Red Rag

You know what’s not fantastic? Having a deadline tomorrow and a hard disk that decides to pack it in today. Yay.

On the plus side, the replacement version I’ve just come up with is way better. At least, the first 1200 words or so is. The remaining 3000-4000 may descend into the depths of utter shit as the night wears on. For some reason, though, I seem to write better with a pen and paper than when I type.

Here’s what I’ve got so far, if you’re interested.

To the workers of Western Australia, greeting. We have arrived.

It was with this enthusiastic confidence that the Westralian Worker announced itself to the world on 7 September 1900. And why not? The formation of Labor parties around Australia offered tremendous hope to the labour movement, and the labour press saw itself as an essential new feature of the changing political landscape. It was the “why and the wherefore of our existence”, explained that first editorial, “to so mould public opinion that the irresistible impulse will be to sweep away all obstacles to proved and desirable reforms.” The Worker saw itself as the voice of the working Westralian, challenging the “gigantic and flourishing commercial concerns” that inevitably used their power and influence to oppose the efforts of the labour movement. This new paper was different: “we would say that this paper belongs to the workers, is run in their interests, [and] is dependent on their support”.

Its clear links to organised labour have given the Westralian Worker a privileged position in regard to the attention of labour historians. Andrew Gill noted its paradoxical existence as both a familiar and altogether unknown institution. “In research on the early labour movement in Western Australia,” he wrote, “few sources have been so frequently cited as the Westralian Worker“; yet there exist only “brief skeletal references to its organisation and its editors, most of which come from the pen of the late Jim Gibbney.” While Gill’s article significantly fleshes out the paper’s early years in Kalgoorlie (1900-1912), little else has been written about its vital role in the WA labour movement.

A notable exception to this silence is the period of John Curtin’s editorship from early 1917 to 1928. Natural biographical interest in a prime minister has meant various snippets about the Westralian Worker have been published; however their focus has been on the man and not the paper. The countless editorials written by Curtin during that period have provided abundant material for analysis of Curtin’s ideological drift from idealistic anti-war revolutionary to pragmatic wartime prime minister. David Black’s In His Own Words and Dianne Sholl’s thesis, “John Curtin at the Westralian Worker: 1917-1924″, fall into this category. David Day’s recent biography, John Curtin: A Life, is far more useful. Its exposition of the forces at play behind Curtin’s appointment as editor, for example, illuminates somewhat the newspaper’s links to the labour movement. Likewise, Day’s account of a dispute between Curtin and Tom Walsh of the Seaman’s Union, in which Curtin refused to publish an article critical of the Labor government, reveals that while the labour press claims to be the voice of the workingman, it does not merely reflect the views of the labour movement. In seeking to shape public opinion, the Westralian Worker, like its capitalistic counterparts, needed to silence certain dissenting elements.

In calling for further research on the labour press, H.J. Gibbney warned about this phenomenon. “Historians are prone to generalise about the state of public opinion from material published in newspapers”, he observed; however, “few historians know anything of the people who composed this material, a fact that sometimes throws doubt on the generalisations.” Given that the pages of the Westralian Worker are so widely regarded as an accurate barometer of labour movement opinion, incidents such as that described by Day are causes for concern. To what extent did the Worker push the ideological barrow of one labour faction to the detriment — including, perhaps, outright censorship — of others? Jon Bekken showed that the Chicago labour press was openly factional, with the progressive Chicago Labor Federation and its newspaper, The New Majority, coming “under increasingly vitriolic attack from the conservatives and their organ, the independent, employer-supported ‘labor’ paper The Unionist.”

Australia was no different, Terry Irving argues, and “Every political tendency in the movement felt that it could not exist without a periodical; indeed, producing and selling the paper was for some socialist groups their only sign of life”. Such publications are hardly problematic: they are so clearly sectional that they are unlikely to form the basis for any movement-wide generalisation. But the Westralian Worker was different. It was one of those newspapers Irving regards as “Most ambitious of all”: it “sought to speak for the whole labor movement.” What’s more, notwithstanding the failed efforts of a few short-lived publications, the Worker could claim to be the only labour paper in the western third.

The need for further investigation of the Westralian Worker’s operation is therefore clear. This dissertation seeks to begin that process. I propose to go beyond Gibbney and Gill’s illumination of the characters involved in “running the rag”; instead, I will investigate the interface between the Worker’s contradictory roles as both the voice and the mould of the labour movement’s opinions by considering the role it played during the tumult of the First World War (1914-1918). This was a period during which tensions in the labour movement were brought to a head, after slowly building up over such issues as Australia’s involvement in an imperial war, the discriminatory and often violent treatment of “enemy aliens”, and the suppression of the Industrial Workers of the World. The movement experienced tremendous upheaval on the issue of conscription for overseas military service, culminating in the expulsion of pro-conscription members of parliament from the Labor party. The dynamics of the labour movement were significantly altered by this development, with the majority uniting against the “rat”, W.M. Hughes, and his Nationalist government. However, differences remained during the second conscription plebiscite, as well as over the formulation of peace terms. Following a brief discussion of the literature, this paper will examine the Westralian Worker’s response to these debates and attempt to explain its permissive or repressive editorial policies in relation to each.

The most comprehensive study of the Western Australian home front during World War I is presented by Bobbie Oliver in her War and Peace in Western Australia: The Social and Political Impact of the Great War 1914-1926. It rejects the notion of “a peculiarly Western Australian consensus” and charges that, “by their uncritical acceptance of consensus as the dominant social and political characteristic, some historians have misinterpreted major events in Western Australian history.” To Oliver, wartime society was divided by ideology, gender, race, nationality and, most bitterly of all, class. Her story is compelling, and a vivid picture of the entrenched class structure is painted by, for example, her juxtaposition of Neil McNeil’s “grand home” — it “overlooked a fine sweep of lawn and some of Perth’s most beautiful river views at Peppermint Grove” — with the “fetid dens” that the workers of Fremantle called home, such as Mouat Street’s “‘cow yard, where six houses were served by only one tap and one sanitary convenience.” This was a society in which the labour movement, with its calls for higher wages and improved living conditions, offered some obvious attractions.