John Christian Watson and 'the instinct of self-preservation'.

By Mark Hearn*


Note: The following paper was presented to the 11th Biennal National Conference of the Australian Historical Association Brisbane 3-7 July 2002.

John Christian Watson, leader of the Australian Labor Party 1901-1907, Prime Minister of Australia 1904, ‘singularly free from peculiarities’.

To create an identity is to create a photo of yourself, to wear an ambiguous social mask. As Roland Barthes suggests, the portrait photograph is a process by which a subject becomes an object, although an “object” playing an active role of self-creation. (1) For a political leader a public identity is usually an attempt to match one’s ambition with whom you are expected to be. In John Christian Watson these categories of desire and duty blurred together. Watson came to so embody the identity of a Labor leader that when he retired from the leadership of the Labor Party there was genuine dismay at his decision, both from within and beyond the labour movement.

Watson is usually remembered for his brief role as the first Labor Prime Minister in 1904. Watson was however the federal leader of the Australian Labor Party for a relatively long period, from March 1901 until October 1907. From his earliest involvement in the New South Wales labour movement Watson displayed a precocious leadership ability, and a pragmatic sense of the discipline required to develop the Labor Party as an effective political voice on behalf of the unions and the working class. (2) As Federal Labor leader Watson played a significant role in the formulation of Labor’s objective - the national vision of harmonious civic life that Labor embraced - and Labor’s position on the key policies of immigration restriction and defence. Watson believed these measures clarified Labor’s commitment to establishing ‘a great white democracy’, a white, British-based culture that would flourish as the new Commonwealth of Australia. (3)

Watson’s subjective experience was a crucial element in his ideal of the Australian nation. His accrued experience as a working class immigrant, unionist and politician reflected a need for an acknowledgement of identity and status that found fulfilment in public office:

Mr. Watson, the new Prime Minister, entered the room and seated himself at the head of the table. All eyes were riveted on him; he was worth going miles to see. He had dressed for the part: his Vandyke beard was exquisitely groomed, his abundant brown hair smoothly brushed. His raiment was a veritable poem - a superb morning coat and vest, set off by dark striped trousers beautifully creased and shyly revealing the kind of socks that young men dream about; and shoes to match. He was the perfect picture of the statesman, the leader. (4)

So Billy Hughes described Watson’s ceremonial entry to the first cabinet meeting of the Watson Labor Government of 1904 . Watson explained that he adopted the restrained formality of the statesman’s dress because ‘…he saw no reason to make himself look different from the men of business and the senior civil servants with whom he would have to deal.’ (5) Watson was attracted to assimilation, in an age that encouraged codes of similarity. Watson, as Labor leader and Prime Minister, was amongst the men ‘in the public eye’, who ruled the culture of the shearer and the swaggie, whose images book-ended the photographs of the nation’s leaders in The Australian Magazine’s profile – a periodical that claimed a triple-A status - ‘All About Australians’. Australia’s national culture had its own code of similarity, expressed through the White Australia policy and the icon of the rugged bushman.

Narratives take many forms, as Barthes famously observed; any substance is fit to receive or express our stories. (6) Narrative identity may be defined as individuals constructing their personal stories, their sense of self, over time and forging a relationship with the social world, pursuing claims for justice or recognition of their needs and aspirations. (7) These narratives need not be conventional, written discourse; they are exemplary lessons handed down or rehearsed in a variety of forms. Watson’s narrative was certainly expressed in language, in speeches and articles, but above all Watson’s narrative was expressed in his being - in his behaviour and in the presentation of an identity before the world. Joyce has stressed 'the centrality of narrative to social life…that social life is itself storied and that narrative is an ontological condition of social life’. (8) This paper will argue that Watson constructed a narrative of his life that reflected a dialogue between himself and the social world, a dialogue of insecurity that Watson sought to overcome through the practice of his public persona and through policies that would secure the presence of the white race in Australia. In 1908 a magazine profile celebrated Watson’s leadership abilities: Watson was ‘singularly free of peculiarities’. (9) In the process of smoothing himself out for the role of Labor leader, Watson suppressed at least one peculiarity that might have threatened his apparently seamless progress from typesetter to union leader, from the backbench of the NSW Parliament to the Prime Minister’s office.

