, 3 August 1889.
Courtesy of the State Library of Victoria

Hop's equally opposed forces of 'Capital' and 'Labor'⁴² were, as suggested above, atypical of cartoons of the period, but the moment which gave them birth marked a significant shift in the cartoonists' rhetoric. The binary, confrontational politics of the great strikes of the 1890s offered up opportunities to portray the employers' associations as generic symbols of 'the employing classes' to be mocked, as in Tom Durkin's ageing boxer (Figure 2 see page 32), or to be feared, as in the same cartoonist's bloodthirsty butcher slaughtering the trades union lamb – note the implication of manhood denied in the figures of the 'blacklegs' also penned for slaughter (Figure 10).⁴³ Fat Man's role was contingent upon shifting political perspectives; in an 1891 issue of Bull Ant Durkin reflects the travails of Victorian Labor's 'fidelity' to that state's colonial liberal/protectionist tradition as a confident 'Capital' leading the Labor Party elephant by the nose down the wrong political road (Figure 11).⁴⁴ (Durkin's cigar smoking Fat Man perhaps closest approximates the classic iconography of the twentieth century). In this sense, Fat's meaning could be reassigned to other exploiting tyrants and tricksters such as 'boodlers' and 'parasites': The Hummer's platform, for example, opposed not capitalism but 'parasites and monopolies of all brands'.⁴⁵ Despite or because of his differing purposes and varying inflexions, Fat rapidly took on a useful set of meanings for labourites.

Figure 10. Tom Durkin, 'Its Aim and Object',
Bull Ant, 27 November 1890.
Courtesy of the State Library of Victoria

Figure 11. Tom Durkin, 'The Progressive Political League's Labor',
Bull Ant, 25 June 1891.
Courtesy of the State Library of Victoria

Radicals consciously placed the newer capitalistic Fat in a lineage of tyrants and enemies of the common people. When F.C. penned 'The Reign of the Fat Man' for the Worker in 1893 he suggested:

The Fat man is not entirely a product of the nineteenth century. Away back ... the squat potbellied savage, with his numerous wives and uncertain morals has, by a gradual evolution, been transformed into the 'right-thinking citizen' ... the fat man is what he always was, a greedy unscrupulous old savage; whose mission in life is to enjoy without toil the fruits of other men's exertions.⁴⁶

Likewise the ancient understanding of the 'usurer' as the common people's enemy fed readily into Fat as the representative of 'the money power'; according to W.G. Spence 'The money power is the tyrant that is crushing humanity'.⁴⁷ As Peter Love demonstrates, that usurer was generally read as Jewish, as in the Brisbane Worker's Money-lending Jew abusing the unemployed (Figure 12).⁴⁸ Here the sign above the usurer neatly expresses labour's conspiratorial and racist claims regarding the shadowy influence of the shylock-backed Money Power: 'Queensland: Millions of Acres, Tons of Gold, Sheep-Cattle-Horses; All belong to the JEWS'. Another image of the Money Power ('The Loaves and Fishes' –Figure 13)⁴⁹– here representing capitalistic Rent, Interest and Profit – shows the centrally figured Jewish financier mocking the 'producers' in an embodied act of Capitalistic 'robbery'. Fighting this predatory money power was proposed as one of the main aims of – and obstacles to – labour representation. An editorial of the Hobart-based The Clipper neatly juxtaposed the interests of Fat money power and 'the People' (workers seemingly coded as 'the body') and its naturalised representatives, 'the Labor Party': 'The Labor party had found in their struggles against Capital that they had the whole influence and weight of the monetary institutions against them, and that these gigantic octopi had no interest in the general welfare of the body of the people – they simply existed to get fat'.⁵⁰ Other traditional enemies like 'the Middle Man' made their appearance as Fat in labour journals, seen here in the Worker as a standover bully boy oppressing the farmer and the consumer (Figure 14>).⁵¹ Employing Fat as the Money Power appealed to a wider audience of supra-class actors, small employers or non-manual workers: a populist constituency of 'producers'⁵² linked in opposition to a powerful Other.

