Chris McConville

Jack Lang was born to a poor watchmaker’s family in Sydney in 1876. He was twice premier of NSW and founder of two breakaway Labor parties. Lang lives on in the popular imagination as that hapless figure at the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932, upstaged when the sword-wielding Captain de Groot of the right-wing New Guard rode in and slashed Lang’s official opening ribbon. De Groot’s ribbon-slashing wins passing notice in Frank Cain’s story of Jack Lang. Very little else in Lang’s life does. His youthful encounters with socialism during the 1890s Depression, his marriage to Hilda Bredt – daughter of feminist–socialist Bertha Bredt – or his success as a real estate agent in Auburn are not important in this story, for Cain places Lang firmly within a framework of economic and constitutional history.

Fresh from celebrating one glorious misadventure in Australia’s radical history, the labour movement now confronts a more awkward anniversary. The recent 150th year celebration of the Eureka Stockade brought with it a certain self-congratulatory afterglow. Less sanguine recollections will no doubt colour the fiftieth anniversary of the great ALP Split of 1955. This catastrophe had its origins in a decade-long struggle between right-wingers combined in Industrial Groups, and communists, over union power. The legacy of this Split ran from mass expulsions in the ALP, to collapse of state governments, disaffiliation of a union bloc and, finally, to a new political party, the Democratic Labor Party (DLP), whose preferences ensured that the ALP could not win a federal election for two decades. Whatever malaise debilitates contemporary Labor, the Split remains the party’s greatest tragedy.

An unfamiliar character from a strange land is barred from setting foot on mainland Australia. Desperate to land, he leaps from ship to shore, breaking his right leg in the process. A conservative attorney-general desperate to protect our borders, pursues this man, now on crutches, through the courts. The charismatic stranger wins his court case and holds the government up to ridicule. Shadowed unrelentingly by Canberra’s spooks, he urges Australians to look past their government’s pronouncements and discover for themselves the real dangers to world peace. Whilst history, even in Marx’s cycles of tragedy and farce, never neatly repeats itself, these duels between Egon Kisch, Czech communist, and Robert Menzies, Anglophile attorney-general, do have contemporary import. No doubt this explains why Kisch’s adventures in 1930s Australia have been told several times through film, theatre and books. In this new and enjoyable recasting of the drama, Heidi Zogbaum reminds us of the bare bones of Kisch’s Australian sojourn, focusing for the most part on his successful courtroom battles and European background. These are interspersed with detailed summaries from spies such as ‘Snuffbox’, charged with dredging up the evidence on Kisch’s European activities that led to his eventual deportation.

Brisbane’s unruly rioters and Melbourne’s enemies within continue the Vulgar Press’s excellent series of city guides. By interpreting familiar places in Melbourne and Brisbane from within a tradition of left-wing activism, the guides emphasise a different environmental heritage. Where city planning seems bent on transforming daily life into those sanitised displays that can garner tourist dollars, these collections speak to far more challenging and imaginative traditions. Sadly, and this seems especially the case in Brisbane, the buildings around which radicals fought and dreamed have, for the most part, disappeared. Photographs in Radical Brisbane present the reader with bland offices, mundane glass and concrete façades and the occasional freeway flyover. Modern city planning has efficiently purged the landscape of any radical intrusion.

The last institution of old Collingwood, the Collingwood Football Club, is poised to take flight from yuppified terraces in the former industrial suburb or new headquarters, on the site of what was once John Wren’s motordrome, Olympic Park. Now is a perfect moment in which to read this intriguing story of the one-time patron of Collingwood’s football, politics and gambling – Its masculine working-class culture, more or less. Published fifty-one years after Wren’s death, will Griffin’s biography finally allow the ghosts – not of Collingwood, but of its fictional shadow, the Carringbush of Frank Hardy’s Power Without Glory (1950) – to rest? Probably not.