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Respect not Relief: Feminism, Guild Socialism and the Guild Hall Commune in Melbourne, 1917

Judith Smart*

The Women's Political Association and Peace Army responded to the Wharf Labourers' strike in Melbourne in 1917 by setting up a commune to assist the men and their families. Critical of the demoralising effects of relief – even when provided from within the labour movement – these feminists evolved a new model of support for those left destitute as a result of industrial action, in the interests of economic and social justice. Preferring to characterise their actions as facilitating self-help and self-respect, they renamed their headquarters the Guild Hall Commune. The article focuses on how the organisers saw their actions as different from the other relief committees supporting strikers and their dependants at this time; it argues that the ideas of guild socialism were of particular significance, and had special resonance for feminists. While the commune's work was soon overtaken by the second conscription referendum campaign, it is an episode that deserves analysis as an alternative construction of traditional female relief and auxiliary work.

 1
On 20 September 1917, the Woman Voter, journal of Melbourne's Women's Political Association and Peace Army (WPA), announced that the Guild Hall – 'twelve months since, the home of true democracy' – was 'now a commune'.1 The activities the paper described had been evolving over some weeks from the middle of August:
Kitchens, dining rooms, grocer's shop, smoking rooms, barber's saloon, boot factory, established in a few days by a handful of women, for thousands of men whom they are proud to stand by.
 But the reconceptualisation of the project as a commune now gave it a new significance for the women involved:
Never in the history of strikes, we venture to assert, has such a miracle been enacted, and should the strike continue many days longer greater things than those accomplished are in sight, until the Guild Hall Commune will stand as a monument to the irresistible force of justice and unity.
 Even given the tendency to grandiloquent overstatement in much of the labour and socialist press of the period, this was well outside the contemporary linguistic parameters of appeal for relief assistance. What lay behind these claims to be taking a leading role in 'the greatest industrial reform in the world'?2		 2
      Others have noted and described the main features of the commune: Janice Bomford devotes four pages to it in her biography of Vida Goldstein, and Jeff and Jill Sparrow give it a number of paragraphs in their discussion of the significance of the Guild Hall in the first volume of Radical Melbourne. The recent article by Rob Bollard also pays it some slight attention in illuminating the grass-roots impetus of the Victorian participants in the 1917 strike.3 But none of these writers asks what inspired the organisers to see it as different from the union-endorsed relief committees supporting strikers and their families at this time. In attempting to do so, this article examines the response of the WPA to the strike of the Wharf Labourers in Melbourne in 1917, first against food shortages and the rise in the cost of living, then in support of the mass strike against the introduction of the 'card system' in the railways of New South Wales (NSW). 3
      There are two important contexts to consider. The first is the ideological environment that shaped the WPA's sense of social and political purpose in its support for the wharf workers. In particular it is important to acknowledge the variety of socialist and other radical ideals on which the WPA activists were able to draw, often in a quite catholic way, before the Bolshevik Revolution imposed new and rigid polarisations on socialist thinking and allegiance. As David Blaazer has pointed out, this event not only destroyed much of the mutual tolerance and diversity among those who shared left-wing platforms during the pre-war and war years but also confined the principal questions in dispute among socialists to the straitjacket of revolution or reformism, most of them also assuming a context of centralised state power.4 As a result, historians have largely missed complexity and nuance in the rationales for action of organisations like the WPA. With this in mind, this article suggests that the ideas of guild socialism had particular resonance and relevance for the new social order to which these women aspired, given the focus of both the guild movement and feminists on self-management, self-respect, quality of work, community and what was understood to be the specifically 'spiritual nature of the problem of social reorganisation'.5 4
      The second context, and the reason for guild socialism's particular appeal to women, is related to the operational principles on which most women's organisations functioned in this period. The expansion of civic organisations in most western capitalist societies from the mid- to late nineteenth century marked a growing awareness of problems associated with rapid urbanisation and industrialisation. Their members were driven to social and political action by the unwillingness of state authorities to challenge dominant laissez-faire values by intervening to mitigate some of their consequences. While these organisations varied enormously in their views as to the type of action required, it is generally the case that they were sex-segregated and that the mainstream groups were masculine and fraternalist in conception, while the women's groups that emerged in consequence of their exclusion from the mainstream organisations were constituted as broadly maternalist and altruistic.6 Fraternalist organisations (for example, trade unions) directly challenged differentials of power by asserting a natural equality of rights among men regardless of class, but the challenge from women's organisations was an indirect one: a response to exclusion that emphasised gender difference and concern for the needs of others as an alternative set of values that could ultimately also be deployed to challenge the self-interested basis of fraternal claims to state power. But there was an in-built tension in this conceptualisation of organisation among women. On the one hand, it was represented as focusing on difference and service; on the other, it constituted an implicit ideological and political challenge and a claim to rights and power – and, hence, self-interest. Most women's organisations played down the tension and obviated the implied threat by emphasising service, but not all of them were willing to do so.7 5
      This article argues that guild socialism was particularly amenable to accommodation of this tension for politically radical and explicitly feminist women such as those in the WPA because it enabled them to justify their actions as simultaneously altruistic and egalitarian. In connection with providing support for the families of strikers, it can be seen as a means of erasing the taint of shame and humiliation that invariably accompanied resort to relief. The distribution of handouts, always understood to be the duty of women, would be replaced by assistance to strikers consistent in method and spirit with the fraternalist co-operativism long favoured in the organised labour movement but identified now with female comrades and extended to include the strikers' involvement in its management. It is significant then that this form of strike support occurred in a feminist organisation rather than among the women who chose to conduct relief work through the male-dominated Labor and Socialist parties, where a largely subordinate and conventionally gender-defined role for women was assumed. That some women belonging both to these parties and to the WPA chose to devote their energies to the Guild Hall Commune indicates their awareness of the implications of these different types of support work. 6
      Guild socialist ideals were influential in some Australian labour organisations from just before the war, though more so in Melbourne than in Sydney. Such leanings among one or two NSW miners' leaders, particularly A.C. (Bert) Willis,8 seem to have been exceptional, whereas by 1917 those who espoused the ideals in Melbourne were a significant proportion of the city's socialist intellectuals and radical nationalist thinkers, as David Walker demonstrated some years ago in his study of Vance Palmer, Frederick Wilmot, Louis Esson and Frederick Sinclaire.9 Guild socialism, like contemporary syndicalist ideas, expressed a significant level of disillusion with parliamentary methods, and was attracted to the idea of 'real' or 'true' democracy associated with direct action by workers at the point of production.10 But guild socialists rejected the hard-edged economism of syndicalism in favour of communalism, and most saw a continuing though limited role for the state and the institution of parliament. Theirs was a very English critique of modern capitalism and centralised bureaucracy, aiming to 'reconcile the citizen democracy of "traditional" socialism with the worker democracy of syndicalism' and respect for the time-honoured skills of individual free craftsmen.11 It thus self-consciously rejected the elitist Fabian insistence on scientific expertise and bureaucratic efficiency and aimed to constrain the power of the modern state in favour of 'return to a world of a smaller, more human scale' of production, organised round self-managing unions or 'guilds'.12 7
      Guild socialism can be distinguished from other currents of contemporary socialist thinking by its opposition to collectivism and a focus on production rather than distribution.13 Drawing on some of the medievalist ideals of William Morris, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold and Edward Carpenter, Arthur J. Penty, author of the founding text of guild socialism, The Restoration of the Gild System, evoked nostalgic and romanticised visions of feudal Merrie England, arguing that the triumph of science and the industrial system had corrupted humanity and substituted the machine, repetitive drudgery and profit for art, craftsmanship, pleasure in work, and imagination.14 Nevertheless, he acknowledged that the changes wrought in the forces of production by the industrial revolution and the emergence of the nation state would not go away, and focused instead on schemes to make the relations of production more human and equitable through transfer of control to workers organised in local guilds, serving a local market and regulating their own conditions. These ideas attracted the attention of Independent Labour Party member and Theosophist A.R. Orage. Together the two men formed the Gilds Restoration League, and, in 1907, Orage acquired the semi-moribund journal, New Age, turning it into the most lively socialist review of the day and a vehicle for guild ideas. In a series of articles in 1911 ad 1912, he developed the guild idea to include the abolition of the wage system – now seen as the key to worker emancipation.15 8
      Over the next three years, with the assistance of S.G. Hobson and G.D.H. Cole, Orage transformed Penty's medievalist stress on the evils of industrialism and the virtues of craft into an assault on capitalism and the illusory ballot-box democracy of the state.16 To achieve the abolition of the wages system, they argued for worker co-management of industry locally as well as nationally in order to 'give the modern workman a greater degree of involvement in his particular industry, thereby restoring a feeling of responsibility and dignity'.17 Local guilds would be linked together to form provincial then national guilds, which, in turn, would elect a guild council or congress. A guild socialist propaganda organisation, the National Guilds League, was formed at Easter 1915 on the basis of a set of principles known as the Storrington Document after the town in Essex at which it was drawn up the previous Christmas.18 Reorganisation of society on guild socialist principles would, it was believed, counter the trend towards an all-powerful state, and social polarisation between a wealthy cultivated elite and a servile working class. Hillaire Belloc's concept of the 'servile state' was important to this perception. Though not a socialist or a guildsman, Belloc had written a critique of modern capitalism in tune with guild socialist suspicion of the modern bureaucratic state as a fetter on freedom even while it promised greater material security.19 9
