JoSCCI


'One of the Greatest of Our Women' -
Jean Devanny's Revolutionary Marxism

Carole Ferrier
English Department
The University of Queensland

To talk about Jean Devanny now, and her role in revolutionary politics in Australasia,1 positions us at the turns of three centuries. Jean was born at the end of the nineteenth century, and her early political formation was in the class struggle in the mining communities of Aotearoa New Zealand2 (the place of work of both her father and her husband) in the early years of the twentieth century. Her extraordinarily energetic activism, the radicalism of much of her writing, and the way she consistently made the political of personal relevance puts much of the New Left and the second wave of women's liberation (or what formed many of my contemporaries in the mid Twentieth Century), to some shame. Communist Parties were set up out of embryonic Marxist groups around the world in the wake of 1917, and began preparing the conditions for mobilising the power of the working class to reverse the hegemonic operations of exploitation and oppression in their own societies. Through the 1920s and early 1930s, Party members in Australia saw their own revolution on the horizon. Jean Devanny was a key figure, especially through the 1930s, in the propagation of the vision of a different world. In 1930 she wrote:

The reason for the tragic treatment generally accorded the originators of true ideas by their contemporaries lies in the fact that the great mass of humanity are the creatures of their condition. They are a part of the particular circumstances surrounding them, and are, therefore, incapable of apprehending new ideas, original thought, until those ideas have been applied to their material conditions of life and practically demonstrated.3
The reasons why the socialist politics for which she stood -- and she herself in agitating for them -- could not be more successful still remain important questions for us today.

Jean did much, and tried to do more. Her daughter Pat asked, in the mid-1970s: 'for a woman forged in her particular circumstances, a politico beyond changing, was it enough?'4 Jean arrived in Sydney in 1929, with Marxist politics (though not yet Communist Party membership). She intended at that stage to continue Home, as Europe -- Britain in particular -- was still termed in that farthest outpost of Empire, to pursue a promising career as a novelist. When she did make a fleeting visit to Britain a couple of years later, this followed travels to Berlin and the Soviet Union, with her fare paid by the Communist Party.

The various things Jean did, in most cases with great verve and distinction, intersected quite explicitly but often in complicated ways with (as well as sometimes engaging in dialogue with) the Party's orientation and 'line' at various points. Particularly in that earlier period, before developments in mass media changed the modes of communication of political ideas, those who could speak powerfully in person to different audiences were much in demand. In Australia, in the turbulent political climate of the 1930s, Jean rapidly became a redoubtable public speaker. 'I spent myself recklessly', she commented. 'But my spirits never flagged. My feet had only to touch the platform, and the soul of the agitator soared aloft on wings of boundless enthusiasm.'5 She had a legendary ability to persuade and sway audiences, a charismatic and commanding presence on the platform, at a time when such direct and personal physical interaction of agitators and leaders with participants in struggles was a familiar feature of the landscape of resistance. 'She was very brilliant on the stump, she was good, you know'6, was a common recollection. An admirer wrote to Jean in the early 1940s:

Sydney well remembers Jean Devanny of the "struggle" ... leather-coated figure of the "Dom"; fighting for what she knew was right. A lone woman towering above a multitude of men.7
Through her life Jean would be recalled as a 'fiery orator of the working class.' The flavour of her oratory can be gleaned from the typescript of a speech headed: 'For Sunday Domain.'8
Oh comrades, for years and years I have dreamed -- dreamed of the day when the workers, the useful people of my country will march to victory over reaction beneath the banners of progress, liberty and peace. That day is coming closer, that day is not far off, when you comrades who have marched the road beside us will step up onto the pinnacles of historical fame, step up onto the crest of the mountain and beside the legions of spirits of our glorious dead, and with our arms wide and heads high and full hearts bursting with joy, will proclaim to the world: the horrors of capitalism are dead in the valleys, the future means freedom forever.9
Audiences were often hostile, and the Workers' Defence Corps never attended Jean's meetings, supposedly because she could keep crowds quiet, even in the face of organised opposition from the far Right. At typical Domain events: 'Tomatoes and other objects were flung at us; there was constant uproar and abuse.' One Sunday, 'after almost falling off the platform, I had to go and lie down under the trees', she reported.10 'Jean was a legend', Fred Thompson, the Communist Party union organiser, told me in 1987, twenty-five years after her death. 'But there were two elements to it, her skill and her personality as a propagandist on the platform but also all the stories, the sexual stories about her that flowed right across Australia.'11 This 'but'-often occurs in references to Jean's sexual, and sexualised, identity; it often speaks volumes, though perhaps more about the speaker than the spoken about. As a revolutionary woman interacting continually with 'private' as well as public issues, Jean frequently encountered or, often, generated responses ranging from discomfort to hostility. How far (or how much of) this could be seen as 'difficulties of her own making'12 (as Macintyre puts it), is another question.