Figure 12. The Goanna, 'The Money Lender to the Unemployed',
Worker (Brisbane), 11 June 1892.
Courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales

Figure 13. Anon., 'The Loaves and Fishes',
Worker (Brisbane), 6 October 1894.
Courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales

Figure 14. Anon., 'The MiddleMan',
Worker (Brisbane), 12 January 1895.
Courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales

The conspiratorial aspect of Fat as the money power made a ready link with other popular explanations of capitalism. When the Shearer's and General Labourer's Record explained and critiqued the profit motivation of Capitalism its headline simply read 'How Labor is Exploited and how the Fat Man (Capitalist) Grows Fatter'.⁵³ Fat corrupted or was aided by impractical bourgeois politicians and degraded hirelings such as unmanly scabs or 'free-labourers', and the racially denigrated Chinese and Kanakas. In 1892 The Worker editorialised: 'That the pressure of the banking interest is behind this Black Labour movement there can be no doubt'.⁵⁴ Moreover, the label of friend or accomplice of Fat helped identify other enemies such as the capitalistic press and non-labour politicians. Conservative opponents of the Woman's Franchise were said to be 'friends' of the 'Fat man's party'.⁵⁵ The capitalist press was described as 'the furious fossil who fights the battle of Fat Man'⁵⁶ or merely the 'Fat Man's organ'.⁵⁷ Political enemies of labour were depicted as the Fat Man's friends, as in The Worker's ironic plea that 'Something must be done to save the Fat Man and that something will take the form of ... the Queensland Anti-Labour Platform Politicians'.⁵⁸ A Labor commentator described the NSW government's attempt to solve the 1893 Bank Crisis as 'only another conspiracy of the Fat person and his colleagues to rob the people'.⁵⁹

The tendency to corpulence amongst the older generation of bourgeois politicians of the time laid them open to humorous characterisation as Fat: Premiers George Reid, Duncan Gillies, and Thomas Bent were all thus honoured. An 1893 cartoon in The Worker (Figure 15)⁶⁰ portrays the newly elected Queensland Labor Members dressed as stage outlaws advancing upon a Shakespearean 'Fat Man' Premier Thomas McIlwraith ('Falstaffilwraith'). The populist conspiracy of labour ideology is encapsulated by the banner of Laborites – 'Advance White Queensland – Justice for the People' – whilst an otherwise frail McIlwraith is protected by the powerful shield of the 'Banks'. As Fat gained political currency and legitimacy, the Upper House began to be described as the 'Fat man's Chamber'⁶¹. Monty Scott mocked the 'neutrality' of 'The Governor's Speech' at the opening of the Queensland Parliament by showing that gentleman spurning stalwart Labor's program for that of a particularly grotesque Fat Man (Figure 16).⁶² The proposed Federal Senate was variously portrayed as the 'Fat Man's privilege'⁶³ or 'Fat Man's Stronghold'.⁶⁴ Corrupting and controlling parliament also evinced Fat's trickery and anti-democratic temper. The Worker argued that 'Time after time have the representatives of the Fat Man fooled the people into electing them into power'.⁶⁵ Echoing these sentiments 'Bush Boy', in a letter to The Clipper, thought 'the Fat Man, knowing his ... reign must shortly end has introduced a new fangled device to destroy the chances of the local democratic candidate'.⁶⁶ These examples demonstrate Labor's attempted transportation of industrial meanings onto the political stage. A similar analysis could be applied to the making of 'scabs'. For 'rats' and 'ratting' were the political application or 'first cousin' of industrial and workplace disloyalty.⁶⁷

Figure 15. Montague Scott, 'Falstaff Up To Date',
Worker (Brisbane), 8 May 1893.
Courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales

Figure 16. Montague Scott, 'The Governor's Speech',
Worker (Brisbane), 28 July 1894.
Courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales

Above all, Fat Man was part of the ongoing attempt to fashion a positive working-class identity and constituency, both creative and consolatory, in the face of wage-labour dependency and material deprivation. Much of this rested on emphasising the negative features and character of the Other – a symbolic practice very different from Hop's original depiction of Capital and Labor as equally matched. As many of the previous images exampled, Fat capitalists threatened the material well-being of the People. But perhaps more importantly, Fat destabilised the gender, racial and moral orders in which they located their identities. Fat's grotesque figure, his slothfulness, his physical and moral repulsiveness, denied or undermined his manliness, in contrast with the taut and muscular body of the worker. Fat was a construction of the individual body as symbolic of the social body (politic) – whereas the worker, as the masculine idealisation of labour's populist imagining, constituted Fat's cultural counterpart. When women began to take on real and symbolic political agency, Fat Man was regularly depicted as a wooer spurned in favour of the manlier, sexually attractive worker. See, for example, Monty Scott's celebration of the outcome of the first New Zealand election under women's suffrage (Figure 17)⁶⁸; the New Zealand Woman Voter demurely links arms with a properly protective Labor candidate, leaving Fat Man in paroxysms of ridiculous rage.⁶⁹ Where Fat was greedy, lazy and exploitative, working people were upright, sturdy, loyal and producers: 'The ordinary Fat Man, full of smug satisfaction ... rarely exerts himself to extend his own vision beyond things not directly pertaining to money making'.⁷⁰ Fat had a simple and effective meaning: when the Worker listed what it 'opposes' – it included the 'rule of the Fat Man'.⁷¹ Conservative opposition to Labor reforms was thus 'The Wail of the Fat Man'.⁷²

