Battlers and Stirrers: Journal of Australian Studies 54/55, 1997
Edited by Richard Nile
Advisory editor Ross Fitzgerald
University of Queensland Press
Review by John Nebauer
Battlers and Stirrers is a collection of essays on "an alternative group of battlers who have been variously agitators, larrikins, workers and public intellectuals", in the words of editor Richard Nile.
This collection is rather like a bag of mixed sweets. Some things are to your taste; others you leave gingerly in the bag. Certainly the personalities covered are a mixed bag, including Katharine Susannah Prichard, Jean Devanny, Louisa Lawson, Fred Paterson, Manning Clark, Frank Hardy and Eddie Mabo. Phil Cleary is interviewed by John Harms.
However, the selection emphasises both aspects of the title, for it also includes such non-battlers as A.P. Elkin and Pauline Hanson. It also includes those such as Neville Bonner who, though they may have had to battle, ultimately took up the cudgels for the wrong side.
Carole Ferrier's "Jean Devanny: Romantic Revolutionary" is an excellent introduction to Devanny's work as a writer and Communist Party activist.
Political activism and writing could produce tensions. Ferrier quotes a letter Devanny wrote to Eleanor Dark in 1943: "I am frightfully conscious that I have never given time to a book to do myself justice ... simply rushed through it in a few months and put it out of my mind, in order to get back to my real work, politics."
Yet the two could synthesise wonderfully. In the mid-1930s, a series of major strikes erupted in north Queensland, and Devanny was deeply involved in strike support work. Her other contribution was the novelisation of those strikes Sugar Heaven, published in 1936.
Sugar Heaven, a classic of political literature, also took up sexism and racism. Many migrants, particularly Italians, worked in the cane fields. Racism wasn't unknown even within the Communist Party; one party member told Devanny that the novel's depiction of an affair between an Italian and an Anglo woman was unrealistic because "No Australian woman would have an affair with an Italian". Devanny recalled later, "I could have told him that the prototype of the woman ... was his own wife!".
Ferrier's essay also brings out some of the problems faced by Devanny because of her feminism, which was sometimes at odds with the Communist Party leadership, burdened as it was with the ideological baggage of Stalinism. Devanny's political heritage deserves to be absorbed by the new generation of revolutionaries. This introduction alone make this issue of the journal worthwhile.
Katharine Susannah Prichard, like Devanny, was both a writer and a member of the Communist Party. Her writing also led to some tension with the leadership of the Communist Party.
One interesting aspect of Prichard's writing which Cath Ellis takes up is the vexed question of socialist realism. Admittedly, there were socialist realist writers who produced trash. Prichard was not one of these. Ellis notes that Prichard was an enthusiastic proponent of socialist realism, and concludes, "It was, for some, an exciting and stimulating new development in literary theory".
Ross Fitzgerald's essay on Fred Paterson is a good synopsis of his full-scale biography The People's Champion (a must for every activist's library). This serves as a useful introduction to Australia's (so far) only communist MP.
Similarly, Noel Loos' piece on Eddie Mabo traces his fight to gain recognition of native title for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. Born on Murray Island, Mabo was forced into exile to the mainland because he had consumed alcohol and made love with a young islander woman. The colonialist Queensland Department of Native Affairs regarded these actions as crimes.
Parts of Loos' biography Edward Koiki Mabo, which included taped interviews with Mabo, as well as access to his personal papers, were used in this piece.
Other interesting and worthwhile reads are Rosa Corrigan on Frank Hardy, John Harms' interview with Phil Cleary and Carl Bridge's essay on a maverick Manning Clark (in which Bridge demolishes the "Order of Lenin" nonsense that appeared in the Brisbane Courier-Mail) are all worth dipping into.
Other essays will infuriate. Glen Ross' piece on A.P. Elkin is not sympathetic. This is good, because Elkin was an anthropologist/sociologist who in the 1930s and '40s was a proponent of Aboriginal assimilation. His was a Freudian view of the "primitive" as a threat to "civilisation", which therefore demanded the strengthening of white Australian culture.
Others are curiosities. Sharyn Pearce looks briefly at the career of Louisa Lawson, mother of the famous Henry. She derives most of her fame from her single-handed editing of Dawn magazine from 1888 to 1905. It was to be an alternative magazine, and although it contained household hints, it shied away from the "agony aunt" type of column.
Lawson's editorials were, "blunt, spirited, evangelising and often abrasive". In particular, she was a crusader for women's suffrage. It feels a bit incongruous reading about a feminist who, for reasons of pragmatism, laced her magazine with recipes, household hints and advice on teaching daughters home care. But it's an interesting glimpse at the first wave of feminism.
Sports fans are catered for with a celebration of Phar Lap by Jill Barnard and Elizabeth Wills (they also point out that his New Zealand origins are usually forgotten). Essays on communism, security and the Wold War, reactions in Australia to the 1916 Easter rising in Dublin and the politics behind the formation of tariff policy in the early part of the century (basically a means of ensuring profitability for the Australian ruling class) round out the issue.