75th Anniversary of the Foundation of the Communist Party of Australia, 1995

Abstract

Saturday, 30 October 1920; a sunny spring day in Sydney; and in a hall in Liverpool Street, 26 men and women met to help create the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). Seventy five years later, almost to the day, but this time on a hail and rain swept Sydney evening, 520 people gathered in a Marrickville reception room to commemorate that event and the movement it helped create. The CPA however was no more, having officially wound up in 1991, its considerable assets held in trust by the Search Foundation to help finance a variety of humanist, left and progressive projects. Communism had declined internationally too, though not completely gone from the political map, and left behind a grab bag of positive achievements and a dreadful catalogue of negatives, steadily unfolding with the legitimisation of dissent and as archives open. So what was there to celebrate? The answer was 'the Australian experience'. It was a strange occasion in some ways. We gathered to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the founding of a political party that no longer existed, and the contribution of that party to Australian history, society and culture a contribution yet to be analysed in the fullest sense, though it exists in many bits and pieces (theses, books, journal articles, oral history recordings, memoirs etc) magnificently garnered in the resource bibliography Communism in Australia compiled by Beverley Symons, Andrew Wells and Stuart Macintyre (National Library of Australia, 1994). It is a contribution, too, as yet unrecognised by mainstream Australian history, apart from the Party's reputation as a political nuisance and a focus for the Red Scare politics that were a feature of Australian political life for some fifty years. Who were the 520 people? A vast cross section of what legendary left journalist Rupert Lockwood once called the largest political party in Australia, that is, former members of the CPA, and those like me whose lives had at one stage or another been significantly touched by the Party. There were people from all walks of life and of all ages, the oldest in their nineties. As one speaker remarked, looking around at the gathering, 'it seems that association with the party has been a recipe for longevity'. Taken out of context, however, that was not so; the death of journalist, activist, author Denis Freney, aged 58, earlier in the year, cast a pall over many, as did apologies from ill and nursing home domiciled comrades around the nation. It was a night of speeches (by Laurie Aarons, Pat Elphinston, Judy Gillett, Stuart Macintyre, Tom McDonald, Pat Ranald, Don Syme, Beverley Symons),