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AUSTRALIAN HISTORY - Forword to "The Bracegirdle Incident" |
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Foreword to "The Bracegirdle Incident: How an Australian Communist ignited Celon's independence struggle" Bracegirdle’s deportation was one
incident in a world-wide pattern of expelling subversives. Lenin sent a
boatload of reactionary intellectuals into exile in 1919 while U.S.
Attorney-General Palmer was dumping hundreds of anarchists, notably Emma
Goldman, back into Eastern Europe. From 1939, Australian-born leader of the West Coast Longshoremen, Harry
Bridges, defied deportation from the United States. The Australian High Court
had prevented the expulsion of the foreign-born leaders of the Seamen’s Union,
Tom Walsh and Jacob Johnson (Johnansen) in 1925; ten years later the Court
saved the Hungarian Communist journalist Egon Kisch from deportation on a
Nazi-flagged ship. Authorities everywhere promoted the
notion that workers and peasants were content unless stirred up by agitators,
frequently foreigners. Propagandists drew parallels with pandemics and plagues,
insisting on a quarantine culture against the Bolshevik bacillus. They alleged
that the infection came from inferior races, frequently Jews. Bracegirdle rang
a change on this stereotype. Not only was he a white man but came from a
respectable English family with connections to high culture. As Alan Fewster
observes, his gravest offence was not being a Red but going Native after losing
his position as an apprentice planter for fraternising with the pickers. In Australia, the 1917 Bolshevik
Revolution panicked the propertied classes but also split the labour movement.
By 1927, one group of unions had set up a Pan-Pacific Trade Union Congress
which committed them to oppose White Australia as inimical to proletarian
internationalism. Also on that principle, the far Left favoured independence
struggles throughout the British Empire. Australian Communists carried
instructions and funds to the barely
legal and miniscule Party in Japan. The Australian Party took up the cause of
China after the renewal of Japanese incursions in 1931.These engagements with
Asia were one of the contexts from which Mark Bracegirdle was thrust onto a
political stage far larger than the speakers’ platform at Nawalapitiya in April
1937 from which he urged the exploited to resist the whip of their employers
and the yoke of Empire. Since historians are engaged with the
risky business of predicting the past, we face the danger of reading causation
backwards. The repercussions from Bracegirdle’s arrival were so wide that it is
tempting to suppose that someone must have planned for this single spark to
start a prairie fire. Alan’s meticulous tracking of the case establishes that
Bracegirdle’s impact bounded far beyond what anyone could have imagined when
the twenty-four year old set sail from Australia. Was Bracegirdle a pawn, and,
if so, whose? Local Trotskyites came to believe that he had been a Stalinist
plant. The Comintern did send agents to straighten out local Communist Parties,
for example, the U.S. American H.W. Wicks arrived in Sydney in 1930 to
proletarianise and Bolshevise the Australian Party which Mark had recently
joined. During the Spanish Civil War, its leaders were reluctant to let too
many militants volunteer so it is doubtful that they would have encouraged
Bracegirdle to quit the struggle here; moreover, Moscow would have looked for a
more mature agent, one who had been schooled in the Soviet Union. Lenin’s 1916 pamphlet Imperialism, the latest stage of capitalism, a popular outline had a half-life far
greater than its author could have imagined as he grappled to understand why
the German Social Democrats were supporting the Great War. Although the short
title, Imperialism, is regularly
confused with colonialism, the late nineteenth-century grab for more colonies
is but an appendage to Lenin’s investigation of monopolising inside the
metropolitan powers. Hence, Ceylon fits into his analysis because of the cartel
that global tea producers set up in 1933 more than because of the island’s
several hundred years of European domination by the Portuguese, Dutch and
English. Lenin’s analysis appealed far beyond
the revolutionary Left, its conclusions confirming Japan’s leaders in their
view that, in order to avoid foreign domination, they must imitate the European
powers by centralising their domestic economy and acquiring possessions abroad.
