Different workers: Political commitment and subaltern labour in Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Brumby Innes

Abstract

Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Aboriginal writings from the 1920s are among the earliest, by a communist, to represent Aboriginal workers in the Australian cattle industry. However, critics have not, in general, situated these writings in relation to Prichard’s Marxist politics or to left-wing discourse more generally. Indeed, there is a general consensus that Prichard’s socialism could not inform her writings about colonial relationships in the way it informed those about white workers. This article reassesses this position by situating her rarely read play Brumby Innes in relation to discourses about race and labour in the Communist Party and on the left in Australia in the 1920s. It argues that Brumby Innes grapples with the disconnection between the concerns of the Australian left and the conditions of Aboriginal workers, at times explicitly pointing to the left’s failure to address the exploitation of Aborigines working on cattle stations. It suggests that Prichard’s own orthodox Marxist commitments were stretched and challenged by her encounter with the Aboriginal worker, and that Brumby Innes constitutes a crucial meditation on silence, political inarticulacy and rage.

Keywords:

• Katharine Susannah Prichard
• Marxism
• committed writing
• Aboriginal labour
• Australian communism

Notes

1. This is also an ambivalence for Prichard herself who, throughout her life, identified strongly with radical nationalism, at times seeing it as a national ancestry for the communist struggle in Australia (see Prichard 1943, 1982, 2000).

2. There is fierce debate about the effect of the pastoral industry on traditional Aboriginal culture and life practices. Ann McGrath (1987) argued, famously, that the northern pastoral industry in the early 20th century did not devastate Aborigine culture like settlement in the south and that many Aboriginal people living and working on station properties saw themselves as sharing the land with pastoralists. For a rebuttal of this argument see Deborah Bird Rose (1991), who provides a far more devastating account of life for Aborigines working on cattle stations in the early 20th century.

3. Recent work by Kevin Anderson (2010) has revealed a late Marx, whose understanding of historic change and political resistance was far more complex and multilinear than this truncated summary suggests. However, the writings that Anderson focuses on are relatively obscure, and this was not the Marx that informed communist discourse in Australia in the 1920s.

4. On this point we should remember Marx’s (1979) instructive differentiation between class as economic descriptor and class as a basis for political transformation in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”: “In so far as millions of families live under economic conditions that divide their mode of life, their interests and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile contrast to the latter they form a class. In so far as there is merely a local interconnection among these small peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no unity, no national unity, and no political organization, they do not form a class” (608). The point here is that the transformation of the Karri workers from an economic grouping without political awareness into a class in the proper Marxist sense is achieved quite simply through their exposure to propaganda and political analysis.