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'It's My Party and I'll Cry If I Want To': Recent Autobiographical Writings of Australian Women Communists

`It's My Party and I'll Cry If I Want To': Recent Autobiographical Writings of Australian Women Communists The title of this came about as a response to a friendly paper suggestion that the titles of my papers were a bit dull. By way of answering the challenge I came up with this one in a spirit of fun. But the more I thought about it the more it came to make good sense in relation to the subject of my research: Australian communist(1) women writers. It alludes generally to the Communist Party of Australia, more specifically to a poem by Dorothy Hewett called `My Party' (discussed below); it is reminiscent of the character Pattie in Bobbin Up who spends a lot of her time singing 50s hits like `Dream'; and it suggests that `crying' -- and I'm using the term very loosely here -- is an active and positive response to whatever it was that caused upset in the first place and is moreover an assertion of intellectual and emotional independence. The ongoing controversy over Helen Darville's The Hand That Signed the Paper is a relevant and useful point of departure in a discussion of the publication of communist women writers. It lets us ask what kinds of accounts of communism get to be published by mainstream publishers like Allen and Unwin, Penguin, McPhee Gribble or Collins? Throughout the media debate about the book during 1995 it seemed that had Darville not made the equation between Jews and Bolsheviks/communists then very little by way of severe criticism and good publicity would have occurred. The ruling assumption seemed to be that all communists were evil and less than human and that their being slaughtered in revenge by the Ukrainian Nazis was perfectly reasonable. Darville's only crime was to make them all Jews. Take away Robert Manne's voice (easier said than done) and the debate can look a lot like a replayed Cold War spat: Eric Butler, Leonie Kramer and Christopher Koch versus Guy Rundle and Bill Schaeffer and many others on the left whose voices were not heard (much like during the Cold War). This is not to suggest that anticommunism is somehow fundamental to the Darville novel and its defence, or that anti-anticommunism is a central intention of its attackers. Nor is it an attempt to deny the anti-Semitism mediated in the novel. It is, however, to open up an unmapped aspect of why a mediocre book has attracted such attention. Whatever else it may be, the publication, promotion, rewarding and defence of The Hand That Signed the Paper by powerful members of Australia's literary/political community is a clear indication that the Cold War is not over and that a number of active anticommunists are still on the warpath. And the failure of just about all of Darville's critics to make the point that the random butchering of rank and file communists is also a heinous crime -- whatever bestialities were commissioned by their Party -- and the correlative silence around Darville's fraudulent adoption of a working class persona (much like Pauline Hanson's taking on the battler mantle) suggests that the spirit of passive anticommunism is also well and truly alive. It seems that the `fresh corpse of communism' needs a good kick every now and then; just to make sure it's definitely not breathing. Communist Women's Autobiographies Since the late 1970s there has been a spate of autobiographies by Australian women communists. For example, Zelda D'Aprano's Zelda (self-published, 1977 and Spinifex, 1995), Nancy Wills' Shades of Red (Communist Arts Group, 1980), Amirah Inglis's Amirah: An Un-Australian Childhood (Heinemann, 1983), Audrey Blake's A Proletarian Life (Kibble/Arena, 1984), Oriel Gray's Exit Left (Penguin, 1985), Jean Devanny's Point of Departure (University of Queensland Press, 1986),(2) Bernice Morris's Between the Lines (Sybylla, 1988), Betty Roland's series of autobiographical works which began with An Improbable Life (Collins, 1989), Dorothy Hewett's Wild Card (McPhee Gribble, 1990), Justina Williams' Anger and Love (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1993) and most recently Inglis's The Hammer & Sickle and the Washing Up (Hyland House, 1995). …