‘Stop the war on Aborigines’: the Communist Party of Australia and the fight for Aboriginal rights 1920-1934

This thesis provides a detailed historical reconstruction of the thought and practice of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) regarding Aboriginal rights from 1920-1934. Based primarily upon archives of the CPA press and internal CPA records, it charts a development from a perspective that failed to challenge the racism of the Australian mainstream, and even embraced some of these racist ideas, towards one of solidarity with Aboriginal resistance to colonisation. Running through this study is a critical engagement with early Marxist thought about Indigenous peoples and settler-colonialism. The classical Marxist tradition insisted on the importance of anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles for the revolutionary working-class movement. However, influential texts in this tradition also contained racist ideas about supposedly “primitive” Indigenous people in Australia and this contributed to the delayed emergence of a pro-Aboriginal communist perspective. As the CPA expanded to become a mass party during the Depression, the experiences of the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association in NSW (forced underground in 1929) and continuing armed Aboriginal resistance in the Northern Territory, inspired theoretical innovation by Australian communists. In 1931, a CPA manifesto for Aboriginal rights drew on Marxist theory to profoundly articulate the ways that Australian capitalism was predicated on continuing Indigenous genocide, along with the importance of the Aboriginal struggle for the liberation of the entire working class. These new insights provided the basis for the first campaigns for Aboriginal rights by working-class organisations in Australian history. This campaigning stopped a police-planned massacre of Yolngu people in Arnhem Land 1933, challenged the imprisonment of Aboriginal warriors in Darwin in 1934 and laid the basis for a tradition of trade union solidarity that would play a crucial role in many campaigns for Aboriginal rights across Australia in the following decades.