Adam Carr Intellectuals and Politics in 1930s Melbourne Events leading to the formation of the Australian Council for Civil Liberties, 1914-37 2. Prologue On the evening of 3 December 1935, 14 people gathered in the rooms of the Henry George League in Melbourne "for the purpose of forming an organisation to defend civil liberties." [2] The meeting was chaired by Geoffrey Leeper, a lecturer in chemistry at Melbourne University. Those attending included the secretary of the Henry George League, J G Atkinson, the well-known painter Max Meldrum, prominent Melbourne lawyers Eugene Gorman and J V (Jack) Barry, another (less well-known, woman) painter Theo Lucas, and Brian Fitzpatrick, at this time becoming well-known as a journalist and supporter of left-wing causes, but not yet a published historian. [3] Also present was Dorothy Davies, a 22-year-old part-time lecturer in economics and history at Melbourne University and later to become Fitzpatrick's second wife. Today Dorothy Fitzpatrick, at 83, is the only surviving participant in that meeting. When I interviewed her at her Glen Iris home, her memories of the time were clear, despite the passage of more than 60 years. From a comfortable and conservative background (her grandfather had been one of Melbourne's leading business figures in the 1890s and her father was an active Young Nationalist), Dorothy Davies had come to the university in 1931, and had been a student of two of the university's best-known radicals, Herbert "Joe" Burton and W Macmahon "Mac" Ball. According to Manning Clark, Ball "in the 1920s and 1930s excited a whole generation of Melbourne students in the future of mankind." [4] Despite this inspiration, Fitzpatrick recalls that she was "not seriously active in student affairs," though she had been "fresher rep" on the Public Questions Society and the History Committee. She had not joined the university's most leftwing group, the Labour Club, since she was "not keen on theory." She had joined a more moderate group led by Leeper, who was "a kind of left-wing rationalist, not sympathetic to the Communist Party." [5] She regarded herself as a follower of Burton and Ball's "mildly socialist point of view." [6] The two principal organisers of the meeting were Brian Fitzpatrick and Lucas, who had been university contemporaries in the 1920s. Lucas was a woman of independent means from a family with a radical tradition, and acted as unofficial organising secretary. [7] Her father had been a rationalist and opponent of the Boer War, an old- fashioned reforming type and an active Henry Georger," Dorothy Fitzpatrick recalls. This connection explains why the ACCL's founding meeting was held at the Henry George League's rooms. [8] In November Lucas had sent out invitations. "Some of the members of the Book Censorship Abolition League - and others - are interesting themselves in the formation of a Council for Civil Liberties on the model of the English organisation," she wrote to the Secretary of the Trades Hall Council. "A meeting is to be held in the rooms of the Henry George League on Tuesday December 3rd at 8pm. We should be very glad indeed if a representative of the Trades Hall Council could be present. Will you be good enough to let me know whether this will be possible?" [9] Apparently it was not possible, for no THC representative attended. According to Dorothy Fitzpatrick, the main inspiration behind the meeting was a person not actually present at it. This was Roy Rawson, whose bookshop cum meeting room at 169 Exhibition St was a centre for Melbourne's small but lively circle of radical intellectuals. As a bookseller and a socialist, Rawson had been prominent in the agitation against book censorship in the early 1930s. "Without him neither the Book Censorship Abolition League (BCAL) nor the Council for Civil Liberties would have got organised," Fitzpatrick recalls. Rawson, Lucas and Ball had been on the committee of the BCAL. Rawson was also the only member of the group which formed the ACCL who had both a working-class background and links to the ALP and the wider labour movement (he later became an ALP state MP).[10] As a student and protegée of Ball, Dorothy Davies had also attended the BCAL's meetings, where she first met Brian Fitzpatrick. "He was then a journalist on the Herald, though he quarrelled a lot with his boss, Sir Keith Murdoch," she recalls. "He was also drinking very badly, though he had been told he mustn't. I saw a lot of him on the Glen Waverley train, going home from BCAL meetings." [11] Brian Fitzpatrick, 30 at this time, was the son of a Catholic, ALP- voting schoolteacher from western Victoria.