Brian Fitzpatrick, Maurice Blackburn and the Quest for the ‘Honest Man’ in Politics

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Brian Fitzpatrick, Maurice Blackburn and the Quest for the ‘Honest Man’ in Politics

Carolyn Rasmussen

Brian Fitzpatrick dedicated the second, enlarged edition of his Short History of the Labor Movement, published in April 1944, to Maurice Blackburn, with the epigraph:

One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward, Never doubted clouds would break,Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,Held we fall to rise, are baffl ed to fi ght better,Sleep to wake.

These lines from Robert Browning’s Epilogue to Asolando were stock-in-trade for eulogies, and their use says more about Fitzpatrick than Blackburn, who had long since ‘fallen out of love with Browning’.1 Their poignancy, in this case, lies in the possibility that while he ‘never turned his back’, towards the very end of his life ‘doubt’ had indeed darkened Blackburn’s heart and mind. His death at the age of sixty-three on 31 March 1944 had not only taken a champion of the labour movement, it deprived Fitzpatrick of the warm, stabilising influence of a man who by word and deed had tempered the younger man’s pessimistic disposition. With the benefit of hindsight, both the

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act of dedication and the words chosen encapsulate a critical element in the relationship between the two men.

References to Maurice Blackburn in subsequent histories tell very little about the man. This absence stands in stark contradiction to Fitzpatrick’s prophesy in Smith’s Weekly of 15 April 1944, when he declared bitterly: ‘The cautious little self-seekers struggle on for their advantage, pausing, some of them, to make a post-mortem tribute to this man of constancy and courage. We shall leave them out of the history books. But Blackburn’s name shall be there’. It also stands in contrast to the estimation of a good many of Blackburn’s contempo-raries for whom he had assumed something approaching heroic stature. For nine years after his death a memorial ceremony was held at his graveside addressed by a cavalcade of notable and various public figures.2 Others were moved to write long articles, or even poems. Two wrote books.3 Bob Brodney, a long-time associate in Blackburn’s law firm, struggled for most of his long retirement to write a full-length tribute.4 Blackburn had, as John Curtin declared, despite the coolness between them, ‘set a standard; and all of us were the better for endeavouring to live up to it’.5 Such a mismatch in esti-mation, together with Fitzpatrick’s determination to cast Blackburn as that rarest of creatures, the ‘honest’ politician who remains true to his principles, invites exploration. A consideration of the relationship between the two men may add something, not only to an under-standing of each of them, but also of the difficult terrain traversed by those who were not of the ‘working class’, but who were deeply com-mitted to the advancement of that class.

Fitzpatrick’s Short History of the Australian Labor Movement is a tale told in heroic mode. It relates an epic struggle in which ‘the organised rich and the organised poor’ have sought ‘to keep or win political and economic power in order to use it in what they have considered to be their own interests’.6 In chronicling this struggle, Fitzpatrick is an unashamed partisan:

I take the view that the effort of the organised working class has been—or perhaps could not but have been—beyond its class ends an effort to achieve social justice, whereas the possessing classes that have opposed Labor have not, according to my reading, attempted to reform society, or to redistribute wealth in the interest of social justice.7


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Most instructively, Fitzpatrick does not ‘blame’ the ‘possessing classes’ for this situation; despite his suggestion that larger imper-sonal social forces are tending in this redistributive direction, he effectively ascribes a higher moral value to the efforts of ‘the organ-ised poor’—and to their leaders. It is within this moral framework that Fitzpatrick’s relationship with Maurice Blackburn must be viewed.8

Twenty-five years older than Fitzpatrick, Maurice McCrae Blackburn was born in 1880 into the possessing class—heir to a rich Victorian colonial inheritance ranging across agricultural, naval/military, engi-neering, commercial, professional and cultural pursuits. His parents’ personal financial resources nevertheless were meagre. Both were late children in very large families, though his father’s position as an up-and-coming rural bank manager promised security. All that changed in 1887 when typhoid left his mother a widow with four chil-dren under six. The precarious circumstances of life thereafter became for Blackburn a defining, even liberating experience, in which he could rejoice with his future wife ‘that we have both known poverty and hardship. We have learned to demand but little of the world and of people around us; and it is only thus that we can be free, independent and happy.’9 It was also an experience that gave his mother an unusual opportunity to project onto her oldest son her own hopes and dreams—and especially her unwavering conviction that he was exceptional. She kept him away from school till he was eleven—but after that he was enrolled at Melbourne Grammar School where scholarships and prizes assured his continued study.

Blackburn was barely sixteen when he matriculated in 1896 but progress at university was slow when combined with earning a living. He took ten years to complete his BA, and another four before he was admitted to the Victorian Bar in 1910 at the age of 29. His mother wanted him to be a judge, but Blackburn’s intellectual journeying over the previous decade had taken him a long way from home. From an early age, he was a prodigious and wide-ranging reader, deeply engaged by ideas. In the course of his education Blackburn’s adven-turous reading and thinking was rewarded and affirmed, especially at university. Here too young men were encouraged to think of them-selves as natural leaders, rightful inheritors of privilege and its attendant responsibilities. So it was that Blackburn acquired the



confidence and sense of personal efficacy of the elite, especially those being groomed for the professions. In this formative environment he added to the powerful sense of social and personal duty instilled in him at home a sustaining conviction that he could be, as Brian Fitzpatrick expressed it so evocatively, ‘Master of his fate, and captain of his soul!’10 In other words, Blackburn by 1910 had decided to forge his own destiny—one other than that mapped out for him at birth. In 1911 he joined the Victorian Socialist Party, a move that simultane-ously undermined his prospects as a barrister and signalled his deepening inclination towards a career in politics. Blackburn had decided to cross over into the service of the ‘organised poor’ to advance the cause of social justice.

