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Last Updated: November 1, 2009
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Interview with Marion Harper

(2,000 words)

Probably the most urgent task we have today is to unite the working class movement, and the trade union movement, and whatever allies we can find at the highest possible level.

I came to Australia from England in 1949. I was 16, a firm royalist and lover of King & Country.

I met my husband at the Union Jack club in Melbourne. He was quite militant. He came from a Scottish working class family of miners, so he had a militant background and that rubbed off on me. I started to look at things in a different way.

We married and moved to Richmond in the 1950's - a time of recession - and we lived behind a shop. We were quite poor and I remember a chap standing on the corner selling a newspaper called The Guardian. I used to walk passed him to go to the local shops and the headlines used to catch my eye.

I used to think 'well, that makes sense'. One day I got up the courage to buy one - it took a lot of courage for someone with my background. . I took it home and read it. My husband also read it and we thought 'this is good stuff, it really explains what is happening here in Richmond'. People sometimes couldn't buy food; kids were going to school with no shoes and yet big shops and businesses seemed to be thriving.

We wanted to know why there was such poverty in such a rich country, and this paper, The Guardian explained why. So the next time I went past the paper seller, I told him how much I appreciated the material.

He said "we are having a lecture next Friday. Why don't you come?"

So we went and that was the beginning of our activism. We learned there were alternative ways of looking at things. We learned that capitalism wasn't the only system, that there were solutions to problems, and that people were the only ones who could change society. That was the beginning of our involvement.

We joined the Communist Party in Richmond in 1956 and our understanding grew. We were very impressed with the people in the Communist Party. They were dedicated, honest and supportive. It was like having a huge family.

We became very involved and of course that began to lead up to 1960 which was the big split in the world communist movement and in the Australian Communist Party. . We had to study hard to find what the split was about. Why people were supporting the Soviet Union or why people were supporting China, what was it all about? What does it mean? What impact will it have on the world and our community?

We read as much as we could and we talked to people to try to find out what the implications were. We decided that the Soviet Union had begun to take incorrect steps and we supported what China was saying. We weren't very popular in the Branch for this.

At that time, the place where we were living was going to be condemned and we had nowhere to live. We had no money. I was very active in the peace movement at that time.

I was working with a woman called Dorothy Gibson who was quite well known in the Communist Party. She was the wife of Ralph Gibson, who was a cadre.

Someone told us a house was coming on the market in Reservoir from public housing so we borrowed a hundred pounds from Dorothy (a hundred pounds was a lot of money in those days) and we put a deposit on the Housing Commission house and moved to Reservoir.

We joined the Communist Party branch in Reservoir, from which we were eventually expelled for arguing about the differences between the Soviet Union and China. First we were gagged and told that if we continued to debate the issues we would be expelled.

We said we couldn't stay in a party that gagged people from debating such fundamental issues, but the rules stood,so my husband resigned and I was expelled.

We had to decide then what we were going to do. We didn't want to stop being involved in things, so we decided that we would become involved in the local community and try to change things through that. We joined a Progress Association, we found out there was one in existence at the time - the Preston Progress Association.

My husband went to a meeting. There were five old guys sitting around a potbellied stove in a house. They were really not getting very much done, although we discovered that they had achieved a great deal in the past when Preston was being built up.

My husband couldn't get anything done because he couldn't get a resolution seconded, so he asked me to go with him. They had never had a woman before.

I remember these very courtly old gentlemen sitting around this stove and Jim (my husband) moved a resolution and I seconded it. They said, "your good woman is not allowed to speak. She is only here as a visitor.

They were totally unused to women in the Association. I was horrified. Anyway, I continued to go and then we suggested that rather than sit round the pot-bellied stove, we should meet in a hall - then people might be encouraged to come.

We took a hall in Reservoir, the Donald Street Senior Citizens and from that the Progress Association grew. Quite large, it grew; we used to get 50 to 60 to a meeting.

We took up a range of issues - local, state and federal. Any political or social justice issues that affected the community, we took up. We had a number of campaigns; perhaps the most famous campaign we initiated was fighting the Commissioners after the Kennett government sacked the councillors.

We went up to the council chamber with a black coffin on our heads - a big wooden coffin - to indicate the death of democracy in Darebin. This got maximum publicity.