      In addition to restoring dignity and responsibility to workers, guild organisation and self-management would foster creativity, craftsmanship, pride in work, and a living vital national culture that regarded the contributions of ordinary men and women as indispensable to 'active citizenship'.20 This focus, emphasising spiritual values at least as much as materialist ones, made guild socialism particularly attractive to writers and artists, and, as argued here, a number of Australian feminists.21 In terms of encouraging debate and producing publications in support of the ideas expounded, the guild movement was most influential in Britain between about 1910 and 1925. It reached Australia via individuals who had spent time in England in the pre-war and early war years and through imported guild publications, most notably Orage's New Age. At this stage, the guild model was only a sketchy outline of principles focused primarily on production. Detailed formulation of how a guild-based society would work in practice with regard to governance, the inclusion of consumer and community interest, and financial organisation (distribution and exchange) only took place after the war. Thus guild ideas were still in flux in 1917 when the WPA set up its commune. 10
      Though in the early years Cole, in particular, was sceptical about the common ground guild ideas shared with the existing co-operative enterprise movement in Britain, given its adherence to the wages system, co-operation itself – mutual help – was seen as a necessary building block, though not a sufficient one, for the ideal society. The notion of the 'just price', rooted in the same idealised mediaeval world as the craft guild, would also be important. Certainly in Melbourne, guild ideas were linked in spirit to the small-scale communal co-operativism that had been encouraged in the Victorian Socialist Party (VSP) by founder Tom Mann and his successors as one means of building a socialist society within the shell of a capitalist one. Among women outside the party, the co-operative ideal had received some publicity through the Women's Co-operative Guild formed in Melbourne in 1907 after the visit of Margaret Ramsay McDonald.22 Women in the WPA had also engaged in some co-operative organisation, discussed below. And in 1915 a Housewives Co-operative Association was formed, though it soon dropped the word co-operative from its title and turned most of its attention to consumer protection and education.23 11
      Before 1918, consumer interest and representation in the guild socialist vision remained undeveloped though they were referred to explicitly by both Cole and A. Fenner Brockway, editor of the Independent Labour Party's Labour Leader. While Cole saw consumer issues as a function of a reduced and modified state representing the general will of the community, Brockway inclined to an alliance with the existing organised co-operative movement, anthema to Cole.24 Cole later canvassed a commune-based alternative in which producers' and consumers' representatives would be elected to local, regional and national communes. This was not fully formulated before 192025 and it is significant therefore that Melbourne's Guild Hall commune used the term and foreshadowed some of the ideas, however rudimentary they may appear in hindsight. 12
      The prevalence of guild socialist ideas in Melbourne was first evident in the pages of the VSP journal, the Socialist, and the Free Religious Fellowship publication, Fellowship, most particularly in the writing, speaking and preaching of Frederick Sinclaire, a New Zealander who had migrated to Australia via Oxford University and taken up a position as minister of the Eastern Hill Unitarian Church in 1908. The first minister of religion to join the VSP, Sinclaire rejected what he called 'the crude dogmatic materialism of Marx' in favour of a 'new morality' and code of ethics that stressed social justice. His frequent public lectures and letters attracted admirers like Vance Palmer and Nettie Higgins (who also spent time in Britain from 1913 to 1915), as well as Nettie's brother Esmonde, poet Frank Wilmot, lawyer Maurice Blackburn, and progressivist liberal Frederic Eggleston. But Sinclaire's radical views also led to conflict within his congregation and with other prominent churchmen, a key exception being the Rev. Charles Strong of the Australian Church, noted for his progressive social reform ideas and his pacifism. Sinclaire resigned his ministry in 1911 but later in the year agreed to head the Free Religious Fellowship, described as 'Christianity without miracle or dogma'.26 His salary of £2 per week was paid by supporters including Eggleston and Maurice Blackburn, who shared his interest in vitalist writers and thinkers such as Nietzsche, Bergson and Ibsen, as well as in Whitman and Tolstoy.27 Blackburn later became a guild socialist too. From this point in time, Sinclaire also acted as a regular celebrant for socialist marriages and funerals. He co-edited the Socialist with Marie Pitt from 1911–12 and edited Fellowship, which first appeared in August 1914. In the ensuing years many of its articles were reprinted in the Socialist.28 13
      Sinclair's early position on the war was consistent with his critique of capitalism: 'So long as the workers accept the ruling class as their moral teachers, they will remain enslaved. A false and perverted moral ideal is the strongest weapon which the ruling class can use to keep the workers in slavery'.29 Already familiar with the writings of Edward Carpenter, Sinclaire renounced his earlier Fabian connections and became an ardent supporter of guild socialism after reading the key work on the subject by S.G. Hobson –National Guilds, first published in 1914. His review of this collection of essays was published first in Fellowship, then reprinted in large type in a prominent position in the Socialist on 8 October 1915. The articles contained in the book were, he wrote, 'by far the most important contributions to Socialist literature that has been made for some years':
Many of us have long been convinced that the only hope of obtaining a human life for the mass of the people lies in the destruction of the wage system. More than this, our particular experience in various fields of activity – educational, religious, artistic, or other – has led us to the conclusion that the fate of all we care about, and, in a word, of civilization, depends ultimately on the emancipation of the worker from wage slavery. To speak of the wage earner as a slave is no mere piece of socialist rhetoric. The essence of slavery is the denial of human personality, and this denial is involved in a system which treats labour as a commodity ... whereas labour, being the expression of personality, is something belonging to a greater category, and in its nature sacred.30
 Guild socialism, he went on to explain, was a 'tertium quid', or third way, that saw faults in both political socialism ('State Capitalism') and syndicalism.31 It argued for 'the principle of co-management with the State', whereby workers 'employed in any given industry' are formed into 'a single fellowship' or guild, democratically and communally managing their own processes of production while acceding to 'formal and effective co-operation with the State in regard to large policy'.32		 14
      The concept of vitality – indicative of the pervasiveness of Bergsonian ideas – was integral to this vision: workers under capitalism merely existed; a system of guilds would breathe life into them once more, fostering their humanity and capacity for idealism and self-expression.33 By the following year, 1916, Fellowship was publishing articles by Vance Palmer on national guilds in which similar arguments about their potential for regeneration of society through the liberation of 'a flood of spiritual energy' were mounted. While Sinclaire wrote of the consequences for a 'living theology', Palmer spoke of a 'living culture', and R.F. Irvine, well-known Professor of Economics at the University of Sydney and also a supporter of guild socialism, advocated a 'living scholarship' through fostering the new social sciences.34 Palmer's brother-in-law, Esmonde Higgins, at the time a member of the Free Religious Fellowship, was also influenced by the humanism of the guild idea as demonstrated in a letter to the Socialist attacking the materialist and atheistic socialism of another correspondent as opposed to the 'more generous Socialism that men like William Morris have stood for [which] scorns such dogmatic crushing-out of all variety and individuality ... Such dogmatism reeks of the Inquisition rather than of the Revolution'.35 15
      Another prominent exponent of guild socialism was law student Guido Baracchi, a good friend of Esmonde Higgins, who, like the Palmers, had come under the influence of the New Age circle while in England in 1915.36 The man who founded the Trades Hall Council–sanctioned Victorian Labour College in mid-1917, W.P (Bill) Earsman, was also a convert, though, like Baracchi, he moved closer to a syndicalist then communist commitment in the post-war years. Sinclaire, Earsman, Baracchi and Blackburn provided most of the instruction at the Labour College, and, through this channel, were able to spread the ideas of guild socialism, and especially the principles of industrial democracy, more broadly.37 Blackburn gave public lectures on the subject too during 1917, and was instrumental in setting up the Commonwealth Guilds League in Melbourne – the Australian counterpart, albeit a less productive one, of G.D.H. Cole's National Guilds League, founded in 1915.38 The growth in support of schemes for workers' control of industry in the following years was, in Victoria, thus probably derived at least as much from this source as from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), who were organisationally weaker in Melbourne than in Sydney.39 As Ian Turner noted in his classic study of the 'dynamics of the labour movement in Eastern Australia 1900–1921', the extended discussion of the future organisation of labour among delegates to the Melbourne Trades Hall Council in 1920 'resolved for a guild-socialist kind of solution', and this was also adopted by the Victorian Labor Party conference in 1920 on the suggestion of Maurice Blackburn, president during the preceding 12 months.40 By this stage, however, Cole's elaboration of guild socialist theory and clarification of the co-ordinating role of the state had moderated the primary focus on worker management that predominated in 1917.41 The guild ideal, with its emphasis on vitality, continued to have resonance, however, since the Labor Guild of Youth, formed by the Victorian Central Executive in 1926 under the leadership of Muriel Heagney, had been inspired by the example of Britain's Independent Labour Party organisation of the same name.42 16
      By the fourth year of the war, guild socialist opposition both to the war itself and to conscription was intimately connected with opposition to the growing power of the state and bureaucracy, a problem to which Cole had also drawn attention in Britain.43 The anti-conscription manifesto Sinclaire issued with Charles Strong in December 1917, explicitly attacked the 'new religion', 'the religion of the State', in which the 'supreme law is not the law of God but the military safety of the country'.44 A measure of Sinclaire's influence was his election as president of the Australian Peace Alliance in 1915. Significantly both R.S. Ross, editor of the Socialist, and Cecilia John, close friend of Vida Goldstein and also secretary of the WPA, then organiser of the Guild Hall Commune, were also on the Alliance executive.45 This was just one example of the close networks existing among socialist, trade union, feminist and pacifist activists in Melbourne; networks that assisted the diffusion and adaptation of new ideas such as guild socialism to existing ideals of co-operativism and community, and a growing scepticism about parliamentary democracy, especially in an increasingly powerful centralised state.46 17
      As an example of these networks, Maurice Blackburn, though a member of the Labor Party, also belonged to the VSP and was a respected figure in WPA circles; in December 1914 he married Doris Hordern, Goldstein's erstwhile campaign secretary for the seat of Kooyong.47 Nettie Palmer's aunt, Ina Higgins, was the sister of Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration judge, H.B. Higgins, a man generally respected within the labour movement, and was also a member of the WPA. Esmonde Higgins had joined the VSP, as had Baracchi and Earsman, and there were many progressive women of the left who belonged to the WPA and/or Peace Army, as well as to the VSP, the Militant Propagandists of the Labour Movement and/or the Labor Party itself. They included the former suffragettes, Jennie Baines, Adela Pankhurst and Louie Cullen, as well as Bella Lavender, May Francis, Mabel Singleton, Mary Fullerton, Sarah Lewis, Jean Daley and Mary Grant. The journals of these organisations, Labor Call, the Socialist and the Woman Voter, together with Fellowship, advertised lectures and various activities for each other in addition to reprinting articles and reviews of common interest. Members of one organisation often spoke at meetings of the others, as well as sharing platforms on the Yarra Bank on Sundays. And co-operation was common in the formation of umbrella organisations such as the Peace Alliance and the No-conscription Fellowship, as well as in deputations and lobbying.48 During the free speech fight in the early months of 1916, for example, the Free Religious Fellowship, Mrs Jessie Strong's Sisterhood of International Peace, the WPA, the VSP, the Peace Alliance, various unions and anti-conscription groups and the Society of Friends joined together in a deputation to the government appealing against the closure of halls to anti-war and anti-conscription meetings.49 18