Watson’s Face Value
Throughout his life Watson concealed the fact that he was born Johan Cristian Tanck in Valparaiso, Chile, in 1867. His father, a ship’s officer, was a Chilean citizen of German birth; his mother was a New Zealander of Irish descent. In their recent biography of Watson, The Man Time Forgot, Grassby and Ordonez highlight this concealment, although historian’s have known of Watson’s unconventional genealogy since the publication by Bede Nairn of a note on this subject in 1967. (10) Watson’s father appears to have died while Watson was only a few months old; by 1869 his mother Martha had returned with the young John, or Johan, to New Zealand and remarried, to George Thomas Watson, by trade a miner and by ancestry Irish, although his family had settled for a time in Scotland before George emigrated to Australia. John Christian seems to have been readily assimilated into the family created by Martha and George (they had nine other children) in Oamaru, in the Otago province in New Zealand’s south island. (11) Grassby and Ordonez suggest that Watson ‘…held close his secret of Johan Christian Tanck’, particularly during the First World War, when his loyalties may have been questioned. (12) They extrapolate from this concealment to an overstatement of the significance of Watson’s Chilean background and Australia’s links with Chile. Nonetheless there are some aspects of Watson’s birthright that are worth considering, even if they involve a degree of speculation. Firstly, Watson’s parentage posed an obstacle to his political career. As Jupp observed in a recent article, Watson might well have been successfully challenged as a member of the House of Representatives under s.44 of the Australian Constitution, on the grounds of his ‘dubious’ nationality – non-British subjects were ineligible to stand as candidates for the Australian Parliament. (13) This begs two questions: did Watson know the truth of his parentage, and did he actively seek to obscure public knowledge of it? I suspect that Watson knew of his real father, and his real name; but what’s interesting about this story is the investment that Watson and his contemporaries make in Watson’s legendary identity, an investment made in Watson’s face value.

In 1902 Watson was the subject of a profile in The Australasian, and he was obviously interviewed for the article. The article noted that Watson had been born in Valparaiso while his parents, George and Martha, had gone on a voyage from New Zealand. He spent the first few months of his life in South America. (14) This story was repeated in the Review of Reviews in 1904, not long after the Watson Government had come to office. Neither article questioned why a working class miner and his wife would travel to South America – was George offered or seeking work in South America? It is unlikely that they could have afforded, or would have contemplated, such an exotic holiday. The Review also claimed that Watson was a Scot by ancestry, a theme enthusiastically embraced by the Bulletin in April 1904. (15) Watson was born of Scotch parents in Chile, and it was greatly reassuring to know that, as Prime Minister and Treasurer, the public finances of the Commonwealth were ‘in safe Caledonian hands…The world has a great and well-grounded faith in Scotchmen in matters of finance.’ (16)

In 1962 the historian and Bulletin journalist M.H. Ellis published a recollection of Watson, whom Ellis had known in the last years before Watson’s death in 1941. Of Watson’s origins, Ellis observed:

His father, George Thomas Watson, is generally described as a sailor. Chris Watson was a little off-hand about it when I asked him, but no meaning could be written into this since he was a stickler for the old fashioned convention that an Australian’s home was his castle and his private life private. But it seems that the father was an immigrant seaman working his passage to New Zealand and that Chris was born on April 9, 1867, on the ship in the harbour of Valparaiso, then a centre of the Newcastle-South American coal trade. (17)

This story conflicts with the previous accounts of his origins that Watson had allowed to pass onto the public record. George Thomas Watson was a miner, not a sailor. Martha met George after her return to New Zealand, and they were married in Waiporo, in Otago and near Omarau, in 1869, two year’s after John’s - or Johan’s – birth. (18) Ellis was reluctant to pursue the meanings that might have lay behind Watson’s discouraging embrace of ‘old fashioned convention’ because Ellis wanted to like Watson and to take him at face value. Ellis described Watson as ‘six feet of sound manhood…Honesty was written all over him…He gave the impression of disinterested common sense.’ (19) Taking Watson at face value reflected a faith, or a hope, that you could take ‘good Australians’ at face value; an investment that many of his peers made in Chris Watson.