Figure 17. Montague Scott, 'The New Zealand Elections: Result: Social Democrats, 64: Fatmen, 14',
Worker (Brisbane), 9 December 1893.
Courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales

The sheer ridiculousness of Fat was seemingly employed to engage those not ordinarily interested in political matters. The Bulletin's sardonic 'The Capitalist's Day Dream' (again penned by Hop) is a wonderful example, in the traditional mode of the 'world-turned-upside-down' (Figure 18).⁷³ It depicts the imagined nightmare of a wealthy Fat Man when his day-to-day routine no longer includes the help of labour as household servants or factory hands. Forced to clothe and feed himself, and with his business appropriated by a coal-lumper, Hop's final frame reads: 'I must starve or work, he gasped, and at this horrible climax of his dream he awoke with a frightful shriek'. In 1894 The Clipper published a fine example of the written version of the genre: the sardonic, witty but ultimately serious 'In Defence of the Fat Man':

The term Fat Man is an obnoxious one – to Fatmen. Still we can't help but thinking that whoever coined the phrase was a genius for terse expressions and deserves a statue ... despite all drawbacks it is a handy phrase to describe the stupid, unreasoning hog-like attributes of capitalism and land-lordism ... it also voices the unmitigated respect with which all those who have grown fat by stealing the labour of others will shortly be universally regarded. ... Fat Man owns and controls all the means of production; therefore controls all the producers. That means slavery ... perhaps when the fatman ceases to threaten our children's lives we will cease to tickle him up with forked figures of speech. Besides, there is nothing to prevent the rich men of the body politic referring to the aggregate poor as the Lean Man⁷⁴

Figure 18. Livingstone Hopkins, 'The Capitalist's Day Dream',
Bulletin, 6 September 1890.
Courtesy of the Monash University Library

Fat Man became part of the discourse of every element of the labour movement and the Left. Even the organ of the increasingly scientific-socialist Australian Socialist League, The Northern People, titled a critique of the capitalist system 'On Fatmanism'.⁷⁵ Likewise when the Victorian socialist journal Tocsin disparaged plutocracy, inherited wealth and privilege, it gave 'surplus value' theories of labour an altogether embodied and animated meaning: 'A Contrast: fat v lean'.⁷⁶ The editorial banner of the 16 May 1896 The Clipper similarly read 'Strike Profits: Getting Fat on others leanness'.⁷⁷ When overseas visitors such as English unionist and Socialist Ben Tillett addressed the Melbourne faithful in September 1897, his speech was consciously peppered for the local audience with Fat Man rhetoric: 'By putting the Fat man in parliament you get no good'.⁷⁸ And while it is difficult to generalise about individual readings of this discourse, letters to the labour journals suggest that Fat resonated with their readers, successfully abstracting particularised experiences. 'Vox Populi' advocated 'Social Democratic Government – government by the people and for the people, and not for the Fat Man'.⁷⁹

How can Fat Man expect prosperity to return when wages are kept at starvation wage point and little or no money is in circulation? Fat Man might have plenty of cash but he evidently lacks that necessary thing called brains and common sense⁸⁰

wrote 'Truth' in a letter to the Worker in 1893. 'Workers, give and take no quarter!' declared 'Social Democrat', 'As Fat Man has kept your noses to the grindstone for so long a period it is your turn now so demand your rights and take them'.⁸¹ Women could also tap into the popular vernacular seeking legitimacy and support. In 1894 'A Woman' reasoned:

Let the women vote. They are the true friends of the people ... They won't be led away by the false promise of the Fat Man and his party. No they will consider who will serve their country best – not himself, as the Fat Man does ... Now is your turn, spurn the false Fat man and his colleagues and vote for the true friend of your country, the Labor man.⁸²

Fat, along with other oppositional identities and the wider language of labour, helped shape the culture of a more politically homogeneous social class. Fat provided a rich array of symbols and rhetoric for political and industrial labour to speak to and beyond the converted. Leaders such as W.G. Spence could shift between industrial and political meanings; imbuing abstract politics with the emotion and life experience of the workplace. At the beginning of 1894 Spence urged people to cast out the 'Fat Man', understood as 'land monopoly' and 'plutocracy'.⁸³ Mid-way through the same (election) year he could slip effortlessly into a parliamentary and masculinist meaning:

Dibbs and Reid are one in support of monopoly and Fat man generally, and neither are going to do anything for the working man except to keep him in the same old slavery.⁸⁴

