The Spanish Anarchists of Northern Australia: Revolution in the Sugar Cane Fields 1786833085, 9781786833082

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Series Editors' Foreword
1: Introduction
2: Making Sense of Australia
3: In Search of Industrial Justice
4: Sugaring the Revolution
5: The Spanish Civil War
6: After the Civil War
7: Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Back Cover

Citation preview

IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

The Spanish Anarchists of Northern Australia

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Series Editors Professor David George (Swansea University) Professor Paul Garner (University of Leeds) Editorial Board David Frier (University of Leeds) Lisa Shaw (University of Liverpool) Gareth Walters (Swansea University) Rob Stone (University of Birmingham) David Gies (University of Virginia) Catherine Davies (University of London) Richard Cleminson (University of Leeds) Duncan Wheeler (University of Leeds) Jo Labanyi (New York University) Roger Bartra (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) Other titles in the series Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes: On Brazil and Global Cinema Maite Conde and Stephanie Dennison The Tlatelolco Massacre, Mexico 1968, and the Emotional Triangle of Anger, Grief and Shame: Discourses of Truth(s) Victoria Carpenter The Darkening Nation: Race, Neoliberalism and Crisis in Argentina Ignacio Aguiló Catalan Culture: Experimentation, creative imagination and the relationship with Spain Lloyd Hughes Davies, J. B. Hall and D. Gareth Walters Catalan Cartoons: A Cultural and Political History Rhiannon McGlade Revolutionaries, Rebels and Robbers: The Golden Age of Banditry in Mexico, Latin America and the Chicano American southwest, 1850–1950 Pascale Baker Teresa Margolles and the Aesthetics of Death Julia Banwell Galicia, A Sentimental Nation Helena Miguelez-Carballeira

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IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

The Spanish Anarchists of Northern Australia Revolution in the Sugar Cane Fields

ROBERT MASON

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS 2018

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© Robert Mason, 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS. www.uwp.co.uk British Library CIP A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-78683-308-2 e-ISBN 978-1-78683-309-9 The right of Robert Mason to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Typeset by Mark Heslington Ltd, Scarborough, North Yorkshire Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Melksham

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Contents

Series Editors’ Foreword 1 Introduction

vii 1

2 Making Sense of Australia

19

3 In Search of Industrial Justice

45

4 Sugaring the Revolution

70

5 The Spanish Civil War

96

6 After the Civil War

117

7 Conclusion

139

Notes148 Bibliography170 Index179

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Series Editors’ Foreword

Over recent decades the traditional ‘languages and literatures’ model in Spanish departments in universities in the United Kingdom has been superseded by a contextual, interdisciplinary and ‘area studies’ approach to the study of the culture, history, society and politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds – categories that extend far beyond the confines of the Iberian Peninsula, not only in Latin America but also to Spanish-speaking and Lusophone Africa. In response to these dynamic trends in research priorities and curriculum development, this series is designed to present both disciplinary and interdisciplinary research within the general field of Iberian and Latin American Studies, particularly studies that explore all aspects of Cultural Production (inter alia literature, film, music, dance, sport) in Spanish, Portuguese, Basque, Catalan, Galician and indigenous languages of Latin America. The series also aims to publish research in the History and Politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds, at the level of both the region and the nation-state, as well as on Cultural Studies that explore the shifting terrains of gender, sexual, racial and postcolonial identities in those same regions.

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1

Introduction

In 1901, the year in which the six Australian colonies federated to become one country, revolution was being plotted across the world. Even as wealthy white men consolidated means to protect their commercial, military and racial interests, networks of anarchists dreamed of their downfall. In imperial Russia, activists in St Petersburg drew on decades of struggle to advocate local control of economic and political decisions. In France, anarchists clashed with socialists over the latter’s plans for incremental change. In Italy, an anarchist had shot and killed the king less than six months earlier. Across the Atlantic, in the United States of America (USA), the legacies of the Haymarket Massacre in 1886 had been reinvigorated by the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901 at the hands of an anarchist agitator. Further south, in Argentina, anarchists sought to shift from such acts of propagandistic killing and instead use unions to push forward hopes for systemic change. Publicised in the newspapers and carried by migrants around the world’s ports, the anarchist movement appeared to be set for a long period of dominance as one of the world’s foremost historical forces. In few places was this more evident than in Spain. In 1901, Spain continued to grapple with the loss of its Cuban and Philippine territories to the USA just three years earlier. The country’s major cities were undergoing unprecedented urbanisation as large sections of the countryside came under extreme population pressure. Spain’s political establishment lacked legitimacy outside the wealthy elite, and anarchists had gradually filled the vacuum, becoming integral parts of communities in the regions of Catalonia, Andalusia and elsewhere. As emigration from Spain increased in response to poverty and lack of opportunity, so too did the outward flow of hopeful workers sympathetic to anarchist ideals.

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The flow of ideas was not solely European in origin. Spain’s former imperial possessions in the Asia–Pacific region were also part of the global debate about the evolution of democracy in the twentieth century. In the Philippines, José Rizal had long advocated Philippine independence, free from the competing influences of Spain, the Catholic Church and American imperialism. Philippine nationalists had immersed themselves in debates about s­elf-­ government, individualism and ­anti-­imperialism while in Europe. The Filipino nationalists were not alone in their desire for change in Asia and the Pacific. Others desperately hoped for more radical developments and carried their ideas in the ships that sailed the periphery of the Pacific Ocean, from Canada to Mexico, Chile, New Zealand, the Philippines and China. The major ports of the Pacific Rim were alive to hopes of reform, led by anarchists and unionists working in unison to better their world. These dreams existed beyond the major trade routes, initially carried by migrant workers and often hidden or misunderstood by authorities. In Anglophone Australia, governments had long been alert to the threat of radicalised migrants. Irish Republicans had been a fixture of the establishment’s fears throughout the nineteenth century, and authorities watched events in Europe with disquiet. Over time, they would come to share t­ rans-­Atlantic worries about the power of radical organisations such as the One Big Union and the anarchist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Contrary to much public commentary at the time, these Australian groups were not solely English speaking, but were supported by many of the new country’s swelling numbers of n ­ on-­British migrants. This book traces the forgotten lives of one particular group of such migrants: northern Australia’s Spanish anarchists. Hidden from the view of Anglophone governments, Spanish anarchists nonetheless maintained their global connections in the fight to instil anarchism and secure justice for their communities. This monograph argues that the group enables new perspectives on the emotional and intellectual connections that migrants cultivated worldwide from their homes in Australia. Rather than focus solely on the region’s geographical isolation from Europe as a problem, the book suggests that the region’s isolation enabled new practices and new ways of imagining the world. These imaginings drew on Anglophone Australian norms, but were also fully immersed in radical critiques and the S ­ panish-­speaking worlds

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of Europe and the Americas. Using ­ Spanish-­ language archives alongside ­English-­language sources, the book reveals the extent to which Australia can be thought of as being integrated in these worlds rather than distant and isolated from them.

Spain in the Pacific Spain’s connection with Australia had begun with a rhetorical flourish of Catholic royalism that would have been utterly reprehensible to the anarchists of 1901. In 1606, Captain Pedro Fernandéz de Quirós had proclaimed that he took ‘possession of all this part of the South as far as the pole in the name of Jesus, which from now on will be called the Southern land Austrialia [sic] of the Holy Spirit’.1 With these words, the explorer claimed the fabled Great Southern Land for the Hapsburg monarchs of Spain, and embedded the continent in their growing circle of imperial possessions in the Pacific Rim. Regrettably for Quirós, he had made his proclamation not from Australia but from the island of Espíritu Santo in ­modern-­day Vanuatu, several thousand kilometres from the Australian mainland. Nonetheless, he founded the fort of New Jerusalem in the hope of securing the region, and to defend himself from the hostile local population. As the fragile settlement collapsed and the limited extent of his discovery became clear, Quirós quickly returned home to Spain amid bitter recriminations and a failure to secure the Australian lands for the Spanish Crown. The search for the southern continent was only part of the reason that the Spaniards were sailing through the region, and they had strict orders to continue to Manila if the new land was not found. Their presence had also been intended to consolidate knowledge of potential routes between Spain’s colonial territories in Latin America and those in the Philippines. Luís Váez de Torres took control of the Spaniards’ remaining two ships in Espíritu Santo, abandoning the fort and continuing to sail eastward and north. On his route, he sailed through the territories of today’s northern Australia, navigating the straits that now bear his name, and likely sighted the Australian mainland. By turning north for Manila, as his orders stipulated, Spain’s claim to have discovered anything more than the northern tip of Australia was left unpursued. The

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steady integration of the Pacific Rim into the Spanish world would nevertheless continue for centuries. Europeans’ contact with Australia was haphazard until the eighteenth century, by which time the Spanish Empire had firmly established its imperial presence in the Pacific Rim. The territories of the viceroyalty of New Spain stretched from the coasts of contemporary California to Central America and west to include Guam and the Philippines. Two other Spanish viceroyalties controlled the entire western seaboard of South America. While Australia remained relatively untouched by Europeans’ presence, and other European and Asian powers jostled for influence, the Pacific Rim could now be described increasingly credibly as a ‘Spanish Lake’.2 Spain’s ability to project its authority varied tremendously across its Pacific possessions, with enormous differences between the coastal ports of Mexico and the rural islands of the Philippines. Contact between the various sections of the empire across the Pacific remained reliant on attenuated communication through shipping, and was mediated by a plethora of local authorities and conditions. While Manila became an important Asian centre from which Chinese goods could continue on to New Spain, it remained highly isolated from other Spanish territories. After a series of debilitating wars with the Dutch and English in the seventeenth century, Madrid made sustained efforts to consolidate and strengthen the Spanish presence in its west Pacific territories. Spain’s presence in the western Pacific remained reliant on support from Mexico City, and there was relatively little direct contact between Madrid and its colonial subjects in the Philippines. Authorities there relied on an annual payment from New Spain to sustain its treasury, and administrators remained focused on providing for the territories’ defence. In the absence of a dynamic and empowered government able to lead in Manila, Catholic clergy became vital for the transmission of Spanish culture through their missionary work. Attempts to liberalise and broaden the reach of a cash economy were frequently blocked by hostile forces within the Church, so that Spain’s authority outside the main cities remained fragile. Given this, Spain’s authority in the Pacific remained far weaker than a map of Spanish territories would suggest. The Spanish Empire was transformed by the Napoleonic Wars in the early nineteenth century. With the French invasion of Spain in