On ideological battlefields, in Jean's time, the desire for liberation could be, and was crystallised in various cultural representations of workers' power as a creative and sexual(ised) energy. Jean's romantic association of vitalist potency with the power of the insurgent working class (with a degree of consciousness or of complicity difficult definitively to establish), generated apocryphal stories. A fellow Sydney Party member Phyllis Johnson recalled Jean, when she returned from Russia, talking about 'this magnificent man in the wheatfields with rippling muscles and how magnificent he was, and she said that she could assure us that sex was a delightful experience in the Soviet Union.' After a speech on International Women's Day in which Jean argued 'that women had the right to enjoy sex as much as men did', Johnson reported the reaction of many women (even in the Party) as: 'we were like stunned mullets really.'13 Another story repeated to me by several comrades, and related also by Oriel Gray, presents Jean as 'wanting to tell everyone that the Soviet Union was transfiguring in every respect.'

At a Waterside Workers' Federation meeting, she was quite carried away. "And comrades, in the Soviet Union sexual intercourse is wonderful!" "It's not too bloody bad here either, lady", said a big wharfie politely from the front row.14
Jack Stephens told me: 'There used to be a lot of jokes about her ... an imaginary speech about: "And there they were, marching, those magnificent Red Army officers", and an imaginary interjection: "Did you see their privates, Jean?" Things like that.' George Bordujenko, a Party stalwart in north Queensland in the mid-1930s, recalled Jean shocking many with her frankness:
she was used to bloody Sydney and her territory ... the younger generation in our circles in those days, they were little prim and propers, and we were trying to build up a youth organisation ... Jean was encouraging them about enjoying sex, they've only got one life to live and Christ knows what.15
While it was the opinion of Fred Thompson that 'the turmoil that she created' was due to her being 'a totally free spirit, and she had no inhibitions about the restrictions of conforming to the norms of society at all'16, the 'turmoil' was not just produced by Jean's often meeting patriarchal politics head on. She was frequently 'at loggerheads with Party authority' -- an authority assumed with difficulty by a largely inexperienced leadership and, in the 1930s, caught up in factional negotiations of Third Period Stalinist politics. Sent to Melbourne in March 1932 to build the Workers International Relief branches and engage in an extensive speaking tour Jean, as the unofficial consort of JB Miles the General Secretary, was viewed with suspicion by the Melbourne leaders Lovegrove and Thornton; both were building up to an (unsuccessful) challenge to the Sydney leadership at the end of 1932 for right deviations, including the capitulation to capitalist legality in their defence of the Workers' Weekly publisher (who happened to be Jean's husband, Hal) and for providing a venue for lurid goings on at Party dances at the Sussex Street Hall.17 Impatience with anything remotely bourgeois was typical of the time. Frank Huelin recalled being told by a member of the Victorian District Committee when he commented on the scenery: 'Comrade, if you've got time to watch sunsets you're not doing as much party work as you should be doing.'18 This was, nonetheless, not only a Third Period attitude; Miriam Soljak, a friend of Jean's in New Zealand was wont to remark to her daughter: 'If you've got your housework done, dear, it's a sign you're neglecting the movement.'19

When she arrived in Australia, Jean was already known as a novelist, indeed a novelist of some notoriety following the banning of her first book, The Butcher Shop, in New Zealand in 1926. Her profession of creative artist -- 'held to be not an asset but a liability' -- complicated her relationship to the Party. '"Writers!" a leading man once scoffed. "They're mad, the lot of them. You don't think we are going to take advice from a writer, do you?"'20 Ted Docker later perorated: 'The trouble with comrade Devanny is she thinks she can teach us something. Because she has scribbled a lot of rubbishy books she thinks she knows something about cultural work that we don't.'21 Dorothy Hewett, in some ways a Jean of the next generation and one of the women for whom she prepared the way, describes her group of contemporaries, the Realist Writers, as 'a beleaguered little group in a philistine Communist Party, in a philistine Australia.'22 Looking back from 1984, Hewett saw herself in the 1950s as 'silenced by political activism, the deep-seated anti-culturalism and socialist realist dogmas of the ACP, plus the terrible struggle to survive.'23 Jean's experience, in the 1950s and earlier, was similar but her aspirations were larger than Hewett's. Jack Beasley ('the rising star in the Party literary firmament'24 in the 1950s), put it this way: 'There is nothing that would have stopped her wanting to be the greatest agitator, the greatest propagandist, the greatest organiser, etc, etc., and of course, that was the problem.'