Fat could be employed to paint images of dystopia such as the poem 'The Fat Man's Dream' (published in the Worker, 16 June 1900) and utopian writings like 'The Fate of the Fat Man's Son' by Henry Lawson:

The Fat man's sire was a leaner man from the Northern hemisphere,
He lived in a day ere the fat began to smother us all out here....
... The papers never exactly knew how the fiendish deed was done,
When the good ship Greed and its blackleg crew went down with the Fat Man's son⁸⁵

And by the end of the 1890s, Fat was beginning to appear in opposition to a homogeneous collection of workers, as in the Sydney Worker's image of a stern female 'Justice' rebuking a mass of toilers for not dumping their gross burden (Figure 19),⁸⁶ their collectivity acting, in Banta's terms, 'to enhance the cultural capital of suffering and to enforce the politics of righteous wrath'.⁸⁷

Figure 19. Anon., 'Why Don't They Drop Him?',
Worker (Sydney), 11 December 1897.
Courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales

Given his popularity, Fat Man inevitably became available for causes other than specifically Labour's. Lenore Layman has shown how the radical campaign against Federation was cast as 'Fighting Fat Man Federation' or 'Fettoration'⁸⁸– a capitalistic plot which allegedly diverted attention away from the main political game. Writing to the Worker (26 August 1899) 'Memorabilia' suggested: 'Federation ... under the Fat man's party will in no way benefit the worker or alter their conditions, but will be monopolised and boosted in the interests of the Fat Man'.⁸⁹The Worker went a step further in its demand to workers: 'If you wish your children to grow up cursing you for your cowardice and apathy in neglecting to strike a blow for liberty and justice, vote for the Fat Man'.⁹⁰ The 1899 Worker cartoon 'The Road to Market' (Figure 20) illuminates this belief; Fat Man rides a horse-cart labelled 'Federal Government' dangling the carrot of 'Reform Legislation' in front of the Donkey Labour⁹¹. But liberal interests could also claim Fat as an enemy; the nationalist journal Advance Australia introduced the 1897 Federal Convention elections with a Hop-inspired cartoon showing a trim and countrified 'Liberal Voter' refusing 'Conservative Fat Man' a leg-up into the federal field.⁹² Fat's ready association with a portly John Bull made him the perfect vehicle for the feisty republicanism of the Bulletin and the Bull Ant's anti-imperialism. Witness Durkin's avaricious English Fat Man gloating over a humbled and servile Australian nation in 1892 (Figure 21).⁹³ With the onset of the Boer War in 1899 (Tocsin called it the 'Fat Man's War')⁹⁴, the Clipper equated Bull with the money power: 'John Bull has got fat with trade and is now the most unscrupulous usurer in the world'.⁹⁵ Thus the figure of capitalist Fat came to signify changing popular attitudes to Britain and Imperialism, broadening the constituency of those identifying him as the enemy, but also perhaps (however unconsciously) weakening his industrial base. Tocsin thus collapsed nationalism, anti-imperialism and worker's exploitation in its 1900 'The Bushwhacker's Brigade' (Figure 22).⁹⁶

Figure 20. Montgomery Scott, 'The Road to Market',
Worker (Brisbane), 26 August 1898.
Courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales

Figure 21. Tom Durkin, 'The Proper Attitude of Australia',
The Ant, 3 March 1892.
Courtesy of the State Library of Victoria

Figure 22. Montague Scott, 'The Bushwackers' Brigade',
Tocsin, 15 February 1900.
Courtesy of the State Library of Victoria

By the late 1890s, perhaps because of such trends, Fat could be inverted against the Labor Party and its more moderate State socialists as tensions arose regarding parliamentary representation and the supposed betrayal by Labor members. The People and the Collectivist mockingly recommended that the Labor Party's manifesto should declare 'we are satisfied with the rule of the Fat Men'.⁹⁷ This allegation, however, was quickly flung back in the faces of those who wanted to establish an independent Socialist Labor Party:

Would you, therefore, who are Socialists, for the sake of a name, destroy the work of years and assist the Fat Man, of whom you prate so much, to pull down that noble edifice you have assisted to build ... Are we not all working for the advancement of the people?⁹⁸

It cannot be denied that the generic figure of Fat carried understandings antithetical to a rigorous structural analysis of society. His reductionist image reinforced dominant ideas of the capitalist system as buttressed by an imperious and global money power, whose strength was as much racially-derived as economic. Thus, commenting on the likely result of an English victory in the Boer War, The Clipper thought:

As is well known to those acquainted with the inner workings of the old world ... a ring of Jewish financiers ... allied by common money grubbing interests, controls all operations.⁹⁹

Similarly after the legislation of White Australia in 1901, Hop's viciously racist cartoon 'Fat in Peril!' (Figure 23) portrayed black (kanaka) labour as the force underpinning capitalism in Queensland – its abolition, according to an optimistic Hop, thus imperilled the Fat Man. Within the language of labour, the gendered and racialised construction of Fat – his opposition to honest manliness and whiteness – reinforced the negative stereotypes which divided working men and women of all races, and the pre-eminence of a masculinist politics.