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1806, the Bourbon monarch in Madrid was overthrown and Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother Joseph installed in his stead. The unintended effect was to accelerate moves to secure autonomy throughout Spain’s colonial territories of the Pacific Rim, as old patterns of loyalty were thrown open. Opinion on s­ elf-­government was sharply divided across the various Spanish territories, but gradually shifted in favour of independence over a number of years. The defeat of the French, and the subsequent winding back of liberal reforms in Spain, accentuated social and political divisions across Spain and its overseas territories. Populations became polarised between Liberals and Conservatives, as political processes became captured by regional elites. Within the Pacific, almost all Latin American territories had secured their independence by 1825. The Philippines remained ruled by Spain, though, and continued to be highly dependent on contact with the ­ now-­ independent Mexico. Despite these shifts, the trade and cultural sensibilities that had underpinned the empire remained a powerful source of collective solidarity. As Spain’s former colonial domains in Latin America readjusted to their ­new-­found freedom, an alternative transnational affiliation was emerging in the Pacific region. The USA had undergone a transformation in the ­ mid-­ nineteenth century, following the annexation of the Republic of Texas in 1845 and the Mexican– American War of 1846–8. The collapse of the Mexican resistance in that war led many Americans to call for a sweeping appropriation of Mexican territories. The territories of Texas, New Mexico and California were relatively unproblematic to absorb, notwithstanding the very serious concerns that they would destabilise the precarious national debate about ­slave-­owning states in the USA. As American troops occupied Mexico City, politicians in Washington worried about the implications of annexing additional territories that contained large numbers of Latino/a, Indigenous and mixed populations. They questioned whether their country’s Manifest Destiny could be extended to new regions that were populated with large numbers of free citizens, whom the majority of citizens in the USA did not view as white. These debates continued long after the end of the war. Questions of whiteness and slavery remained at the centre of national life, and the USA was torn apart by the Civil War from 1861 to 1865. Notwithstanding the eventual abolition of slavery, the political elite

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The Spanish Anarchists of Northern Australia

and the social majority continued to view the nation as fundamentally white and Anglo–Saxon in culture. The 1898 Spanish–American War was viewed as an opportunity to expand American commercial and strategic interests in the Caribbean, but quickly expanded to encompass a conflict that stretched from Puerto Rico and Cuba to Guam and the Philippines. After successive victories against Spain, and despite already existing liberation movements in both Cuba and the Philippines, Washington moved swiftly to secure control of its new territories. The ejection of the Spanish forces and their replacement by Americans radically altered the balance of power in the Pacific Rim. It also transformed the racial debates about the imperial and emancipatory role of Europeans in the region. Anglophone Australians viewed the developments with delight, hopeful of increased security and cooperation between the white colonies of Australia and their Anglo–Saxon ally to the north.3 The impact of the Spanish–American War, and the loss of overseas territories, proved devastating in metropolitan Spain. Attempts had earlier been made to revitalise and consolidate Spain’s overseas provinces and colonies, through an emphasis on a transnational community of Spanish speakers imbued with centuries of continuous Spanish culture. Spain was already reeling from decades of ongoing insurrections and conflict between Liberal and Conservative forces, and the colonial defeats were taken as further proof of the country’s woes. The losses prompted a generation of debate about what direction Spain should choose for its future. Conservatives blamed the defeat on the loss of militant Catholicism and the decline in cultural unity, which they alleged had been caused by Spain’s industrialisation. Others felt that Spain had to embrace its future as a modern European power, and turn from the tortured legacies of its lost empire. Following the defeats in 1898, there had been an initial impetus towards political and industrial modernisation, as new leaders sought to align Spain with a European model of development. Traditional elites rapidly reasserted control of the corrupt parliamentary system, however, and the sense of progress quickly dissipated. While the Catholic Church remained politically powerful, this influence rendered it increasingly vulnerable to criticism. Far from evangelising in the expanding cities, new urban areas were without places of Catholic worship and the Church’s social influence was gradually eroded. This crisis among the

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7

traditional elites was matched by a broader sense of malaise. Without important markets, especially in Cuba, demand dropped away and industrial centres such as Barcelona experienced economic and social crisis. Workers in these centres responded to their political exclusion and poverty with increasing frustration and violence. Spain’s major industrial centres experienced a rapid growth in radical sentiment in the years following the Spanish–American War. This acceleration was aggravated by economic downturn, but drew on the ­long-­standing influence of political thinkers whose work resonated across broad sections of society. Anarchism, in particular, had a powerful influence in Spain. Its appeal had grown in the second half of the nineteenth century, as workers sought a more democratic voice in how their communities were governed. Spain’s anarchists were not alone, and much of Europe debated the significance of anarchists’ acts of violence against leading politicians and statesmen, then known as ‘propaganda of the deed’. Across Europe, from Russia to Spain, anarchist thinkers and activists began to articulate an alternative vision of society. This new world would not be based on the needs of the few, and would not seek colonial adventures to distract the public and secure resources for the capitalist market. Instead, it would offer a vision of locally controlled political processes that genuinely sought to address the needs of the many. Within Spain, as elsewhere, differences emerged between anarchist traditions. Over time, there was a decline in the emphasis on an individual who sought to raise public awareness by targeted acts of violence. Communities instead debated how to change the economic system through social action, so that politics and society would be transformed in its wake. Large aristocratic estates dominated in southern Spain, where landlords frequently enforced social and political control of their tenants. From the late nineteenth century, however, southern anarchists articulated a rural Utopian alternative that was dominated by a vision of land redistribution and autonomous communities. Anarchism developed differently in the expanding cities of the north, of which Barcelona became a major centre of activism. By the turn of the century, workers there confronted employers regarding control of industrial sites as workplaces emerged as the central organising principle by which a new world could be constructed.

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The Spanish Anarchists of Northern Australia

Spain’s urban centres experienced a period of sustained growth from the late nineteenth century into the twentieth. The population increase in regions such as Andalusia caused pressure on land use, with the result that many peasants were displaced to squalid settlements on the fringe of the expanding cities. Such was the economic distress in the south that approximately 20,000 peasants left Andalusia for Barcelona annually in the early part of the twentieth century, few of whom forgot their earlier grievances. Industrialisation increased from 1900, but immigration and a dearth of welfare provision ensured that wages remained at meagre levels. Within the first decade of the century, Barcelona underwent a severe subsistence crisis as the cost of living rose by 50 per cent.4 Population movement did not occur only within Spain, and many hundreds of thousands of Spaniards emigrated across the northern border to find opportunities in the cities of Europe. They were not alone in their move, and cities and governments struggled to support and assimilate the numbers of displaced poor across the continent. In their absence, informal networks provided the urban poor with a means to provide for basic physical needs as well as intellectual succour. Emigration from Spain was widespread, and many left Europe for North Africa and the Americas in the years prior to the First World War. Many Spanish emigrants chose to shun traditional destinations, such as Cuba, for more urbanised and industrialised locations. These included major American centres such as Tampa and New York, but also involved enormous migration to the rapidly growing Latin American cities of Buenos Aires, Caracas and Santiago de Chile. The number of immigrants arriving in Argentina alone increased from 1.8 million to 7.8 million during the forty years preceding the First World War.5 As ­kin-­based chain migration accelerated to these destinations, their governments sought to capitalise on the influx of workers by encouraging new arrivals; the Spanish city of Malaga was allocated over 10,000 free passages by the Argentine government alone. These workers were desperately needed as South American economies experienced very rapid growth. Argentina took advantage of the new technology of refrigeration, and its conquest of Patagonia, to become a major global exporter of beef. Yet, the rapid economic expansion of the late nineteenth century was slowing down. Industrial growth was increasingly contentious, as the chasm between the rich and the

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poor increased across Latin America’s immigrant nations. Just as in Spain, workers found themselves obliged to fight for protection against exploitation. To make matters worse, large numbers of immigrants were publicly vilified by politicians who sought to consolidate their own power in uncertain and violent times. Many migrants in the expanding urban centres of Latin America experienced extreme poverty, employment insecurity and a lack of safe housing. They were subject to violent attacks, as well as being agents of violence themselves to attain security in exploitative workplaces. Within the cities that formed their new homes, migrants relied heavily on social connections based on ­ pre-­ migration affiliations. Much research has focused on the community and cultural organisations that provided access to low-­ ­ interest loans, housing and potential employment opportunities.6 Radical workers’ groups also sought to support new arrivals, informed by a strong desire to transform the economic and political system. Anarchists in Argentina used general strikes and the assassination of key leaders to pressure for change. Strikes flowed from the urban centres of cities such as Buenos Aires to the immigrant s­ hare-­croppers, who were desperate to improve their economic security. Workers remained particularly strong in the ports, where a­ narcho-­syndicalism appeared to offer an effective pathway for change. Faced with the brutality of everyday capitalism, those on the margins of society rarely imagined that parliamentary socialism would affect immediate change. Indeed, while anarchists believed in universal suffrage, they also believed that any exercise of traditional political power corrupted those involved. Divisions between those on the Left became increasingly bitter in the early years of the twentieth century as activists debated the relative merits of anarchism and syndicalism. Emotions famously spilled over at the International Anarchist Congress of Amsterdam in 1907. While the influential Italian Errico Malatesta believed that the trade union movement was insufficiently radical, others, such as the Frenchman Pierre Monatte, felt that it held the key to total revolution. While philosophically important, relatively few in the cities of Europe and the Americas engaged with the detail of these debates. They were clear that ­community-­based organising and bargaining had not worked, and wanted whatever alternative would deliver concrete results most rapidly.