Hal was seen by the police to be quite prominent in the Party leadership -- more so than he in fact was. His Security file reports inaccurately that in 1940 he was 'Member of Central Committee ACP; Member of Political Bureau of ACP; Member of District Committee No. 1 (Sydney).' By contrast, Jean was never formally part of the official leadership. When I talked to the journalist Frank Ryland about this, he commented: 'I never realised before that she was hardly a lieutenant, she was just a sergeant in the Party. But she was doing more for the Party than some of the so-called leaders.' Jean was viewed ambivalently by the Party's central leadership, but was often identified with it (sometimes to her detriment, as in Melbourne). Her stature as an organic intellectual of the working class was, however, recognised and celebrated by groups of the rank and file. In circulation at the end of 1934 was a 'revolutionary workers song' by TA Ricketts that compared her to Rosa Luxemberg:

You are our heroine, comrade good and true Sweet and so noble, pure right through and through Fighting so valiantly 'gainst capitalistic laws Suff'ring as Red Rosa did for the workers' cause.26
Kay Brown, the author of Knock Ten, recalled Jean's magnetic personality when she visited Mount Isa in April 1935:
Every night we had talk-fests with all the men coming, and she was brilliant; oh, she was an attractive woman, I think every one of the men I knew, married and all, was in love with her.27
A series of extraordinary conflicts was played out through and around Jean's intrepid figure, particularly during the decades she spent in Australia. She was one of the most significant figures in the history of women's liberation here, and attempted to live out an unfettered sexuality in environments within and without the Party of differently inflected intolerance. She does seem to have been comparatively discreet about her decade-long relationship with the General Secretary, JB Miles -- or a veil of discretion was drawn over it for years by the Party. When I mentioned it at the 'Sixty Years of Struggle' Conference in Melbourne in 1982, several people came rushing up to me to say: 'You've got it wrong. The "Leader" Jean was involved with was Jack Henry, not JB Miles.'28 On the other hand, Jack Stephens told Jean's daughter, Pat Hurd, in 1976: 'The affair with the leader was well known at the time in the sense that there was considerable gossip.'29 Throughout the 1930s, she maintained a close relationship with JB, in whom she found 'a stellar-like physical attraction ... something of glamour about his ruggedness, his likeness to Lenin.'30 In her autobiographical writings Jean seems, understandably, concerned to combat her legendary image, summed up by one Party member, Sam Hook: 'She couldn't help herself, she was a real sex fiend.' In the interview I pressed him a bit further on why he referred to Jean as 'a wrecker':
SH: Personal relationships with men, and Party members' wives getting up in arms, and all this kind of thing.
CF: Why did she get blamed for that rather than the Party men?
SH: You want to know? Well, she was the aggressor. I know it was in my case, and in one or two others.
CF: What, she used to get around seizing all these men and hauling them off?
SH: Nearly as good as that.
CF: And they had to fight her off?31
When Jean returned from Europe at the beginning of 1932, a separation from Hal, her husband, that would last nearly twenty years had occurred. Jean habitually represents herself as serially monogamous, with comments such as: 'Still, had my relations with my husband been otherwise, had I not been left swinging, as it were in an emotional void, I should not have met Leader halfway in his advances.'32 She also wanted to assert of JB's sexual politics that 'his relationship with myself was proof enough that he stood for the right of the individual to free choice in mating',33 -- and that she was 'by no means the only woman who had been sensitive to his magnetism.'34 The official Party position on sexuality had always been rather more complicated in practice. Even in the more liberated days of the late 1920s, Edna Ryan suggested, many Party members in those days 'couldn't cope'35 with Jean's view that 'the acceptance of Marxism necessarily rules out the concept of bourgeois morality in favour of behaviour based on the materialist conception of history', despite her concomitant insistence that 'commonsense, decency, mutual respect, the effect on others', should always be kept in mind and, 'mainly to be considered, the effect upon the Party.36