Watson was routinely described as an honest, companionable leader to whom the Labor caucus members readily deferred. He was a man of decency and ‘robust common sense.’ (20) The Worker claimed Watson’s features ‘are undoubtedly those of an idealist’, befitting ‘the youthful leader of a young democracy.’ (21) Lone Hand celebrated Watson as ‘a good Australian…the possessor of certain personal qualities which were indispensable at the critical time in the history of his party and of the nation.’ (22)

Watson embodied a certain identity that appeared to conform to the explanation offered of that person. Therefore he was unambiguously that frugal Scot, although the Bulletin did not offer its readers a shred of evidence to justify its claim of Watson’s financial skills. Watson’s legend reflects the ambiguous journeys of the emigrant – part design, part accident, crossing cultures and the imagined boundaries of identity. The fact that Watson achieved some vestige of stability as the child of “British parents” – from Ireland and nominally Scotland - only dramatised the instability of his birthright, and its rough mix of ethnicity and geography, destabilised again as a young man by economic circumstance, propelling his ambiguous identity from New Zealand to Australia. As Jupp observes, Australia was still ‘a settler society’ in the late nineteenth century – that is, an unsettled society, an immigrant culture struggling to define itself and the character of its people. John Christian Watson would become an interpreter of this character, both as a model of an ideal citizen and as a political advocate. (23)

Watson and White Australia
The first principle of the Australian character, as far as Watson was concerned, was that Australians should all look like each other. The idea of a White Australia underpinned Australian identity and was crucial to the survival of the nation, as Watson explained to the Australian Parliament during the debate on the Barton Government’s Immigration Restriction bill in 1901. Watson claimed that Australians lay exposed to a real threat of ‘racial contamination’ unless the Commonwealth government legislated to introduce uniform, national restrictions against non-European immigrants. This disease of illegitimate difference would insidiously creep in and infect white Australians, imported by that most obnoxious of alien categories, ‘the heathen chinee’, as he belittled Chinese immigrants to Australia.

Watson cursorily acknowledged that his concerns about immigration to Australia by Asians, Africans and indeed by Pacific Islanders were ‘tinged with considerations of an industrial nature’, Labor’s traditional objection to cheap foreign labour being imported to undercut Australian wage rates and conditions. However industrial issues were far from the real concern animating Watson’s fears. The essential question, Watson asserted, was

…whether we would desire that our sisters or our brothers should be married into any of these races to which we object. If these people are not such … as we can expect to give us an infusion of blood that will tend to the raising of our standard of life, and to the improvement of the race, we should be foolish in the extreme if we did not exhaust every means of preventing them from coming to this land, which we have made our own. The racial aspect of the question, in my opinion, is the larger and more important one; but the industrial aspect also has to be considered. (24)

Watson proposed to eliminate all ambiguity about Australian national identity by amending the Immigration Restriction bill to remove the dictation test provided for in the bill and instead to specifically prohibit any Asian or African from entering Australia. Despite attracting the support of a number of opposition Free Trade MPs, and several government members, Watson’s amendment was narrowly defeated. Watson worried that the dictation test would fail to exclude the clever alien: the more educated, the worse the threat posed by the ‘Baboo Hindoo’ or the cunning ‘Oriental’ with ‘his peculiar ideas of social and business morality’. Watson was happy to facilitate the migration of Europeans of ‘an enterprising character’, particularly north European Aryans, whose historic invasions of the British isles had raised the standard of ‘the national character’. Apparently it was acceptable to have German blood flowing in your veins. (25)

Watson’s seamlessly integrated sense of British-Australianness was indicated by his response to those who might claim that Australia had no right to exclude ‘coloured British subjects’: ‘The ground I take is that the natives of India are British subjects and subjects only, whilst the people of the United Kingdom are citizens as well, and British subjects in Australia are citizens also. That constitutes a wide distinction.’ (26) A distinction that existed nowhere more powerfully than in Watson’s mind, however it might be buttressed by imperial law. Immigration restriction would preserve the racial and cultural links between home and the fledgling Commonwealth, easing the alienation white Australians felt in a remote and threatened corner of empire.

Attorney-General Alfred Deakin acknowledged that the Immigration Restriction bill responded to a need to preserve a sense of self through the nation: ‘We here find ourselves touching the profoundest instinct of individual or the nation – the instinct of self-preservation – for it is nothing less than the national manhood, the national character, and the national future that are at stake.’ (27) Watson shared Deakin’s intuitive belief that the individual, the race and the nation had to joined in harmonious union: ‘We reserve the right to say who shall be citizens. We ask that they shall be on a moral and physical level with ourselves, and that they shall be such as we can fraternize with and welcome as brother citizens of what we hope will some day be a great nation.’ (28)

In Imagined Communities Benedict Anderson observed the bond between racial identification and nationalism: ‘…in everything “natural” there is always something unchosen. In this way, nation-ness is assimilated to skin-colour, gender, parentage and birth-era – all these things one can not help…precisely because such ties are not chosen, they have about them a halo of disinterestedness.’ (29) Watson craved a natural identity. His own identity was precariously poised at the rim of Australian identity, from Valparaiso to Oamaru and in threatened Australia itself. This uncertainty only intensified his desire to make what Anderson might describe as a natural claim on Australia, ‘this land’, as Watson asserted, ‘we have made our own’.