Fitzpatrick, born in 1905, engaged in a similar process of unhitching himself from his class and family moorings. If, as the son of a schoolteacher, his journey across the class divide was rather shorter than Blackburn’s, it was in some ways more fraught, since he carried a smaller measure of the confidence and easy assumption of leadership that characterised the Blackburn/McCrae family milieu, or, for that matter, most of the friends he made at university. Nevertheless this shared journey gave Blackburn and Fitzpatrick much in common, as did a family environment that was ‘moral and civilised, observant of proprieties, and even cultivated’. Fitzpatrick’s Moonee Ponds home, ‘was never without a piano’, and his father, ‘who also had a pleasant tenor voice, played it with some talent’. His mother was ‘particularly fond of opera, and she passed on her knowl-edge and some of her love of it’ to her son.11 Thomasann Blackburn, who felt the best gift she had to offer was her undoubtedly fine voice, would have been comfortable visiting this household. It also con-tained a substantial library, allowing Fitzpatrick, like Blackburn, to read voraciously from an early age. Households such as these, and that of the poet Bernard O’Dowd, made Blackburn’s move from Toorak to Moonee Ponds in 1914 less unusual than it might seem.

Fitzpatrick and Blackburn also shared experience of the fierce pride, cultivation of restraint and the cloistered family life that accompanied genteel poverty. While there was a greater masculine presence in Fitzpatrick’s life than Blackburn’s, this was offset by the enlistment of his two older brothers during World War I, leaving him at home with five sisters, as well as his father’s death in 1919 when Fitzpatrick was only fourteen. If there was one thing the two men did



not share, it was the powerful sense of family responsibility imposed on the oldest son in a widowed household. Blackburn would contribute to the maintenance of his mother and one sister for his entire life.

These two rather bookish and romantic young men, deficient in ‘manly’ sporting prowess, also felt deeply the privilege of an educa-tion that was theirs only by virtue of scholarships. That alone perhaps is sufficient to explain its singularly transformative effect on both of them—that, and a vibrant group of thoughtful, challenging and tal-ented friends and lecturers at university, many of whom were destined to make their own notable mark in the world. At university, Fitzpatrick, like Blackburn before him, was drawn away from the values of his upbringing towards socialism.12 As a consequence, he too had to con-struct an identity for himself somewhat at odds with the one mapped out for him at birth. There can be little doubt that Fitzpatrick intended himself to be, as far as possible, ‘Master of his fate, and captain of his soul!—and he would do this by ‘living intelligently’.13 Convinced by 1925 that ‘thought ought to govern reality’, and that ‘Every last frag-ment of creative effort’ was ‘a contribution to the achievement and progress of humanity’14, he set out to devote his literary and intellec-tual gifts to advancing the cause of social justice.

Fitzpatrick’s relationship with the labour movement remained self-consciously intellectual until 1935, when he helped found the Australian Council for Civil Liberties (ACCL). It was at this moment of translating ideas into action that he was drawn to Maurice Blackburn, who, by this time, had acquired a singular aura as a courageous man of principle. How Blackburn came to acquire that singular aura, and Fitzpatrick’s determination to deploy his considerable literary skills to represent Blackburn to the world as the exemplar ‘honest man’ in politics must firstly be understood in terms of the ambivalent relationship between intellectuals and the labour movement more generally.

Fitzpatrick acquired early the view that principles and politics were unlikely bedfellows. He was not alone in this view. ‘Power’ was, as revered Labor journalist Henry Boote warned, ‘a dangerous and demoralising dope’.15 The natural cynicism of working-class men and women about the sincerity, loyalty and empathy of middle-class intellectuals who climb down the ladder to join them was neatly tagged by long-serving Victorian ALP leader, George Prendergast,



when he quipped, ‘The trouble is that a lot of people who pride them-selves on a good education suffer from Toryism’.16 This suspicion is well matched by a strain of dark pessimism that afflicts many of those intellectuals themselves. Intense fear of corruption by association with the compromises and temptations of power is close to a defining characteristic. A prominent early exponent of this pessimism in Australia, V Gordon Childe, offered an extended treatise on the ways and means whereby the ‘middle class’ institution of parliament cor-rupted, co-opted and seduced the representatives of workers. Published in 1923, at precisely the moment Fitzpatrick claims he was converted to socialism, How Labour Governs undoubtedly played a role in shaping Fitzpatrick’s response to the labour movement.17

A proportion of educated, middle-class individuals drawn to the left of the political spectrum also harboured a deep pessimism about the workers themselves. There is a noticeable lack of empathy with ‘petty reformism’, with the average trade unionists’ concentration on conditions of work and pay. For the ‘radical intellectual’, as defined by Irving and Scalmer, the working class appears to be deficient, in need of ‘education’ and ‘organisation’, and so they put themselves forward as leaders, publicists and organisers to correct this deficiency.18 To the extent that their dreams and strategies to usher in a better world founder, radical intellectuals tend to blame the workers themselves for their lack of revolutionary zeal, and/or their betrayal by mediocre politicians and/or corrupt ‘machine men’. A natural corollary of this position is a powerful longing to be proved wrong. Radical intellec-tuals seek an antidote to their pessimism in a quest for the ‘honest man’—one who always puts principle above politics.

It is through this pessimistic lens that Fitzpatrick viewed the career of Maurice Blackburn prior to 1935.19 Pessimism was not, how-ever, the dominant mood when Blackburn joined the Victorian Socialist Party (VSP) in 1911. The nursery of many men and women who would rise to prominence in the labour movement over the fol-lowing four decades, the VSP provided a rich and challenging finishing school for the first phase of Blackburn’s political education—an edu-cation he repaid by editing the party’s journal, the Socialist, from 1912–13. It is important to note, however, that he was not especially comfortable in the VSP. The antipathy between him and Curtin dates from this time, and he also fell out with RS Ross and some others on the issue of his support for the Citizens’ Army. Blackburn’s inclination



towards Irving and Scalmer’s ‘representational’ intellectual mode was already clear.20 For all his later reputation as an intellectual and a purist on some issues, Blackburn had a practical, pragmatic bent that would see him more often in the company of trade union leaders and local branch members than radical socialist intellectuals.