In the 1920s and early 1930s. Arthur Howells viewed the CPA as 'notorious for the bohemianism displayed by many of its adherents. One so-called "comrade" informed me that the main reason he had joined the Party was that it was "good for lays".
' Subsequently, a repressive sexual 'morality' would re-assert itself in the Party's homeland and model, the Soviet Union, under the aegis of Stalin; the CPA also would be 'subjected to a process of cleaning up and its bohemianism was replaced by what almost amounted to a wowseristic puritanism.'37 As time went on, the Party became much more conservative and circumspect about its image. By the mid-1930s, JB was suggesting that, just as the Party had 'cleared out "those who had become degenerate through unemployment", so it had cleansed its ranks of bohemians and their "pseudo-advanced ideas".'38 Nonetheless, Jean's novel The Virtuous Courtesan (published in the US in 1934 but banned in Australia until 1958) gives an even-handed account of Sydney artistic bohemia.

Jean was also said to be a talented organiser, and there were legendary elements as well to her image as a recruiter for the Party, especially in the North. She was habitually involved in a ceaseless round of activities, sometimes detailed in reports such as these.

Ballarat. Arrived 9th Nov. Took meeting Soviet Union at night at Creswick, 12 miles out. Collected 16 shillings.
10th. FOSU factory gate at engineering repair shops. Collected 10 shillings. Night attended at Trades Hall and got in to mass meeting of bacon strikers. Good hearing.
11th. Factory gate at Sunnyside textile factory. Unpleasant but no hostility. At three pm took meeting of butchers again. Very good hearing. Collected two pounds, four shillings. About 150 present. Bad night. Good meeting. Many women. Met P[arty] after in room.
12th. Visited Eureka Stockade and left Ballarat at 11 am, taking 30 shillings with me.
No WIR formed because of wrong P[arty] attitude. Regarded it as another sick baby on top of FOSU and MM.39
At Broken Hill in 1932, her most successful meetings were on birth control. There were very few women in the Party (Macintyre suggests 200)40, let alone in leading positions, and the local comrades had suggested that this was a topic that would help 'win the women.' Their judgement had been correct for, Jean reported, 'after three hours they were still there, standing in groups, clustering round me at the table.'41 This was also the case in Adelaide:
I find the birth control meetings are wonderful for bringing the women to us.... I wish I could stay long enough to find an able comrade to teach so that she could continue them.42
Jean's summary of her time there reflects the continuing strenuousness of her timetable:
Arrived in Adelaide Saturday morning. Slept afternoon and wrote report. At night house party and dance. Sunday night meeting at Port Adelaide on WIR. Very good meeting. Monday night same place branch meeting. Tuesday night reception in Trades Hall. Spoke for fifteen minutes on Russia by request. Wednesday night big Town Hall meeting. Very successful. Took over 11 pounds, five pounds more than ever taken down here before. Thursday morning, branch meeting at North Adelaide. Afternoon meeting at Port Adelaide Birth Control. 8pm WIR public meeting at Brompton, to try and form new branch. Friday afternoon women's meeting in Trades Hall. Saturday night big meeting on Soviets in Port Adelaide Watersiders hall. Sunday afternoon park meeting and night in P[arty] hall, because we can't get a hall anywhere on Sunday. This is most regrettable as we could undoubtedly have had a big meeting indoors and got big money.43
These frenetic speaking and agitational schedules in the heady days of the 1930s took their toll: 'Afterwards -- the reaction, the exhaustion; till once more the platform, once more the blinding light.'44 Jean, already in her forties, was periodically reduced to near-collapse. Increasingly she sought sanctuary in north Queensland which she first visited in 1934, and came increasingly to love. At this time, it was the Red North, a congenial arena for a propagandist and agitator, and home to the 'mythic figure' of Jack Henry whom, Beasley suggests, 'carried enormous clout in Queensland early on. He looked the part, too, well built and handsome, and with, when he chose, an engaging manner.'45 Lawrencean figures46 stalk Jean's novels from this time such as Sugar Heaven and Paradise Flow, and the imaginations of more people than just herself. Loma Thompson told me: 'When I first came up to north Queensland from Victoria, and I was nursing at the Innisfail hospital, I met a number of Party members there, and they used to talk about Jean Devanny, and her sexual adventures with various people, she was either going into the canefields with somebody or coming out of the canefields with somebody else.'47