      Knowledge was thus shared in many ways – lectures, reprints of articles and Yarra Bank meetings, but also sale and circulation of pamphlets and celebrations of significant anniversaries. A relevant example in the context of this article was that great historical precedent for communal co-operative government and political solidarity, the Paris Commune of 1871. In July 1915 the Socialist advertised and offered for sale a pamphlet by Harry Holland (editor of the Maoriland Worker) titled The Commune of Paris– 'the first great socialist revolution'. Holland described it as 'five great months marked by the flashing splendor of the Commune's life and Capitalism's orgy of fire and blood'.50 Each year since its foundation, too, the VSP had held a dinner to celebrate the commune.51 The leading speaker in 1916 was left-wing lawyer A.W. Foster, a good friend of both Sinclaire and Blackburn, and another enthusiast for guild socialist ideas.52 In attendance to prepare the food as well as to listen were members of the Women's Socialist League, a semi-autonomous organisation of VSP women, a number of whom were also members of the WPA. It may be that the Paris Commune, then, inspired the choice of name for the activities at the Guild Hall late in 1917, for Cole's guild commune theory was in no more than embryonic form at this stage. 19
      While these links and associations do not conclusively prove that the Guild Hall Commune was a fully conscious attempt to put the ideals of guild socialism into practice, or create a mini Paris Commune, they do demonstrate that guild socialism was an important, if inchoate, ingredient in contemporary anti-capitalist and anti-militarist discourse in Melbourne by 1917. And the philosophy and self-conscious organisational rationale adopted by the Guild Hall Commune are clearly congruent with the ideals of guild socialism. But why should it have had particular resonance for the WPA? For a start, its spiritual emphasis was in harmony with the views of Vida Goldstein, Cecilia John and other contemporary feminists. Goldstein had received her early spiritual and social education in Charles Strong's Australian Church, and, through her father's involvement, was familiar with the ideals guiding the village settlements that Anglican priest Horace Tucker had established with Strong to relieve the plight of the unemployed in the 1890s.53 By 1902 Goldstein had converted to Christian Science, a faith founded by American Mary Baker Eddy that explicitly challenged the materialism of the age by emphasising metaphysical and spiritual renewal and healing. It first made its appearance in Australia in the late 1890s and grew from 217 adherents in 1901 to 1,189 ten years later, many of them women of some education and independent means. Christian Scientists stressed what they believed was the lost element of Christ's teachings – healing – focusing on mental, physical and emotional restoration through prayer and spiritual reflection.54 But some, like Vida Goldstein, also saw social discord and economic exploitation as obstacles to restoration of individual as well as community health and harmony. The common elements in the guild socialist critique and the stated objectives of the Guild Hall Commune organisers, as well as the conviction that they were laying the basis of a new world (or 'new age'), would seem more than coincidental. And it is also significant that the concluding rationale drawn at the end of a long description of their activities in support of the wharf labourers was the altruistic but also self-serving Christian injunction: 'Give, and it shall be given unto you'.55 20
      In arguing the appeal of guild socialist ideals, the prior focus of the WPA on co-operativism, self-sufficiency and egalitarianism in relation to women's productive work and economic status must also be given some attention here. In January 1915, for example, the WPA established a Women's Labour Bureau, because 'nothing was being done by Unemployment Committees to relieve the conditions for unemployed women'.56 Soon after, Cecilia John, together with Ina Higgins, made arrangements with the Closer Settlement Board to purchase a block of land near bayside Mordialloc for flower and fruit growing and poultry production in order to provide meaningful work for unemployed women, and to be run on co-operative rather than philanthropic or maternalist lines.57 In the city, the Women's Labour Bureau functioned on donations collected by the WPA for two months before receiving a grant of £50 from the government's Central Unemployment Relief Committee, which continued to give intermittent assistance until July.58 The bureau offered help and training mostly to 'widows with children, women with invalid husbands, delicate women and deserted wives', who were paid four shillings per day for two days work per week. Organisers of the bureau argued that, unlike the various charitable organisations, they 'endeavoure[d] to prevent women reaching starvation point'; moreover, 'in a self-respecting community work instead of charity should be offered to those willing to work for a living'.59 After July, the Central Unemployment Committee regularised the payments under the supervision of the Senior Lady Inspector of Factories, Miss Cuthbertson, and, when the committee was disbanded in November, the government continued to grant the bureau £45 per week. But the bureau was consistently under attack from conservative charity organisations, like the Melbourne Ladies' Benevolent Society, from its inception. Melbourne Ladies' Benevolent Society honorary secretary Janet Henderson repeatedly argued that 'the two bodies overlap, and money and other relief is thus misapplied'.60 Direct government assistance continued until mid-1916 when the ministry succumbed to the pressure, ceased all payments and, as the Socialist put it, reverted to 'the old condition of "nothing for unemployed women but charity"'.61 21
      When, nearly two years later, the WPA recast their assistance to striking wharf labourers and their families as a 'commune', they were taking another step away from charity and traditional labourist forms of relief. The women's farm and labour bureau had not been conceptualised as the beginnings of industrial democracy, whereas in early September 1917 the Woman Voter could claim, using language common also to guild socialists, that it had 'realised from the beginning the full significance of the conflict' as a struggle 'in the cause of industrial democracy' by 'working men [who] are no longer to be regarded as dumb driven cattle' or 'wage slaves of the capitalist system'.62 In early October, Cecilia John began to talk about an 'Industrial Parliament' that would 'give the workers control of industry'.63 She received support from Alf Foster, who also argued along guild socialist lines at an address to the VSP in mid-October that workers were:
absolutely at the mercy of their boss. Had they any say as to who should govern them and what should become of their products? What the people needed was industry for themselves. They had achieved a measure of political democracy, but had not commenced to achieve industrial democracy at all.64
 And in November, Vida Goldstein extended the idea still further in speaking of democratic control of industry as the primary condition of a 'People's Peace' that would privilege right over might.65		 22
      The cost of living and availability of food had been a constant matter of concern for the WPA since the outbreak of the war. There was continuing resentment that neither the state nor the federal government had made price control effective but the men of the Labor Party and trade union leaders focused most of their attention on unemployment. Labour movement women followed suit, and, at the highpoint of wartime unemployment in 1915, formed the Labor Women's Unemployment Relief Committee under the leadership of Mary Killury.66 The WPA meanwhile expressed some interest in the formation of the Housewives Co-operative Association in mid-1915 but the Housewives' leaders mostly came from the middle classes and were linked to the National Council of Women; they 'talked down' to working-class women, and there was never any serious consideration that those whom co-operation was designed to benefit should take charge of the organisation themselves. The association failed to thrive in this form and the early team spirit dissipated. Most of the original WPA supporters had resigned before the organisation completed its first year of operation, and the number of shareholders overall slipped from 250 to 96.67 Certainly working-class women do not seem to have given the organisation the grassroots support it needed, most likely because they lacked the cash to buy in bulk from the depots and the space to store what they bought in their homes,68 but perhaps also because they saw it as maternalistic. In 1916 left-wing women's attention was also diverted by the free speech, recruitment and conscription issues but, by mid-1917, with a surge in unemployment as well as shortages of some basic foodstuffs, the cost of living and food supply issues resumed priority for socialist women and feminists. This time the Labor Party and sections of the union movement were also roused to action. 23
      Shortages and high prices resulting from meat and wheat sold to the British government being stockpiled in cold stores and silos because of the lack of shipping had caused considerable resentment. But the conviction that some of it was being shipped abroad to closer Southeast Asian and Asian markets69 to get prices higher than those prevailing in Australia provoked angry public meetings. It was the Wharf Labourers Union that first took decisive action on 29 July by resolving not to load foodstuffs for shipment overseas, except where they were for war purposes, 'until the cost of commodities was reduced to pre-war rates'.70 President Mr E. Jones
declared that in the course of his work he had found out that there were ample supplies of food available, yet the people could not get it. The cool stores were full of frozen rabbits, which might never be shipped. The Ministry should open the stores and let the people have some of those rabbits at a reasonable price.71
 Further, wharf labourers had observed 'a very heavy consignment of flour' waiting to be loaded onto one of the steamers affected by the embargo. Rupert Lockwood wrote that they believed some of this was being exported to neutral countries such as Holland for resale to Germany.72 The wharfies garnered widespread support in the labour movement for their action, as a 'monster protest meeting' featuring state and federal leaders of the Labor Party indicated.73 It was probably the nearest an official Labor Party meeting came to endorsing semi-syndicalist tactics. Eventually the cost of living issue merged with that of the time-card system, which had caused the NSW wharf labourers to go out in sympathy with the railway workers who had struck work on 2 August. The Victorian wharfies went out in support of their Sydney comrades on 13 August,74 but the cost of living issue remained pre-eminent and they stayed out till November, well after other unionists in both NSW and Victoria had resumed work. For this reason the WPA regarded support for them as the special responsibility of women.75		 24
      Until the third week of the great strike in NSW, the Victorian Trades Hall Council successfully contained industrial action to the unions of the Waterside Workers' Federation in the belief that the role of Victorian unionists was best confined to moral support and fund-raising. But, when two leaders of the Strike Defence Committee in NSW were arrested under a new War Precautions Regulation making it illegal to incite men to strike, moderating influences in Victoria began to lose their battle to contain the dispute. Since one of the Sydney men arrested was Bert Willis, the secretary of the Australian Coal and Shale Employees Federation, Victoria's coal miners in Wonthaggi and Korumburra now stopped work.76 Between 23 August and 6 September, the ship painters and dockers came out, followed by the timber workers, carters and drivers, rope and cordage workers, storemen and packers, iron workers, rubber workers and coal loaders and baggers.77 25