Not that radical intellectuals were easy to escape. The place where Blackburn was more truly ‘at home’ in these years was the Free Religious Fellowship (FRF) led by the radical Unitarian clergyman, Fabian socialist, and founding member of the VSP, the Rev. Frederick Sinclaire.21 A non-denominational Christian gathering, best summed up by the sub-title of its journal published from 1914 to 1922, ‘A monthly magazine of undogmatic religion and social and literary criticism’22, its ranks included Frederic Eggleston, Gerald Byrne, Nettie and Vance Palmer, Bernard O’Dowd, Lesbia Harford, Louis Esson, Frank Wilmot, Bill Earsman, and the poet Dick Long. The overlap with the VSP was extensive, but the mix of people and ideas was more eclectic. The tone and style of the fellowship were set by the passionate, forthright Sinclaire, but for the first few years at least the atmosphere appears to have been relaxed and convivial. It nourished and supplemented the more public political and cultural activity of its members.

For Blackburn, it was time to step more decisively into the public arena. He was not greatly enamoured of the life of a barrister, but the reformist lawyer in him was attracted by parliament.23 He was partic-ularly struck by the legal disabilities and injustices suffered by trade unionists, injured workers, women, prisoners and the disadvantaged generally. It seemed to him that many immediate and tangible bene-fits for them could be achieved through legislative reform. As he told his fiancée several years later, quite simply, he wanted ‘to do some-thing to make life a little easier for the men and women of this country’. 24 When, in 1912, the VSP decided to confine itself to propa-ganda activities, Blackburn immediately joined the Labor Party with the intention of seeking pre-selection.

Engagement in 1913 to the ardent young feminist Doris Hordern added another layer to Blackburn’s political commitment. Doris shared his experience of upper-middle-class Victorian heritage, in her case stretched threadbare by adventurism and alcohol. More importantly, the intensity of her commitment to social justice fanned the flames of his ambition. Like his mother also, Doris reinforced



Blackburn’s sense of himself as a man of destiny. ‘I know you were drawn aside for some reason’, she wrote, but that ‘is not of yourself … there is work for you to do and something for you to say to your fellowmen, and I know that you will do it and say it … I have … great faith in you’.25 Again like his mother, only more explicitly, Doris challenged Blackburn with the responsibility to realise her dreams as well his own. ‘For you, dear’, she wrote in December 1913,

I am ambitious … You know I do not want worldly goods, nor material advantages, but I am anxious that you shall help in the struggle for freedom & advancement. As a child, as a girl, always I have had thoughts such as these for myself but … when I met you and loved you I [saw] clearly that you were to do these things and I was to walk beside you.26

Doris did not see herself married to some ordinary backbencher, but rather to someone destined to ‘make a difference’, just as she was her-self destined, for she did return to politics in her own way and her own time.27

When the Deakinite liberal, WA Watt, resigned to seek a federal seat in 1914, Blackburn was drafted to contest what looked like an unwinnable by-election for Essendon, where, as it happened, the Fitzpatrick family resided. The Blackburn of legend was immediately apparent. He expounded the key issues lucidly and treated the elec-tors respectfully as people of intelligence—to be informed and consulted rather than led or whipped into a frenzy. Typically, he ‘did not trim’, or ‘indulge in personalities’. He spoke what he ‘honestly believed to be true and said nothing [he] did not mean’.28 He gathered up affirming responses like trophies and presented them to Doris. ‘You’ve been straight with everyone’, he reported of one conversation. ‘“Everyone in [the electorate] would say that. There are a great many people who will vote against you who have a high respect for you as an individual.” So there you are.’29

That is not how everyone saw Blackburn. Indeed his very cour-tesy, coupled with his background and his socialist convictions—in short his position as class traitor—laid him open to exceptionally hostile treatment by the leading newspapers and his opponents. Not that this did him any harm with Labor voters. The hostility grew to murderous levels during the conscription referendum campaigns of



1916 and 1917. Confirmation that Blackburn had registered on the young Fitzpatrick’s political radar in 1914 comes with his recollection of his ‘unregenerate’ eleven-year-old self running around in 1916 with his ‘little playmates wearing a “Vote Yes!” button’ on his boy scout uniform, and ‘threatening his juniors with the fearsome statement that if they weren’t good’, the ‘Big Bad Wolf’ Maurice Blackburn ‘would get them’.30 This image acutely captures the hysterical, and frankly nasty, wartime atmosphere in which Blackburn lost the seat of Essendon in November 1917 on the eve of the second conscription referendum.

Given his personal sacrifice, Blackburn was ripe for fashioning as the ‘honest man’ in politics. Labor Call glowed with pride in his defeat. Recognised ‘as one of the brainiest men in parliament’, he had been ‘a finely courageous and intelligent battler for Labor’; a man who kept ‘a strong hold upon the principles and ideals of the Labour Movement’.31 Not that too much should be made of this. Although the decision of Billy Hughes to introduce conscription for overseas mili-tary service was dramatic confirmation of the corrupting influence of political power, the response of virtually all Victorian Labor politi-cians had been a comforting antidote. Blackburn’s ‘sacrifice’ at this stage served no more than to confirm the genuineness of his cross-over to the cause of working people.

