"The most expelled man in Australian politics"
Red Hot. The Life and Times of Nick Origlass, by Hall Greenland
Reviewed by Alan Thornett
Hall Greenland’s excellent biography of Nick Origlass is a useful edition to the early history of the Trotskyist movement.
Copies available at £11.50 including p & p from W. Greenland, 11 Temple Fortune Lane, London NW11 7UB; cheques payable to W. Greenland
Nick Origlass was a central leader of the Australian section of the Fourth international for 30 years — from the mid 1930s until the mid 1960s — when he was expelled as part of a minority opposing the reunification which formed the United Secretariat. After that he remained an active and campaigning socialist, mostly in local government, until his death in May 1996 at the age of 88. He was politically active for a total of 60 years.
Hall Greenland presents him as "the most expelled man in Australian political history". He explains that he was: "ousted from the Communist Party in 1931, from the State Council of the Unemployed in 1939, from his union in 1946 and 1955 (the first time by the Communists and the second time by the anti-Communists), from the Labour Party in 1955 and 1968, from the Fl in 1965, and even from the Leichard Council in 1969. And this isn’t counting the times the bosses tried to sack him.
Its an interesting point but his various expulsions were in fact quite diverse events -although some of them, at least, did reflect his prickly and uncompromising character. Origlass, however, was first and foremost a fighter for the rights of the working class, that is what shaped his life, and that is what comes through in the book most clearly.
His first battle was a beer boycott, in 1929 in Mount Isa, a mining town in the hot and thirsty Australian interior, which began in October 1929 and ended 10 months later in August 1930. Town mass meetings demanded, and eventually got, a reduction the price of beer from two shillings to one shilling and threepence a pint.
He left Mt Isa in 1933 to work in Brisbane and Sidney where he came into contact with Trotskyists, and eventually joined the Workers Party of Australia - the Australian section of the Left Opposition.
In 1937 he moved to Balmain, the industrial district of Sidney, and two years later started work as a blacksmith in Mort’s ship yards - where he was to play a major role as a key rank-and-file organiser for the next 10 years.
This is the most fascinating part of the book. For me it was déja vu with a vengeance, since the battles he was involved in at the shipyards in Sydney during the 1940s are a remarkable parallel with the battles myself and others fought at Cowley 30 years later. In Balmain they faced not only management and right-wing union leaders acting together but the industrial role of the Communist Party.
Many of the measures taken against them then would be painfully familiar to Cowley car workers in the 1970s: ballot rigging by the right-wing, de-recognition of elected left-wing union reps, the expulsion of left-wingers from the union, the disbanding of militant branches of the union, and key union positions held by renegade Trotskyists who had moved to the right.
I was de-recognised by Cowley management in 1974 and defended in a month long strike. 30 years earlier in February 1945 Nick Origlass was also was de-recognised, in his case by the Stalinist leadership of the union - the Federated Iron Workers Association - for failing to get workers back to work as ordered under war-time regulations.
He was defended for 6 weeks by nearly 3,000 Balmain shipyard workers. It was one of the most remarkable strikes in Australian trade union history, such strikes over the recognition of individual militants are in any case rare. And the strike was aimed directly at the Stalinists themselves - a strike led by Trotskyists who they had marginalised and vilified. When 600 strikers turned up at the union branch meeting to call for the ban on Origlass to be lifted the Stalinists refused to take a vote.
The end of the strike was as remarkable as its beginning. The strikers turned up at a union meeting and claimed the right under an overlooked rule to re-elect the leadership. They voted out the existing leadership and voted in a new one - with Nick Origlass elected not just as the delegate for Mort’s shipyard but as the full-time official of the union!
After the vote they marched through Balmain to the union office to install the new leadership only to find that the existing officials had barricaded themselves in and were refusing to leave! They resolved the problem by setting up a new office, from which the union could function, under the leadership of Origlass and the militants. It was a total victory.
Mort’s yard did not survive very long into the 1950s, but the contribution which Origlass and other early Trotskyists around the world made did survive - with all its problems - and the workers movement has been much stronger as a result.
The book is a short history of the Australian Trotskyism and essential reading for those interested in the history of the movement.