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Like migrants throughout the ­so-­called ‘new world’, Spaniards found themselves embroiled in workplace tensions in the fields, ports and railways of Central and South America. These locations became the homes of migrant workers from already radicalised Spanish cities, where new arrivals organised themselves to oppose exploitation by employers and the Conservative state. In these locations, they frequently came into contact with the regions’ First Peoples. The many migrants working in the new ports and railways in such states were not unsympathetic to a­ nti-­colonial sentiment, and sought to navigate the fraught encounters that this involved. Whether in Patagonia or the Philippines, radicalised migrants sought to critique the colonial capitalist status quo. They laboured and sailed on the shipping routes that crossed the Pacific Ocean from the Chilean port of Valparaiso to cities such as Manila, Hong Kong and Sydney.

Australia in the empire In contrast to the ­so-­called Spanish Lake, the ­English-­speaking world of the Pacific Rim remained a relatively new phenomenon at the turn of the twentieth century. The consolidation of the Anglo–Saxon presence in Oregon, British Columbia and California remained within living memory, while large parts of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands were barely touched by the European presence. The desire to exercise more effective sovereign control of these territories had accelerated in imperial capitals from the ­mid-­nineteenth century, and the six Australian colonies federated to form the new Commonwealth of Australia in 1901. Its founding mythologies as a redoubt of imperial Britain resonated increasingly, as the new nation sought to establish its authority and image on the new territory. The commemoration of James Cook’s moment of triumphal s­o-­called ‘discovery’ and the attempted erasure of Indigenous people’s presence worked in tandem with the imagined establishment of an enlightened new nation, which had emerged from its penal past to fashion a fairer and more benevolent British society in the Antipodes. This new nation was underpinned by a commitment to a British legal system that protected settlers’ property rights, trumpeted its commitment to progress and staunchly defended British culture

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in the face of the millions of ­ non-­ whites living north of the continent. The sense of British identity was closely connected to the social and familial connections that many Australians continued to derive with the United Kingdom (UK). Australia’s political system had blended elements of Washington and Westminster, but it remained overwhelmingly British in its cultural, social and political orientation. The new country’s political and economic elite retained close ties to the UK. Many were educated at exclusive public schools and universities in Britain, and others worked in the British armed forces across the empire. The Australian working class also maintained very strong connections with the British Isles. These included sustained cooperation between the emerging trade union movements and respective Labour parties. British in outlook, and integrated into the political firmament, these emerging socialist alternatives nonetheless emphasised a sharply different narrative of what the new country might be. Many Australian radicals viewed socialists’ collaboration with the parliamentary process as a form of complicity that enabled the spread of capitalism by dampening enthusiasm for more profound revolution. Far fewer of the groups that advocated profound or revolutionary change sought inspiration from the UK. Many were instead more closely connected to the USA, and would come to look with excitement at groups such as the One Big Union and the IWW. Such groups connected with Australia through the circulation of sympathisers and information on the shipping lines that crossed the Pacific Ocean from South America and elsewhere. In the ethnically diverse ports that formed the Pacific Rim’s major trading centres, ideas were exchanged across linguistic and ethnic divides. Whereas Australia’s emerging national identity was increasingly that of a country that was committed to securing the needs and aspirations of the white working man, this progressive settlement alienated and ostracised many. While elite politics remained defined by Britishness, Australia’s radical alternatives were conceived and formulated in very different spaces and with different audiences. Australia’s institutionalised political spaces and narratives of identity were underpinned by a consciousness of its place and destiny as a bastion of Anglo–Saxon civilisation in the Asia–Pacific region. This sense of Anglo–Saxon ethnicity subordinated Celtic

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narratives of the Irish presence, while marginalising others and erasing Indigenous traditions, but emphasised Australia’s place in a transnational world of E ­ nglish-­ speaking nations. Australia was isolated if alone, but Anglo–Saxon states together formed a powerful global bloc that might resist the rising populations of Asia and Africa.7 One response was the growth in a siege mentality as the nations of Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and the USA developed new immigration policies that could safeguard Anglo–Saxon culture and its supposedly civilising purpose. Within Australia, this transnational sentiment relied on a particular construct of whiteness that frequently denied its privileges to residents from southern Europe. By distinguishing themselves from others in carrying the colonial burden, Anglo–Saxons set themselves apart, eager to preserve their particular political settlement and imagined racial purity in the face of purported threats. Analyses of Australia’s particular sense of self in the early twentieth century have traditionally emphasised the tyranny of distance. This preoccupation with geographical isolation emphasised Australia’s distance from its British referent point, and positioned the Asia Pacific’s proximity as a source of vulnerability for the new nation. During a period when Anglo–Saxon identity was shifting globally, Australia’s dominant sense of itself was as a proudly colonial outpost of British culture. Moreover, it was one that relied on the Great White Walls of immigration control to protect it from being ‘swamped’ by its large Asian neighbours. From this perspective, Australians believed themselves to be facing threats from the emerging power of Japan, the decadent Chinese and the general presence of massed hordes of Asians. It was the latter who were particularly threatening for an Australia whose north remained largely unpopulated by Europeans. Only by maintaining an exclusively white territory was it believed that the country would be morally and strategically strong. Only by developing ties with its t­ rans-­Pacific partners, as well as its imperial relations, could Australia remain safe. Yet, the majority of Spanish speakers around the Pacific Rim also thought of themselves as white. This was a whiteness based not on exclusivity to those born in the Iberian Peninsula but on a very different trajectory of mixing with Indigenous populations over centuries of religious proselytising, colonising and violent

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domination. Large differences continued to exist between the presence of First Nation peoples and political elites, but the majority of populations were mixed heritage. Those in power were generally white, male and wealthy, though, and were eager to secure for their new countries, economic and political progress comparable to that seen in Europe and the USA. While Australia remained tied to the UK, Latin Americans had lost their imperial protection in what had been a turbulent century. While Australia emphasised racial delineation, the populations of the former Spanish Empire were faced with the task of creating new narratives of national identity and community. With an elite that was often detached from the lived experiences of much of the population, tensions quickly emerged. By the early twentieth century, ethnic and class divides remained pervasive and unresolved. The ­ now-­ infamous White Australia policy was established in 1901, as one of the founding tenets of the new Pacific nation. To protect the living standards, morals and social cohesion of the white community, ­non-­Europeans would not ordinarily be permitted to enter the new Commonwealth. Simultaneously, large numbers of non-­ ­ European labourers were removed from the country. In practice, the policy’s flexibility varied considerably. Immigration officers were empowered to enforce a dictation test in any one of a number of European languages, which bore no formal reference to the person’s country of origin. Rather than allow all Europeans access to the country, the policy allowed privileged access for those north Europeans who most closely approximated the ideal Anglo– Saxon population. It did not prevent all others from entering, particularly in its early years of operation, but such groups were viewed with distrust and fear that they might undermine the fledgling national ethos. Australian migration histories tend to focus on the country’s major metropolitan centres. This is not surprising, given that these cities comprise the majority of the Australian population. The wider metropolitan areas of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth have long been home to concentrated populations of recently arrived migrants. New arrivals familiarised themselves in their new homes with the help of ­pre-­existing communities from their countries of origin. This clustering of Australia’s population around the major cities of the southern and eastern coastal rim further accentuated widely articulated concerns about the country’s

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vulnerability to invasion in the north. It also drew attention to the precariousness of Europeans’ presence and of their claims to have rendered the landscape of the whole continent as legitimately and irrevocably white. In this context, new ­non-­British migrants were both desired, in order to populate the regions, and feared as potentially subversive residents in the strategically crucial periphery with Asia. While many worried that the British culture of Australia’s cities was becoming diluted, parts of ­non-­metropolitan Australia were also home to a rich variety of migrant cultures and ethnicities. Many migrants were involved in the attempts to establish permanent agricultural enterprises and communities in newly cleared lands. Groups such as the Germans and Italians rapidly established themselves in new rural homes. Administrators and politicians continued to worry that many of these regional communities had relatively few residents from northern Europe, and that this was particularly the case in the strategically vulnerable north of the continent. The tropical climate meant that many politicians despaired of attracting Britons to settle in the hot and humid north. In addition to those new arrivals who did settle in the emerging communities along the tropical coastline, there were many ­non-­ Anglophone groups who did not remain permanently in a single location. Chinese traders, Lebanese hawkers and Afghan cameleers all moved through the northern Australian landscape, providing essential services and products to established regional communities on the recently accessed frontier. These were not staid or monocultural townships. Instead, Australia’s regions were dynamic and fluid spaces of social and commercial interaction. The diversity of the country’s northern frontier regions was a source of great concern for those in the metropolitan centres. The temporary presence of those moving through the landscape was no less troubling than those who were recognised to be establishing themselves permanently in the land. For Australians, the process of ‘taming’ and ‘civilising’ the land for commercial agricultural use was a key part of the nation’s mission to render the continent a progressive white country and remove Indigenous Australian societies. The presence of n ­ on-­north European groups, such as the Italians, evoked fears of indolence and criminality on the geographic periphery. It also led to ­oft-­repeated concerns that the legitimate demands of British workers would be undercut by the new arrivals’

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15

supposedly lower living standards and wages. The memory of the nineteenth-­ ­ century violence against Chinese workers who had been working in Australian gold fields remained raw. While these had actually been occasioned by Europeans’ violence against Chinese workers, the events were popularly held to exemplify the social dangers of a ­multi-­ethnic workforce. The fact that these diverse populations were concentrated on the northern periphery made the perceived threat of fi ­ fth-­columnist action more pointed. The negative correlation between Australia’s strategic vulnerability to invasion and the proportion of Britons in the population was, on paper, striking. Certainly, those living in the regions were able to use their distance from centres of governance to negotiate new realities about community belonging and ethnic hierarchy. Newly cleared lands, which were only connected with urban centres of political authority by steam ship, provided rich opportunities for the articulation of a new type of freedom for workers in Australia. This possibility of a morally degenerate northern ‘piebald country’, populated by fifth columnists, was exactly what the cultivated elites of the metropolitan southern cities feared.8 For many, though, the freedom of the ‘Red North’ was exactly what they craved.9 Migrants may have striven to r­ e-­establish themselves in their new homes, but they did not do so in isolation from their previous experiences. Nor were they content to accept working conditions without seeking to maximise their settlement. In this manner, their previous political experiences were imported to Australia. In few places was this more obvious than in north Queensland. The lands north of the city of Townsville, itself 1,300 kilometres north of the state capital of Brisbane, remained in the early stages of clearance in the years following Federation. ­Sub-­tropical rainforests were gradually giving way to s­ ugar-­cane fields, and Europeans settled in the area as the South Sea Islander workers were removed or marginalised as part of the White Australia policy. Nonetheless, the northern population continued to range from Filipino divers to Chinese shopkeepers, Japanese laundry workers, Lebanese and Syrian itinerant traders, Scandinavian labourers, British mill owners and, of course, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. Neither the region’s first inhabitants nor the more recent arrivals passively accepted British authority. The north of Queensland was not unusual, and similar diversity and vibrancy were present across

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northern Australia. Far from the centres of authority, but connected to the ports of the Pacific and Indian oceans, many of the new arrivals actively challenged the Anglophone social and political accord. Such histories of the first half of the twentieth century, hidden from many Anglophone Australians in the country’s south, reveal the important connections between migration, trade, and transnational political identities.