During his term in parliament Blackburn had certainly proved his usefulness to a party desperately short of legal expertise. It offset the hostility in some quarters to someone whose background and education provoked suspicion. So too did the demeanour of this unfailingly courteous, warm man of simple tastes, with a life-long reputation for ‘never saying a word that hurts or belittles’.32 Described by close associates as ‘lovable’, Blackburn was credited with repaying in kind: as Senator Gordon Brown wrote, ‘He loved all men, as friend and foe will tell’.33 Even his bookishness appealed to the section of the movement that was hungry for self-education. While his public ora-tory was rather wooden, he was much sought after to address small groups. It was quickly apparent that the rank-and-file liked and trusted him. And he liked and trusted them. Moreover, despite his personal abstinence, he was happy to meet with them in pubs, where much labour business was transacted. He preferred the music hall and the cinema to high culture. In short, Maurice Blackburn had found a home. The loss of his seat was a great blow, but he turned his



mind to establishing a legal practice that served the working class and the underprivileged, founding the Victorian Labor College with Bill Earsman and others, and working within the party, as editor of Labor Call for a time, and on the central executive.

Blackburn disappeared into this work for and with the party, loosening his associations with the VSP and the FRF, where the mood darkened noticeably. It is intriguing to wonder whether Fred Sinclaire was making an exception of his friend and supporter when he declared that ‘Every Labor politician who has brains enough is a potential traitor to Labor’34—or when he asked, in language reminis-cent of Fitzpatrick at his best, ‘If there were a counter-revolution tomorrow, what would you have done to deserve hanging?’35 As a rad-ical intellectual, Sinclaire was clearly sceptical about the entire project to which Blackburn was committed. ‘Those reforms that come along in the casual shape of parliamentary concessions’, he declared, ‘are accepted by the worker, but they have no affect on his mind’.36 For himself, Sinclaire preferred detachment.

In the fi rst place we have never pretended to be committed to the Platform of the Labor Party, because, for one thing, it is not radical enough for us, and for another, we believe that the cause of labour can be just as well served by detached and sympathetic criticism as by the special plead-ing of partisans.37

From others he called for ‘more imagination, more honesty, more courage’.38

Though Sinclaire was not entirely without hope that ‘the workers’ might ‘keep alive the traditions of freedom’39, his despair—like Childe’s, and also Fitzpatrick’s in the aftermath of another war—soon reached beyond the labour movement to Australian society as a whole.40 The resonance of Sinclaire’s commentary in the Fellowship with Fitzpatrick’s style of committed journalism—their ideas, their energy, their passion, their ‘disinclination to pin their faith entirely on any party or system’41 and their academic propensities—are suffi-ciently striking to suggest some parallels with Fitzpatrick’s later relationship with Blackburn. Blackburn was famously unperturbed by dissidence and disagreement. Perhaps in 1935 Blackburn saw in Fitzpatrick a younger version of his friend Sinclaire, by then



occupying the chair of English at Canterbury University, and so trans-ferred some of the warmth, tolerance and respect of that earlier relationship. Perhaps Blackburn even felt the correlation between Fitzpatrick’s ‘radical imagination’ and Sinclaire’s passionate soul.42 But by then Blackburn stood in a very different relationship to the party himself.

In the meantime, Blackburn’s path was lit by an essential opti-mism of the sort captured in the Browning verse. While he did harbour doubts about reformism and the conciliation and arbitration system, these were overwhelmed by his penchant for detail and capacity to be deeply satisfied by small gains. Rather than bemoan what could not be achieved, he attended assiduously to what could. In his legal work he concentrated on providing to ordinary men and women the benefit of whatever comfort there was to be had in the existing laws—and planned ways to improve them. In the many grateful beneficiaries of this work lay his strongest core of personal support. An activist and advocate rather than an agitator, Blackburn took from his middle-class heritage the notion of public service and transformed it into service to the labour movement. He also applied strict ‘democratic’ tests to that service. He accepted the strategic value of solidarity—but only after the voice of the members had been heard in the properly constituted forums—and the right of the industrial movement to expect compliance from its delegates to parliament. Conformity to rules of association, where that association was freely entered into, was a central tenet of Blackburn’s civic engagement. His disputes with the Labor Party, as with any government, would all hinge on use, or misuse, of executive power.

Undue concentration on Blackburn’s bitter expulsions from the party in 1935 and 1941, however, obscures the fact that for most of his career he was an advocate of ‘sane radicalism’43, and content to pursue the twin goals of ‘rational amelioration’ and social justice. The 1925 label ‘practical “intellectual”’44 places Blackburn neatly within Irving and Scalmer’s ‘representational mode’. The principal role of such intellectuals ‘is to confirm the existence of the movement in its own terms and as a constituent of civil society. They deploy skills such as bargaining and negotiation, they provide the movement with expert knowledge about politics’, and in Blackburn’s case the law. Such people must ‘strike a balance between the demands of the lib-eral state and the hopes of the rank and file. The mediating intellectual



walks a fine line’.45 In the 1920s Blackburn proved particularly adept at walking that fine line.

In the long and intense debate on the socialisation objective in 1921, it was Blackburn who expressed what has since generally been acknowledged as the mood and temper of the average rank-and-file member. He considered the new objective, which was carried by a convincing 22 votes to 10, to be at the same time too vague and unnecessarily alarming. ‘The Objective must be so clearly worded’, he argued, ‘that he who runs will read, but the present Objective is such that he who reads will run’.46 He proposed an amendment interpreting the objective in such a way that necessity rather than dogma deter-mined the extent of nationalisation. The ‘Blackburn Declaration’, as it became known, advocated collective ownership only to the extent necessary to prevent exploitation, and ensure that the instruments of production were used in a socially useful manner.47 Although the amendment was not formally passed, the Labor Party behaved there-after as if it had—even re-affirming it in 1948.48

Not till 1925—the same year in which Fitzpatrick, already foun-dation editor of the student newspaper, Farrago, joined with a new generation of idealistic intellectuals to found the Melbourne University Labor Club—did Blackburn secure a chance to re-enter parliament. The episode was sufficiently dramatic and well reported that there can be no doubt that the fully politicised Fitzpatrick was paying attention. During the 1914 campaign for Essendon WA Watt had contrasted Blackburn—‘as mild a man as ever cut a political throat’—with ‘those fierce socialists who hurl their doctrines from the platforms of Collingwood or Fitzroy’.49 In truth, there were not too many ‘fierce socialists’ among the political power brokers of Fitzroy and Clifton Hill, and when the seat became vacant, Blackburn was drafted to take them on.

