From Saxony to South Brisbane: the German-Australian socialist Hugo Kunze
Andrew G. Bonnell
Abstract
The life of the master-painter and socialist activist Ernest Hugo Kunze can help to illuminate an internationalist tradition on the left wing of the Australian labour movement. Kunze was born in Dresden, Saxony (ca. 1868), and came of age during the organized persecution of the German Social Democratic Party under Otto von Bismarck (anti-socialist law, 1878-1890). He settled in South Brisbane, and quickly became active in local labour politics. Kunze was one of the inner group of activists who formed the Social Democratic Vanguard (SDV) with Ernest Lane in 1900. The SDV presented itself as a “Socialist propagandist organisation”, and the main focus of its work was publishing socialist tracts and leaflets and placing articles in the labour press, including The Worker. Kunze was perhaps the SDV’s most tireless organizer of propaganda, sending thousands of tracts all over Queensland, in an effort to “paint the state red”. While Kunze’s work was largely organizational, he also wrote newspaper columns and tracts for the SDV. These show the influence of German Social Democracy, that was clearly formative during his early years in Saxony, but also show a wider interest in internationalism – he corresponded with socialist periodicals and groups in Europe and North America. This internationalist outlook is manifest in the degree to which he (and to some extent the SDV more generally) kept a distance from national chauvinism and racism – no mean thing in the colony/state that the labour press sometimes referred to as “Kanakaland”. This paper will reflect on the implications of Kunze’s life for linking Australian with trans- and international labour history.
Dr Andrew G. Bonnell is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Queensland.
What can the biography of one German worker who emigrated to Australia in the 1880s reveal about the international links of the avowedly socialist section of the Australian labour movement, in the decades between the emergence of labour as a political force in the Australian colonies and the First World War? The role of socialist/ social democratic organisations within the broader Australian labour movement was documented in the 1980s by writers such as Verity Burgmann and Frank Farrell, both of whom noted the internationalist side of these groups.1 While the role of German socialists in internationalist socialist groups in Sydney and Melbourne has been documented by these and other writers, the role of Ernest Hugo Kunze as a key activist in Brisbane’s Social Democratic Vanguard (SDV) is less well-known. This paper will attempt to show that Hugo Kunze’s journey from Saxony to South Brisbane is of more than individual biographical significance. Not only did his early political formation in the German socialist labour movement expose him to different intellectual influences than those more prevalent in the nascent Australian labour movement, suggesting the possibility of European influence on radical political groups in Australia, but also his career as a writer and distributor of socialist printed material points to an engagement in transnational networks of socialist thought, and the importance of print culture itself for the radical labour movement.
The master painter Ernest (Ernst) Hugo Kunze was born in Dresden in 1867, one of six children of a clerk, Hugo Ernst Kunze, and his wife, Antonia von Ebersbach. Family photographs suggest a level of modest but respectable comfort at the Kunzes’ home in Dresden’s Markgraf-Heinrich-Strasse. Kunze grew up in the Kingdom of Saxony, part of the newly united German Empire. Saxony was a regional stronghold of the emerging Social Democratic Party. From the year of Kunze’s birth, which was also the year of the founding of the North German Confederation that preceded the new Reich, the socialist people’s tribune August Bebel represented the parliamentary seat of Glauchau-Meerane in Saxony’s industrial region. Leipzig, Saxony’s commercial and industrial centre, was a crucial base for both Ferdinand Lassalle’s General German Workers’ Association, founded in 1863, and the Social Democratic Workers’ Party, founded in 1869. Saxony remained a key centre of the social democratic labour movement after the two parties merged in 1875 at Gotha in the neighbouring state of Thuringia. In 1877 Bebel took over the representation of the constituency of Dresden II in the Reichstag. The growth of the Social Democratic Party in this rapidly urbanising and increasingly industrial region of South-Eastern Germany was so impressive that by the 1903 Reichstag elections the party claimed 22 out of 23 Reichstag seats in the so-called `Red Kingdom’, and the state government had introduced a more regressive property-based franchise for the state legislative assembly (Landtag) to prevent it from being swamped by socialist deputies.2 The Social Democratic labour movement in Saxony was initially recruited primarily from the ranks of skilled workers in established trades, who were increasingly finding themselves subject to the new discipline of wage labour and the capitalist market.3 In this environment the young painter Hugo Kunze, who worked for Dresden’s famous Meissen porcelain works, was hardly an exception in his adherence to socialism in the 1880s.4
