Red Rag

I was up in the Battye Library during the week, doing some research on Joe Swebleses. I left that section out of my honours dissertation because it didn’t quite fit, but I’ve gone back to it for fun. Yeah, I know, I should get a life…

Anyway, while I was there I noticed the library is testing the Scanwrite software, which allows you to scan microfilm images and burn them to CD. So I decided to pop in again today and give it a burl. It’s very easy to use, and I was plugging along quite well until I hit a snag: the demonstration version’s license “will expire after being used for 100 scans”. I was lucky 100.

However, the library hadn’t set up the computer very securely, and thanks to Microsoft Imaging and the microfilm scanner’s TWAIN driver, I was able to continue my work. (If I download the demo software to my notebook, I’m pretty sure I could bypass the library’s computer altogether. Simply whack the USB scanner into my PC, and use my own software to run the thing. That would save the cost of the blank CDs.)

I decided to take a look at the WA Communist Party’s official newspapers — first the Red Star, later the Workers’ Star. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, you can find them here. If you’re not keen enough to sit in the library, I’ve uploaded some of the scanned images for your enjoyment.

Early days

The Red Star began very simply, as a Roneographed sheet. A Roneograph was a particular brand of mimeograph machine. It operates by a waxy stencil — where the wax has been stripped away, the ink can permeate the tissue paper underneath and produces an image. Australian MPs still use this technology, albeit in a modern form.

As this Green Left Weekly article describes, the Red Star was started when the Nationalist Government banned the Sydney-based Workers’ Weekly from being transported on the trains. The article is slightly inaccurate — it has it that the alternative Communist papers were started in 1933. Not so: the Red Star commenced in 1932. However, the reason is certainly correct. As the first editorial, of 8 April 1932, explains:

Our reason for existence is the absence of the “Workers Weekly” and the “Working Women” the official newspapers of the Central Committee.

These papers are not appearing in W.A. because of the Postal Ban imposed by the Lyon’s Government.

While it was intended eventually to publish our own paper here in W.A., events have hastened our decision.

This sort of repression was a feature of the Communist Party’s existence in Australia, and that’s one of the reasons I’m so fascinated by its press — they had to work bloody hard to publish their views.

That’s evident from the initial quality of the Red Star. Typewritten with a roughly sketched masthead, funds were too scarce for anything more elaborate. It’s interesting to see how the paper’s masthead changed in these early roneo days. The standard probably depended on who was editing it that week, and how much time they had to spare.

I like the way the elaborate design appears sporadically. It’s as if the editorial committee can’t decide what a Communist masthead was supposed to look like: should they adopt the gothic face that most newspapers used, or would that be a bourgeois indulgence that would betray their commitment to the common people?

Print at last

The very first issue explained that a printed newspaper was the Red Star’s goal:

Only our lack of funds is responsible for the fact that we are compelled to issue a roneoed sheet, instead of a printed one, but with the support of the workers we will soon realise that end.

Over a year later, they finally achieved their £50, and in September 1933 a handsome printed edition appeared. However, since the Communist press could hardly rely on advertising, and a penny a pop was not going to cover costs, the need to raise more money became a regular refrain — for both the Red Star and the Workers’ Weekly, which the Party hoped to publish on a daily basis.

As one such appeal put it:

The struggle to maintain publication of the “Workers’ Weekly” and “The Red Star” has been a tough one: successfully waged against tremendous odds. It is part of the great fight of the workers for their right to all the good things of life they are so basely deprived of: the grandest, most heroic fight a man or woman could take part in. A man ought to be proud to stand up to it; be ashamed to slink away from it.

We have won the first round. The second is beginning. Comrades, is your money with us, or against us? With every note, shilling or sixpence you answer this appeal for a stronger, more effective Workers’ Press, your champion wins. You win when he does.

Interestingly, from the first printed edition to this one, two years later, the Communist Party stamp on the front page has shrunk by half. I’m not sure why that would happen — the content of the paper certainly didn’t shrink from the Party’s Stalinist ideology. Strange.

At the 1934 elections, the Red Star included a Communist Party manifesto as a supplement.

Expansion — but more repression

The constant fundraising eventually paid off, and the Red Star was expanded and improved. The “magnificent support given by our members and sympathisers” made possible “another step forward on the road to a Soviet Australia.” The Workers’ Weekly didn’t quite make it to a daily, but became bi-weekly. The new Red Star masthead is quite spiffy — in fact, I’m thinking of copying it in my next blog redesign.

The leading article from that first larger edition gives some indication of the Communist Party’s performance in Western Australia at the time. While it was small, it had a steady following:

It is fitting that the occasion of tangible proof of the growth of the Party expressed by the publication of an enlarged “Red Star” should be the time to review our progress. Starting from the last District Conferences the period under review has been one of increased activity and a number of successes.

We have increased our membership considerably and given it a more stable character. A greater percentage of our membership is organised in units than before. Of course, the increase has proceeded unevenly.

[...]

The success of the Press Fund is a reflection, not only of the greater solidarity and strength of the Party, but of the consequent increased support from the workers. The new “Red Star” is something to be proud of, as it is the only Communist printed newspaper outside of Sydney and Melbourne. The new size will bring the West Australian organ within striking distance of the “Workers’ Voice,” which is issued by the more advanced and much stronger Party District in Victoria.

While the circulation of “The Red Star” is small and something that must be rectified, it has a widespread incidence and has created a host of contacts which has stood the Party in good stead in the Press Fund appeal.

It wasn’t long after this advance that the Communist Party suffered a major setback. The Friends of the Soviet Union (FOSU) organisation had sued the Government for banning the distribution of its publications through the post, and the Government responded by seeking a declaration from the High Court that FOSU was an illegal organisation. The move attracted widespread opposition from the labour movement. Previous attempts to make the Communist Party illegal had failed, and after two years in the courts, so would this one.

Broadening the readership

You might have noticed that in the two years that the case against FOSU spanned, the Red Star ceased and the Workers’ Star took its place.

This decision was made in order to broaden the paper’s appeal — the inward, party-centric approach was proving hard to flog to red-wary workers:

It is not merely a matter of changing the name of “The Red Star.” The time has come when a narrow official organ of the Communist Party is no longer necessary, and must give place to a broader workers’ paper having a much wider appeal than “The Red Star” could ever hope to have. This is what has influenced us in handing over the whole of our apparatus and assets to “The Workers’ Star”

Indeed, the tone of the paper shifted dramatically. For example, the regular references to the ALP as “social fascists” ceased, and there was an appeal for unity among the broad left. This almost certainly owed to the Communists’ constant battle for survival — they could not afford to piss off the reformist Left if they hoped to continue to exist.

The Workers’ Star continued until 1950, but here ends my journey through the WA Communist Party’s publications.