Jean's involvement in the sugar strikes of 1934 tied in with the Party's adoption of the united front tactic in industrial work and elsewhere, which meant taking unions much more seriously. Sugar, along with mining was one of the key segments of the capitalist economy and also a place where concentrations of conscious and organised workers were to be found. Jean's novel of the Weil's disease strikes, Sugar Heaven (which she would claim in 1942 was 'the first really proletarian novel in Australia'48), was finished in 1935, and she 'handed it in to the Party for consideration.' Modern Publishers, a company established in 1933 to publish local editions of communist texts that were subject to import restrictions, produced it in 1936 (with a subsidy organised by Jean). JB, she reported, 'liked the political aspects of the book so much that, for once, he withheld criticism of my handling of the sex question.'49 The sex question was, however, quite an issue for the Party in 1935. Parts of Kollontai's Communism and the Family had been run in Working Woman in 1932;50 by contrast, in the Communist Review in 1935 it was Klara Zetkin's supposed interview with Lenin in which he rejected the theory that sexuality should be as uncomplicated as drinking a 'glass of water' that was being foregrounded. (There is considerable doubt about how much of this really came from Lenin.) The Central Committee had drawn the attention of 'All Districts' to the publication of the article in the same month, and particularly to Lenin's reported injunction: 'Will the normal man in normal circumstances lie down in the gutter and drink out of a puddle, or out of a glass with a rim greasy from many lips?' Back in 1931 Lindsay Mountjoy had reminded comrades that the Party was 'not a bohemian club.'51 JB reinforced this at the Eleventh Congress in December 1935, perorating: 'Bolshevism demands a steel-like character and that has to apply on sex questions as well as on other questions.'52

In relation to Sugar Heaven, as Kath Olive would recall many years later:

the main criticisms raised in Party circles were not of its literary worth, or even of its political accuracy, but of the presentation of the sexual exploits of some of the male characters who, it was felt, were fairly recognisable as well-known north Queensland personalities.53
Beasley recalled being told of Jack Henry's reaction to Sugar Heaven: 'He stamped up and down the office, "Look at this bloody stuff", because really she had shocked him.'54 Clearly the pre-publication notice in the Party press that asserted: 'the leading romantic characters are pure fiction',55 hadn't convinced everybody. Making it worse was that, according to David Gollan, one of the two central figures in the novel, Eileen, 'of course at times is Jean. No question about that.'56

It seems that the original version of Sugar Heaven (though none other than the printed one seems to have survived) might have been more detailed. Reading Sugar Heaven, it is hard to see what was so disturbing. Hendry, based on Jack Henry, is discreetly charming in Jean's text, and bears little resemblance to the figure Macintyre evokes:

A Queensland communist woman has recalled how Jack Henry, the district organiser, used to "pick off" female recruits at party dances; when she taxed him with this behaviour he replied that "what he did outside was his own business". But his business was also party business: applicants for membership in Queensland were asked not just about their class origins but whether they had venereal disease.57

Eileen's first husband, Bill in Sugar Heaven has venereal disease, but I have not established whether he had an original. Olive suggests of militants in the Red North:

quite a few of those real-life strike leaders were very well-performed sexual practitioners. But the peculiar morality of the Party at that time was such that, not only was there one standard for men and another for women, but there was also one for public and another for private consumption.58
Olive's championing of Jean here, in 1980, is very much coloured by the later political shift within the Communist Party away from what some members perceived as the sexism of its earlier practices. The process of that shift suggests that there should have been a particular interest in such figures as Jean -- yet little has been written about her by Party members. Perhaps a problem exists in coming to terms with someone like Jean -- her politics and her sexual politics presented a challenge both inside and outside the Party. 'Within the Party, Jean was invariably recalled as a brilliant agitational speaker, and as a stirrer who refused to accept hypocrisy',59 says Jack Beasley. The 'and', like the 'but', continually resurfaces in comments about her sexual politics.

Despite a widespread general interest from the 1960s in the history of and strategies for achieving women's liberation as well as socialism, fostered by the women's movement and the New Left, little in-depth attention has been given to Jean. She would have been a highly congenial subject to the libertarian politics of early second-wave feminism, but she had somehow slipped from history and we didn't hear about her. Edna Ryan commented: 'With hindsight I realise that Jean was too good for us, in the sense that she was ahead of us on feminism.'60 The Communist Party from the 1960s was increasingly turning to the women's movement; some would even say, liquidating itself into it and other movements, in an over-reaction to the earlier situation in the Party. Perhaps Jean was too difficult a challenge to a Party that had emerged from the sexually repressive period of the 1950s, repressive in the Soviet Union as well as in Australia and elsewhere, as the New Left would stress. Dorothy Hewett described 1950s conditions like this.