      The anger and suffering among workers and their families in Melbourne were reflected in the violence of the cost of living riots during September. These were led mainly by Socialist Party women, though many were Labor Party and WPA members too. The tens of thousands of ordinary women who simply participated were responding to their own conditions of hardship.78 The WPA did not officially support the street demonstrations and the violent methods used, although they opposed the harsh treatment of the demonstrators at the hands of the authorities and the refusal of Prime Minister Hughes to hear their case.79 Instead, they declared solidarity with the wharf labourers in recognition of the sacrifices they had made in taking industrial action to reduce the cost of food, setting up a registration bureau specifically for the men of this union and their families.80 Before and at the height of the dispute in early September, the wharf labourers represented over a quarter (2,500) of all the workers in Victoria on strike or locked out,81 and they refused to go back even when it became clear that Justice Higgins would have no choice but to revoke the preference agreement in their award.82 A mass meeting of wharfies at the Guild Hall on 26 August 'decided by an overwhelming majority to remain on strike, the men believing that solidarity of the workers is more important than a preference "agreement" that may be broken at any moment'.83 At the Yarra Bank meeting three days later, a spokesman further declared that:
the wharf labourers would remain out till the Sydney wharf labourers went back to work, and that even when they did resume they would not, in any circumstances, handle foodstuffs for export except for war purposes, till the price of food was reduced.84
 		26
      The WPA saw the wharf labourers' action in sympathy with the NSW strikers as quite consistent with their action over the food crisis. Early in November, the Woman Voter printed the manifesto of the Unions' Defence Committee in Sydney, which stressed that the strike in the railways over the card system had been a refusal by the men to submit to a scheme that 'would have robbed them of every attribute of manliness, and reduced them to the wretched position of being half slaves, half machines'. It was 'a free and spontaneous protest by vast bodies of men against unjust and degrading conditions'. Their own inspiration they attributed to these 'first signs of the awakening of the people as to what must follow after the war'.85 To the WPA, then, both rationales for strike action indicated a readiness on the part of the men to assert control over the quality of their life and work and to assist others to do so too. On being invited on to the joint Wharf Labourers and WPA platform at the Yarra Bank as early as 29 August, Frederick Sinclaire summarised this imperative in language that evoked guild socialist ideals of industrial democracy, as well as the syndicalist sentiments that marked the growth of the One Big Union movement by the end of the war. Sinclaire recognised the steps the strikers had taken towards workers' control and urged that they
should not only refuse to allow the use of the card system, but should abolish all foremen, inspectors, and other "spies", and themselves conduct the businesses in which they were employed.86
 		27
      The WPA did not take lightly the decision to aid and abet the wharf labourers' actions. They recognised
that men do not strike, that their womenfolk do not consent to suffer increased privation for the pleasure of the thing. Workers and their families suffer the tortures of the damned before they can bring themselves to respond to the capitalistic goad with the dreaded and dreadful strike.87
 The WPA thus felt a particular responsibility for the wharf labourers out of all the strikers because they
did not strike for themselves, for better wages, better conditions. They struck for their class and for the community, against the increased cost of living, caused by gambling in food supplies. They struck for you and for me.88
 Their actions, in other words, were understood as not just in the fraternal mode of defending male workers' interests and conditions but as more attuned to the concern of women's organisations with selfless rather than purely self-interested action. To WPA women this represented a genuinely class- and gender-conscious response that expressed the values of care and humanity, dignity and responsibility, they believed to be at the core of the best in socialist thinking. And, as the Socialist put it, their action declared 'unionism to be something with a soul', with 'vast numbers of men prepared to assert the dignity of toil upon humanitarian lines and for the welfare of all the people'.89 It deserved a similar response that was directed not simply towards satisfying the material needs of the men and their families, though that was important too. The organisation of the commune was an evolutionary process rather than a preplanned blueprint but it resulted in a new system of mutual assistance and a conviction this could be the foundation stone of genuine social reorganisation.		 28
      The first response within the WPA was to join with the Labor and Socialist Party women, the Australian Labor Federation and unionists to organise for the billeting of children of the strikers but the WPA soon revised this plan, on the suggestion of member Mary McMahon, in favour of asking members to commit regular weekly amounts to enable the children to be kept in their own homes with their mothers. This was not possible for all, but those of independent means and some with professional incomes, like federal parliamentarian Dr William Maloney, did as asked.90 From the end of August, the WPA then made arrangements with the Wharf Labourers Union 'for getting the names and addresses of members and registering their families' at the Guild Hall so that they could organise provision of food and medical assistance where necessary, especially for 'nursing and expectant mothers'.91 29
      Vida Goldstein did not give up on conventional political and constitutional strategies. Consistent with a guild socialist position she acknowledged the need for co-operation with the state on matters of over-arching policy but asserted the centrality of the human, ethical and spiritual issues at stake. In an 'Open Letter to the Right Honourable the Prime Minister' early in September, she defended the wharf labourers' actions in some detail and pleaded for the third time for an interview to put their case but, in doing so, she also emphasised that the workers were protesting against a 'soulless system' that would eventually drive them to revolution if they did not receive justice.92 In the meantime, Cecilia John and other WPA members set about the task of supplying basic necessities. St Kilda and North Fitzroy Labor Party branches were acknowledged for 'their very valuable help with funds and groceries', as were 'the willing helpers in the pantry and kitchen', 'those who have sent provisions, eggs, milk, vegetables and bread' and 'those who have helped with money', which made possible the provision of meals for all strikers, their wives and children who came in to the hall.93 Supporters were urged to keep up this type of assistance and warned that it would be some time before the men and their families were back on their feet, even after they had returned to work.94 30
      By early October, nearly 1,500 were being fed in the kitchen and restaurant on the premises and 5,000 others supplied with groceries.95 This part of the Guild Hall Commune's work, together with fund-raising gift nights, including dancing and games, was very similar to what the Socialist and Labor Party volunteers in the Women's Relief Committee appointed by the Trade Union Defence Committee were also doing for the other strikers and their families.96 But, where the efforts of the latter were couched in terms of donations and assisting 'deserving cases',97 the Guild Hall activities were increasingly directed to enabling the men and their families to be as self-sufficient as possible by encouraging the active participation of the wharf labourers themselves in setting up services and securing provisions.98 It was this that justified the designation 'commune'. 'Realising that men need some attention as well as the women and children', for example, the WPA assisted two members of the Wharf Labourer's Union with experience in cutting hair and shaving to set up a barber's saloon at the back of the stage in the main hall. There were several men too who could repair boots, and Jennie Baines' son, Wilfred, offered to train other members of the union, while husband George helped fit up the benches and 'lent lasts and tools of every description'.99 On being asked about the importance the commune placed on these services, Cecilia John replied: 'One of the first essentials for victory in the industrial fight is that the men shall keep their self-respect, and nothing tends to break a man's spirit so much as being unkempt'. On the Wednesday and Thursday of the eleventh week of the strike, some of the wharfies also took the initiative of approaching Jim Smith of the Carlton Brewery for the loan of a motor lorry to collect six tons of groceries provided by Newport workers. Their reception on arriving back at the hall was filmed and shown at the Guild Hall the following Saturday evening.100 They also solicited donations of supplies from other unions, the men at Newport railway shops and Sunshine Harvester supplying nearly half the weekly quantity of twenty tons. Cecilia John and Vida Goldstein were probably responsible for enlisting the help of sympathetic employers, including the Australasian Jam Company, the Federal and Bacchus Marsh Milk Companies, the McAlpin Bakery, and Messrs Cookes and Hurley, who supplied leather, and Ward Bros, who lent a boot-sewing machine. Throughout the whole period of the commune, union members themselves ran the various stores – second-hand clothing, grocery and baker's shops, in addition to the two boot repair shops and the barber's saloon – as well as the recreation hall and smoking room, and they also provided assistance to the women volunteers in the kitchens.101 In addition, the hall became the strike headquarters for the union, with most of their meetings being held there over the period the men were out. 31
      The wharf labourers were able to sustain their strike only with the help of the WPA and its facilities so that, as the Woman Voter proudly announced on 1 November, they were the 'first in in Victoria and the last out in Australia'. As the men continued to resist the conditions on which they were given work – having to apply through the newly constituted Yarra Stevedoring Company, working alongside scabs and being denied preference 102– the Woman Voter devoted a page and a half to summing up what had been achieved and what was still being done. The extended headline was a statement of pride as well as political purpose:
The Guild Hall Commune or Self Help for Trade Unionists. The Greatest Industrial Reform in the World and the Wharf Labourers' Strike, 1917. What We Have Done in the Women's Political Association and Australian Women's Peace Army for Industrial Democracy, National and International Solidarity, Justice & Peace.103
 The preamble to the description of activities explained the WPA's early educative purpose and related how this was changed by the outbreak of a war that threatened to 'slay all that women held most sacred in the moral and spiritual domain'. The account also made explicit the self-conscious political purpose of the 'commune' in terms consistent with the aims of guild socialism and the form of workers' control it espoused: 'From August, 1914, to the present moment ... [t]hey saw that the war would make a new world ... that a new epoch in human history was being born and the women must lead'. This became more apparent with the Great Strike of 1917, the announcement by Defence Minister Senator Pearce that 'Australia must be Organised on a War Basis, and Industries Adapted for War Purposes', and 'the attempt to introduce Conscription.'104 At this point:
We realised that almost the last link had been forged in the chain of the enslavement of the people of Australia ... and that the time had come for the People to stand for the New Social Order and demand the establishment of Industrial Democracy and Production for Use, not Profit ...
 It thus seemed
natural [that] we should be ready for action when we saw the first signs of the awakening of the people as to what must follow after the war in the Railways Strike in New South Wales against the introduction of the Card System, and the Wharf Labourers' Strike in Victoria against the Cost of Living by refusing to handle food for export except for war purposes.