The Spanish anarchists of Australia Rather than consider the Pacific Rim as having been dominated by any one language and cultural group at the turn of the twentieth century, it is helpful to consider it as a series of interlocking transnational and transcultural networks. Research has tended to place Australia firmly in the Anglophone sphere, with emerging recognition of the importance of its connections to Chinese spheres of influence. This book argues that it is also useful to consider Australia’s points of intersection with the ­Spanish-­speaking world, through both personal contacts and the trade routes that connected it with Asia, Europe and the Americas. The radical communities in Australia’s north offer one example of this connectivity that reveals the ­working-­class political ties that operated across linguistic and ethnic groups. Although numerically small, the community of Spanish anarchists in Australia’s tropical north offers one surprising example of global connectivity. They challenge assumptions of White Australia and Anglocentric preconceptions about its evolution. They also reveal the circuit of radical political ideas through the S ­ panish-­speaking world and the Pacific Rim. Seemingly isolated from the radical cosmopolitanism of ports such as Sydney and embedded within an Anglophone white country, they nonetheless reveal ­ non-­ British models of radical politics transforming local communities. This book provides a chronological analysis of the evolution of the Spanish anarchists of Australia. It traces how the earliest migrants arrived in Australia at the turn of the century, and struggled to make sense of the landscape and society of their new homes. Focusing on the north of the continent, the book demonstrates the sense of physical and emotional isolation that early arrivals experienced as they adjusted to life in the tropical

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17

north. It also reveals the sense of possibility that existed, as new arrivals sought to remake a world free from the inequities of Europe and the Spanish Empire. Their attempts were closely tied to the ­sugar-­cane industry that was rapidly expanding in the north of Queensland, bringing together diverse migrant communities in a struggle for their right for dignity of labour and living. The migrants made sense of their lives through references not only to Australian context but to their experiences and knowledge of the USA, Argentina, Chile, Spain and its former Caribbean possessions. The struggle for legal, economic and social justice in Australia did not detach the S ­ panish-­speaking community from events in its former home in Spain. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 acted as a catalyst within the community. Although they had proselytised their message of equality since their arrival in Australia, the migrants now engaged more directly with others in the local community, with fund raising and rallies. Others returned to Spain to fight for the Republican forces. The end of that war, and the decades of repression by the Franco dictatorship, radically altered the migrants’ sense of global connectivity. Their hopes for the future also shifted as the Cold War took root in Australia and the world. Rather than a political change, the remaining activists sought to advance education, secularism and economic justice. In so doing they corresponded with Australia’s leading thinkers, such as Nettie Palmer, and other exiled and refugee communities across the ­Spanish-­speaking world. This monograph approaches the history of the ­Spanish-­speaking communities of Australia by drawing on sources traditionally excluded from the study of labour history. Reinterpreting Australian government archives from the perspective of Iberian and Latin American Studies sheds new light on what are otherwise framed as lawless and problematic migrants. Engaging with ­ little-­ known archives, such as those of the James Cook University in Townsville, provide ­Spanish-­language materials that are rarely consulted by historians unused to ­non-­English sources. In addition, the book draws on a number of oral history interviews with ­Spanish-­speaking migrants and their children. Almost all of the interviewees have sadly died since meeting with the author to assist with research for his PhD thesis more than ten years ago. The book seeks to reinstate a diversity of voice in the study of labour history in culturally diverse countries such as Australia, and

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to reveal the profound political and ethical convictions of migrants that are too often viewed from ­Anglo-­normative positions. It also seeks to expand on studies of global connectivity, pointing to the diverse personal and political connections with Europe and the Americas. In so doing, it challenges motifs of Australian exceptionalism, and connects events in that country to global political debates and struggles for social justice and dignity for all in the first half of the twentieth century. Events in the north of the Australian continent were part of a contested landscape. This connected Australia not only to the Indigenous and Anglophone worlds, but also to the S ­panish-­ speaking world through trade, migration and political debate.

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Making Sense of Australia

Northern Australia remained distant from centres of urban population at the turn of the twentieth century. Indigenous residents had lived in the region for tens of thousands of years, but the European presence remained recent and sparse. Within two decades of the new century, the sparse new northern communities would become ­well-­consolidated towns and, by the middle of the century, would number almost a quarter of a million n ­ on-­Indigenous residents. Yet, very large distances separated these communities. Darwin, on the coast of what would become the Northern Territory, was generally accessible only by sea at the turn of the century, and the north-­ ­ eastern towns of Queensland remained connected to southern and eastern cities by long journeys on steam ships. While the landscape along the sea board was undergoing a process of transformation, vast tracts remained untouched by European presence. Far from centres of political authority, the northern communities developed unique characteristics through their ethnic diversity and isolation. The region’s lack of industrial development outside key centres meant that the Anglo–Australia of neatly planned cities, ­well-­connected communications, police stations and town halls was tenuous at best. Distant from the continent’s major cities, communities’ resilience relied on robust connections across ethnic difference and on strong friendships formed in the teams of migrants that worked the ­sugar-­cane fields and cleared new lands for farms.

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The journey to Australia European emigration to the Pacific Rim was uneven during most of the nineteenth century. The great cities of Santiago de Chile, Acapulco and Lima gradually configured themselves in response to the seismic geopolitical events of the ­mid-­century, and became central to the long and contested processes of nation building. In Anglo–America, cities such as Vancouver and San Francisco proceeded to develop apace in the final quarter of the nineteenth century, but developments outside urban settlements often remained precarious for Europeans. Australia was little different as the colonies sought to refashion themselves in the aftermath of convict deportations, frontier conflict and European settlement during the nineteenth century. Although the majority of early settlers were Europeans, large numbers of Chinese, Afghans, Lebanese and others lived and worked in the regions outside the major urban centres. The vast majority of European emigration to Australia occurred as part of British initiatives, which sought to consolidate that country’s imperial presence. While southern European migration to Australia gathered pace, it was entirely unconnected to Spain’s early claims of discovery. Spaniards did arrive under British impetus, as part of attempts to consolidate British control of the colonial economies. They nevertheless began the process of reconnecting Australia with the broader transnational Spanish world. Their efforts and early businesses also created the conditions for Australia’s later cultures of Spanish radicalism. The earliest Spanish migrants to Australia were rare, and connected to the legacies of the British presence in Spain during the Napoleonic Wars. Juan de Arrieta is the earliest recorded Spanish migrant and arrived in 1821.1 He had been associated with the British Army during the Peninsular War, when he had likely acted as a contractor procuring items for British forces. After the war’s end, he briefly spent time in a London jail, seeking to regain moneys owed from the war. The colonial New South Wales government granted Arieta 2,000 acres, with convict labour to assist him, with a view to accelerating the colony’s economic development. His ultimately unsuccessful career in New South Wales was based on the introduction of Spanish techniques of olive and wine production to service the needs of the fledgling colony.

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At the other end of the scale of colonial society was the Spaniard Adelaide de la Thoreza Vega. She had fled the social and political turbulence that overwhelmed Spain in the early nineteenth century, and which claimed the life of her p ­ ro-­Liberal aristocratic father in 1823. Soon after, in search of safety, she arrived in London, where she enjoyed a privileged life and moved in high society.2 She was convicted of petty theft after a contentious dispute with servants, and was sentenced to transportation to New South Wales in 1829. While she was introduced to Arrieta on her arrival, the two did not become friends and Thoreza smarted at her changed circumstances. She separated from her husband, supporting herself independently through work. The difficulties that both Thoreza and Arrieta experienced speak to the very high risks involved for migrants who were not British subjects, and who lacked the networks and connections necessary to succeed in the colony. As a consequence of this, and of the far easier opportunities for emigration elsewhere, the number of Spaniards in Australia remained low. By the time of Federation in 1901, barely 500 Spaniards had lived in Australia. A number of colonial governments and organisations had attempted to increase the number of Spaniards throughout the nineteenth century. These attempts were focused on a desire to expand industry, and the transformative impact that agriculture offered to remake the Australian landscape in a European image. In 1864, James Quinn, the Bishop of Brisbane, petitioned the Queensland government for aid to introduce Spanish migrants to settle in the colony’s north. Quinn’s appeal was not without precedent, and the Victorian government had similarly sought Spanish migrants to accelerate local tobacco and wine production in the previous year. As with Arrieta, many viewed Spaniards’ successful cultivation of agriculture in their home country’s s­ emi-­ arid landscape as holding great promise for production in Australia. Such efforts stalled at a practical level, and were heavily criticised by Protestants who remained concerned by Spaniards’ possible disloyalty in a colonial British outpost. Spain remained a mystical land to most Anglo–Australians, as it was strongly associated with dogmatic Catholicism and opposition to liberal British imperialism. Superficially, this image of Spain was reinforced by the establishment of the ­Spanish-­speaking Benedictine monastery of New Norcia in Western Australia. Established as a missionary base for Aboriginal Australians in 1846, the monastery relied almost