The idea in the Left at that time was that class politics were all important and if you brought up any other kind of politics like sexual politics, it was a red herring.... I continually found myself at loggerheads with the Party, asking the wrong questions. I can remember asking why the Party Secretary's wife wasn't active in politics and being told that her job was to look after Lance [Sharkey] and keep him active by being a domestic treasure.
The paradox, however, in the position of women in the Party, present in Jean's earlier relationship to it, was also recognised by Hewett. There were 'awful attitudes to women and yet the sort of women who were attracted into the Communist Party were strong, passionate and revolutionary ... it was possible within the Party for women to act with more force than in any other political area.' Despite the shift away from a more liberated approach from the 1930s, that got much worse in the drearily repressive surrounding climate of Menzies' 1950s, Hewett mentions that there were 'certain people, if not many, the intellectuals in the Party, who were very enlightened even sexually.'61 So, a woman like Jean was positioned in particular ways in the Party as well as in the surrounding society. Her legend, in which she is habitually constructed as a rebel girl, can perhaps usefully be thought about in terms of Luisa Passerini's suggestion:
the rebel stereotype ... would serve a markedly allegorical role. It could be the means of expressing problems of identity in the context of a social order oppressive of women, but also of transmitting awareness of oppression and lack of integration, and hence of directing oneself to current and future change.62
To fall into certain stereotypes in the course of disavowing others was a role often more or less forced upon revolutionary women. Joy Damousi offers this reading of how men and women in the Australian Party saw themselves:
The self-representation of the women differs in that some construct themselves as rebellious and adventurous, defying conventional stereotypes and leading a bohemian life, whereas the men's autobiographies established a morally pure and respectable image of themselves as "Party men."63
There were not many models for the 'Party woman' when Jean joined at the beginning of the 1930s. While many constructed Jean as a rebel or a bohemian, she does not in her autobiography represent herself thus, in strong contrast to explicitly rebellious players such as Betty Roland, Oriel Gray or Dorothy Hewett. The rebel tries to some extent to create her own individual myth, but the myth is also created for and around her. Imperatives towards censorship in Jean's own writing of her life come both from a desire to deflect censoriousness about sexuality and from a desire to appear disciplined in relation to the Party. Contradictory impulses are at work for women writers in that they simultaneously want to talk about sexual liberation, and to protect themselves and those around them from personal attack for doing so. Jean's friends Katharine Susannah Prichard and Miles Franklin were very aware of the undesirability of offering ammunition to a censorious society, Prichard confessed: 'I do not like to be seen in déshabillé, even in manuscript',65 and Franklin further suggested in 1936 that this was not just a problem for women, especially in the Antipodean context:
We are members of a small community that imposes small community decencies upon us. We can't dismember our friends' souls and [illeg] pretend that the publicity makes them, as the exhibitionists do abroad.66
Oriel Gray wonders at one point in Exit Left if her racy and ironic narrative has obscured the seriousness with which she and her comrades approached political life. 'Do I make them sound ridiculous? If I do, I have failed them. They were not ridiculous. They had one thing in common with the Vietnam protest generation. They cared.'67 The children of the 1917 Revolution, in Communist Parties around the world, applied themselves with an immense energy to a politics that they fully expected could produce an end to exploitation and oppression and by and large, despite everything, they joyed in it, expressing like Jean an 'incorrigible romanticism.'68

Miles Franklin asked Jean at one point to include in her book 'her ideals of Communism ... you put much of what it meant to you, but why?'69 While, with the rise of Stalinism, the practices of Communist Parties around the world were essentially tied to the needs of Russian state capitalism and imperialism, these Parties were nonetheless often a focus for the best militants and organisers especially in the working class, and played a central role in the class struggle, as well as in other arenas of gender and racial conflicts. The collapse of the Bolshevik project by the late 1920s into state capitalism and a 'socialism in one country' that would lead to imperialist expansion and the Cold War did not mean, for Jean and her comrades, that the ideas of Marx that were the inspiration of the 1917 revolution were thereby discredited. The CPA was recognised from the 1930s as the only substantial revolutionary socialist force that had a chance of aiding the organised working class to remove the exploitation and oppression that the Party hated and consistently combated. To be a leading member of it, the Party of the socialist future, offered the possibility of shaping human history itself. Many who were driven to resign at various points report anguish; a sense of being cut adrift and of loss of identity. Some spent years writing memoirs trying to understand where they, or the Party, had gone wrong. Hewett's comment on her own Party membership and her literary production is very relevant to Jean's experiences also:

