User:Fifelfoo/bugle review

Fifelfoo. Review: Debelle, Penelope (2011) Red Silk: the life of Elliott Johnston QC Kent Town, SA, Australia: Wakefield Press.

Elliot Johnston was an army educator, an anti-war leader, a senior Communist Party Australia leader, a principle member in South Australia, a lawyer, Queens Council, judge and a commissioner in Black Deaths into Custody. His practice exemplifies the return-from-war spirit of Australia in the 1940s and 1950s; though in a communist guise. And Debelle's biography of him is deeply flawed.

As the theme of the biography, Debelle's inability to see humanism as compatible with communism or the Communist Party of Australia, this is a failure of the highest order of subject empathy in a biographer. (xi–xiii, 145) In Wollongong, at a conference on Baby Boomer activists, I saw a room full of baby boomer social democrats, labor party supporters, and a few hard militant radicals—along with a younger crop of anarchist influenced libertarian Marxists—applaud a hardline pro-Stalin Communist Party of Australia activist. She'd raised her family hard, and done difficult local work for the Party, and for the Australian revolution. And sectarian political divides vanished because the conference saw her work as a genuine commitment to the shared hope for a socialist Australia. Penelope Debelle doesn't understand this, and never will. She spends an entire book grappling with Elliott Johnston's mutual commitment to the Communist Party of Australia, and to a communist revolution in Australia—but remains incapable of seeing communism and the Communist Party as the vehicle and load that was Elliot's humanism. Perhaps Debelle should have read the communist historian Amirah Inglis, who understood "the practical good that some Australian Communists achieved through the trade unions, in running mothers' clubs for Aboriginal people, in encouraging tolerance towards migrants, and in helping the marginalised"(204)—Australian communists were committed to a new world coming into being, and personally experienced the signs announcing its coming in their day to day party work as socialists, not as supporters of Stalin.

As a failure as a history, we should be more worried. Debelle gets ASIO's foundation date wrong by seven years (39) and fails to understand Soviet society as it was giving us a CPA dissolution bill era bogeyman instead (55). She regularly turns aside to filling material with anecdotes from secondary characters not connected to Elliott or her inquiry into socialist humanism. I have deep suspicions about her capacity to produce military history during the periods of Elliott's service. I am deeply disappointed with her capacity to get inside CPA party life, and adequately contextualise Elliott's position particularly before the 1970s—particularly as she characterises Elliott as a humanist socialist when his maintenance of a leadership position in South Australia indicates very strongly otherwise. She believes his crocodile tears over the Soviet legal system, a moment that threatened to genuinely open up Elliot's complexity of political beliefs. I only really trust Debelle on the legal anecdotes, but even here, cases that aren't significant have an anecdotal attention paid to them that focuses on journalistic interest but doesn't advance the biography of Elliott.

Perhaps worst of all Debelle seems to have deep feelings of disgust towards the working class and rank-and-file communists, who are dismissed, elided, overshadowed and reviled. This is illustrated throughout, but becomes most clear in her characterisation of Elliott's highly lucrative industrial injury legal practice as a paternalistic relationship between social better and social inferior. You have to wonder if Debelle would have written this at all if Elliott didn't come from good protestant lower middle class stock, and marry into the bourgeoisie. There are far too many biographies of bourgeois communists inquiring into how idealism and materialism could have married and not divorced.

For the military historian there are some key data points to glean from this work, where Debelle's inability to analyse does not affect the quality of her narrative. Debelle seems to be able to repeat an anecdote with veracity. Debelle's accounts of the Army Education Services (42) being a dumping ground for commos, and the effects this had on middle class commos and on the improved education of servicemen is worth using. It may contribute to an understanding of Australian mutinies in the Pacific. If we strip Debelle's hostile and out of date analysis of Soviet perfidy from Johnston's travels behind the Iron Curtain for Peace there's some useful material on the early Soviet organised peace conferences for the military historian. Finally, the chapter on Elizabeth Johnston's life is a useful depiction of a woman cadre and behind the scenes leader—Liz was a harder comrade than Elliot. (There are other uses of this work for the social historian, but they remain largely data points as for the military historian).

Debelle's account indicates some of the basic flaws of non-academic history, and in particular, non-academic biography. (Debelle is a journalist and received Australia Council funding for this work). Often the analysis, narrative structure and facts outside of the author's area of expertise are deficient. Many times this kind of work can supply us with something a little better than a primary source; but, as when we use primary sources we should seek out secondary sources for the importance of the stories we glean from amateur biographies.