Blackburn was only one of thirty hopefuls, and John Wren’s pre-ferred candidate was well known. Blackburn, however, had a solid following among unionists, most notably from the boot trades, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers and the printing industry. The leaders of these unions, Tommy Richards, Nat Roberts and EC McGrath were names to conjure with at the time, and they judged rightly that Blackburn could rally many who might have been more faint-hearted behind a lesser man. Throughout a difficult and dan-gerous campaign, Blackburn again conducted himself with dignity



and conviction. His substantial majority sent shock waves through the whole of Melbourne. Once more, he had won against the odds.

The victory was hailed in terms of a purification. The Labor Call cartoonist had his opponents drowning ‘themselves in a mud puddle of their own making’.50 The communist Workers’ Weekly was jubilant.51 It is at this point that Blackburn moves decisively into the narrative of the left as the iconic ‘honest man in politics’, one who could not only defend the rank-and-file against the authoritarian and corrupt tendencies of the party machine, but also call out the best in that rank-and-file. This election stands as a pivotal episode in Frank Hardy’s Power Without Glory—one so replete with its own plot and drama that he felt no need to exercise his fertile imagination.52 Blackburn had acquired a special usefulness to the far left. By stressing his exceptional honesty and integrity, other members of the party could thereby be further denigrated as deceivers and corrupters.

Blackburn preferred a more inclusive style of politics and returned to parliament content to do whatever he could in that arena to improve the lives of working people. Carrying an increasingly heavy load of expectations, he did not disappoint his constituency in his response to the Depression. He stood with those who preferred to lose government than cut wages—but again, he was not alone in this virtue in the Victorian Parliament. At much the same time, having made little headway in the state parliamentary party, he turned his sights to the federal arena. In a keenly fought battle in 1934, he won pre-selection for Frank Anstey’s seat of Bourke—one of the safest in the country. By this time his growing stature as a man of principle had become a source of irritation to some, not the least of them John Curtin, who confided to Anstey that Blackburn gave him ‘the joes’! ‘I do not regard Blackburn as a Messiah of the Latter Day’, he wrote. ‘He is blancmange—clever perhaps; a man without sin, he is really desti-tute of virtue. He is personally too good to be politically worth a damn.’53 Far too much has been made of this tiny fragment, but it illustrates the downside for Blackburn in the halo being drawn about his head. Some of his supporters, in the industrial unions, and in his local electorate branches, were taking on the characteristics of disci-ples who unrealistically looked to him to deliver them from the increasingly defensive, right-wing, Catholic-dominated Victorian Labor Party.54



Blackburn’s interest in international affairs had always set him apart from the Labor Party, but this only became a problem with the rise of European fascism in the 1930s. Convinced that timely, united action by the democratic countries could avert this danger, he sought valiantly to persuade the party to support a policy of collective secu-rity. He also attempted, via the ‘Socialisation Units’, to deepen the party’s commitment to socialist ideals and practices. He made little progress on either issue. The tension came to a head over the Victorian Council Against War and Fascism (VCAWF)—a ‘popular front’ body set up and supported by the Communist Party which initially attracted substantial numbers of Labor Party members and union-ists. When the ALP banned joint membership, Blackburn was defiant. Rightly afraid that if the issue went to annual conference Blackburn would have the numbers, the central executive took pre-emptive action and expelled him in December 1935.

The excitement generated the previous year surrounding the congress organised by the VCAWF in Melbourne in 1934, and Menzies’s attempts to prevent the international delegate Egon Kisch from attending, created an exaggerated sense of what might be achieved through ‘popular front’ bodies. While Blackburn had his own reasons for defying the Victorian central executive, he was also responding to powerful pressure on him to ‘perform’ a certain role. This was the role of one who, as Fitzpatrick declared, had ‘the courage … always to speak their mind, take the stand which intellect and con-science dictated, never fail or falter, always to tread the high path, impervious to inducements or preferments, impervious to threats and menaces, careless of self, determined to do their duty, though the heavens fall’.55

In truth, Blackburn was not at all certain in 1935 that he wanted to walk that lonely path. ‘I am attached to the Labor Party’, he said, ‘It has been a great part of my life. I do not want to break with the people with whom I have worked for 25 years. But I see something vastly more important to me than any political party. I see war looming ahead’.56 It soon became clear, however, that he had misread the mood of both Labor supporters and the general community. Much to the relief of the majority of his constituents and long-term supporters he applied for re-admission to the party in December 1937.

Some hint of the anguished clash between the comforts of soli-darity and the obligation to follow the dictates of conscience that



confronted Blackburn at this time can be found in his review in 1937 of Lloyd Ross’s book on William Lane. Commenting on the failure of the Paraguay venture Blackburn wrote:

One does not go to Paraguay in quest of freedom or to express his individuality. One goes in quest of surrender willingly, gladly to spend and be spent for an impersonal cause. Unless one had the anima naturaliter christiana vel communistica there is no place for him in Paraguay. Lane had it not, nor had his colonists. To him should have come the warning that came to William Meister and that must come to all of us—except a tiny and happy minority—Thy America is Here or Nowhere.57

Blackburn was clearly willing to ‘spend and be spent for an imper-sonal cause’, but if it was no longer clear to him that the Labor Party embodied that cause, was the alternative for him also ‘Nowhere’? Or was it the Council for Civil Liberties?

It was at precisely this moment of rupture, when the ‘fine line’ Blackburn had been walking as a ‘mediating intellectual’ for most of his political career had stretched to breaking point, that he encoun-tered the energetic and persuasive Brian Fitzpatrick. The point of connection was civil liberties, which were coming under increasing attack. The persecution of Egon Kisch, along with ever-heavier cen-sorship of political literature, had galvanised many into action, but Blackburn was not a founding member of the council. Only when safely back in the party did he accept Fitzpatrick’s polite and respectful request that he join the council’s legal panel in May 1937.