Kunze’s friend and comrade Ernest H. Lane (brother of the socialist author and Paraguay colonist William Lane), would later write that Kunze had fled Germany `on account of his illegal Socialist activities’.5 Kunze was a refugee from Bismarck’s anti-socialist legislation, which outlawed the German Social Democratic party in 1878. Legal harassment of socialists continued even after the law’s non-renewal by the Reichstag and expiry in 1890.6 Under the anti-socialist law, known Social Democratic agitators could be expelled from their places of residence, and many of the party’s leading figures went into exile. Persecution of Social Democrats took place in Saxony’s capital and royal residence city, Dresden, as it did in other German cities. In an eighteen-month period from July 1880 to January 1882, ninety party members were sentenced by Dresden’s courts for various political offences (half of them to a week or less in prison, the other half to longer terms of imprisonment).7 Crowds gathering around the city hall on an election night were driven back by police armed with fixed bayonets, and arrested Social Democrats were blamed for inciting their jurors to sedition. Hundreds of houses were searched for contraband socialist printed matter, and dozens of suspected socialists were banned from using a printing press or the mail. Some men were expelled from their homes in the city.8
Later, in Australia, Kunze was to publish a dramatic account of his experiences as a member of the outlawed party when he was not yet 18 years old, recounting a police raid on a Dresden pub, just before the 1884 Reichstag elections. The Social Democrat Vertrauensmann (organiser), managed to swallow an incriminating paper before being searched by the gendarmes, but the houses of the men present were then searched and their employers notified of their suspected Social Democratic affiliations, with some getting the sack as a result. But Kunze took evident pleasure in relating the fact that the night after the raid a Social Democratic election leaflet `was distributed in the town from end to end’.9
In another anecdote, published in The Worker in 1901, Kunze related a story of how Social Democrats smuggling the party newspaper Der Sozialdemokrat and other printed matter from Zurich across the Swiss border into Germany outwitted the police. Kunze wrote: `Literature obtained under conditions such as these was highly treasured at the hearths of the people, where privilege and the oppressor with all his serfs are powerless to confiscate’. Kunze wrote that the dedication to their own cause that German working people had developed under such conditions had led to `the most united and best organised Socialist party in the world’.10 The years of illegality saw the party develop a strong allegiance to Marxian revolutionary principles that found their definitive articulation in the 1891 Erfurt Programme, the year after the expiry of the anti-Socialist legislation. The law had manifestly failed to stop the party’s electoral advance, which surpassed 1.3 million votes in 1890.
Kunze does not appear to have been among those Social Democratic activists who were expelled from their places of residence under the anti-Socialist law, but there is plenty of reason to see his departure for Australia as politically motivated,11 to escape the oppressive and frustrating political conditions of Bismarck’s government of Germany and the constant repression of the Social Democrats. Under highly adverse conditions, with key leaders in exile or locked up, the Social Democrats were able to increase their vote in the February 1887 elections (gaining 28 per cent of the vote in Saxony compared with a nationwide average of 10 per cent), but they lost a number of their seats in the Reichstag against a better organised and less inhibited conservative coalition. By the end of that year, Kunze was at sea on the Bulimba, on his way to Australia. He arrived in Brisbane in February 1888 at the age of around twenty as a `free nominated immigrant’.12
In October 1891 Kunze was naturalised (which obliged him to swear to defend Her Majesty Queen Victoria against `all treasons and traitorous conspiracies’). Within six months he appeared on the electoral roll for Legislative Assembly elections in the district of South Brisbane, as a resident of Melbourne Street.13 His emigration from Germany was not a flight from political activism; Kunze became involved in the early years of Labour political organisation in South Brisbane. His name appears as the `Hon. Secretary’ convening a pre- election meeting with talks on `Labour in Politics’ in West End in March 1899.14
By 1900 Kunze was among the core of activists who joined Ernest Lane in forming the Social-Democratic Vanguard in Brisbane. The Manifesto of the SDV proclaimed it part of the `great international Labour Movement’. Its objective was to urge `a revival of Socialist activities’, at a time when the original impetus of the labour conflicts of the early 1890s in Queensland seemed to be dissipating? the `capitalistic oligarchy’ was still defending its control of the colony’s administration by any means it could, and Labour leaders were starting to show themselves wanting in their commitment to `the basic principles of social regeneration’.15 The SDV saw its role as that of a `Socialist propagandist organisation’.16 The main focus of its work was publishing socialist tracts and leaflets and placing articles in the labour press, including The Worker. It advocated support for socialist candidates in elections, and sought to hold Labour parliamentarians to the socialist principles of their original party platform and to oppose any attempt to change this platform: `Let the worker beware of any politician who fears to speak of Socialism’.17 At its peak, the SDV claimed to have `over five hundred members’, as well as maintaining a club- room, library, and book depot, and to have distributed 60,000 leaflets around Queensland.18 By February 1903 the Vanguard was counting some 1,500 parcels of literature, containing over 70,000 items, despatched around Queensland over the previous three years of activity. Kunze was credited with having sent out 19,222 `messengers of the Gospel of Justice and Happiness on their errand of mercy’ during 1902 alone.19 He was also among the most active SDV members in raising money for the (ultimately unrealised) project to purchase and fund a Vanguard `Travelling Van’ to transport literature around the state.
