|
||
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
||
|
|
Issue No. 139 | 07 June 2002 |
|
||
|
||
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
With Prejudice
Interview: Class Action Safety: A Mother's Tale Unions: The Hottest Seat in Town International: Defensive Enterprise Economics: A Super Deal? History: A Radical Life Media: Cross Purposes Review: When the Force Is Unconscious Poetry: Wouldn't It Be Loverly
The Soapbox The Locker Room Bosswatch Week in Review
 Romeo and Juliet?Robbo's RaveLatham Ad NauseumOur Home Is Girt By WireHands Off Hooligans!
|
|
|
History A Radical Life
*************** For half a century Don Cameron, a migratory socialist, was a leading, almost totemic, figure in the Australian Labor Party (ALP). He was hard to ignore. In 1917, for example, he was seen as the obvious substitute when personal problems forced John Curtin, Labor's future inspirational leader, to move from his native Victoria to Perth. In documenting Cameron's contribution to Australian history a valuable resource is available in the form of his political papers, held in the National Library of Australia's Manuscript Collection. These allow us to delve into a fascinating Australian career. Born in North Melbourne in 1878, Cameron migrated to Western Australia in the 1890s and worked as a compositor for the Coolgardie Miner. In 1901 he volunteered for the Boer War. From newspaper reports kept in his papers it seems that he embraced left-wing notions largely as a result of witnessing violence and brutality in war-torn South Africa. Back in Perth after the Boer War Cameron worked as a plumber before taking over as secretary of the local plumbers' union. Soon he was a figure of political consequence. He attended national Labor Party conferences during World War I and participated in the two referendum campaigns which thwarted the Federal Government's attempts to introduce military conscription. He was a fearless speaker at public rallies. His papers contain an anti-conscription how to vote card that conveys Labor's basic message which was 'keep Australia white'. Australian men, if conscripted, would be replaced, it was feared, by coloured labour. In the course of his activism Cameron befriended R.S. (Bob) Ross of Melbourne, a fellow socialist. His papers contain wartime Christmas and New Year's greetings from Ross and his wife Ethel. John Curtin's move to Perth was arranged when Cameron and Ross helped to secure his appointment as editor of the Westralian Worker. Ross then looked to Cameron to fill the gap left by Curtin. Cameron, in response to an offer from Ross, agreed to become organiser of the Victorian Socialist Party (VSP). His brief was to make the VSP an energising force within the larger and more pragmatic ALP. The VSP petered out during the Great Depression of the early 1930s. Cameron's radicalism was undimmed though. He was regarded as a tireless exponent of socialism. A letter in his papers indicates that in 1931, when he attended an Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) congress in Sydney, he was invited to 'chip into' a public discussion on 'the economic crisis and its causes'. Cameron, along with Arthur Calwell, dominated the Victorian branch of the ALP in the 1930s. Sensing the power of myth and tradition, he invoked the imagery of the Eureka Stockade as he sought to rekindle anti-conscriptionist �lan. He needed to do this to head off a new breed of activists associated with the Communist Party who, rejecting xenophobia, advocated an internationalist agenda focused on promoting solidarity with nations (Abyssinia, Spain, China) menaced by anti-Soviet dictators. Cameron was keen to hit back. He contended that a policy of collective security, which the Communist Party advocated, was bound to lead to war and, equally inevitably in his opinion, a second attempt to impose military conscription. Conflict between the two camps surfaced in 1935 at a Melbourne ACTU congress where militant delegates were outvoted when they advocated support for sanctions against Italy after Mussolini invaded Abyssinia. The challenge to his hegemony infuriated Cameron. In a letter in the E.J. Brady Papers in the Manuscript Collection he singled out the left-wing New South Wales railways union leader Dr Lloyd Ross, the son of his former VSP mentor, for particular criticism, claiming that it would not take much to make Ross 'wildly hysterical and stupidly fanatical'. Ross's having a doctorate in Australian labour history did not impress the self-educated Cameron who felt that 'book knowledge' always needed to be 'fortified by the lessons of practical experience'. In 1935 Cameron also stood as the ALP candidate in a Federal by-election. He was defeated by the future Liberal Party leader Harold Holt but picked up unexpected newspaper support in the form of unstinting coverage of his campaign in the Melbourne Herald. His papers contain revealing correspondence with the Herald's owner, Keith Murdoch (Rupert's father), in which Murdoch expressed the wish