At this point, Miss Cecilia John, with her phenomenal business ability, stepped into the breach with far-reaching proposals for establishing a Workers' Commune at the Guild Hall, with the object of befriending the women and children ... and helping the men to win out in their fight against the unendurable exploitation and oppression of their class, and lay the foundation of Industrial Democracy in Australia.105
 		32
      The commune was at its peak of efficiency as the strike was coming to an end and the men began to seek work once more. The WPA claimed that its success demonstrated that 'the Guild Hall Commune should be a permanent institution', for: 'as long as the workers permit the wage system to endure, self-help of this kind will be required'. This decidedly guild socialist formulation merged in the conclusion with a more explicitly syndicalist hope that they would go on to
form a Women's Union – One Big Union for Women – the condition of membership to be membership in a Trade Union, if eligible, or that the applicant shall be the wife, daughter, mother, sister of a Trade Unionist, or a woman who actively supports Trade Unionism, who shall be organised with the object of inspiring them with a sense of women's responsibility for Industrial and International Solidarity, Justice and Peace.
 Precisely what the roles of these women would be is unclear but the suggestion preceded by 17 years the first formal organisation in Australia of wives into an activist auxiliary – in the coalmining community of Wonthaggi in Victoria.106		 33
      The commune did not become a permanent institution. It continued to operate until the following February but the Woman Voter announced on 22 November that the renewed threat of conscription necessitated the diversion of two-thirds of the cash donations to the campaign against compulsory military service. There was very little reference to the commune in the WPA journal after that until the issue of 18 April, which reported the annual meeting and gave an account of the activities of the 'Guild Hall Commune Work', which it dated from 6 August 1917 to February 1918. The round figures cited were impressive: 60,000 food parcels, 30,000 meals, 6,500 haircuts, 30,000 items of clothing distributed, 2,000 pairs of boot repaired, 200 cases of confinement or illness cared for, and £1,500 in donations and almost 700 tons of food collected.107 And, as others have noted, during the Eight Hour Day march in March 1918, the wharfies made a diversion to the Guild Hall to salute the women of the WPA for their contribution.108 34
      Though the WPA's efforts shared many of the features of traditional relief committee work, their conceptualisation of their relationship with the strikers and their families was self-consciously critical of that model. Instead they involved the men themselves in organising and carrying out many of the support activities. Preferring to characterise their actions as facilitating self-help and self-respect, the WPA's renaming of their headquarters the Guild Hall Commune was intended to be indicative of 'how a strike should be conducted'. And these ideas were ones drawn particularly from the ideals of guild socialism that stressed workers' control of their workplaces and conditions rather than an increase in the power of the state. Goldstein's continuing, if unreciprocated, faith in rational dialogue with state authorities and her clear sense of Christian fellowship indicate that she and her supporters had not gone down the path of IWW or syndicalist extremism even where they shared some terms like 'industrial democracy' and occasionally used Wobbly ones like 'One Big Union'. It is fitting that they should have the last word in explaining their rationale. They 'would confine the Commune to Trade unionists', men and women prepared to 'make some personal sacrifice to secure justice for their fellow-workers by collective effort' for:
self-respect and respect for one's comrades demand that workers, who are aiming at changing our social system, through their industrial organisations, should not accept any help except that lovingly given by their fellow-workers, and other friends who are also working to change the system, otherwise the help given is only a disguised form of charity.109
 		35