‘Cultivating an Australian Sentiment’: The 1905 Commonwealth Labor Party platform.

1905 Objective
Watson believed that making Australia our own could only be effectively achieved by ensuring that the Australian Labor Party pledged, above all other aims, to cultivate ‘…an Australian sentiment based upon the maintenance of racial purity.’ This was the guiding principle of the objective adopted by Labor in 1905, first by the NSW Political Labor League conference and subsequently by Labor’s Commonwealth conference. Watson moved the adoption of the objective at both conferences. As chairman of the NSW PLL’s drafting committee Watson seems to have played a significant role in deciding its language. Watson argued that Australia would only develop to its fullest extent by the ‘rigid exclusion’ of aliens. Once that was accomplished, Australians would receive ‘the full results of their industry’, developing into ‘an enlightened and self-reliant community.’ The objective clarified in the minds of the Labor faithful and the electorate that Labor had embarked on an historic nation building task, and that Labor embodied that task. In the NSW PLL debate on the objective Watson was dismissive of attempts to embrace bolder statements of socialism or internationalism, insisting that the objective reflect a politically realistic nationalism. Watson argued that the non-Labor parties had attempted to ‘pose’ as the Australian party. Adoption of the objective would display to the Australian people Labor’s ‘…identification with the statement pledging themselves to develop every possibility in Australia to the fullest extent.’ (30) The Australian Commonwealth would be an model before the world of enlightened racial purity, but an insular nation focused on itself and its own needs.

Watson as Leader
Watson resigned as Federal Labor leader in 1907. The tone of regret at the loss of Watson’s capacity for leadership, and the burden of that legacy for future Labor leaders, was well-captured by Hop’s cartoon in the Bulletin. A rather patronising little boy instructs Watson’s successor as Labor leader, Andrew Fisher, as they both consider Watson’s portrait: “Of course you can never be like him, but be as like him as you are able to be.” (31) Watson’s resignation represented in many ways the high point of his public career; for a moment he was held forward as an ideal citizen and Labor leader. Watson seemed to understand this himself, preserving in his papers a range of responses to his resignation, including over 70 newspaper cuttings on the subject assembled for him by the Australasian News Cutting Agency. An expression of vanity perhaps, but an exercise that also reflects an urge to comprehend, as he made an undoubtedly difficult choice, what the public life of John Christian Watson had meant to others - and himself. (32)

Watson apparently told M.H. Ellis that he never wanted to lead the Labor Party or to serve as Prime Minister – an unlikely claim from a senior politician which, in Watson’s case, was probably true. (33) Watson placed a stress not his personal advancement, but on the achievement of the policies important to him and the Labor Party – compulsory arbitration, white Australia and tariff protection, as he explained to Parliament in July 1905, as Deakin resumed office with Labor’s support: Labor was prepared ‘to sink any idea of ourselves taking office, as long as the work of the country was carried on.’ (34) The Labor identity that Watson embodied could be blurred into cross-class or cross-political coalitions, particularly if those coalitions were driven by a concern about the nation - the category of loyalty and identity that Watson placed above all others.

Watson as caricatured in the Sydney Worker in February 1905. The Worker claimed that Watson’s features ‘are undoubtedly those of an idealist’.

Defence: ‘A Distinct Departure’
Watson was active in the Australian National Defence League from its establishment in 1905. The League attracted a range of mainly conservative business, political and community leaders in a campaign to establish a national scheme of compulsory military training for young men. The League made a direct link between defence and the maintenance of a White Australia, a theme which Watson took up in an article for the League’s journal, The Call, in 1908. Watson argued that the ‘urgent’ need to upgrade Australia’s defences was highlighted by the menace posed by the ‘awakening’ of the East. Australia’s wide, unpeopled territories ‘must inevitably prove an attraction to nations confined within boundaries too small for the natural expansion of their populations.’ (35)