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entirely on Spaniards for its religious personnel and it expanded rapidly throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Abbot and religious brothers remained in frequent contact with family and ­ co-­ religionists in Spain throughout this time, corresponding extensively regarding conditions in Australia. They also wrote to ­Spanish-­speaking religious people throughout the Pacific Rim, in California and the Philippines, about race relations and the nature of the European presence in the region. The community at New Norcia was one part of the tenuous connections that situated Australia in the broader ambit of Spanish culture in the Asia Pacific. It remained detached from the broader groups of Spaniards in Australia, but nonetheless possessed important transnational connections. It was not until the Victorian Gold Rush of the 1850s that there were sufficient incentives for sustained Spanish migration to Australia. Peter ­ Gras-­ i-­ Fort led the first group, and arrived in Victoria with ten other Catalan settlers in March 1854. Another Catalan, Josep Parer, arrived in Victoria from South America the following year, and began an extensive pattern of chain migration among that family and other Catalans. The Parers reapplied skills originally honed in Spain in their new homes. They greatly added to Melbourne’s rapidly expanding hospitality industry, with business techniques that they had learned in the Catalan resort town of Alella. The Parers owned five hotels and two cafés in the city’s central Bourke Street alone, and other Spaniards owned a further seven elsewhere in central Melbourne. Such businesses provided the necessary guaranteed employment to spur further migration, and Melbourne became a significant centre of Catalan settlement. This connection with Catalonia was to become central to the northern community’s ­long-­term development. The majority of Spanish migrants to Australia in the second half of the nineteenth century originated from the n ­ orth-­eastern region of Spain. As the Catalan presence in Melbourne’s hospitality industry increased, so did their influence in subsidiary areas such as market gardening and fishing. The connections within the community remained strong, with chance encounters for new arrivals embedding the Catalans’ commercial dominance. For example, the young man Ramon Porta had an initial contact with two kitchen hands from Parer’s Crystal Hotel in central Bourke Street, prompting a decision to move into market gardening. From

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this base, he built up acquaintances and commercial experience that allowed him to buy his own fish shop and expand outwards to supply local businesses. Many Spaniards similarly bought their own market gardening businesses in suburban Melbourne, and areas such as Box Hill and Keilor were home to large numbers of Spanish agricultural businesses. In typical examples of chain migration, these families sponsored further new arrivals once they became established, and concentrated pockets of Catalan settlement spread from Melbourne to regional southern cities such as Bendigo. These groups firmly established Australia as a destination in the Catalan imagination, where potential migrants could seek economic success. The closely connected Catalan community in Melbourne became important to broader Spanish arrivals throughout Australia, providing newly disembarked migrants with information about employment opportunities elsewhere in the continent. Although Melbourne was home to the largest concentration of Spanish nationals in Australia, it was not the only city that was home to Spanish speakers. A number lived and worked from the major ports of Fremantle and Sydney. Some of these had remained in Sydney after working on the ships that crossed the Pacific from Chile, and had been born in towns and villages dotted along the Pacific coast. A number arrived as a consequence of the destructive wars that rocked Peru and its neighbours. A large number passed through Australian ports on their way to trade elsewhere. Of these, some remained in the colonies and clustered in w ­ orking-­ class suburbs such as Sydney’s Balmain. Many others came from the Basque Country, drawing on their long histories of fishing and emigration. From Sydney, they settled in communities along the east coast of Australia throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There is little evidence of any particular enthusiasm among Spaniards to move to the north of Australia. As with their initial arrival in Victoria, it was the prospect of a Gold Rush that pushed migrants to consider the northern territories. In a pattern that was common, the young Ramon Casanovas had moved to Essendon on arrival in Victoria, before drifting through southern Australia and New South Wales to reach the ephemeral mining communities in Queensland. Small groups of Spaniards remained based in these mining towns after the Gold Rush had ended, and the periodic opening of new mines attracted workers to regional towns such as

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The Spanish Anarchists of Northern Australia

Mount Cuthbert and Mount Morgan. Without a sustained rush, however, numbers declined and there were barely fifty Spaniards in northern Australia by Federation in 1901. The Spaniards in the north of Australia took many different routes to their future homes. Many had lived in the small towns close to Barcelona, and had experienced the pressure and anxieties of maintaining the quality and dignity of their labour as the Spanish grappled with economic, political and social crises at the turn of the century. Many such migrants had travelled north to work in the cities of France prior to emigration to Australia, but such migration had been temporary, with regular opportunities to return home. The economic and political turmoil in Spain made this an increasingly difficult proposition. A few came to Australia after first attempting to secure a new life in South America. More commonly, though, they came directly to the newly federated Commonwealth. Indeed, British consuls in the major cities of northern Spain were active in encouraging people to migrate to Australia in the years following Federation. Those migrants who were not sponsored by friends, family or agents often worked as crew on ships, choosing to desert once in Australia. This opportunity became easier as the volume of shipping increased. Following the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, the number of ships arriving in Australia from Chile decreased sharply. Conversely, the connection with Latino/a communities in New York increased steadily. In six months in 1919 alone, six Spaniards deserted ships arriving from New York to settle in northern Australia. A number travelled to Britain to work in the booming steelworks during the First World War, but few stayed in the UK for long. Some of those who had worked in British factories to generate the capital necessary to establish themselves subsequently departed from the country as ships’ crew or stowaways, to travel to Australia. Many came from Europe in this manner during 1919, when the availability of ships and the contraction of the European labour market after the First World War provided new opportunities and incentives to leave Europe. Since no ships sailed directly to Australia from Spain, Spanish emigrants normally left from Marseilles on French or British vessels, although limited numbers embarked in the UK, Germany and Italy. The ease of transferring funds and getting access to an A ­ ustralian-­ bound vessel speaks to the increasing global connectivity that

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bound communities across the world, and opened new opportunities for those seeking to find work and dignity in labour. For many, the ships that carried migrants from Europe to Australia were a sign of the progress and possibilities that the future held. The notion of progress was one that held particular appeal for the many radicalised workers of Barcelona, who hoped to set aside the superstitions, oppression and corruption of the past. The ­ocean-­going ships encapsulated this for many, as they passed from Europe through the Mediterranean to the great engineering wonder of the Suez Canal, and on to Yemen, Sri Lanka and eventually to the port of Fremantle in Western Australia. This experience was to be transformative for one particular man whose history would become crucial to the anarchists in the north. Salvador Torrents’ journey to Australia from Barcelona was little different to those of many others. He had wanted to migrate to Australia for some time, but had lacked the 600 pesetas required for the journey. He contacted a Catalan friend in Melbourne, who forwarded him the money on the understanding that it would be repaid in instalments. His sponsor had arrived in Australia in 1907, but had been prevented from forwarding the money earlier by the outbreak of the First World War.3 While with a friend, Torrents left from France in late November 1915, to arrive in Australia one month later. Few had spent a prolonged period without work previously, and many found the experience on board the ships profoundly liberating. For the first time, ­working-­class Spaniards were in close proximity to the wealthy and relished their symbolic equality and shared facilities.4 Many were delighted by the social egalitarianism that existed on board their ship, and revelled in the h ­ igh-­quality food and entertainments that were provided. The journey not only exposed the migrants to a degree of social equality, but was also the first time that many had experienced n ­ on-­ European cultures. Passengers were deeply shocked by the poverty that they saw in the ports as they progressed on their journey. Torrents was struck by the appalling conditions of workers in Egypt and wrote movingly of what he viewed from the side of his ship as labourers who ‘worked as true slaves’. His description of Egyptians’ lives displays his pride at his s­ elf-­made education, when he suggested that he would ‘have to be a Zola to describe’ the scene before him.5 Famed for his positivist depictions of ­working-­class life, the novelist

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Émile Zola was a firm favourite of the Spanish anarchists with whom Torrents mingled.6 Indeed, Torrents’ notes during the voyage display a firm commitment to international solidarity between workers, and he was deeply distressed to see workers in Colombo degrade their intelligence to act as rickshaw drivers and servants to Europeans.7 When their ship reached the port of Fremantle in Western Australia, the passengers were understandably eager to disembark after the long journey and to explore an Australian town for the first time. Instead of curiosity at this exploration, Torrents and his friend Juan Jordana were quickly shocked by the amount of alcohol that was consumed by locals and passengers alike. Torrents wrote wryly that one in three of the population was permanently drunk, and that the experience confirmed his own commitment to abstinence.8 While he sarcastically noted that the ‘effects were not entirely positive’ to locals’ demeanour, it was the effect of alcohol on Indigenous Australians that shocked him the most. Despite his initial impressions of Australian society and race relations, he continued his journey and arrived in Melbourne after crossing the Great Bight. On arrival in Melbourne, Torrents shared the views of many other emigrants from Spain. He was amazed at the wide streets and the comparatively high quality of housing. After disembarking, the two men met family member and sponsor Jaume Torrents, who took them to his home in Essendon. The suburb was then on the outskirts of i­nner-­ city Melbourne, and home to a number of Spaniards. After a few days exploring the city and beaches, another Spaniard arranged work for the two friends, as market gardeners. They also met a fellow native of their home town, Mataró: Juan Ybern. These early social connections would come to influence the later northern communities strongly. Juan’s brother, Vicente, would later follow Torrents and Jordana to join the group of radical thinkers who would establish themselves in the north.9 Although the new arrivals worked in Essendon for four months, they earned barely thirty shillings all summer and decided to head north.10 They left the southern state of Victoria in May 1916, with the hope that they would soon buy land to start their own farm.11 The journey from Melbourne to north Queensland was long and involved many stops on the way. Men and women who had never travelled north before used the voyage to garner information about