Judith Smart is a principal fellow at the University of Melbourne and adjunct professor at RMIT University. She has published on Australian women's political activism, venereal diseases, youth organisation, the Miss Australia contest, and the Billy Graham crusade. Current projects include a study of Melbourne during World War I and (with Marian Quartly) a history of the National Council of Women of Australia. She edits the Victorian Historical Journal
<jsmart@unimelb.edu.au>


Endnotes

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

1.  The former home of the organisations was WPA Hall, 215 LaTrobe Street. Jeff and Jill Sparrow write that the Guild Hall, now Storey Hall and part of RMIT University, 'began life in 1884 as the Hibernian Hall, intended to bolster the presence of Irish Catholicism in the face of the growing organisation of Protestant Loyalist groups. From 1904 it held services for Central Zion Tabernacle, before becoming the secular Guild Hall in 1907 – a site for dances, exhibitions, meetings and the like'. The WPA 'took up the lease' late in 1916. Jeff Sparrow and Jill Sparrow, Radical Melbourne: A Secret History, Vulgar Press, Melbourne, 2001, p. 169.

2. Woman Voter, 8 November 1917, p. 1.

3.  Janice Bomford, That Dangerous and Persuasive Woman: Vida Goldstein, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1993, pp. 180–4; Sparrow and Sparrow, Radical Melbourne, pp. 172–4; Rob Bollard, '"The active chorus": the Great Strike of 1917 in Victoria', Labour History, no. 90, May 2006, pp. 88–9.

4.  David Blaazer, 'Guild socialism and the historians', Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 44, no. 1, March 1998, pp. 1–15.

5.  Review of National Guilds by the Rev. Frederick Sinclair, reprinted from Fellowship in the Socialist, 8 October 1916, p. 3.

6.  These organisations were also, of course, largely race segregated, and race therefore adds another dimension to this categorisation but it did not feature overtly in the issues this article discusses. Civic organisation in Australia at this time assumed whiteness and Britishness. On the sex-segregated and fraternalist/maternalist distinction, see, for example, Barbara Arneil, 'Just community: social capital, gender and culture', in Brenda O'Neill and Elizabeth Gidengil (eds), Gender and Social Capital, Routledge, New York and London, 2006, pp. 19–21. Further, more detailed discussion of maternalist organisation and activism can be found in Seth Koven and Sonya Michel (eds), Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States, Routledge, New York and London, 1993.

7.  See Arneil, pp. 21 and 37.

8.  Ian Turner noted that Willis was a product of the British Miners' Union and the guild socialism associated with the London Labour College. See I.A.H. Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics: The Dynamics of the Labour Movement in Eastern Australia 1900–1921, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1979, p. 88. See also Frank Farrell, 'Willis, Albert Charles 1876–1954', in John Ritchie (ed.), Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 12, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1990, pp. 509–11, who also refers to Willis's brief flirtation with De Leonite IWW ideas after the 1917 strike.