that Cameron would make it into parliament one day. There was, Murdoch considered, 'a lot of work to be done in the future by a Left Wing Party'. Carried away by the magnate's words, Cameron briefly harboured the unrealistic hope that the journalist Edgar Ross, Bob Ross's younger son and a closet Communist, might be given a plum job in the Murdoch newspaper empire. Cameron finally got to Canberra when he became a Victorian Senator in 1938. He was appointed as Minister for Aircraft Production when John Curtin became Prime Minister in 1941 and was made Postmaster-General in 1945. In this latter capacity he stirred up a furore when he banned the popular radio personalities Jack Davey and Ada and Elsie from the airwaves because they indulged in ribald humour. This act of prudishness reflected Cameron's belief in the need to raise 'the general cultured level of the masses'. At all times Cameron was keen for Labor not to forget its ennobling objectives. His papers show that during World War II he pushed for the implementation of socialist policies. Labor's success in 1943 in winning majorities in both Houses of Federal Parliament emboldened him to approach Curtin's Treasurer, Ben Chifley, to suggest that the Government should rely more on taxing company profits and less on bank credit. Correspondence on this matter concluded abruptly with Chifley spurning Cameron's suggestion. Cameron went into opposition when Labor lost the 1949 election. The 1950s were a bleak time for the Federal party with the electorate enjoying unprecedented prosperity and contentment. Nonetheless Cameron clung to his political faith. Now sporting silver hair, a pinkish complexion and steel rimmed spectacles, he increasingly came across as 'the Sage of the Senate' but his zeal had not departed with his youth. It is clear from Cameron's papers that he did not regard the traumatic Labor split of the mid-1950s as a major setback. Instead he dismissed the breakaway Democratic Labor Party as a bunch of 'deviationists' and felt that their absence would allow the ALP to be more forthcoming in promoting progressive policies. His friends saw him as the only senior Labor politician who was not prepared to dilute core party values and views. Principal among these was opposition to conscription, a position forsaken by Labor governments in the 1940s despite forceful criticism from Cameron. Prolonged years in opposition did not sap Cameron's work ethic. He regularly rose at five o'clock in the morning to spend time on formulating ways to advance Labor's cause. He was keen, he told a reporter, to avoid the 'mental stagnation' that seemed to afflict so many of the Federal politicians who wended their way to and from Canberra. Cameron's papers contain a list of suggestions drawn up in 1957 in which he summarised his commitment to bold immediate domestic measures including greater press control and censorship to prevent newspaper proprietors creating 'false fears and panics', tighter regulation of the financial sector, increased pensions and a levy on capital gains. Unfortunately Cameron's democratic socialist program presupposed a Labor majority in both Houses of Federal Parliament, a situation made virtually impossible by the 1949 ALP decision, masterminded by Arthur Calwell, to base the Senate election process on a form of proportional representation. Australia's road to socialism was stymied but Cameron, even when he became an octogenarian, was still able to enrich his party's sustaining sense of historical destiny. He donned the mantle of a seer. His papers indicate that in the course of a Collins Street lunch in 1960 he told a friend that by the end of the decade his much younger parliamentary colleague Gough Whitlam was certain to be Australia's next Labor prime minister. Cameron praised Whitlam's aptitude for hard work and frank speaking.On being told of this conversation after he became party leader in 1967 Whitlam sent a note to Cameron's family in which he said that the comments provided 'great encouragement'. Cameron never witnessed Whitlam's accession to power. Beset by deafness, he retired from the Senate in 1962. Within less than two months he was dead. His estate included a collection of some 764 pamphlets on a range of topics including religion (he was a freethinker), finance, economics, war, international relations and the rival brands of socialism. In 1963 the National Library acquired this collection. Don Cameron's studiousness reflected his status as one of federal Labor's ultimate true believers. He personified its ethos from its infancy at the start of the twentieth century when it was saturated with racism through to the first stirrings of its transformation under Gough Whitlam. His personal papers in the National Library provide a series of lively and unique insights into a rock-like, and sometimes ruggedly expressed, Australian credo. STEPHEN HOLT is a Canberra author
|
| Search All Issues | Latest Issue | Previous Issues | Print Latest Issue |
|
© 1999-2002 Workers Online 
|
|