[12] He grew up in suburban Melbourne and attended state schools, from where he advanced as a scholarship boy to Melbourne University in 1922. Melbourne University was at this time a very conservative institution. "The University of 1922. . . was a resort for sons and some daughters of gentlemen, and a few others," he later recalled. Despite his disadvantages, he flourished there, meeting and impressing such giants of the University as Ernest Scott, Professor of History, and William Boyce Gibson, Professor of Philosophy. [13] He shared a room in Trinity College with Geoffrey Leeper, and met Kathleen Pitt, later to become his first wife (and later still, as Kathleen Fitzpatrick, a historian and author). In 1925 he was chief of staff of Farrago, and in the same year was, along with Mac Ball and Ralph Gibson (son of Professor Boyce Gibson), a founder member of the Melbourne University Labour Club. Leaving University, Fitzpatrick became a freelance journalist, writing for the Bulletin, the Melbourne Punch and Smith's Weekly. After a brief and unsuccessful attempt to work as a journalist in London, he moved to Sydney 1931 to work for the anti-Langite ALP paper the World. Here he developed his interest in civil liberties issues. "You may conceive of the corpus of Australian democracy lying inert in the anaesthesia of ignorance, the while dexterous surgeons (with international qualifications) direct the novices, like Mr Bruce and Sir Robert Gibson, how to cut their way through the vital organs," he wrote in the World in 1932.[14] In August 1932 he married Kathleen Pitt, but the married failed after three years. As a result of his marriage, Fitzpatrick returned to Melbourne and got a job on the Herald. By 1935 Fitzpatrick was at the centre of Melbourne's intellectual left, such as it was at that time. He had links to the university, the press, the ALP and the Communist Party, to the legal world, to writers and artists and booksellers. The forming of the ACCL may have been, as Dorothy Fitzpatrick says, Rawson's idea, but it was Fitzpatrick's network of friends and contacts that made it possible. From his university days came Ball, Lucas and Leeper, together with Sandy Gibson (son of William Boyce Gibson and his successor in the chair of philosophy, and brother of Ralph) and other staff members. From the literary and artistic world came Meldrum ("rather to some people's horror due to his cultural anti-semitism," says Dorothy Fitzpatrick [15]) and Rawson, with his links to the ALP. From the legal world came the liberal lawyers Barry and Gorman. Fitzpatrick was the best-connected of the ACCL's founding members, and he soon became its dominant figure. Footnotes [2] My account of this meeting is based on the ACCL Minute Book, to be found in the Fitzpatrick Papers, National Library of Australia (hereafter NLA) 4965/1/19894. Direct quotes are taken from the Minute Book, which is in Geoffrey Leeper's handwriting. The ACCL's records from its foundation until Fitzpatrick's death are contained in the Fitzpatrick Papers. [3] Details of Fitzpatrick's career are in Brian Fitzpatrick: A Radical Life, Don Watson, Sydney 1979. [4] M Clark, "Melbourne: an intellectual tradition," Melbourne Historical Journal, 2, 1962, 17. Kathleen Fitzpatrick (first wife of Brian Fitzpatrick) says of Ball at this time, "a very handsome young man, of Irish descent, dark-eyed and dark-haired. . . known to all the women students as a 'heart-throb.' He was also an extremely gifted teacher." (Solid Bluestone Foundations, Melbourne 1983, 171) [5] Leeper was the son of Professor Alexander Leeper, Master of Trinity College, who had led the anti-German agitation at the university during World War I. His commitment to civil liberties may have been a reaction against his father's views. [6] Direct quotes are from my interview with Dorothy Fitzpatrick, née Davies, on 26 September 1997, at her home in Glen Iris. Mrs Fitzpatrick did not wish the interview to be tape-recorded. [7] Watson, Brian Fitzpatrick, 80 [8] Dorothy Fitzpatrick interview [9] Lucas letter, Fitzpatrick papers, NLA 4965/1/117 [10] Geoff Browne, Biographical Register of the Victorian Parliament 1900-84, Melbourne 1985, 175. Rawson's father was a gold miner, and he began his working life at 14. He was the father of the historian Don Rawson. [11] Dorothy Fitzpatrick interview [12] This section is drawn from Watson, Brian Fitzpatrick, chapters 1 and 2. [13] He seems to have used the surname Boyce Gibson (Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Solid Bluestone Foundations, 169, refers to him as Boyce-Gibson). His sons Alexander and Ralph used the surname Gibson). [14] Quoted in Watson, 43. Sir Robert Gibson (no relation to the Boyce Gibsons) was the Governor of the Commonwealth Bank and a favourite bogey of the left. [15] Dorothy Fitzpatrick interview. Meldrum was a controversial figure in both Melbourne cultural circles and in Australia's artistic history. Although a radical in some areas, he was an artistic conservative and he supported Menzies's plans to establish an anti-modernist Academy of Australian Art. He apparently associated modernism with Jewish influence in art.