Ernest Lane described Kunze as a key member of the SDV, indeed, as `one of the immortals with regard to his devotion to the working class and his fidelity to the highest ideals of the movement. He undertook the onerous duty of dispatching all the literature and it was indeed a labour of love’.20 Kunze kept a map of Queensland on which he marked the localities to which the Vanguard distributed its literature, intent on eventually colouring all of Queensland red.21 He was also one of the `principal writers of the group’, an `earnest and brainy group’ that kept Labour newspapers throughout Queensland supplied with Vanguard articles.22 Kunze chaired the first public meeting of the Vanguard on 18 May 1900, in the Brisbane Trades Hall.23 He was also designated in a Vanguard tract as one of the `Van trustees’ who could take receipt of subscriptions and donations at the Vanguard office in Queen Street, Brisbane.24 Kunze and a fellow member of the Vanguard inner-circle, the shorthand clerk Ted Holliday, were among those listed as nominating the Social-Democratic candidate for Brisbane South, French polisher John Bond, in the 1902 elections.25
Among the seventeen numbered extant SDV tracts and leaflets that were published from 1901 to 1903 was a little tract on `Woman and the Social Problem’ written by `Eznuk’. Spelling Kunze in reverse, `Eznuk’ is a transparent nom-de- plume for Kunze. In the tract Kunze alluded to the imminent enfranchisement of women in Australia and sought to stress the common interest of men and women in overcoming the economic injustices that flowed from capitalism.26
Although he cited examples from the American press on women and the social question, it is more than possible that his emphasis on the indissoluble link between the situation of women and the social question for the working class owed something to August Bebel’s Woman and Socialism, the best-selling German Social Democratic text (which went through fifty editions between 1879 and 1910). Bebel is even reported to have sent a `sympathetic letter’ to the Brisbane Vanguard in late 1900, which `Comrade Mary’ hailed as `the event of the month from a woman’s point of view’.27 Kunze also attended a meeting of Emma Miller’s Woman’s Equal Franchise Association to give a talk on the subject of his tract. This rapprochement between social democracy and women’s suffrage seems to have been a success, with the women’s association resolving `to promote a social and dance’ in aid of the Vanguard.28
Kunze helped to maintain contact between the Brisbane Social Democrats and like-minded comrades in Europe, corresponding with the Dutch socialist newspaper Het Volk, for example.29 He also provided the Vanguard circle with accounts of major events in Germany, such as the funeral of the veteran socialist leader Wilhelm Liebknecht, presumably drawing on accounts he obtained from German sources.30 In June 1903, he contributed a commentary on the Reichstag election to The Worker that celebrated the gains made by German Social Democrats, in which he stressed that the German party was `avowedly revolutionary’, `engaged in a fight to a finish with all sections of the capitalistic forces’.31 In a contribution to the regular Vanguard `Round Table’ in The Worker, Kunze (alias Eznuk) reflected on his place between the German and Australian labour movements:
Ever since the Jingo fever doubts and reflections are haunting my mind. I have no Fatherland and cannot feel that sentiment called patriotism. Yes, I was born in Germany – that may account for much. Yet, in other spheres of life, my moral station may pass muster. When I first set foot on these bright shores, still smarting under the memory of oppression we Socialists of the ‘Fatherland’ have had to suffer, carried along in the stirring times of `90’ by that great movement, my heart went out to the brave fellows who so eloquently voiced the sentiments and hopes of Labour, and to the people who would re-echo and applaud them. At last I had found the place where Liberty was Queen, where national bigotry engendered by militarism was unknown. This be my Fatherland, I said. Shoulder to shoulder with comrades of many nations we have since laboured and battled for the Labour cause. And there are dear ones? yes, and little ones who call me dad, whose love makes home. Perhaps tomorrow that monster in the way of goodfellowship among the nations, Capitalism, goaded by insatiable greed for profit and its concomitant mania for expansion of territory, having possession of the Government and the armies, will set the world ablaze with bloody combat. Arouse your patriotism and mine – for what? To murder all we love. No, I am not a Patriot. 32