Watson repeated these racial fears when he successfully led a debate at Labor’s 1908 Commonwealth conference to include a specific commitment to compulsory military training in Labor’s defence policy, despite fears of war and militarism expressed by some delegates. (36) The League’s promotion of defence was highly successful: from 1906 all Australia’s political parties united in support of the principle of compulsory military training, and in 1910 the Fisher Labor Government legislated to introduce such a scheme. Fisher also established the Australian Navy and the Royal Military College at Duntroon; defence spending trebled in the period 1901-14. (37)

In 1914 Watson reflected on Labor’s achievements. Writing just before the outbreak of the First World War, Watson drew together the threads of White Australia, defence, the working man’s hard won rights - and the responsibilities that flowed from Labor’s embrace of a “distinctive” Australian nationalism:

The adoption of compulsory military training as a definite plank of the Labour Party’s programme in 1908 marked a distinct departure from the traditional policy of Labour and Radical parties elsewhere. It is true that this change of view was partly brought about by the peculiarly isolated position of Australia as the “white outpost of the Pacific”, but it was also recognised that in Australia more than elsewhere the working man had something to defend. His individual property might not amount to much, but his hard-won rights and glorious opportunities were worth some sacrifice to retain. (38)

The logic of compulsory military training was compulsory military service. Watson emerged as a strong supporter of conscription for overseas duty in the referendum of October 1916. Watson had been active in the Universal Service League, the pro-conscription lobby group founded in September 1915 that, like the Defence League, submerged class and political rivalries in the name of the nation. (39) Watson’s support for conscription resulted in his expulsion from the Labor Party in November 1916. (40) He went on to help Hughes and Holman establish the Nationalist Party. Watson was the inaugural chairman of the Party that in his mind replaced Labor as the unequivocal representative of Australian nationalism. (41)

A determination to defend a White Australia also played an insidious part in driving a wedge between Watson and Labor. Watson’s leadership on defence took on a top-down character, lecturing the working class to accept a burden of duty rather than responding to working class and Labor identification with the democratic spirit of voluntary military service. This disconnection with class interests developed from the primacy that Watson gave to the defence needs of the nation, in turn intensified by his concerns about race. White Australia, which had been so intrinsically linked to the labour movement, contributed to the slow transformation of Watson’s politics from its labor/class base into empire nationalism. Conscription drew this transformation into the open.

Conclusion
In his history of the Australian Labor Party Ross McMullin wonders why Watson, this otherwise ‘…decent, enlightened and usually tolerant man’ was moved to passionately racist outbursts in support of a White Australia. (42) McMullin’s disappointed bewilderment reflects the way in which Watson’s racism is often rationalised; it’s put to one side, as if it’s an unfortunate aberration. The ideal of a White Australia stood at the centre of Watson’s political ideology because it fed his instinct for self-preservation. If racial contamination infected and destroyed national identity, it would destroy individual identity. Australians would, Watson feared, no longer be recognisably themselves, or tied to their cultural roots in the British Isles; they would be adrift in a world of random and indistinct human categories.

Benedict Anderson observed that ‘it is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny.’ (43) By chance Australia became a site in which Watson might invest an ideal of a new nation. Australia became the repository of an adaptable, colonial British identity in which Watson had been reared in New Zealand, and which readily transferred across the Tasman. Whether or not Watson was troubled by his German origins, he had to find a way in the world; and what better way to settle doubts about yourself, or to succeed in the company of others, than to invite them to become like you, to represent to others, by your own example, how they should behave as a good unionist, Labor man or a good nationalist.

Nairn observed that Watson was attracted to ‘the clubbable atmosphere’ of Parliament. (44) Watson’s instinct for assimilation and nationalism led him into close association with non-Labor politicians and other community and business leaders, both in terms of parliamentary alliances with Deakin and in his obsessions with race and defence, the defining motifs of his political ideology. Watson’s racial fears, and fears about Australian security, only stressed the insecurity and fragility of the nationalist identity craved by Watson and many of his peers. The war subject Watson’s equation of citizen, Labor and the nation to an impossible test. In search of a secure nation, and a secure Australian identity, Watson found himself exiled from the movement that he had once personified.