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their destination and new homes. Many were so disturbed by stories of hardship in the north that they curtailed their journey in Sydney. On one journey, eight men under contract to work in the northern ­sugar-­cane fields left the ship, after local Spaniards juxtaposed the security of cities with the harsh rural lifestyle that they expected on arrival.12 Torrents was not overly impressed with the stories, and instead focused his attention on the new experiences of cultural diversity in the microcosm of the ship. Sailing from Brisbane 1,500 kilometres north, to the small port of Mourilyan, he listened with pleasure to the many languages and noted the presence of English, Italians, Greeks, Spaniards, Germans and Russians, as people conversed seemingly without prejudice. This cosmopolitanism and relative equality between the working classes on board were to cause him lasting delight. They were also notable characteristics of the northern townships. Anglo–Australians’ impressions of Spaniards varied widely. The first large group of Spaniards had arrived in 1907, causing significant comment and excitement among locals. The inhabitants of the Queensland capital city Brisbane firmly placed them in the romanticised imagination of the Mediterranean, and commented that ‘these children, who people the shores of the blue Mediterranean along with Italians, Sicilians and other old and romantic nationalities, have much in them to commend to the eye of the artist’.13 The migrants from Barcelona had been encouraged to migrate because of their supposed affinity as north Europeans, and many Australians juxtaposed them favourably with the Asian threat that haunted the imaginations of north European Australians. Newspapers carried stories of how the ‘fine built’ men could be trusted to challenge any Asians attempting to cheat them.14 Their portrayal as northern Europeans remained contested, however, and one newspaper recorded them as indolent, suggesting that the new arrivals looked ‘as though they would rather have sunk down in bush grass and slumbered’.15 The racism that structured and divided Australian society was to challenge the men’s hopes of a new egalitarian world and their own place within it.

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Making sense of Australian society The migrants’ arrival in Australia marked the start of long processes of meaning making, as they began to make sense of Australia’s landscape and cultures. The new country’s ­self-­proclaimed progressive identity offered obvious appeal to the labourers who had come from oppressive working conditions overseas. Their world view was also informed by anarchist theorists on the emancipatory potential of landscape for the human condition, and they strongly believed that hygienic and w ­ ell-­planned cities were conducive to healthy human relations. The prospect of rural living, far from government authority, offered new potential to remake a new world in northern Australia that was based on cooperative living, solidarity between workers and freedom from the distortions of capitalist markets. The rugged isolation of the tropical north was both debilitating and oppressive in its heat and intensity of labour. Yet it gave the promise of hope for a future that would be remade according to the principles of equality, education and freedom. The community contained a number of literate and educated men, who gradually left Barcelona to travel to Australia. One man in particular left a significant record of his thoughts and correspondence on this transformative process: Torrents. He was born on the outskirts of Barcelona, and he lived and worked in Catalonia and France before coming to Australia. He became convinced of the injustice of the inequities that he experienced on a daily basis, and while his move to Australia did not disabuse him of this reality, he did come to make sense of his Australian experiences in the light of conditions elsewhere in the world. His experiences prior to coming to Australia give context not only to his own life, but to the lives of others similar to him in the north. Like most of the early migrants to the north, Torrents had grown up in the febrile atmosphere of Barcelona in the first decades of the twentieth century. As economic conditions worsened in that city, the youthful Torrents became involved in a number of food cooperatives, political centres and social groups. He was not alone, and such groups formed part of the social fabric of the ­working-­ class industrial suburbs of the city. As he became older, he worked hard at the workers’ clubs to learn to read and to analyse social conditions, and from a young age was convinced of the need to use these skills for practical work. In the meantime, Barcelona

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continued to experience economic and political polarisation. Violence steadily increased in the city’s workplaces and public spaces. Those who felt excluded directly expressed their anger at their disenfranchisement from the political system. Many primarily sought job security and affordable food, but others looked across the Pyrenees for political inspiration that might provide a framework for transformative action. The frustration and anger boiled over in 1909, when the city exploded in ­anti-­Catholic, ­anti-­government and ­anti-­capitalist violence. Attacks on churches and convents shocked the middle and upper classes, but were symbols of the daily oppression experienced by the workers. Torrents had become steadily more associated with those who were opposed to the reactionary government, and was himself questioned by police with increasing regularity. He later wrote ­self-­effacingly of his role in the events of 1909, when he commented later in life that ‘I myself took active part in that movement though I was, as I have always been, a man of rank and file’.16 The result of his association was that he was obliged to flee to Toulouse, where he admittedly struggled with ‘the life of the emigrant – without money, without knowing the language, no place to work’.17 He survived through the solidarity of French workers, and continued his political activism. In the aftermath of the bitter repression against those involved in the 1909 violence, he protested against the killing of the reformer and activist Francisco Ferrer, with hundreds of other expatriate Spaniards outside that country’s consulate in Toulouse. After 1909, Torrents found that life for political radicals in his former home country had become increasingly unsustainable. However, he attempted to return to Spain as soon as was feasible, to care for his partner. Nonetheless, he rapidly found that he had been blacklisted by employers, and he relied on charity from friends and family to survive. In the face of this new reality, periodically over a number of years, he was forced to return to work in France. His decision to do so was not unusual, and many Spaniards were drawn to France in search of employment and greater freedom. Even in France, he frequently found himself ostracised and treated as a criminal by authorities who assumed that he had engaged in mindless acts of violence against churches. Although the work was hard, and he had little money, the arms race prior to the First World War meant that work was available. Once war broke out, the French need for labour became yet more pressing.

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Torrents returned to Spain temporarily after the birth of his daughter, but was again unable to work because he ‘had the mark of being a revolutionary’.18 Although he bitterly resented that the capitalist system penalised his desire for equality, he did not resent being known as someone committed to changing the status quo. On his return to Mataró, he established a radical school modelled on Ferrer’s principles to teach young people skills without the interference of either Church or state. Nonetheless, he remained unable to support his family in Spain and returned to France with his wife and child. Torrents had many French and Spanish friends who shared his ideas and aspirations for the future. He returned repeatedly to the French city of Lyon, with its large and established anarchist workers’ centre. He spent almost a year in the city, where he and his partner joyfully engaged in political debate with other attendees. He was still harassed by police in France on a regular basis. On one occasion, barely a year before the outbreak of the First World War, he was arrested by French police when the King of Spain passed through the city on his way to meet French President Raymond Poincaré. His arrest was not unusual, and also occurred in Paris, where police viewed him as a dangerous anarchist known to be opposed to the war effort. He recalled, laughingly, that he had ‘never used any arms other than paper. Every time the police frisked me, all they found in my pockets were newspapers and brochures’.19 Although the war meant that he was able to find work in France, Torrents recognised that his position was not sustainable. He was not alone, and many people from northern Spain were similarly seeking opportunities overseas. He had long wanted to escape what he saw as the capitalist cruelties of Europe. Rather than the Americas, he sought to draw on family connections that would allow him to move to the distant continent of Australia. While in Paris, he finally heard word that he could leave Europe. Even so, and after a brief return to say farewell to his family in Mataró, Spanish police attempted to stop him crossing into France. The same experience of arrest and questioning awaited him in the French port of Toulon. He nonetheless boarded his ship on time, with his close friend Jordana, quickly meeting other Catalans on board who were similarly bound for the new opportunities of Australia. Many of these fellow travellers came to settle in the north of Queensland, a coastal region more than 1,000 kilometres north of

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the state capital Brisbane. The area remained accessible only by steam ship at the turn of the century, with the rail connection to Brisbane completed only in 1924. Residents experienced hot, wet summers with fierce storms and occasional cyclones. A string of small towns dotted the coastal lowlands, although the coast was relatively sheltered from the rough Pacific Ocean by the nearby Great Barrier Reef. This thin coastal strip remained dominated by tropical rainforests in the north, with the highlands rising steeply to the interior. Over time, these highlands came to be dominated by tobacco growing while the coastal regions were cleared for ­sugar-­ cane farms. The progressive clearing of the rainforest to make way for farms relied on gruelling labour. By Federation, the cleared land had become characterised by a number of ­family-­owned farms, investing together in small cooperatively owned mills that were separated by undeveloped bush and rainforest. Most Spaniards, newly arrived in the north and eager to maximise their potential earnings and minimise their linguistic disadvantage, found employment with resident Spanish farmers. Francesco Gil was typical of many arrivals, and had arrived in Melbourne in January 1913. Within three years, he had left to work in the north. He travelled to the small township of Mena Creek, where he joined a handful of Spaniards clearing the rainforest and scrub. By 1920, at least thirteen Spaniards had passed through the tiny township, where an earlier Spanish arrival owned a local farm. The vast majority of these men had been born in Catalonia. With so many migrants who originated from Barcelona and its surrounds, the radical nature of w ­ orking-­class Catalan life rapidly became a local feature. Baudilio Masnou was typical in this. Masnou had arrived in Melbourne from the large Catalan city of Gerona in March 1913. Like Torrents, he travelled to the small northern port of Mourilyan, where he established himself as an important member of the local community. Masnou remained in touch with European and American politics, and was one of a number of Spaniards who regularly imported anarchist literature from Spain and the USA. Such actions were widely replicated within the community, which remained passionately involved in political and economic debates despite their physical distance. Many of the earliest Spanish residents had initially made their homes in townships that were focused on mining. These isolated towns rarely provided sustained employment, as mining veins were