9.  David Walker, Dream and Disillusion: A Search for Australian Cultural Identity, ANU Press, Canberra, 1976.

10.  Logie Barrow and Ian Bullock, Democratic Ideas and the British Labour Movement, 1880–1914, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, p. 250; Nyle Carpenter, Guild Socialism: An Historical and Cultural Analysis, D. Appleton and Co., New York and London, 1922, p. 45. Carpenter's account is a doctoral study and one of the few contemporary detailed academic examinations of the movement, based on both interviews with participants and documentary sources.

11.  Barrow and Bullock, Democratic Ideas, p. 264.

12.  Walker, Dream and Disillusion, p. 46.

13.  G.D.H. Cole, Self-government in Industry, G. Bell and Sons, London, 1918, pp. 110–13.

14.  Geoffrey Foote, The Labour Party's Political Thought: A History, Croom Helm, London, 1986, p. 104. The Restoration of the Gild System was published in 1906. See Carpenter, Guild Socialism, pp. 45–7 for a discussion of William Morris's influence on these ideas especially.

15.  Carpenter, Guild Socialism, pp. 83–5, 90–3. 'Gild' was spelt this way in Penty's book and by the restoration movement 'in order to break away from the little hole and corner self-governing arts workshops that call themselves guilds'. It was later abandoned. See Carpenter, Guild Socialism, p. 93, note 102.

16.  Foote, The Labour Party's Political Thought, p. 105; Carpenter, Guild Socialism, p. 50.

17.  Walker, Dream and Disillusion, pp. 45–6.

18.  Carpenter, Guild Socialism, p. 95.

19.  Foote, The Labour Party's Political Thought, p. 262. Belloc's The Servile State was published in London in 1912.

20.  The term is Cole's (p. 301).

21.  Walker and Blaazer both acknowledge that guild socialism was a minor stream in socialist thinking even in Britain and that it was even less influential in Australia where its appeal was mostly to progressive intellectuals. See also Jeff Sparrow, Communism: A Love Affair, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2007, pp. 37–9.

22.  G.C. Hewitt, A History of the Victorian Socialist Party, 1906–1932, MA thesis, LaTrobe University, 1974; Meredith Foley, The Women's Movement in New South Wales and Victoria 1918–1938, PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 1985, p. 113. There is very little information extant on the Women's Co-operative Guild.

23.  Judith Smart, 'The politics of consumption: the Housewives' Associations in south-eastern Australia before 1950', Journal of Women's History, vol. 18, no. 3, September 2006, pp. 17–20. A special section in Labour History, no. 91, November 2006, 'The politics of consumption and co-operation' (edited by Nikola Balnave and Greg Patmore), has discussed the under-researched field of co-operative enterprise in Australia. The emphasis of the articles is on mutual help through consumer co-operation, credit unions and co-operative finance schemes rather than co-operation among producers, Nevertheless, the contributors demonstrate the prevalence of the co-operative ideal as an essential underpinning concept in the 20th-century labour movement's search for a more just community.

24.  Barrow and Bullock, Democratic Ideas, pp. 267–8; Cole, pp. 6, 110, 298–9.

25.  G.D.H. Cole, Guild Socialism Re-stated, Parsons, London, 1920. Carpenter cites the 1921 edition in his discussion. Carpenter, Guild Socialism, pp. 183–90.

26.  Walker, Dream and Disillusion, ch. 5.

27.  Warren G. Osmond, Frederic Eggleston: An Intellectual in Australian Politics, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1985, pp. 45–6, 49–50.

28.  Walker, Dream and Disillusion, ch. 5.

29. Socialist, 20 Nov. 1914, p. 2.

30. Socialist, 8 October 1915, p. 3.

31. Socialist, 8 October 1915, p. 3. It is interesting that Tony Blair, following Anthony Giddens and others, used the same term to describe 'New Labour' in Britain as a party no longer dominated by trade unions but more akin to the centre-right European social democratic parties, embracing a mix of market and interventionist philosophies. For the third way of guild socialism, trade unions were, on the contrary, the fundamental building blocks of the more just society. See Anthony Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy, Polity Press, Malden, Mass., 1999, and Otton Newman and Richard Zoysa, The Promise of the Third Way: Globalization and Social Justice, Palgrave, London, 2001.

32. Socialist, 8 October 1915, p. 3.

33.  Cole, Self-government, pp. 121–2.

34.  Walker, Dream and Disillusion, pp. 93–7.

35. Socialist, 10 March 1916, p. 4. Esmonde later rejected New Age idealism and became an orthodox Marxist.

36.  Sparrow, Communism, pp. 37–9; Walker, p. 106.

37.  Walker, Dream and Disillusion, p. 112.

38. Socialist, 24 August 1917, p. 3; Foote, The Labour Party's Political Thought, p. 107.

39.  Verity Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism: The Industrial Workers of the World in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995, ch. 8; Sparrow and Sparrow, Radical Melbourne, p. 112.

40.  Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, pp. 217–18; Australian Labor Party, Victorian Branch, Central Executive Minutes, 1919, 1920.

41.  J.G. Corina, 'Introduction' to the 1972 edition of Cole's Self-government in Industry, Hutchinson Educational, London, p. xvi.

42.  Judith Smart, 'Cultivating class consciousness in a new generation: the Labour [sic] Guild of Youth in Melbourne, 1926–28', Labour History, no. 82, May 2002, p. 51.

43.  Cole, Self-government, pp. 7–9, 15–16, 18–19.

44.  C.R. Badger, The Reverend Charles Strong and the Australian Church, Abacada Press, Melbourne, 1971, p. 147. Only five other ministers of religion signed, an indication of the overall support of the Protestant churches for the war. It is worth too noting that a letter from Edward Carpenter in opposition to compulsory military service reprinted from the Daily News of 24 November 1915 had appeared in the Socialist, 4 February 1916. p. 1.

45. Socialist, 22 October 1915, p. 2

46.  It was a network that extended to a number of progressive thinkers outside the labour movement too. In addition to Frederick Eggleston, they included H.B. Higgins and, at the outer edges, the Brookes and the Deakins.

47.  Carolyn Rasmussen, 'Doris Blackburn', in Marilyn Lake and Farley Kelly (eds), Double Time: Women in Victoria, 150 Years, Penguin, Melbourne, 1985; see also guest lectures by Blackburn advertised periodically in the Woman Voter.

48.  This information has been compiled from comparing names and events across the various publications and minutes of these organisation. Note that the creation of the Women's Peace Army in July 1915 enabled Labor Party women to be part of this network once more after being forced to quit the Women's Political Association the previous year when it was proscribed by the party's central executive (Political Labor Council Central Executive Minutes, 27 November 1914).

49. Socialist, 24 March 1916. p. 3.

50. Socialist, 9 July 1915, p. 4.

51.  See account in the Socialist, 24 March, 1916, p. 1.

52. Socialist, 24 March, 1916, p. 1; Constance Lamour, Labour Judge: The Life and Times of Judge Alfred William Foster, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1985, pp. 30–1, 83–4.

53.  Badger, The Reverend Charles Strong, ch. 8. Like Jacob Goldstein's other such venture, these semi-utopian village settlements failed.

54.  Jill Roe, '"Testimonies from the field": the coming of Christian Science to Australia, c. 1890–1910', Journal of Religious History, vol. 22, no. 3, October 1998, pp. 307–8, 309, 312, 316.

55. Woman Voter, 8 November 1917, p. 2.

56. Woman Voter, 18 May 1916, p. 1.

57. Woman Voter, 9 March 1915, p. 1.

58.  Before the grant on 17 March, £212 had been raised (Woman Voter, 9 March 1915, p. 1). In contrast, Labor Party women led by Sarah Lewis requested the Trades Hall Council (THC) to set aside some of the unemployment funds for the relief of 'unemployed women and families in distress' and the THC agreed to allocate £40 per week specifically for workless women (Trades Hall Council Minutes, 4 March 1915; 1 July 1915). But labour men shared with conservatives and Liberals a profound ambivalence to women workers, who, they alleged, were taking men's jobs.

