The Ideology and the Cause
Gerard Henderson
Ross Fitzgerald
The People's Champion:
Fred Paterson
UQP $26.95pb, 312pp
0 7022 2959 8
IF CITIZEN X had become Australia's only Fascist Party member of parliament circa 1938, would an adulatory biography be written about him or her today? Almost certainly not. So what explains the attraction of Fred Paterson, Australia's only Communist Party MP? Read all about it in Ross Fitzgerald's The People's Champion: Fred Paterson.
Professor Fitzgerald is one of Australia's finest biographers. It's no surprise, then, to find that he has produced a well written, interesting and thorough work on the radical who held the Queensland State seat of Bowen from 1944 to 1950.
Virtually no extant material seems to have escaped the author and his researchers. The People's Champion contains some 1350 endnotes extending over almost 50 pages. The text itself is also replete with information. Early on the reader learns that in 1915, when a student at Brisbane Grammar, Fred Paterson was forced to drop studying chemistry 'due to a timetable clash'. Towards the end reference is made to the fact that, in 1957, Fred's son Jim set a 440 yard record in the New South Wales High Schools athletics competition which 'stood for ten years'. Somewhere in the middle it is recorded that Fred's younger brother Alec played in the Bowen Town Band. Well now you know. Fortunately the author manages to avoid being lost in such detail. More-over he places the career of Fred Paterson (1897-1977) within a national and international context.
Ross Fitzgerald has a sharp and penetrating mind. Even so, it's never difficult to work out where his heart is. The People's Champion is rigorous history. Yet it is self-evident as to whom the author is barracking for. Fred Paterson is presented as a life-long member of the 'progressive forces', an 'idealist' who, as a practising lawyer,
And here lies the quandary. Without question, Fred Paterson was a frugal, decent man born of humble means. He used his considerable academic talents to study law at Queensland University and, later, to win a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. In between he joined the Australian Imperial Force and served overseas, but not in action. Fred Paterson was generous to the poor, taking on 'many legal cases either for nothing or for very little recompense'. Before and during his time in the Queensland Parliament, he was a strong supporter of Italian Australians who frequently suffered discrimination working on the cane fields. In other words, your man Paterson was a decent bloke who was good to the wife (Kathleen) and kids (John and Jim) and more.
How come, then, that Fred Paterson supported one of the most appalling totalitarian regimes ever to exist? Paterson joined the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) in the 1920s and never really left it. As Fitzgerald concedes,
defended the powerless, and thwarted the grinding machinations of a legal, economic, social and ideological system which sought to preserve itself at the expense of its victims.
Holy Fred, we praise Thy name.
it is apparent that his political goals and affiliations never shifted far from those of the CPA, or more precisely from his understanding of communist theory.
The People's Champion makes clear that Paterson supported all of Soviet communism's worst excesses -- from Lenin's crushing of the nationalities, to Stalin's forced famine in the Ukraine, to the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939-41. The terror, the show trials, the invasions and the crushing of all dissent -- Paterson accepted it all without query or qualm...
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