Polite and respectful is how the relationship remained, at least on paper. At no stage did the two men address each other in letters by their first names. This is a measure of the courtesy, even ‘courtliness’ of both men, and of Blackburn’s rather Edwardian restraint. Fitzpatrick’s evident deep regard undoubtedly had a filial dimension too.58 Not only was Blackburn old enough to be his father, he carried the venerable authority of a founding father. It should not be inferred from this that the relationship was cool. Blackburn’s warmth and amiable disposition matched Fitzpatrick’s own warmth and eloquent charm. Fitzpatrick felt privileged to ‘help’ Blackburn, in ‘some of his noblest work’, and grateful that he could find time to assist from ‘his



onerous end of the pitch’.59 In turn, Blackburn was likely encouraged by Fitzpatrick’s youthful commitment so reminiscent of friends from his own youth, such as Sinclaire. Indeed some of those, such as Nettie and Vance Palmer were also in the council. He had sons of his own too—one of them a young firebrand in the Communist Party. Both men were in love with ideas and ‘justice’. Fitzpatrick was surging with energy to ‘make a difference’; Blackburn needed his batteries recharged. Fitzpatrick was hot-headed, inclined to hasty action and bouts of pessimism. Blackburn could place a steadying hand on the shoulder.60

Blackburn retained the seat of Bourke in October 1937 with the highest majority in Australia, and returned to the central executive, but much of the old comfort was gone. He had become increasingly isolated in the party, and there were ill-concealed moves afoot to oust him. With little prospect of high office, and excluded from Curtin’s inner circle, he was satisfied to apply himself to issues of civil liber-ties. Civil liberties lay at the heart of the parliamentary and industrial system to which he was committed. Under conditions of war, they were easily swept away, and with them the capacity to organise and represent the workers. It was not without its heroic dimension. Indeed, it was a cause with a long history—one which could call up titles for fliers such as Throwback to Henry VIII written by Blackburn in 1939. Within this tradition, there was ample space for cooperation between the labour movement and the ACCL, of which Blackburn became president in 1940.

The working relationship between Fitzpatrick and Blackburn around issues such as the National Register and the Queensland Government’s Public Safety Act61 gave Fitzpatrick singular comfort.62 So too did a number of other Labor stalwarts such as Frank Brennan, Reg Pollard and EJ Ward, whom Fitzpatrick bracketed with Blackburn among his select band of ‘honest men’.63 Collaboration with such men drew the determinedly individualistic Fitzpatrick sufficiently close to the Labor Party that he took out membership in 1942. In contrast, work with the ACCL gradually disconnected the essentially collabora-tive Blackburn from Labor and narrowed his focus, especially once the minority Curtin government took office in October 1941. While Fitzpatrick orchestrated a softly, softly approach to the Curtin gov-ernment, Blackburn adopted an increasingly radical, individualist stance. While Fitzpatrick was buoyed with uncharacteristic optimism,



a rather saddened Blackburn seemed to succumb to Fitzpatrick’s more characteristic view that the history of the Australian Labour Movement was the history of illusion.64 Unlike the hero of Browning’s poem, he had begun to doubt that ‘clouds would break’.

The directive to Blackburn from the Victorian central executive in August 1941 to disassociate himself from the Australia-Soviet Friendship League after the Germans had already marched into Russia was a blatantly tactical ploy to force his hand and free up his seat. His defiance was logical and consistent, but on the scale of things at the time, it was a trivial issue on which to be placed outside the party just as it was about to take office federally, and so stand in a far better position to defend, or even extend, civil liberties. It must have dismayed Fitzpatrick as much as it did Blackburn’s supporters. He was far more useful to his constituency in the labour movement and the ACCL inside the party than outside it.

From this point Blackburn did indeed walk alone. He no longer wished to represent anyone but himself. Once Curtin decided to introduce conscription for service beyond Australia in late 1942, there was no way back into the party. He had stood shoulder to shoulder with Curtin in the front-line trenches of the anti-conscription cam-paigns of World War I. It had affirmed his place in the labour movement. He did not read the circumstances of 1942–43 as suffi-ciently dire to abandon his life-long conviction that unions should not accept restrictions on their activities in wartime, or that conscrip-tion for overseas service was always wrong. Perhaps too he sensed that the time had come to ‘expend himself fully’, to make the final sacrifice for an abstract cause. In embodying fully the role of the man who refuses ‘at all times, to go against conscience for the sake of party and personal advantage’65 that Fitzpatrick and many of his close sup-porters, including his mother and wife, had projected onto him, then perhaps his exile could stand as a symbolic sacrifice that might allow the party, this time, to weather intact the trials of wartime govern-ment. It certainly allowed Blackburn to remain unequivocally ‘Master of his fate, and captain of his soul!’—and in that lay a critical element in his appeal to Fitzpatrick.

Reflecting on his father’s political career, Dick Blackburn observed, ‘He was one of those people who stuck to his guns and if people didn’t like it, well he’d go his own way. It was hard for his followers’.66 It was hard for Fitzpatrick. Once the Curtin government



took office, at the height of his optimism about the prospects for good government and social justice under a Labor administration, even under conditions of war, Fitzpatrick abandoned high-profile, public campaigning for civil liberties in favour of behind-the-scenes lob-bying.67 Given the overriding danger to the country, neither did he object to Curtin’s conscription legislation. Blackburn was the prin-cipal opponent of this strategy, both inside the council and in the federal parliament, where he continued to speak forcefully on mat-ters related to civil liberties, trade unions and the conduct of the war on which the ACCL and the government would have preferred he remain silent. It was almost as if Blackburn and Fitzpatrick had reversed places, with Fitzpatrick the ‘mediating intellectual’ and Blackburn the pessimistic radical intellectual.