Figure 23. Livingstone Hopkins, 'Fat in Peril',
Bulletin, 7 September 1901.
Courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales

But for all this Fat Man and his heroic opponent were crucial instruments in the rhetorical toolkit available to the nascent labor-in-politics as it moved – tentatively at first, then with increasing assurance – against political forces which that rhetoric defined as class enemies. Like the labour movement itself, Fat Man did not enjoy some linear development; rather his heterogenous meaning waxed and waned depending on political contingency, and in the end, reflected a consolatory and defensive culture which permeated much of 1890s Australia. The Fat Man tag was never fair, but it was effective. And that effectiveness was due less to the application of theory than to the reflections of cultural and political reality captured in that rhetoric. The point can be made by comparing the Australian Fat Man and his heroic Labor opponent with the 'fat capitalists and scrawny workers'¹⁰⁰ pictured in English and American journals sympathetic to labour. The universally loathsome Fat Man achieved within Australian political rhetoric by 1900 had no parallel in English discourse and only a belated parallel in mainstream American radicalism's brief venture into socialism immediately before 1914.¹⁰¹ Australian tradition credits the Melbourne cartoonist Will Dyson with introducing the duo of 'young, militant, triumphant' worker and gross Fat Man to the English press from about 1910¹⁰²– at a time when the English labour movement was just beginning the political and social mobilisation already triumphantly achieved in Australia. The difference turns not only on the level of labour organisation in Australian cities and the development of journals dedicated to the union cause; it also reflects a reading public broader than the labour movement who enjoyed a laugh – an increasingly class-inflexed laugh – at Fat Man's expense.

Nick Dyrenfurth teaches International Studies in the School of Historical Studies at Monash University and is finishing his PhD, entitled Heroes and Villains: the Cultural Politics of Australian Labor, 1878–1918. More broadly he is interested in the nature and importance of cultural politics and political language to the practice of Australian politics. His work has been published in the Australian Journal of Political Science, Australian Journal of Politics and History and Labour History.
<nick.dyrenfurth@arts.monash.edu.au>

Marian Quartly teaches history at the School of Historical Studies at Monash University. She edits History Australia, the journal of the Australian Historical Association. Currently she is investigating the history of gendered white citizenship in the twentieth century, with special reference to cartoons and photographs. Her publications include the jointly authored feminist history of Australia Creating a Nation, reissued in late 2006 by the API Network.
<marian.quartly@arts.monsh.edu.au>

Endnotes

^* This article has been peer-reviewed for Labour History by two anonymous referees. The authors are grateful to the referees for their helpful suggestions.

^1. Livingstone Hopkins, 'And that is now the question', Bulletin, 16 August 1890.

^2. Tom Durkin, 'Toe the Scratch', Bull Ant, 9 October 1890.

^3. Michael Leach, ''Manly, True, and White': Masculine Identity and Australian Socialism', in Geoff Stokes (ed.), The Politics Of Identity in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, p. 63.

^4. Sean Scalmer, 'Being Practical in Early and Contemporary Labor Politics: A Labourist Critique', Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 43, no. 3, 1997, p. 307. Also see Frank Farrell, 'The practical politician: Link between early imagery of the working man of the 19th century and the working class hero of 20th century labourism', Australian Cultural History, no. 8, 1989, pp. 50–61. On labour constructions of mateship see Mark Hearn, 'Mates and Strangers: The Ethos of the Australian Workers Union', in David Palmer, Ross Shanahan and Martin Shanahan (eds), Australian Labour History Reconsidered, Australian Humanities Press, Parkside, 1999, and Nick Dyrenfurth, 'Howard's Hegemony of Values': the Politics of Mateship in the Howard Decade', Australian Journal of Political Science, forthcoming June 2007.