Footnotes
(1) Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, Vintage London 2000 pp.13-14.
(2) Bede Nairn, “J.C. Watson in New South Wales Politics, 1890-1894”, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol.48 part 2 1962.
(3) J.C. Watson, “The Labour Movement”, in British Association for the Advancement of Science, Handbook for New South Wales, Edward Lee & Co. 1914 p.134.
(4) W. M. Hughes, Policies and Potentates, Angus and Robertson, Sydney 1950 pp.141-2.
(5) Bulletin, 18 August 1962.
(6) Roland Barthes, ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’, rpt. In Martin McQuillan (ed.), The Narrative Reader, Routledge London 2000 p.109.
(7) Peter Poiana, “Narrative Identity”, Literature and Aesthetics, Vol. 9 October 1999 pp.99-100; see also Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects, Cambridge University Press 1994, Introduction; Geoffrey M. White, “Histories and Subjectivities”, Ethos, Vol.28 No.4 December 2000.
(8) Joyce, Democratic Subjects, p.153.
(9) ibid., 28 April 1904; Australian Magazine, 1 January 1908 p.423.
(10) Although Nairn and Grassby and Ordonez have done much to clarify Watson’s genealogy, a definitive identification of Watson’s parentage and date of birth remains elusive, given the lack of a birth certificate. Grassby & Ordonez claim – unfootnoted – that ‘a record’ of Watson’s birth, but apparently not a birth certificate, is held by the Mormon Church at Santiago. Grassby and Ordonez, The Man That Time Forgot, p.13; Bede Nairn, “J.C. Watson, A Genealogical Note”, Labour History No.34 May 1978 p.102; Bede Nairn, “John Christian Watson”, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol.12 Melbourne University Press 1990 p.400.
(11) Malcolm McKinnon (ed.), New Zealand Historical Atlas, David Bateman Ltd plates 44-45; Keith Sinclair, A History of New Zealand, Penguin Books 1985 pp.106-7.
(12) Grassby & Ordonez, p.145.
(13) Under s.44(i) of the Australian Constitution anyone who ‘…is under any acknowledgement of allegiance, obedience, or adherence to a foreign power, or is a subject or entitled to the rights or privileges of a subject or a citizen of a foreign power…shall be incapable of being chosen or of sitting as a senator or a member of the House of Representatives’ is ineligible to stand as candidates for the Australian Parliament. James Jupp, ‘Ethnicity, Race and Sectarianism’, in Marian Simms (ed.), 1901: The Forgotten Election, University of Queensland Press 2001 p.144.
(14) The Australasian, 6 September 1902.
(15) Review of Reviews, 20 May 1904 p.474.
(16) Bulletin, 28 April 1904 pp.8, 17.
(17) Bulletin, 18 August 1962.
(18) Grassby & Ordonez, p.16.
(19) ibid.
(20) ibid., 28 April 1904; Australian Magazine, 1 January 1908 p.423.
(21) Worker, 4 February 1905.
(22) Lone Hand, 1 June 1911.
(23) Jupp, ‘Ethnicity, Race and Sectarianism’, p.135.
(24) Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 6 September 1901 p.4633.
(25) CPD, 7 August 1901 p.3505; 6 September 1901 p.4636.
(26) CPD, 6 September 1901 p.4634.
(27) Initiating the second reading debate on the bill, Barton observed: ‘self-preservation is the highest law.’ CPD, 7 August and 12 September 1901 pp. 3506, 4804.
(28) CPD, 25 September 1901, p.5177.
(29) Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, Verso London 1991, p.143.
(30) Worker, 11 February 1905.
(31) Bulletin, 7 November 1907.
(32) Australasian News Cutting Agency cuttings, MS451/5/93-171, Watson Papers NLA.
(33) Bulletin, 18 August 1962.
(34) CPD, 27 July 1905 p.236.
(35) The Call, August 1908.
(36) Official Report of the Fourth Commonwealth Political Labor Conference, July 1908 pp.16-20.
(37) C.M.H. Clark, A History of Australia, Vol.5 Melbourne University Press 1981 p.325; Lloyd Robson, The First A.I.F., Melbourne University Press 1970, p.14.
(38) J.C. Watson, “The Labour Movement”, pp.136-7.
(39) Universal Service, 15 July 1916 p.7.
(40) NSW PLL Executive to Watson, 4 November 1916; Watson to Paddington PLL, 13 November 1916, MS45l /1 items 190 & 191 respectively, Watson Papers NLA.
(41) SMH, 10, 12 January, 24 November 1917.
(42) Ross McMullin, The Light on the Hill, Oxford University Press 1991 p.47.
(43) Anderson, p.14.
(44) Nairn “JC Watson” ADB, p.403.

Mark Hearn,
Department of Modern History,
Macquarie University.

Copyright. Do not cite without the permission of the author. mark.hearn@humn.mq.edu.au

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