Kunze also contributed to socialist periodical literature internationally. In September 1902, The International Socialist Review published a four-page article by Kunze on `Socialism in Australia. With Special Reference to Labor in Politics in Queensland’.33 Kunze provided the journal’s American and international readership with an account of the growth of the labour movement in Australia, from the maritime strike of 1890 and the shearers’ strike of 1891 to the most recent developments in labour politics, including the transient experience of the five-day Labour government in Queensland. Kunze wrote of the desire among labour circles in Queensland for a more long-lasting labour administration in the state, to replace the `capitalistic coalition’ then in power. The desire for such a labour administration gave rise, however, to `a danger of principles being sacrificed to expediency’. Consequently, it had been necessary:
for the Socialist section of the labour movement to form a special propaganda, going under the name of the Social Democratic Vanguard. Its object is by free and plentiful circulation of Socialist literature […] and by other means, to maintain and spread the spirit of class-consciousness.34
Kunze conceded at the outset of his account that `conscious, avowed and organized socialism here in Australia is, as yet, confined to a comparatively small number of men and women, who have carried on Socialist propaganda within the last ten or fifteen years’. In addition to the SDV, he named the Social Democratic Federation, International Socialist Club, and the Socialist League. These `active propagandists would add but an insignificant thousand or two to the total of the world’s Socialist millions’, but Kunze believed that the future for `the coming of the Socialist age’ in Australia was bright.35
Kunze’s contribution to the International Socialist Review is noteworthy. The journal was produced by the Chicago socialist publisher Charles H. Kerr which, in addition to publishing books by United States socialists like Eugene Debs and Daniel de Leon, distributed cheap translations of socialist literature, including works by Marx, Engels, Wilhelm Liebknecht and Karl Kautsky. It played an important role in the dissemination of Marxian socialism in the English-speaking world: Frank Farrell has referred to a `virtual cascade of books from the Kerr & Co. press of Chicago’ reaching the far left groups in Australia.36 Kunze organised the distribution of the International Socialist Review in Brisbane through the SDV.37
Ernest Lane left Brisbane in early 1903 to join the Cosme colony in Paraguay and the SDV came under the leadership of Joe Collings, who tried to move the group towards supporting more pragmatic Labour Party politics, including coalition with liberals. The group split? Kunze and the staunch Marxist Andy Anderson were among those who broke with Collings and left the SDV.38 Kunze and Anderson remained adherents of Marxian socialism, and re-emerged in 1909 in the labour movement press as critics of the political line of the newspaper The Worker and the political direction of the Labour party at that time.39
After Kunze published a critique of The Worker’s rejoinder to Jack London, who had criticised the Australian Labour Party from an `international revolutionary socialist’ point of view, The Worker devoted its next editorial to a polemic against Kunze.40 Kunze may have been provoked by the way in which The Worker quoted Marx, the German Social Democratic Party and August Bebel himself to vindicate reformist and gradualist politics. The Worker devoted much of its nearly full-page editorial against Kunze to justifying its political position as being consistent with the revolutionary objectives of The Communist Manifesto, while pursuing these goals by `evolutionary’ means. It labelled the socialist revolutionary Kunze a sectarian who was cutting himself off from the main stream of the working-class movement. The Worker was particularly dismissive of Kunze’s objections to the White Australia policy:
Mr Kunze does not like the section of the Labour objective referring to ‘the cultivation of an Australian sentiment, bas[ed] upon the preservation of racial purity’. He seems to imagine it is opposed to the international spirit. It is nothing of the sort.41
Kunze seems to have been a politically isolated figure in some respects by 1909. The Vanguard was gone, and the international socialists were increasingly marginalised by Labour.42 Unlike Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide, where a number of Germans active in the labour movement were able to group together, Kunze, as a left-wing German immigrant, was also something of a rare bird in Queensland. (South Australia’s German community had a tradition of dissidence to draw on, and there was a greater critical mass of urban German workers in the larger cities from which to recruit social democratic groups.) Although a contingent of German Social Democrats were among the German immigrants who arrived in Brisbane on the RMS Osterley in 1910, most German immigrants up to then were engaged in farming and small business: clearing the scrub of the Lockyer Valley and the Darling Downs to establish their farms, or opening shops.43 As for Kunze, he was a partner in a painters’ and decorators’ business in Queen Street, in the centre of Brisbane, which afforded him sufficient independence and time for his political work.44 He escaped internment during the First World War. He had been naturalised since 1891, as noted, and had been married to a Queensland-born British subject, Elizabeth Ralston, since 1897. His elder son, Ernest Ralston Kunze, served on a hospital ship.45