^5. Sean Scalmer and Terry Irving, 'Labour Intellectuals in Australia: Modes, Traditions, Generations, Transformations', International Review of Social History, vol. 50, no. 1, April 2005, pp. 1–26 and 'Australian Labour Intellectuals: An Introduction'', Labour History, no. 77, November 2000, pp. 1–10; Sean Scalmer, 'Experience and Discourse: A Map of Recent Theoretical Approaches to Labour and Social History', Labour History, no.70, May 1996, pp. 156–68; Neville Kirk, Comrades and Cousins: Globalization, Workers and Labour Movements in Britain, the USA and Australia from the 1880s to 1914, Merlin Press, London, 2003, and Nick Dyrenfurth, 'Rethinking Labor Tradition: Synthesising Discourse and Experience', Labour History, no. 90, May 2006, pp. 177–99. With regard to visual intellectuals see Marian Quartly, 'Making Working Class Heroes: Labor Cartoonists and the Australian Worker, 1903–16', Labour History, no. 89, November 2005, pp. 159–178.

^6. Verity Burgmann, 'Language and the Labor Tradition', in Tim Battin (ed.), A Passion for Politics: Essays in Honour of Graham Maddox, Pearson, Frenchs Forest, 2005.

^7. See for example Hearn, 'Mates and Strangers' and Lenore Layman, 'Fighting Fatman Fetteration: Labour Culture and Federation', in Mark Hearn and Greg Patmore (eds). Working the Nation: Working Life and Federation, 1890–1914, Pluto Press, Annandale, 2001. For an analysis making use of narrative constructions see Mark Hearn, 'A Wild Awakening: the 1893 banking crisis and the theatrical narratives of the Castlereagh Street Radicals', Labour History, no. 87, November 2004, pp. 65–82.

^8. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Penguin, London, 1963.

^9. June Senyard, Labor in Cartoons: Cartoons of the Australian Labor Party in Victoria 1891–1990, Hyland House, South Yarra, 1991, p. 1, our italics. Senyard is one of the few writers to explicitly discuss the salience of the Fat Man in labourite imagery. Also see Vane Lindesay, 'Rich 200', Business Review Weekly, 12 May 1989, pp. 56–9.

^10. Quartly, 'Making Working Class Heroes', p. 160. For the social context of the labour intellectuals see Bruce Scates, A New Australia: Citizenship, Radicalism and the First Republic, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1997, ch. 1, and Stuart Macintyre, 'The Concept of Class in Recent Labourist Historiography: Early Socialism and Labor', Intervention, no. 8, 1977, pp. 79–87.

^11. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, translator Hélène Iswolsky, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1984. Martha Banta, Barbaric Intercourse: Caricature and the Culture of Conduct, 1841–1936, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2003, p. 401, identifies the fat capitalist as 'part of a long tradition stemming' from Pantagruel.

^12. Jamie Agland, 'The Corporeality of Excessive Consumption in Eighteenth Century Visual Culture', unpublished article, 2006.

^13. See for example 'Bubbles of the Year: Cheap Clothing', published in the London Punch in 1845, and reproduced in Frank E. Huggart, Victorian England as Seen by Punch, London, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1978, p. 24.

^14. John Rickard, Class and Politics: New South Wales, Victoria and the Early Commonwealth, 1890–1910, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1976, p. 21.

^15. Public celebration and display of the female body took a few decades longer, though a semi-private appreciation – in women's gyms, for example – coincided with the masculine phenomenon.

^16. John F. Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America, Hill and Wang, New York, 2001; Caroline Daley, 'The Strongman of Eugenics, Eugene Sandow', Australian Historical Studies, vol. 33, no 120, October 2002, pp. 233–247; Anna Alexandra Carden-Coyne, 'Classical heroism and modern life: bodybuilding and masculinity in the early twentieth century', Journal of Australian Studies, no. 63, December 1999, pp. 138–149.

^17. 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.

^18. Quartly, 'Making Working-class Heroes'. Banta, Barbaric Intercourse, ch. 5, shows the efficacy of heroic white working class images in the American scene, a decade or more later than the same phenomenon in Australia.

^19. Scalmer, 'Being Practical in Early and Contemporary Labor Politics', p. 302. As should become clear we employ a wide use of the term 'labour' during the period under study – for socialists, unionists and other radicals were reading, with different purposes and inflexions, from the same script: producing and manipulating knowledge for a 'labour public'. Here we follow the work of Sean Scalmer and Terry Irving. They argue for the importance of a heterogeneous, uneven 'labour public': 'a space of withdrawal from wider society and organization to change it' (Scalmer and Irving, 'Labour Intellectuals in Australia', pp. 3–4). But during the 1890s this labour public meshed most effectively with wider public, popular culture. Intellectuals and institutions worked so successfully because they grasped and moulded the cultural materials both available in and foreign to the dominant public space.