This is why I was so keen on Communism. It structured the world for me. I firmly believe that most people become writers because they want to organise the world. The world is too fragmented for them; they want to get it together in some way and make sense of it.70
When revolutionary communism turned into Stalinism its overall project became unsupportable (though its interventions in local struggles were frequently exemplary). The Party repeatedly made turns of direction, earlier under considerable Comintern direction, later under the aegis of the local leadership who were nonetheless always mindful of the interests of the Soviet Union. Party members saw themselves as building a new world; they were not free agents, but voluntarily devoted themselves to it. The talents, training, propensities or specific situations of various individuals intersected and corresponded, or did not, with the needs of the Party at any point as these were worked out in practice, and they often put their lives at its service.

Jean's life of 'a politico beyond changing' can, then, be looked at as both an individual career of extraordinary talent and as an expression of what could and could not be achieved in and around the Communist Party in the first half of the twentieth century. She had a hard life, but it was also an immensely fulfilling one: in Wellington back in the 1920s she had commented:

Great sorrows give one the capacity for experiencing great joys, especially in the matter of sex delight, and following on that the capacity for experiencing great sex delight breeds sympathies and an understanding as wide as the world.71
Jean Devanny lived her politics and her writing, speaking the personal with public political force. While the revolution that was eagerly expected in the 1930s did not occur in her lifetime she never abandoned the struggle to change the world.

Jim Skea of the Realist Writers in Brisbane wrote in 1962: 'As Jean Devanny was an inspiration to me, so she was to the best of the Labour movement. We never have and never can fully repay our debt to one of the greatest of our women.'72 Frank Ryland said of Jean in 1983: 'At her best, I don't think there's been any woman in Australia who was as successful as she was against great odds.'73

1. This paper is drawn from research done for Jean Devanny: Romantic Revolutionary, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1999.

2. The current preferred term is Aotearoa/New Zealand, acknowledging the prior occupation of the country by the Maori people. Since 'Aotearoa' was not in use in the period of which I am writing, I have used the term New Zealand in all other instances.

3. 'The Literary Moral Standard', Stead's Review, 1 July 1930, 13.

4. Pat Hurd's 'Epilogue' to her mother's autobiography, written in the mid-1970s and printed in her posthumously published autobiographical draft, Ferrier, C. (ed) 1986, Point of Departure [PD], St Lucia: University of Queensland Press.

5. PD p.149.

6. Sam Hook, Interview, Brisbane, 21 August 1988. Tape CF.

7. CA Helleman to JD, early 1940s, JD/MSS/1/5, 33. [All MSS with a 'JD' number are in the James Cook University Library.]

8. 'Obituary: Jean Devanny', People's Voice, 23 May 1962.

9. JD/COM/20.

10. PD p.224.

11. Fred Thompson, Interview, Townsville, 7 June 1987. Tape CF.

12. Macintyre, S. 1998, The Reds, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, p.243.

13. Stevens, J. 1987, Taking the Revolution Home, Melbourne: Sybylla; p.198.

14. Grey, O. 1985, Exit Left, Ringwood: Penguin; p.41.

15. George Bordujenko, Interview, Townsville, 17 December 1985. Tape CF.

16. Fred Thompson, Interview, Townsville, 7 June 1987. Tape CF.

17. Macintyre 1998, p.227.

18. Lowenstein, W. 1978, Weevils in the Flour, Melbourne: Hyland House; p.385; Macintyre 1998, p.242.

19. Page, D. in Macdonald, C. et al (eds) 1991, The Book of New Zealand Women, Wellington: Bridget Williams Books; p.611.

20. PD p.154.

21. PD pp.154, 214.

22. Hewett, D. 1990, Wild Card, Ringwood: Penguin; pp.247-8.

23. Hewett, D. 1985, Bobbin Up, London: Virago (reprint); p.ix. NB - the Introduction where this comment occurs is dated 1984.

24. Jack Beasley, Interview, Sydney, 18 April 1987. Tape CF.

25. AA ACT CRS A6126XM/53.

26. 'Comrade Good and True', and 'dedicated to Comrade Jean De Vanney [sic] for the occasion of an epic event on 1/11/34.' JD/MSS/172.