The extent to which Kunze was involved in organised political activity after the First World War is difficult to determine, given the available sources. He certainly maintained his socialist beliefs and continued to correspond with like- minded socialists. The Commonwealth Investigation Branch suspected him of being a `secret Communist’ and monitored his informal associations with other persons of radical sympathies in 1922-24.46 He was suspected of involvement with communist propaganda, and of making donations to the Communist Party, and was reported to be in contact with Germans who were under watch for involvement in either `pro-German’ or Bolshevik propaganda, or both (the Investigation Branch did not seem to draw a strong distinction between German nationalists and communists, between Germans loyal to the deposed Kaiser Wilhelm II and followers of Lenin).47 Kunze was even suspected of seeking to raise finances for the Communist Party from other members of the German community in Queensland, of trying to stir up sympathies for the `Communist and Bolshevik’ cause among them, and of generally seeking to make trouble for the British Empire.48 On 27 March 1922, Inspector D. A. Mackiehen sent a profile of Kunze (classified Secret) to the Investigation Branch of the Commonwealth Attorney-General’s Department in Melbourne, which stated that the painter, now resident in Park Road, South Brisbane, `Employs only men who are very militant’, enjoyed a `Fair financial position’ through his painting business, and was friendly with a number of Germans (and at least one Russian) who were of interest to the authorities. His political position was described as: `Not known in Labour movement, but is very militant. Is a secret member of the Communist Party and Russian Association’. He was in communication `with Kerr, Printer of Chicago, who circulates militant literature’.49 How much credence can be put in Mackiehen’s suppositions about Kunze’s alleged activities as a clandestine organiser and fundraiser for the Communist Party is not clear – hard evidence is absent from these reports, but there is enough here to suggest that Kunze’s socialist views remained consistent, that he kept in touch with other radicals, and continued to subscribe to Charles H. Kerr’s publications. Ernest Hugo Kunze died in South Brisbane on 6 January 1934, survived by his wife and three children. He is buried in the South Brisbane Cemetery, Dutton Park.
Verity Burgmann has noted the involvement of Germans (such as Heinrich Dierks) in the International Socialist Club in Sydney (founded in 1898), and the existence of a German socialist club in Melbourne from the 1880s on, the Verein Vorwärts.50 There were also German Social Democrats active in Adelaide. The small socialist groups that existed on the left flank of the labour movement in Australia in the early 1900s may have drawn on an eclectic range of intellectual sources, but the Germans, with the experience of the Marxist mass party in Germany behind them, may be seen to have made a distinctive contribution, stressing the primacy of class struggle, and promoting an internationalist outlook that was at odds with the xenophobia and racialist rhetoric that was often prevalent in the wider labour movement in this period. Hugo Kunze can be seen as representative of this contribution of German Social Democrats to Australia’s socialist left groupings before 1914. He is perhaps representative of a wider phenomenon as well: Régis Debray has recently written on the crucial importance of print culture for nineteenth-century socialism? the dissemination of the ideas that animated the Second International was made possible by the rise of cheap mechanical printing.51 The German labour movement was particularly conspicuous for its profusion of print media: newspapers and mass-produced pamphlets.52 In his own sphere, in a small socialist group in Brisbane, Kunze was an outstanding participant in the socialist `eco-system’ described by Debray, with its vigorous transnational circulation of print media. From participating in (or at least witnessing) the smuggling of contraband socialist papers in the Germany of Bismarck’s anti-Socialist law, to the systematic distribution of socialist literature all over Queensland, to maintaining a network of contacts with socialist publishers and periodicals internationally, and remaining a loyal subscriber to Charles H. Kerr’s publications long after the days of the Social Democratic Vanguard, Kunze’s life’s work as an activist is a great illustration of the importance in that era of the transnational circulation of socialist ideas through the vehicle of print media, and of the zeal and assiduity with which his generation of socialist workers read their newspapers, pamphlets, periodicals and books.