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exhausted and new ones were opened elsewhere. Many miners lived in precarious conditions, gouging minerals such as copper from open mines, while others searched in the hope of finding gold. These peripatetic lives were not unusual in the north. Few men brought their partners until they were able to help support them at a fixed location. Nonetheless, some women joined family members in the north. José Merrey Vasquez is one early example of this, and he moved from Victoria to the Croydon gold fields in the late 1870s with his wife and six children. Such women were regularly left alone in makeshift tents in the bush, armed with a shotgun, while male adults sought work elsewhere for months at a time. Anarchists fundamentally opposed social hierarchies as false and demeaning to the human condition. Notwithstanding this, the specific oppression of women was rarely addressed as a priority. Mikhail Bakunin had urged ‘equal political, social, and economic rights, as well as equal obligations for women’, on the principle that oppressing any human would impinge on the freedom of everyone.20 The issue was largely ignored by anarchist leaders, who proved uninterested in sexual relations as a tool of oppression that was equally pernicious as ­ state-­ based oppression. Most anarchists concurred that the achievement of social justice must involve changing the nature of social relations, and freeing it from the influence of the state. To such end, it was believed that institutions such as marriage demanded abolition, but few men were willing to engage with a fundamental r­e-­ imagining of the domestic subjugation of women. Spanish women in northern Australia suffered serious isolation, in common with all women in the area. In their early days in the north, many lived in the barracks that dotted the cane fields, and in which the male c­ ane-­cutting teams lived after working in the fields. There was most commonly one woman in each barrack, who undertook to cook and clean for all the men in hot, humid and unsanitary conditions. The barrack building was generally located in the fields or in very basic huts nearby and, with relatively few women in the north, any female worker was likely to be the only woman in the vicinity. By the 1920s, chain migration meant that more women and families were arriving, often from proximate towns and villages in Spain. Even so, the distance between farms and towns was very significant. While women were able to travel, their capacity to do so was limited practically by the distances and

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limited road networks. Without access to other women, or shops to support their domestic work, they remained highly isolated. Many migrant women were vulnerable and suffered from depression as they sought to reconcile their new lives with the migrant narrative of hope in a new home. A number wrote of their initial shock at the conditions of their new homes, which were little more than wooden huts that offered little protection from the elements. With little else to occupy them in the early years, these homes often appeared as prisons until improvements in housing and the density of settlement from the 1920s. Not only were women shocked at the physical conditions; they were generally without the extended support networks that they were used to in ­close-­knit villages in Spain. Without familial supports or a casual economy based on domestic production, they found themselves unusually reliant on male partners to provide income and support their daily needs and duties. Other women were the victims of violence at the hands of their partners. Only very rarely were they able to take such matters to courts, which privileged male authority and conducted matters in English. One such example was Balbina Palmada. Her husband, Felix, had come to the north in 1907 as part of the large group of cane workers. Soon after, Balbina travelled to join her husband. He had purchased his own farm near Silkwood by November 1918, but the enterprise failed and Felix was instead forced to collect timber in the bushland near the small port of Mourilyan.21 Local police were aware of her husband’s political views and had placed him on a list of suspicious local communist sympathisers, to be viewed with caution. Balbina’s life in Australia was not easy. She was regularly left on her own, or with her children, while her husband went to find seasonal work in the bush. Unable to survive on the allowance he paid her, she repeatedly took her husband to court in an effort to increase the support money.22 It rarely worked, and he beat her regularly. Decades later, she left him and was forced to support herself in Brisbane. Thousands of kilometres from any friends or family, her life in the state capital was hard. Although she was safe from her husband, she lost contact with her children, who had remained with their father, collecting timber in the north. Women’s vulnerability is further emphasised by the number of sex workers in the northern communities. Spaniards’ prominence in these businesses suggests that the commitment to anarchist

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ideals was rather pragmatic at times, and drew influence from its practical attempts to improve workers’ conditions rather than an ideological enthusiasm for social purity. One Spaniard recalled that the town of Innisfail possessed seven to eight brothels at any one time, although it increased to twelve at one stage in the 1920s.23 Women’s lives did not pass in endless stretches of passivity to male wishes, and, where possible, negotiations occurred on a daily basis. While the men of the fields were regularly able to visit local towns to socialise in public houses and hotels, these options were not available for women. Not only was entry into a public house socially and legally difficult, but travelling alone along country roads carried its own forms of danger. Many women organised dances as part of the network of fundraising and community supports that existed within and across ethnic groups. Picnics were similarly sociable affairs, during which the two sexes generally separated for the main period of the event, allowing the formation of ­peer-­support networks. Such events were popular but were not common, given the distances and low density of the population of Spanish speakers. Life was not easy for those who lived and worked in the s­ugar-­ cane farms. The future community leader Claudio Donatiu cleared trees from his land in his free time after working in the ­sugar-­cane fields. Doing so allowed him to plant his own sugar cane among the cleared stumps, while he saved money to bring his wife and children from Catalonia. Torrents and Jordana borrowed money to buy 60 acres of land for farming at Mena Creek without having seen the property, and similarly cleared the land with an axe after their own gruelling paid work.24 Torrents had been very shocked when he first viewed his purchase, which he later recalled as the start of a painful ­re-­evaluation of his status from ­self-­made intellectual to labouring animal.25 The northern landscape of ­sugar-­cane farms was not wholly foreign to the migrants, and matched what they knew of ­sugar-­cane farms in Cuba. This did not necessarily ease the transition to life in the north. Lorenzo Duran was one of a number of Spaniards who came to Australia after time in Argentina. He was horrified by the work that the labourers were doing, and said to friends that ‘the work done [in the north] was done in Cuba by the blacks. He said we might as well try to get back to Argentina and live like white people’.26 Others, such as Francisco Crus, sought to travel back to South America and returned to Innisfail’s ­sugar-­cane fields

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only when it became clear that he could not easily return to Argentina.27 Spanish migrants in the north settled in a string of towns, with each one tending to be associated with a particular region of Spain. Basques generally settled in towns such as Ayr and Ingham, whereas Catalans preferred more northern towns such as Innisfail and South Johnstone. Less likely to have chain migration through families, Catalans were also less able to secure y­ear-­ round employment on family farms. Prior to the First World War, Catalan, Valencian and Andalusian migrants predominantly settled in the Johnstone area south of Cairns. The substantial numbers of Andalusian and Valencian migrants who also lived in the Innisfail region are unsurprising, given that many of the former had earlier migrated to Barcelona before their emigration, and that the cultural ties between Catalonia and Valencia were strong. One descendant of early Valencian migrants recalls a sense that his father’s decision to settle in Innisfail was predetermined: ‘That was the address. You going to Australia, you go to Innisfail.’ 28 It was these towns around Innisfail that would become home for the anarchist community in the north. In 1909, Innisfail remained a town that was ‘raw in its clearing, unlovely with its messy river banks and depressing streets of dirt or mud’ that could frequently be crossed only with planks.29 It was this emergent town that would service the regions in which most Spaniards settled. On arrival in Innisfail just a few years later, Torrents and Jordana met ‘El Patagonian’, Vicente Vives, who directed them to a Spanish cook working in one of the local businesses. The cook, in turn, introduced them to a Spanish farmer, Zafolet, who agreed to employ them to work in his s­ ugar-­cane fields until they found more permanent employment. Despite his dislike of the farm work, Torrents was drawn to Innisfail’s cosmopolitan nature. He described the town as ‘neither large nor small, constructed in wood with modern houses . . . all arranged in lines that resemble streets’.30 On a Saturday in Innisfail ‘one can appreciate the variety of races there are, all in little groups, and English spoken the least of any languages’.31 Torrents’ initial impressions of Innisfail were not far from reality. The town relied on serving the growing ­sugar-­cane industry, and had grown rapidly in the previous decades. Nonetheless, it remained a relatively small town of only a few thousand people. It was not

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unusual in this regard, and a number of similarly sized towns existed along the coast, many of which were focused on the s­ugar-­cane industry and were home to large numbers of Spaniards. Such towns were transformed at weekends, when large numbers of cane cutters left their barracks in the fields to descend on the towns’ boarding houses and drinking establishments, and to use local sex workers. Tensions occasionally existed between rival nationalities, but were not common. Rather, people used the weekends as an opportunity to collect mail that had news of distant family and former homes, and to meet friends for discussions. These opportunities for meetings, gathering information and reflecting on hard work were to be an important component of the north’s role as a crucible for Australian radicalism. As the land was gradually cleared of native vegetation, migrants shifted to employment that could support family units and provide improved security. Some went to the small ports along the Queensland coastline, such as Mourilyan. These ­single-­dock ports were vital for the region’s expanding industry, but they were also important sites for receiving news from the wider world, and migrants would exchange books and newspapers when they were passing through. Other new arrivals worked on the expanding railways that connected small communities along the coast and interior. Jesús Rosende is one such example: he initially worked on the railways around the port of Mackay before working in the mining regions north of inland Cloncurry. In his role on the railways, he was able to transmit information to fellow Spaniards and political sympathisers out of the sight of the authorities. In many ways, these jobs on the rails and ports of northern Australia replicated similar tasks being undertaken by marginally employed Spanish migrants in Latin American countries such as Argentina. Certainly, they provided a similar context for the community’s political beliefs. The number of Spaniards arriving in the years from Federation through to the 1920s and 1930s only rarely exceeded thirty people each month, and was often lower. Nonetheless, the north Australian community had become an established destination for sections of Spanish society by the 1920s. At this time, its appeal was further fuelled by the USA’s imposition of restricted immigration quotas. Rather than anticipate a swift return to Spain, most new arrivals anticipated that Australia would become a permanent home.

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Naturalisation rates in the town of Innisfail demonstrate that between five and ten Spaniards were naturalised every six months during the 1920s.32 The increased rates of naturalisation were connected to the changes to the USA immigration system, as naturalised Spaniards sought to facilitate family sponsorship and aid their own businesses in the process. Only during the 1930s, when democratisation in Spain renewed hopes for social equality, did many defer their renunciation of allegiance to Madrid and contemplate a possible return to Europe.