27. Brown, K. 1987, 'Kay Brown Remembers Jean Devanny', Hecate, 13 (1), pp.132-137; p.134.

28. Simon Bracegirdle, who was in Sydney in the 1930s, told me he was unaware of it, while Sam Hook said: 'I didn't think old Jock Miles would do a thing like that [chuckle].'(Interview, Brisbane, 21 August 1988. Tape CF.)

29. This continues: 'Dan Donovan used to talk about following them to the Botanical Gardens and peeping at them from behind bushes.' Jack Stephens to Pat Hurd, 17 August 1976. Photocopy: CF.

30. 'Confession and Critique' [CC], autobiography draft, 224-5.

31. Sam Hook, Interview, Brisbane, 21 August 1988. Tape CF.

32. CC 224-5.

33. CC 237.

34. CC 224-5.

35. Edna Ryan, Interview, Sydney, 16 January 1984. Tape CF.

36. CC 238.

37. Howells, A. 1985, Against the Stream: Memoirs of a Philosophical Anarchist, Melbourne: Hyland House; p.35. Hard to place in this trajectory is Jack Jiggens' visit to the Cribb Island Branch of the Communist Party in the late 1940s. He was a member of the District Committee and three of the four women members of the Cribb Island branch were pregnant. Jack Jiggens commented that it was 'good that they were using every tool to build the Party. (Sam Hook. Interview. Brisbane, 21 August 1988. Tape CF.)

38. Macintyre 1998, p.264.

39. JD to CE Org, 17 November 1932, AA ACT A8911/1/69.

40. Macintyre 1998, p.262.

41. PD p.156.

42. JD to CE Org, 17 November 1932, AA ACT A8911/1/69.

43. 7 November 1932, AA ACT A8911/1/69.

44. PD p.149.

45. Beasley to CF, 13 May 1987. CF.

46. See Ferrier, C. 1996, '"A Completely New Type of Woman": Jean Devanny and Katharine Susannah Prichard: A Dialogue', in M. Duwell & I. Peterssen (eds) And What Books Do You Read? New Studies in Australian Literature, St Lucia, University of Queensland Press; pp.181-195.

47. Loma Thompson. Interview. Townsville, 7 June 1987. Tape CF.

48. 'The Worker's Contribution to Australian Literature.'

49. PD p.196.

50. Working Woman, January 1932; some of Kollontai's writings had first been made available by Andrade's bookshop in 1920.

51. Macintyre 1998, p.238.

52. Macintyre 1998, p.264.

53. Tribune, 30 April 1980.

54. Beasley to CF, 13 May 1987. CF.

55. Workers' Weekly, 12 August 1936.

56. David Gollan, Interview, Brisbane, 26 September 1983. Tape CF.

57. Macintyre 1998, p.238. The information here is drawn from Jess Grant in Joyce Stevens, 172, and Claude Jones interviewed by John Sendy.

58. Tribune, 30 April 1980.

59. Jack Beasley to CF, 13 April 1987, CF.

60. Edna Ryan, Interview, Sydney, 16 January 1984. Tape CF.

61. Hewett, Interview with Drusilla Modjeska, in Chamberlain, M. (ed) 1988, Writing Lives: Interviews Between Women Writers, London: Virago; p.93.

62. Luisa Passerini in Personal Narratives Group (eds) 1989, Interpreting Women's Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives, Bloomington: Indiana UP; p.191.

63. Damousi, J. 1994, Women Come Rally, Melbourne: Oxford University Press; p.208.

64. The cover blurb for Wild Card, for example, reads: 'Hewett has lived out a soap opera of a life. If she were a man, her life would be described as Rabelaisian, and she, a hell-raiser.'

65. Throssell, R. 1975, Wild Weeds and Wind Flowers, Sydney: Angus and Robertson; p.x.

66. Franklin to Ambrose Pratt, 2 May 1936, in Roe, J. (ed) 1993, My Congenials: Miles Franklin and Friends in Letters, Sydney: Angus and Robertson; Vol. I, pp.333-34.

67. Gray, O. 1985, Exit Left, Ringwood: Penguin; p.42.

68. CC, 89.

69. Franklin to JD, 12 September 1953 in Ferrier, C. (ed) 1992, As Good As a Yarn With You, Sydney: Cambridge University Press; p.338.

70. Hewett, Interview with Jim Davidson, Meanjin, 38, 1979, p.361.

71. JD/MSS/38/1, 280.

72. JD/CORR(P)/243.

73. Frank Ryland, Interview, Blue Mountains, NSW. 9 July 1983. Tape CF.

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