In the days when the left was red.(Comrade Roberts: Recollections of a Trotskyite)(Book review)

Comrade Roberts: Recollections of a Trotskyite, by Kenneth Gee; Desert Pea Press, 2006, $29.95.

LABOR PARTY factionalism, now largely a matter of personal ambition among interchangeable apparatchiks, once concerned issues of great historical and political importance. Because he reminds us of the significance of past conflicts in an incisive way, Kenneth Gee's lively memoir of his time as a wayward Marxist in Sydney during the Second World War serves a highly salutary purpose.

Gee, later a senior barrister and district court judge but then a young Sydney solicitor, encountered luxuriant factionalism at first hand when he joined the Australian Labor Party in the late 1930s. His local party branch in the Labor fastness of Auburn was wracked by conflict between the disciples of Jack Lang and members of an invasive Communist Party cell. Both camps engaged in ballot rigging and branch stacking as they struggled for supremacy in the branch.

Gee sided with the communist faction. As a law student he was introduced to socialist ideas by John Kerr, a fellow Fort Street High and Sydney University law school alumnus. Kerr got Gee to study Sidney and Beatrice Webb's naive portrayal of Soviet communism. As a result of reading the Webbs, Gee was forced to conclude that nobody other than Stalin and his Communist Party disciples seemed to have a workable cure for a world thrown into paralysis as a result of the Great Depression and the coming of war.

The Auburn branch of the ALP expelled Gee once the Langite faction detected his Marxist sympathies. It seemed that he had no choice other than to join the Communist Party, which in any case was poised to take over control of the state Labor Party. Gee was acquainted with Jack Hughes, Labor's leading communist, and was already in a Christian Socialist front organisation where he met Anne Taggart (John Kerr's future second wife) and Alan Dalziel, later Dr Evatt's secretary and biographer.

But in the event Gee did not sign up with Hughes and the Communist Party. He went elsewhere. In the turbulent weeks after the Stalin-Hitler pact of August 1939 upset left-wing thinking he gravitated to the handful of revolutionaries in Sydney who, under the banner of the Communist League, supported Trotsky's Fourth International. He met and "fell in" with the energetic Trotskyite John Wishart ("a solicitor with a practice that would not have survived close scrutiny by the Law Society") when he attended an anti-war rally at the Domain.

Sydney's wartime Trotskyites, though vastly out-manned by their Stalinist rivals, included some notable personalities--Laurie Short, Guido Baracchi, Jim McClelland, Nick Origlass--who formed their own claustrophobic political universe. Gee immersed himself in this tiny world and attended its intimate meetings in locales ranging from Wishart's seedy room in the Newcastle Hotel to Baracchi's trendy Castle Crag residence. He was a fascinated observer as the Trotskyites engaged in their usual furious infighting, which centred on conflict between Wishart and Origlass.