The next issue was when the Commissioners decided to close down the Town Hall. We had a massive campaign over that. It was successful. We saved the Town Hall. As a result of that, more and more people became involved in the struggles.

Going back to when we moved here - I needed to go to work. Jim had become a tram driver. The pay was not very big and we had a lot of expenses with 4 children, as a result of my involvement in the peace movement, through the Party, II became involved in the Unitarian Church.

Victor James was the minister of the church at the time and I was involved in the planning of the big meeting with the Red Dean at the Exhibition Building. I became very involved with Frank Hartley, Victor James and Alf Dickie - who were the three ministers who worked together in the peace movement.

As a result of working with them, Frank Hartley offered me a job in the Victorian Peace Movement. So I worked for the peace movement for quite some time. Early on there were some great campaigns there. It was interesting.

I remember Joyce Clayton - who was the honorary secretary of the Unitarian church - used to organize a few of us to walk around the city with placards, defending the Soviet Union. It was during the cold war. The city council's rules were that you could not impede the flow of pedestrian traffic, so we had to walk single file.

I remember we walked with placards in our hands, defending the Soviet Union and condemning the cold war, and people would call out to us "GO BACK TO RUSSIA, YOU TROUBLE MAKERS, GO BACK TO RUSSIA". or 'BETTER DEAD THAN RED', I was pretty nervous, I must say.

I was young, but we would take these walks around the city regularly, Joyce striding ahead of me and me hiding behind her rather large form, hoping people wouldn't see me.

I joined the church as a result of my involvement with Joyce., My children went to the Sunday School and my oldest daughter eventually became a Sunday School teacher, President, Vice President and even now she is involved in proof reading the Beacon, the church magazine.

My whole family was involved in the church. At one stage I had two children going to Sunday School, I was on the Committee of Management, my mother and father were involved, my father, Harold Jury, became the chairman of the church. My brother, Len Cooper has been involved for many, many years.

Finally I was asked to take over the role of Secretary/Organiser which I did for several years. Then I was offered a job with public housing tenants in Reservoir, something close to my heart and I took it.

With the Progress Association and the tenants group I became immersed in all aspects of life in Darebin. I have been doing that since 1960. Now it is 2004 and I am 71, I am still doing that. Although I was expelled from the Communist Party in 1960, that didn't mean that I, or we, weren't still committed to socialism - we were!

We continued to carry out our responsibilities as socialists as much as we could, with awareness of the fact that the system of capitalism won't solve the problems of the working class and that we need a planned economy. So wherever we went, and we were quite well known, we never hid the fact we were members of the Communist Party - we were proud of it.

The people I worked with all knew and respected that. So, apart from a few reactionaries , I have never had anyone who has changed their view of our work because we were communists - although I have had people say to me "you don't look like a communist".

I often wonder what a communist looks like. We had lots of stoushes with conservative councillors who made statements about the' Progress Association meeting in a telephone box and led by communists,' that sort of thing, but otherwise I never found that the connection affected my work at all.

We never rejected our commitment to socialism and I continue today to believe, fervently, that there is no alternative to socialism. It is very important today, given the attacks, and more vicious attacks, on the working class movement, particularly under the guise of 'dealing with terrorism'.

My view is that , I believe that they are using terrorism to introduce vicious legislation that will be used to attack any attempt by the working class to organize and that it will be used against progressive organisations. I think we need to get terrorism into perspective. I think we need to talk to people about what is happening - and what is happening in housing, health, education, social welfare, social justice, democracy.

This is the terrorism that exists in Australia today, the terrorism by the State on peoples living conditions and quality of life. I think all of these things have to be talked about wherever we are working, because whereas someone with a health problem will see what is happening in health, if they don't have children at school, they won't see what is happening in education.

Really, it is an overall package. You can't isolate one issue from another, because there is no question that capitalist governments can't afford to wage wars of aggression and to still provide for the needs of the people.

People are going to have to say, strongly and in a united way "We pay taxes and we want those taxes returned to us in the form of services. We are not prepared to spend them on war unless we are being attacked."

Probably the most urgent task we have today is to unite the working class movement, and the trade union movement, and whatever allies we can find at the highest possible level.

When I look at small organizations fighting for the same things, but suspicious of each other, or are jealous of their territory or whatever, I would like to remind them there is a bigger issue, a more important issue - that is unity.

Then we can fight the real enemy, not each other.