After 1941, other Asians, including Ceylonese, allied themselves with the
Imperial Japanese Army as the shortest escape route from their European
overlords. To carry through the call for ‘Workers
of the World to Unite’, the Bolsheviks established three organisations: the
Comintern for political parties, the Profintern as the Red International of
Labour Unions, and a Krestintern for peasant parties. Lenin’s political economy
posed dilemmas for his comrades. The Comintern did not put the interests of
revolutionaries in the colonies above those of the ‘bourgeois–democratic’
movements for independence until the Indian delegate M.N. Roy effected a policy
switch in 1920. This line gained significance in Ceylon after the granting of
universal suffrage in 1931 for a State Council with considerable influence over
domestic politics, added to an independent judiciary. The question facing the
island’s Communists became one of how to match this constitutional liberality
with the impoverishment of the tea-pickets, many of whom were recently arrived
Tamils. A Director of the East India Company
in 1796 had called for an end to compulsory labour, ‘for slaves cannot work so
cheap as free men, and we ought to give all our subjects liberty.’ From 1827,
Indian Tamils were brought to establish plantations, foreshadowing the bonded
labour that replaced chattel-slavery
across the British Empire after 1833,
what scholars identify as ‘a new system of slavery’ through contracts and
indenture. Indians also went to Fiji for the sugar as did Pacific Islanders to
Queensland. The woes of Indians in South Africa gave Gandhi his training as a
campaigner for labour rights. The Tamils were not peasants like
those whom Mao Zedong investigated in Hunan in 1927, though they were landless.
The conditions under which they worked were as disciplined as those on one of
Henry Ford’s production lines yet plantation workers were not exactly factory
proletarians. Ceylon’s Reds had little success at juggling class, ethnicity and
religion. Lenin had come to power with the
demand for ‘Peace, Land and Bread’. By the 1930s, the latter pair had most
relevance for Ceylon. Some adjustment to incomes would ameliorate the demand
for bread without driving the wealthier supporters of independence into the
arms of Whitehall. The struggle for land could not be so easily compromised.
Imported labourers raised the question one of whether nationalised plantations
should be transferred to Singhalese or to Tamils? It was easy enough for
Bracegirdle and his backers to stir up demands for higher wages and improved living
conditions. It was quite a different matter to resolve land ownership and
political power. In yet another of the tangles that
this story picks up, Australia’s Attorney-General throughout the Bracegirdle
case was Robert Gordon Menzies who, from 1936, strove for a Royal Australian
Academy of Art to ’set certain standards of art’ and to direct ‘attention to
good work.’ As a trained artist, Bracegirdle’s mother introduced him to bohemia
in Australia, notably the Left-leaning Sunday Reed who, with her wealthy
husband John, sponsored Modernism here for several decades. Traditionalists
like Menzies loathed that subversive style, seeing it as Bolshevism, even when
touched by the Theosophy that Annie Besant had picked up in India, along with
her support for its independence. Menzies resisted independence for the
sub-continent but was consoled that Ceylon did not follow India by becoming a
Republic (until 1972). Two actors in the Bracegirdle affair courted his
good-will in the councils of the new Empire-Commonwealth. Ceylon’s first prime
minister, Don Stewart Senanayake, sent him mangoes in July 1950, while during
the Coronation in 1953, his son and successor, Sir Dudley, dispatched tea from
the Dorchester to his Australian counterpart at the Savoy. Seventy-five years after the
Bracegirdle case reached the Privy Council in London, ASIO was before the High
Court in Canberra about Tamils with refugee status being kept in indefinite
detention as threats to our security. To where will this wheel of misfortune
have turned in a further seventy-five years? Before then, let’s trust that the
Bracegirdle story reaches the widest possible audience with a television
program jointly from Australian, British and Sri Lankan production houses. Alan
Fewster provides all the materials needed for script development. Meanwhile, we
have the chance to glean insights from this ripping yarn into the clashes that
continue to shape our lives through what Thomas Mann in 1940 called a ‘world
civil war in which everyone must choose sides.’ Canberra |