^20. Our practical stress upon the decade of the 1890s does not ascribe to 1890 some talismanic power as a 'turning' point. Deep material and discursive continuities persisted – though they were often presented as the historically legitimate maker of 'class' traditions. We must be critical in our sense of 1890 and the 1890s – both in terms of 'Labor in Politics' and of actual economic conditions. John Rickard points out that depressed conditions were unevenly spread and were often delayed until the mid-1890s (Rickard, Class and politics, p. 7). The 1890s did not embody, nor escalate a form of class warfare (however defined) despite clear organisational shifts, but did, however, produce a hey-day of counter-hegemonic ideas, cultural forms and institutions – which meshed with and ultimately accentuated human action and agency.

^21. Dyrenfurth, 'Rethinking Labor Tradition', Raymond Markey, The Making of the Labor Party in New South Wales, 1880–1900, NSW University Press, Kensington, 1988, p. 20, John Rickard, Australia: A Cultural History (2^nd ed.), Longman, Essex, 1996, p. 102 and more generally Graeme Davison, 'The Dimensions of Mobility in Nineteenth Century Australia', Historical Studies, no. 2, August 1979.

^22. 'The General Council's Appeal', Worker (Brisbane), 7 March 1891, p. 4.

^23. Ibid.

^24. Ann Curthoys and Andrew Markus (eds), Who Are Our Enemies?: Racism and the Australian Working Class, Hale and Iremonger in association with the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Neutral Bay, 1978; Humphrey McQueen, A New Britannia, Penguin Books, Ringwood, 1970; and Markey, The Making of the Labor Party in New South Wales.

^25. Marilyn Lake, 'The Politics of Respectability: Identifying the Masculinist Context', Historical Studies, no. 22, 1986, pp. 116–31 and 'Socialism and Manhood: the Case of William Lane', Labour History, no. 50, May 1986; Leach, 'Manly, True, and White', and Bruce Scates, 'Mobilising Manhood: Gender and The Great Strike Of 1890 In Australia and New Zealand', Gender and History, vol. 9, no. 2, 1997, pp. 285–309.

^26. See also Frank Bongiorno, The People's Party: Victorian Labor and the radical tradition, 1875–1914, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1996, and Peter Love, Labour and the Money Power: Australian Labour Populism 1890–1950, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1984.

^27. Dyrenfurth, 'Rethinking Labor Tradition' and Neville Kirk, Comrades and Cousins, p. 124. Joyce controversially argued that populism and class were divergent discourses; Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–1914, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1991 and Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994.

^28. Love, Labour and the Money Power, p. 1.

^29. Ibid, p. 7–8

^30. Verity Burgmann, In Our Time: Socialism and the Rise of Labor 1885–1905, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1985.

^31. Cited in Humphrey McQueen, A New Britannia, p. 189.

^32. Graham Maddox, 'Revisiting Tradition: Labor and Socialism', Overland, no. 173, 2003, p. 54.

^33. Anon, 'Capital and Labor: As it too often is - As it should be', Australasian Trades and Labour Journal, c. 1889.

^34. Tom Carrington, '"Mammon's Rents"!!', London Punch, 10 November 1883. It is intriguing that this image was contributed to London Punch by the Melbourne-based Tom Carrington, whose cartoons in the Melbourne Punch generally made a gross and tyrannical King Workingman the villain. The caption of the oppressor ('House-jobber') reads: 'Now, then, my man; week's hup! Can't 'ave a 'ome without payin' for it, yer know!'

^35. Tom Durkin, 'The Sweating Fiend in His Element', Bull Ant, 5 June 1890.

^36. 'Editorial', Bull Ant, 21 August 1890.

^37. Phil May 'Poverty and Wealth: it all depends on the position of the bundle', Bulletin, c. 1887. Reproduced in Vane Lindesay, 'It all depends on the position of the bundle', Business Review Weekly, 12 May 1989, p. 56.

^38. Anon, 'The Difference Between Capital and Labor', Life, 3 February 1887.

^39. 'Why Labouring Doesn't Pay', Boomerang, 3 March 1888. The subcaption reads 'The man who carries the hod would be lighter if he shook off the man who lives by his wits'.

^40. Montague Scott, 'What Queensland is Coming To', Boomerang 3 August 1889.

^41. See for instance Lake, 'Socialism and Manhood'.

^42. The shift in terminology from May's 1887 'Poverty and Wealth' is striking. Given Hopkin's famed apoliticism, the label is probably W.H.Traill's – but the spelling of Labor suggests an American influence, perhaps as atheoretical as the the US Senate's investigation of 'Relations between Labor and Capital' in 1883.

^43. Tom Durkin, 'Its Aim and Object', Bull Ant, 27 November 1890.

^44. Tom Durkin, 'The Progressive Political League's Labor', Bull Ant, 25 June 1891.

^45. Hummer, 2 April 1892.

^46. Worker (Sydney), 12 August 1893.