1 Verity Burgmann, ‘In Our Time’: Socialism and the Rise of Labor, 1885-1905 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1985)? Frank Farrell, International Socialism and Australian Labour (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1981), Ch.1. See also Bertha Walker, Solidarity Forever!, (Melbourne: National Press, 1972).
2 On the history of the Social Democratic Party in Saxony, see Karsten Rudolph, Die sächsische Sozialdemokratie vom Kaiserreich zur Republik 1871-1923 (Weimar, Cologne, Vienna, 1995).
3 Ibid., 39; see also Hartmut Zwahr, Zur Konstituierung des Proletariats als Klasse. Strukturuntersuchung über das Leipziger Proletariat während der industriellen Revolution (Berlin, 1978).
4 I am grateful to Hugo Kunze’s grand-daughter, Lexie Smiles, for background on the family and for sharing some of the family’s photograph collection with me.
5 E[rnest] H. Lane, Dawn to Dusk: Reminiscences of a Rebel (Brisbane: William Brooks, 1939) 65.
6 The standard account of the German Social Democrats under the anti-socialist law is still Vernon L. Lidtke, The Outlawed Party (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966).
7 Ignaz Auer, Nach zehn Jahren. Material und Glossen zur Geschichte des Sozialistengesetzes (Nuremberg, 1913), 231.
8 Ibid., 231-232.
9 `The Vanguard Round Table’, The Worker, 22 September 1900.
10 `The Vanguard Round Table’, The Worker, 13 April 1901. On the smuggling of the party newspaper Der Sozialdemokrat into Germany, see Ernst Engelberg, Revolutionäre Politik und rote Feldpost 1878-1890 (Berlin, 1959). In 1887, 400 paying Dresden subscribers were receiving the illegal delivery regularly (284-285).
11 Apparently unlike his younger brother Johannes Kunze, who followed Hugo to Australia voluntarily, in search of adventure and opportunity. Johannes reportedly did not share Hugo’s political views, and the brothers were not close. Personal communication from a descendant of Johannes Kunze (email), March 2011.
12 Death certificate for Ernest Hugo Kunze, Queensland Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, 1934/22996;? Passenger list for the Bulimba (London, 17 November 1887 to Brisbane, 21 February 1888), Queensland State Archives (QSA), ID 18484 Registers of Immigrants’ Ships Arrivals, 431-444 (Kunze, Ernst, aged 20, free nominated immigrant from Germany, 442).
13 QSA Index of Naturalisations, no.10271, 1891, item ID 882272, microfilm no. ZZ209? Brisbane Courier, 22 April 1892, 2.
14 Brisbane Courier, 10 March 1899, 1.
15 The Red Light. Manifesto of the Social-Democratic Vanguard (Brisbane, 1901), 1. This and a collection of Vanguard tracts and leaflets are most easily accessible in digital copies at www.reasoninrevolt.net.au/biogs/E000311b.htm see also The Worker (Brisbane), 5 May 1900, which prints the inaugural version of the Manifesto and names Kunze as one of the members of the executive. On the SDV, see Burgmann, ‘In Our Time’, 186-192? Jeff Rickertt, `Organising the Revolution by Ballot: Queensland’s State Socialists, 1889-1905’, Queensland Journal of Labour History, No. 11, Sept 2010. (My thanks to Jeff Rickertt for making this article available to me before its publication.)
16 The Red Light, 2.
17 Ibid,4.
18 `Comrade Mary’, An Appeal to Women (Vanguard Tract No.13), Brisbane, n.d., 1. More details can be found in Rickertt, `Organising the Revolution by Ballot’.
19 Comrade Revlis, `Social Democratic Vanguard’, The Worker, 28 February 1903.
20 Lane, Dawn to Dusk, 65.
21 `Comrade Sam’, `Social-Democratic Vanguard’, The Worker, 30 June 1900.
22 Lane, Dawn to Dusk, 66.
23 `Comrade Sam’, `Social-Democratic Vanguard’, The Worker, 26 May 1900.
