The Communist Manifesto in Australia

by Audrey Johnson

The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels 
for the Communist League, was published in 1848. This year will mark the 
150th anniversary of one of the most enduring documents of communism. The 
Manifesto has its own oral history in Australia.

When Edgar Ross went to Broken Hill to work on the Barrier Daily 
Truth in 1925, he stayed in a boarding house which had portraits of 
Marx and Engels on the wall and had, as a fellow boarder, Marxist Paddy 
Lamb.

Lamb, a miner who had been a member of the first Australian delegation to 
Moscow in 1921, became Edgar's tutor in Marxism, and he still remembers how 
impressed he was with the simplicity of the Manifesto's language and 
the clarity of its politics.

Another who was strongly impressed by his first reading of the 
Manifesto was Irish Canadian Jack Kavanagh who became president of 
the small Communist Party (1926-29).

Edna Ryan, who managed the Party office in Communist Hall, Sussex Street, 
could recall that Kavanagh knew the Manifesto by heart; he had 
learnt it one hard Canadian winter while living in a snowed-in logging 
camp. Kavanagh began the classes in Marxism which were a feature of the CP 
in the 1930s and 1940s.

Those classes were important to Della Nicholas — she is Della Elliott now 
— when she joined the Young Communist League in 1932, when she was 15. She 
was introduced to the Communist Manifesto by way of those classes 
and to a new way of looking at the world — "the history of all hitherto 
existing society is the history of class struggles". Della's father, mother 
and sister were all to become Party members.

Sometimes the familiar language of the Manifesto gave people 
confidence.

When Phyllis Johnson was organising street meetings in East Sydney during 
the Depression, she asked George Gowland to speak, but he demurred, thought 
he lacked the necessary ability. However, he was persuaded to act as 
chairman. He opened the meting with his own paraphrase of the Communist 
Manifesto's opening sentence — "A spectre is haunting Australia," he 
said, "the spectre of communism." Then he introduced Phyllis. George 
Gowland was later a member of the Party's State Committee.

During the Party's illegal period (1941-1943), a leaflet boldly titled the 
Communist Manifesto used the power of that title to draw attention 
to the real matter of the leaflet: the Party's tough and long-standing 
struggle against fascism.

The first centenary of the Communist Manifesto occurred in 1948 and 
it was marked in various ways in Australia. Several Sydney branches 
commemorated the event with cottage lectures, and one with a musicale; the 
Communist Review carried an article by Vin Bourke on the origins and 
history of the Marxist revolutionary movement.

In Melbourne a group of communists put on a locally written show in a 
"living newspaper" format in which sentences from the Manifesto, 
spoken by various actors, punctuated the action. Mona Brand, who was 
present, used the same format for her acclaimed On Stage Vietnam at 
the New Theatre some years later.

Edgar Ross shall have the last say on the power of the word — or rather, 
belief in the power of the word. Paddy Lamb, referred to previously, was an 
old friend of Edgar's father, Bob Ross, a highly respected Victorian 
socialist, but one who had resisted all Lamb's attempts to convert him to 
Marxism. Paddy could not understand such stubbornness, especially since "he 
has read the Communist Manifesto a dozen times"!

And we still read the Communist Manifesto.