^47. Worker (Sydney), 12 December 1896

^48. The Goanna, 'The Money Lender to the Unemployed', Worker (Brisbane), 11 June 1892.

^49. Anon, 'The Loaves and Fishes', Worker (Brisbane), 6 October 1894.

^50. The Clipper, 6 May 1893.

^51. Anon, 'The MiddleMan', Worker (Brisbane), 12 January 1895.

^52. Bongiorno, The People's Party.

^53. The Shearer's and General Labourers' Record, 15 August 1893.

^54. Worker (Brisbane), 5 March 1892.

^55. Worker (Brisbane), 10 March 1894.

^56. The Clipper, 12 October 1897, p. 2.

^57. The Clipper, 26 June 1897, p. 2.

^58. Worker (Brisbane), 21 April 1894, p. 2

^59. Worker (Sydney), 4 November 1893, cited in Love, Money Power, p. 30.

^60. Montague Scott, 'Falstaff Up To Date', Worker (Brisbane), 8 May 1893.

^61. The Clipper, 9 February 1895, p. 2.

^62. Montague Scott, 'The Governor's Speech', Worker (Brisbane), 28 July 1894.

^63. The Clipper, 13 September 1898, p. 2.

^64. The People and the Collectivist, 10 September 1898.

^65. Worker (Brisbane), 16 April 1895.

^66. The Clipper, 28 April 1899, p. 2.

^67. John Iremonger, 'Rats', in John Faulkner and Stuart Macintyre (eds), True believers: the story of the federal parliamentary Labor Party, Allen & Unwin, East Melbourne, 2001, p. 267.

^68. Montague Scott, 'The New Zealand Elections: Result: Social Democrats, 64: Fatmen, 14.

^69. The implicit threat of rape and subjugation was something borrowed from and replicated in images of Chinese people. See Leach, 'Manly, True, and White', p. 74.

^70. Worker (Sydney), 20 January 1894.

^71. Worker (Sydney), 16 September 1893

^72. The Northern People, 29 May 1897.

^73. Livingstone Hopkins, 'The Capitalist's Day Dream', Bulletin, 6 September 1890.

^74. The Clipper, 12 May 1894, p. 2. See also 'The Fatman's Song' published by Tocsin, June 23, 1898, p. 7.

^75. Northern People, 27 March 1897.

^76. Tocsin, 2 February 1899, p. 4.

^77. The Clipper, 16 May 1896.

^78. 'What shall we do with Australia?', speech by Ben Tillett, Melbourne Temperance Hall, 13 September 1897 printed in Tocsin, 9 December 1897.

^79. Worker (Brisbane), 1 September 1894.

^80. Worker (Brisbane), 9 December 1893, p. 3.

^81. Worker (Sydney), 9 February 1894.

^82. Worker (Brisbane), February 1894.

^83. Worker (Sydney), 13 January 1894.

^84. Worker (Sydney), 16 June 1894.

^85. Worker (Sydney), 20 July 1895.

^86. Anon, 'Why Don't they drop him?', Worker (Sydney), 11 December 1897.

^87. Banta, Barbaric Intercourse, p. 232.

^88. For other examples see E. Bowling, 'Letter to the Editor', Northern People, 30 January 1897 and Tocsin, 9 February 1899.

^89. Worker (Sydney), 26 August 1899.

^90. Worker (Sydney), 20 February 1897.

^91. Montgomery Scott, 'The Road to Market', Worker (Brisbane), 26 August 1898.

^92. Advance Australia, 1 March 1897.

^93. Tom Durkin, 'The Proper Attitude of Australia', The Ant 3 March 1892.

^94. Tocsin, 25 January 1900

^95. The Clipper, 15 April 1899, p. 2.

^96. Montague Scott, 'The Bushwackers' Brigade', Tocsin, 15 February 1900.

^97. The People and the Collectivist, 16 October 1898.

^98. 'Pallis', 'Letter to the editor', Worker (Sydney), 16 November 1898.

^99. The Clipper, 18 November 1899, p. 2.

^100. The tag actually refers to the American examples; see Rebecca Zurier, Art for the 'Masses' 1911–1917: A Radical Magazine and Its Graphics, New Haven, Connecticut, 1925, p. 107, cited in Banta, Barbaric Intercourse, p. 401.

^101. See for example Arthur Young's 'A Little Child Shall Feed Them', Life, 16 February 1911, and his 'Breed!', The Masses, December 1915, reproduced in Banta, Barbaric Intercourse, fig. 5.1 p. 233; fig. 5.2 p. 233.

^102. Vance Palmer, 'Will Dyson', Meanjin Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 4, 1949, pp. 213–33.

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Fat Man v. 'the People': Labour Intellectuals and the Making of Oppositional Identities, 1890–1901