Fitzpatrick counted it among Blackburn’s virtues that he ‘often … stood alone’. Perhaps some the depth of emotion evident in Fitzpatrick’s posthumous representation of Blackburn implies a touch of remorse that he too might be guilty of finding ways to ‘praise a good man, when he can no more affect issues that trouble and vex’.68 Blackburn had certainly vexed Fitzpatrick at times, most espe-cially early in 1942 when he moved to disallow the wide-ranging Regulation 77 permitting control of public movement and the com-mandeering of assets.69 Fitzpatrick considered this motion a threat to the government, asserting in a report to the executive committee that: ‘Maintenance of the Government is very much more important than the fact that the Government has taken preposterous powers. I would urge the Executive Committee to bear constantly in mind that the Council exists to maintain our democratic institutions, not to express uncompromising democratic theory’.70

Given Blackburn’s deep fear of misuse of executive power—indeed it was the principal reason why he was ‘outside’ the party—it is little wonder that, while remaining president of the ACCL, Blackburn drifted into the fringe No-Conscription Campaign, the members of which continued to groom his sense of himself as a staunch defender of higher principles whatever the personal, or even perhaps, national cost.

The personal cost to Blackburn included his seat in parliament in August 1943. Fitzpatrick was outraged. It revived in him the rhet-oric of the radical intellectual disappointed in ‘that once-great organisation’ which ‘customarily denounces as “Communist” almost



every group or movement that looks like doing anything for Labor’s causes’.71 As ill-health and disillusion overwhelmed Blackburn, Fitzpatrick’s mood darkened too.72 His increasingly forceful criticisms of Labor policy from this time led to his own expulsion in July 1944. While he had taken some lessons from Blackburn in walking the mediating intellectual’s fine line, it was the lonelier road now walked by Blackburn that beckoned. He did not know that Blackburn was ‘always right’. What was ‘important in the last analysis’, was his ‘unwavering honesty, his unfaltering courage, his unyielding adherence, in all circumstances to the principles by which he lived’.73 This Blackburn certainly towers above the ‘the cautious little self-seekers’ in Fitzpatrick’s writing.74 It suggests that he remained compelled by the possibility that ‘the shaft of light from an honest man here and there’ might yet dispel the gloom and disappointment settling around him by the end of the war.75 Sadly, that shaft of light had gone out.

Curtin acknowledged that in life Blackburn had ‘set a standard; and all of us were the better for endeavouring to live up to it’.76 Fitzpatrick was determined to extend that ‘standard’ beyond death. Here was the exemplar ‘honest man’ in politics to stand as an anti-dote to the radical intellectual’s instinctive pessimism. Through his writing and his role in organising testimonials and participation in the annual pilgrimages to Blackburn’s graveside, a genuinely grieving Fitzpatrick played a major role in transforming the man into the legend.77 Ironically, this partly explains why Blackburn is less promi-nent in labour history than Fitzpatrick prophesised. These days there is not much interest in the ‘lives of saints’. A more dispassionate account of Blackburn’s life and achievements would have served him better. If Fitzpatrick had been better able to untangle the personal and the political, quiet a little the radical, romantic imagination, and his penchant for polemic, he was a good enough historian to have written that.

Notes1 The author wishes to acknowledge the assistance of a State Library of

Victoria Creative Fellowship in the preparation of this paper, and Sheila Fitzpatrick and Stuart Macintyre for insightful comments and advice.

Blackburn to Doris Hordern, 30 October 1913, Maurice and Doris Blackburn Papers, State Library of Victoria (SLV), MS 11749, Boxes 73–4.



2 Judges Foster and Stretton, the historian Professor Max Crawford, several clergymen, politicians, the ageing socialist Percy Laidler, as well as Fitzpatrick.

3 John McKellar, Maurice Blackburn and the Struggle for Freedom, Challenge Press, Coburg, Vic., 1945; KJ Kenafi ck, Maurice Blackburn and the No-Conscription Campaign in the Second World War, [self-published], Melbourne, 1949.

4 Manuscript in possession of author. Ralph Gibson kept up the tradition, especially in The People Stand Up, Red Roster Press, Ascot Vale, 1983.

5 17 July 1944, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates (CPD), vol. 179, p. 25.6 Brian Fitzpatrick, A Short History of the Australian Labor Movement,

Rawson’s Bookshop, Melbourne, 1944 (enlarged edition; fi rst published 1940), p.11.

7 Ibid.8 For an extended consideration of Fitzpatrick as historian, see Don Watson,

Brian Fitzpatrick: A Radical Life, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1979, pp. 164–91.

9 Blackburn to Doris Hordern, 7 October 1913, Blackburn papers, SLV, MS 11749, Boxes 73–4.

10 Smith’s Weekly, 13 November 1943.11 Watson, pp. 3–4.12 Ibid., pp. 11–17 deals with Fitzpatrick’s early development as a radical

intellectual.13 See ibid., p. 10, for a discussion of the origin of this phrase in an early

autobiographical novel by Fitzpatrick.14 ‘The Minor Poet’, Melbourne University Magazine, November 1925, quoted

in ibid, p. 28.15 7 September 1927, quoted in Clyde Cameron, ‘Henry Ernest Boote—“It’s

Wrong to be Right”’, Labour History, no. 80, May 2001, p. 206.16 27 July 1926, Victorian Parliamentary Debates, vol. 171, p. 455.17 Watson, p. 11.18 For a discussion of this attitude, see Terry Irving and Sean Scalmer, ‘Labour

Intellectuals in Australia: Modes, Traditions, Generations, Transformations’, International Review of Social History, vol. 50, part 1, April 2005, pp. 15–18.