24 `Comrade Mary’, An Appeal to Women, 4 (referring to Kunze under the pseudonym `Eznuk’).
25 `The General Election. Yesterday’s Nominations’, Brisbane Courier, 7 March 1902, 5.
26 `Eznuk’, Woman and the Social Problem (Vanguard Tract No.14), Brisbane, n.d. [1902].
27 `Comrade Mary’, `Social-Democratic Vanguard’, The Worker, 22 December 1900.
28 `Comrade Sam’, `Social-Democratic Vanguard’, The Worker, 13 July 1901.
29 T.L.J., `Social-Democratic Vanguard’ The Worker, 13 October 1900.
30 `The Vanguard Round Table’, The Worker, 20 October 1900. An earlier Vanguard column in The Worker (6 October 1900) had already marked Liebknecht’s passing, exclaiming: `If only we had a Liebnecht [sic] in Australia!’
31 Eznuk, `The German Elections’, The Worker, 27 June 1903.
32 The Worker, 1 December 1900. The reference to `Jingo fever’ is to the fervour whipped up around the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer War.
33 E.H. Kunze, `Socialism in Australia. With Special Reference to Labor in Politics in Queensland’, International Socialist Review, Vol.III, 3, September 1902,161-164. Kunze’s SDV comrade Andy Anderson also contributed a number of pieces to this journal from 1903 to 1905.
34 Ibid., 163.
35 Ibid., p.161.
36 Farrell, International Socialism and Australian Labour, 10. Aside from Kunze’s German antecedents, the ideological influences on the SDV and the other socialist groups in Australia were more eclectic than references to European Marxism indicate, however. Ian Turner referred rightly to the influence of `the ideas of [Edward] Bellamy, Robert Blatchford and William Morris’. Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics: The Labour Movement in Eastern Australia, 1900-1921 (Canberra: ANU, 1965), 30.
37 Eznuk, `Social Democratic Vanguard’, The Worker, 30 August 1902.
38 Lane, Dawn to Dusk, 68-69, 86-87.
39 A.A. Morrison, `The Brisbane General Strike of 1912’, in D. J. Murphy, et al., Prelude to Power (Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1970), 127.
40 `Jack London on the Labour Party’, The Worker (Brisbane), 20 January 1909; `The Discussion is Resumed’, The Worker (Brisbane), 27 January 1909.
41 `The Discussion is Resumed’. The Worker went on to say that `Australian sentiment’ could only be abolished by getting rid of Australia.
42 Unfortunately, evidence on Kunze’s political activities becomes scarce after the fading away of the SDV and its regular columns in the Queensland labour press, and no personal papers relating to his political work have survived in the possession of his family. Further sifting of sources on Queensland labour history will be needed to recover other traces of his activism.
43 Andrew G. Bonnell, `Missing linke? The Queensland labour movement and German Social Democracy before 1914’, in idem and Rebecca Vonhoff, eds, Germans in Queensland: 150 Years (volume in preparation for publication, 2011),.
44 Advertisements in Brisbane Courier, 6 March 1907, 26 July 1911, announcing changes in the partnerships.
45 For E.R. Kunze’s war service, see National Archives of Australia (NAA), Canberra, CP979/2, item 6289 Ernest Ralston Kunze.
46 NAA, Canberra, A402/ W248 German Revolutionaries allied to Communists (1922-1924). Excerpts from weekly reports on German propaganda in Queensland.
47 Ibid., 2, entry for 13 June 1922;? 3, entry for 28 December 1922. A couple of Germans linked to the (Catholic) Centre Party fell under suspicion when it was noted that a leader of that party was called Herr Marx. Ibid., 3, entry for 16 October 1922.
48 Ibid., 3-4, entries for 12, 19 January and 12 February 1923.
49 Inspector D.A. Mackiehen to Investigation Branch, Attorney-General’s Department, 27 March 1922, in NAA, Canberra, A402/ W248. Mackiehen mistakenly gave Kunze’s date of birth as 1872.
50 Verity Burgmann, ‘In Our Time’, 101, 108-109, 117, 119. On the Verein Vorwärts, see also Walker, Solidarity Forever!, 49-50.
51 Régis Debray, “Socialism and Print”, New Left Review 46 (N.S.), July/ August 2007, 5-28.
52 See Andrew G. Bonnell, `Did They Read Marx?’