59. Woman Voter, 8 June 1916, p. 2.

60. Woman Voter, 8 June 1916, p. 3.

61. Socialist 14 July 1916, p. 3. In June 1915, the minister for public works, in response to a question from Maurice Blackburn, announced that he had told the central committee to discontinue financial assistance to the bureau because 'verbal reports' from officers of the treasury and the government's labour bureau had advised that 'the existing charitable agencies were sufficient'. Any necessary extra funds would be provided by the government. Victorian Parliamentary Debates, vol. 139, 8 June 1915, p. 672. Miss Cuthbertson intervened to have the grant restored and the bureau's relationship with the central committee formalised but the Argus and the MLBS continued to allege misuse of funds for political purposes. Woman Voter, 8 June 1916, p. 3. Miss Cuthbertson's view that the Women's Labour Bureau money was 'well and wisely spent' (p. 4) prevailed for the time being and, when the government did eventually withdraw its support in mid-1916, it promised to establish a state-run women's employment bureau to take over the remaining cases. It failed to do so and decided soon after to subsidise the Ladies' Benevolent Society. Woman Voter, 10 August 1916, pp. 1–2.

62. Woman Voter, 6 September 1917, p. 1.

63. Woman Voter, 11 October 1917, p. 2. See also 8 November, p. 2.

64. Socialist, 12 October 1917, p. 1.

65. Woman Voter, 1 November 1917, p. 3.

66. Labor Call, 24 June, 1915, p. 1.

67.  Brookes Papers, MS 1924/38/15–17, 18–19, 24, 25, 26, National Library of Australia; Housewives' Association of Victoria Ltd Minutes of Executive 1915–16, PA 92/7, Box 4, State Library of Victoria, LaTrobe Collection. The resignation of the WPA members may also have had something to do with the expulsion of their newly elected delegate, Adela Pankhurst, from the NCW in September that year on the grounds of her antiwar activities.

68.  Meredith Foley, 'From "thrift" to "scientific spending": the Sydney Housewives Association between the wars', Sydney Gazette: Organ of the Sydney History Group, no. 6, March 1984, p. 14.

69. Argus, 8 August 1917, p. 8. A leader in the paper refers to wharf labourers refusing to 'handle any portion of about 4,000 tons of good sold to Eastern markets'.

70. Argus, 30 July 1917, p. 6; 1 August 1917, p. 6

71. Argus, 8 August 1917, p. 8.

72.  Cited in Bollard, '"The active chorus": the Great Strike of 1917 in Victoria', p. 79 and note 17.

73. Labor Call, 2 August 1917, p. 7. See also resolution of support for the wharfies and for action to call a conference of all unions concerned to take steps to bring down the price of food, moved by Sarah Lewis at the Trades Hall Council meeting of 2 August. THC Minutes, 2 August 1917.

74. Argus, 14 August, 1917, p. 7.

75.  My emphasis here differs from that of Rob Bollard, who sees the wharfies' continuing strike action as mostly 'defensive' 'in solidarity with the men in Sydney'. Bollard, '"The active chorus": the Great Strike of 1917 in Victoria', p. 80.

76.  As Bollard has convincingly argued for Victoria, and Turner before him for New South Wales, this was a strike led by the rank and file, not by their leaders. Bollard, '"The active chorus": the Great Strike of 1917 in Victoria', pp. 79–81; Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, pp. 159–61. While Bollard argues that this should be celebrated, Turner takes a classic Leninist position that condemns the strikers as lacking in a 'realistic understanding' of the situation.

77. Age, 24 August – 7 September 1917.

78.  Judith Smart, 'Feminists, food and the fair price: the cost of living demonstrations in Melbourne, August-September, 1917', Labour History, no. 50, May, 1986, pp. 113–31.

79. Woman Voter, 23 August 1917, p. 2.

80. Woman Voter, 6 September 1917, p. 1.

81. Age, 6, 7, 11 September 1917. It was estimated that about 20,000 were affected, a half to a third on strike and the rest stood down or on short time. Earlier figures Argus, 28 August. p. 5, show the wharfies were about half of the strikers (not including those stood down). By October, 32,533 were out of work or on short time – 7,820 on strike, 7,456 involuntarily thrown out of work, and 17,257 on short time. Argus, 6 October 1917, p. 16.

82. Argus, 27 August 1917.

83. Woman Voter, 30 August 1917, p. 3.

84. Argus, 30 August 1917, p. 7.

85. Woman Voter, 8 November 1917, p. 3.

86. Argus, 30 August 1917, p. 7.

87. Woman Voter, 16 August 1917, p. 3.

88. Woman Voter, 8 November 1917, p. 3.

89. Socialist, 14 September 1917, p. 2.

90. Woman Voter, 30 August 1917, p. 1, and 6 September 1917, p. 2. Maloney had long been a friend of the women's movement, having moved suffrage bills in the Legislative Assembly when he was a member of the Victorian parliament.

91. Woman Voter, 6 September 1917, p. 1.

92. Woman Voter, 13 September 1917, p. 2. Letter was dated 8 September.

93. Woman Voter, 13 September 1917, p. 2.

94. Woman Voter, 20 September 1917, p. 2; 1 November 1917, p. 1.

95. Woman Voter, 4 October 1917, p. 1.

96.  See report of E.J. Bremner for the Women's Strike Committee, in Socialist, 7 September 1917, p. 1. Also see Labor Call, 20 September, 1917, p. 10, and 4 October, 1917, p. 3.

97. Labor Call, 20 September, 1917, pp. 3 and 10. In a section of Labour History, no. 81, November 2001 (edited by Melanie Oppenheimer) devoted to volunteer work in the labour movement, two articles are of special interest. Bobbie Oliver's 'In the thick of every battle for the cause of Labor': the voluntary work of the Labor women's organisations in Western Australia, 1900–71' notes the parallels between 'Lady Bountiful' charity workers and the palliative fund-raising work of labour movement women (pp. 105–6). However, Margot Beasley's study, 'Soldiers of the federation: the women's committees of the Waterside Workers' Federation of Australia' in the 1950s and 1960s adds an important observation. Motive, she argues, marked the palliative work of these women as different from the charity of their middle-class sisters because it 'occurs within one class, the working class, and ... was done largely from a political activist perspective because society itself was judged to be failing' (p. 117). Nevertheless, even four decades later, it did not take the next step away from the palliative charity model as did the WPA commune.

98. Woman Voter, 8 November 1917, p. 2.

99. Woman Voter, 13 September 1917, p. 1; 8 November 1917, p. 2.

100. Woman Voter, 25 October 1917, p. 1.

101. Woman Voter, 8 November 1917, p. 2.

102. Argus, 26 October 1917, p. 7; 5 November 1917, p. 6.

103. Woman Voter, 8 November 1917, p. 1.

104. Woman Voter, 8 November 1917, p. 1.

105. Woman Voter, 8 November 1917, p. 1.

106.  Winifred Mitchell, 'Wives of the radical labour movement', in Ann Curthoys, Susan Eade and Peter Spearritt (eds), Women at Work, Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Canberra, 1975, p. 7.

107. Woman Voter, 18 April 1917, p. 2; Bomford, That Dangerous and Persuasive Woman, p. 184.

108.  Sparrow and Sparrow, Radical Melbourne, p. 174; Bollard, '"The active chorus": the Great Strike of 1917 in Victoria', p. 89; Bomford, That Dangerous and Persuasive Woman, p. 170.

109. Woman Voter, 8 November 1917, p. 2.

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