19 For more detailed accounts of Blackburn’s life and work see especially, Susan Blackburn, Maurice Blackburn and the ALP 1934–43: A Study of Principle in Politics, Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Northcote, Vic., 1969; Carolyn Rasmussen, ‘Labour Politics in Coburg 1919–1940’, MA thesis, The University of Melbourne, 1978, and ‘Defending the Bad Against the Worse: The Peace Movement in Australia—Its Origins, Structure and Development’, PhD thesis, The University of Melbourne, 1984 passim; David Dodd, ‘A Prince for the Paupers: A Political Biography of Maurice Blackburn’, PhD thesis, La Trobe University, 1994.

20 Irving and Scalmer, p. 6.21 DR Walker, ‘Sinclaire, Frederick (1881–1954)’, Australian Dictionary of

Biography, vol. 11, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1988, pp. 615–16; H Winston Rhodes, Frederick Sinclaire, University of Canterbury Press, Christchurch, 1984.



22 See also Fellowship, no. 4, November 1916, pp. 27–9.23 Louis Esson, fellow member of the FRF, and one of the friends at university

credited with ‘converting’ Blackburn to socialism, observed that ‘Maurice Blackburn is a lawyer by trade, but a reformer by nature’; ‘Le Preux Chevalier’, undated, Thomasann Blackburn Clipping Book (TBCB). Private collection, courtesy of Louisa Hamilton.

24 Blackburn to Doris Hordern, 26 June 1914, Blackburn Papers, SLV, MS 11749, Boxes 73–4.

25 Ibid., 17 November 1913.26 Ibid., 19 December 1913.27 See, for example, C Rasmussen, ‘Doris Blackburn MHR: Radical

Representative’, in Marilyn Lake and Farley Kelly (eds), Double Time, Penguin, Ringwood, 1985, pp. 353–63.

28 Blackburn to Doris Hordern, 10 July 1914, Blackburn Papers, SLV, MS 11749, Boxes 73–4.

29 Ibid., 11 September 1914.30 Smith’s Weekly, 13 November 1943. 31 Labor Call, 1 November 1917.32 The Rechabite, 1 June 1944, A Tribute from Judge Kelly of the

Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration, TBCB.33 ‘To Maurice Blackburn’, 1 April 1944, p. 4, TBCB.34 Fellowship, vol. 6, no. 4, November 1919.35 Ibid., no. 7, February 1920. 36 Ibid.37 Ibid., vol. 4, no. 10, May 1918.38 Ibid., vol. 6, no. 7, February 1920.39 Ibid.40 Note, for example, Frederick Sinclaire, ‘Notes of the Month’, Fellowship, vol.

7, no. 2, September 1921, p. 149.41 Watson, p. 121. 42 Ibid., p. 271. 43 Report of Presidential statement, Labor Call, 29 May 1919; Blackburn to

Doris Hordern, 24 March 1914, Blackburn Papers, SLV, MS 11749, Boxes 73–4.

44 Truth [1925], TBCB.45 Irving and Scalmer, p. 6.46 Quoted in LF Crisp, The Australian Federal Labor Party 1901–1951, new

edition, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1978, p. 279.47 Ibid., p. 281.48 Ibid, p. 294.49 Argus, 22 July 1914.50 Labor Call, 12 February 1925.51 Workers’ Weekly, 13 February 1925.52 Frank Hardy, Power Without Glory, new edition, Sphere Books, London,

1968, pp. 395–419.53 Curtin to Anstey (undated), Lloyd Ross Papers, National Library of

Australia (NLA), MS 3939, Box 33, Folder 7. 54 For more detail see Rasmussen, ‘Labor Politics in Coburg’, pp. 147–80.



55 Coburg Courier, 16 April 1947.56 Ralph Gibson, My Years in the Communist Party, International Bookshop,

Melbourne, 1966, p. 48.57 Australian Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 3, September 1937, p. 106.58 Note especially letter to Blackburn, 26 May 1940, Brian Fitzpatrick papers,

NLA MS 4965/1/545.59 Coburg Courier, 16 April 1947; Fitzpatrick to Blackburn, 17 June 1940,

Fitzpatrick papers, NLA MS 4965/1/545. 60 Note especially, Blackburn to Fitzpatrick, 28 June 1940, Fitzpatrick papers,

NLA MS 4965/1/545, when Fitzpatrick was embroiled in a dispute with JV Barry and others on the executive over comments he had made to the Sydney press.

61 Maurice Blackburn, The Queensland Way to Dictatorship, ACCL, Melbourne, February 1941.

62 Note especially, Fitzpatrick to Blackburn, 17 June 1940, Fitzpatrick papers, Fitzpatrick papers, NLA MS 4965/1/545. See also Fitzpatrick’s outline of the Blackburn’s role in the preparation of The Case Against the National Register, Coburg Courier, 16 April 1947.

63 Fitzpatrick to JV Barry, 12 December 1940, quoted in Watson, p. 138.64 Ibid., p. 187.65 Smith’s Weekly, 15 April 1944.66 Interview with the author, September 1995.67 The council formally abandoned public campaigning on 2 March 1942.

Minutes of Executive Committee Meetings, 2 March 1942, Fitzpatrick papers, NLA MS 4965/1/14. See also James Waghorne’s chapter 5 in this volume.

68 Coburg Courier, 16 April 1947.69 25 March 1942, CPD, vol. 170, p. 394.70 Secretary’s Report to the Executive Committee, 4 May 1942, Fitzpatrick

papers, NLA MS 4965/1/14.71 Smith’s Weekly, 13 November 1943.72 Watson, p. 159.73 Coburg Courier, 16 April 1947.74 Smith’s Weekly, 15 April 1944.75 Fitzpatrick to JV Barry, 12 December 1940, quoted in Watson, p. 138.76 17 July 1944, CPD, vol. 179, p. 25.77 For Fitzpatrick’s address in 1947, see Coburg Courier, 16 April 1947.


Brian Fitzpatrick, Maurice Blackburn and the Quest for the ‘Honest Man’ in Politics

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