Making sense of Australian landscapes One of the most influential thinkers for members of the Spanish community in their northern Australian homes would be the Frenchman Sébastien Faure. Faure engaged directly with questions of the connection between physical and social environments, and placed a strong emphasis on its importance for the healthy formation and full expression of human personalities. He expressed this particularly clearly when he wrote that his aim as an anarchist was ‘the establishment of a social environment that can assure the maximum ­well-­being and freedom to each and every one’.33 As Emma Goldstone wrote, Faure believed that ‘only when the material needs, the hygiene of the home, and intellectual environment are harmonious, can the child grow into a healthy free being’.34 Although focusing on social environments, these were inextricably linked to the physical environment in which people lived, since lived spaces based on economic, political and social injustice could only ever give rise to hatred and enmity between people. Torrents had heard Faure speak on a number of occasions while he was working in France. He first heard him talk during one of his formative visits to the workers’ centre in Lyon. He was immediately struck by Faure’s capacity to teach and orate, and the experience transformed his aspiration as an anarchist from being a protester to being a social organiser devoted to the creation of educated and equal communities. Listening to Faure developed Torrents’ limited exposure to the anarchist theories that he had gleaned from Ferrer and Barcelona’s local working men’s clubs. Significantly, for one who would later be so impressed by the cleanliness of Australian cities, Faure taught Torrents that ‘the individual is nothing but the

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reflection, the image and the result of the society in which he develops; as is the society, so is the individual’.35 This struck Torrents powerfully as he sought to escape from the urban conflict and oppression of Europe.36 Torrents’ initial impression of Australia’s urban environment was of the lack of urban development. Although he had thought Fremantle to be a ­well-­planned city, he noted that barely two streets could be viewed as fully constructed. Similarly, he described Port Adelaide as basically ‘a field with three buildings for the government, the customs, the station, and a large building with the market. There are two cafes, and that is all. The people are two hours away from this small port’.37 While he did not necessarily view the lack of European presence as problematic, there is no doubt that it was striking after his life in the bustling European cities of Barcelona and Paris. His comments remained positive though, and he emphasised the potential for progress and equality in this (to his mind) new country. Torrents’ arrival in Melbourne marked the end of his long journey from Europe. His impression of the city contrasted favourably with that of the large conurbations of Europe, and he wrote that ‘Melbourne was good: a modern city with wide streets, clean, many gardens and well organised. The majority of people live outside, the houses all single story, without touching each other and almost all with a small garden around the house that is very hygienic’.38 It was particularly appealing to him that it was possible for each person to aspire to own a small house with a vegetable garden that might sustain a family. Later, when travelling north to Queensland, he also enjoyed Sydney greatly, admiring its wide streets, pretty stores and elegant inhabitants. Such cities appeared to give the opportunity for the positive social environments he so desired. It is little surprising that Torrents’ positive impressions were confirmed during his stay in Melbourne, when he first experienced the accessibility of leisure. While working to establish themselves, a group of friends were able to take a day’s holiday for the first time. He recalled catching a train to Sandringham, which was then ‘a little town close to the sea, [where he] popped into the water and had half a bag of mussels’, spending one of the happiest days that he had ever had in his life.39 Such leisure time appeared to confirm the dignity of labour that might be possible in their new homes.

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Such hopes would be sorely challenged after he made his way north to Queensland. On his initial arrival in northern Australia, Torrents was immediately struck by the lack of development, and the proximity of a raw and seemingly untamed nature. The sides of the river seemed to come in on the boat as the arrivals sailed up the Mourilyan River to dock, and the forests appeared almost impenetrable to eyes accustomed to European country. Moreover, he was deeply shocked by the quality of life that Europeans endured in the north. From the start, he found sleeping in the suffocating heat difficult, wearing sweaty clothes that had been designed for Europe. He was initially well fed by friendly Spaniards, but he had arrived in the height of summer and struggled to get used to the heavy humidity. Spaniards had to reconcile themselves to extremes of temperature, but also had to orientate themselves to Australia’s unique physical landscape. Primary among these new experiences was their shock at the sheer distances between townships and metropolitan centres. Torrents was not alone in his surprise. Spaniards in the Northern Territory, writing during the First World War, were equally aghast. The latter group worked on the train line several hundred kilometres south of the city of Darwin, in arid scrub. Single Spaniards were infuriated that even when they reached their destination, they were repeatedly without food or water and had to walk for days to find provisions.40 They panicked and believed that they had been ‘marooned’ and would ‘starve’, when a train that was to have taken them elsewhere left without them.41 They believed that they were only saved from dying alone in a remote country by a telegram sent to the Spanish Consul far in the south, who in turn contacted the Australian Minister for External Affairs, Hugh Mahon. Without friends or family, and weeks from the nearest town, the reality of the Australian landscape was deeply unsettling. Isolation was hard to experience, but the extreme heat and weather conditions were a source of ­ near-­ constant frustration. Torrents wrote regularly of the ‘suffocating’ heat that represented the epitome of his sense of professional and personal loss. After four months working in the northern Queensland summer, he said that there had not been a single week when it had not rained for a majority of days. Depressed, he wrote that ‘[i]n the morning, before starting work, the sky, full of clouds, announced the course of the

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day. It begins to rain, almost every five minutes, the wind blows, blowing the clouds, hiding the sun, for which one could write so many tales about its blazing heat’.42 Life was little different in the Northern Territory. Each family of migrants there was initially obliged to share a tent that could hardly remain intact through the violent wet season.43 On his arrival in the north, Torrents and his friends had been shocked by the conditions in which the majority of Spaniards lived. While conditions had been extremely poor in Europe, in Australia they were living in houses that comprised four wooden walls that barely kept out the rain, and that were hopelessly ineffective at protecting inhabitants from small animals or the wind. Torrents’ first jobs were 40 kilometres from the nearest town, and he had ­no-­one for company other than his work colleagues. Disgusted at being constantly soaked in sweat, he was soon exhausted from walking for miles, searching for work in the ­mid-­day heat. By the end of a day cutting, he could barely move and thought that he would die from the combination of physical exhaustion and the heat. He recalled the work in the cane fields as being the most brutal that he had experienced anywhere, and was shocked at what was expected. Each day, labourers would work in teams to cut sugar cane by working systematically up and down fields that were sodden with rain. Writing in poetic form, he bemoaned: ‘Oh miserable life! That which we have to do, which is nothing, is all we can take in this detestable world.’ 44 The team environment relied on fast work and pushed the men to compete to retain their places in the cutting gang. He was shocked by the barbaric masculinity that eulogised the physically strong and shamed the weak.45 After working in harsh conditions all day, and carrying his food to his house, he would collapse to sleep, believing that his dog outside had better food and milk than he did. It was, he wrote, ‘the most brutal job that exists’.46 Torrents’ shock at the conditions was accentuated by his ­long-­ cherished ­self-­perception as a thinking man, who aspired to engage in intellectual debate that might change the world. He sought to maintain his life as a s­elf-­educated intellectual by writing in the evenings after his work. He s­ elf-­consciously wrote a preface to his poetry, asking that the reader not read his poetry and stories if they wanted high culture, ‘but if you want to read the thoughts of a man, who, after hard work stealing hours from his body’s relaxation, will

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spend time crafting the illusions and deceptions suffered in short stories, always expecting the comedy of life that plays out in the theatre called “planet earth”’.47 Nonetheless, his early sense of despair at his new life is palpable in his writing. Drawing on his new experiences, he sought to explain to posterity [h]ow the workers are not free, always sodden with sweat and rain . . . Again and again thoughts crush my brain, that it could stamp about in the soil to create a library to rival Carthage. So many castles built in the sky. The thought that one could be crushed by the convenient ignorance of the masses. To fall to the bottom of the abyss, with nothing to hold, with nothing remaining secure, and to have to contemplate the end through the fault of indifference in others who form a part of humanity.48

Writing to a friend in Spain ‘with a crate for a table and my cot for a chair’, he sought to reach across the miles and acknowledged that ‘I’m feeling low. I don’t know if I’m going mad in the middle of this loneliness and of not knowing the truth . . . I hope to be able to read with people that understand me’.49 Occasionally, more profound disaster struck. On 10 March 1918, a cyclone struck the north Queensland coastal area that was inhabited by the Spaniards. Almost 100 European inhabitants were killed in the sparsely populated region, with no accurate figures for Indigenous residents. Torrents was living with three Spanish men and one Spanish woman in a wooden hut when the ‘horrible catastrophe’ occurred. He recalled the rain getting steadily heavier, and retreating to his slab home to get shelter. As the rain continued to worsen, they began to reinforce the walls but the winds continued to worsen and it was clear that nothing was safe. In defiance of this latest disaster to befall them, he remembers desperately shouting at the storm and the group feigning bravado by singing loudly to show that they were not afraid.50 As the rain continued, the winds lifted part of their roof and shattered their remaining lights. The inhabitants began to panic as the whole house moved, and they rushed to safeguard whatever money they could find. By the time the storm had passed, the inhabitants were in shock. Not only were their clothes ruined, but most of their belongings were destroyed. One of Torrents’ last symbols of status, a treasured hat brought from Europe, was beyond repair. Personal losses notwithstanding, they were horrified to see the damage to

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neighbours’ properties. Many homes were destroyed totally, with roads blocked by fallen trees and cane flattened in the fields. Innisfail, then a town of 3,500 people, had only twelve homes standing. Torrents thought that it was ‘impossible to describe’ the sight of Innisfail, ‘which was no longer a town but looked like an abandoned field’.51 Despite this shock at the force of nature, he recognised that there was no state to assist them. While Europe tore itself apart in the First World War, Torrents was struck by how all nationalities came together for the common good when nationality was unimportant, noting how Germans formed teams with English to clear the crucial roads and railways. The northern townships offered a sense of camaraderie in the face of hardship, which gradually developed into a vibrant ­working-­ class culture. Over a number of years, volunteer organisations created community libraries and sports clubs that were recognisably similar to those in European cities. Less formally, people with similar backgrounds and shared families came together to relax with food and dancing. While he remained firmly opposed to the constant ­ alcohol-­ fuelled fights between young men, Torrents recognised the north to be a land of outstanding natural beauty and one in which he eventually found a sense of belonging. Torrents was not alone in his astonishment at the regions’ cultural diversity. He did not believe that there was any other part of the world that was home to people of so many different backgrounds. On one visit to Innisfail at a weekend, he recorded English, Irish, Italians, Greeks, Spaniards, Turks, Pacific Islanders, Indians, French, Germans, Russians, Austrians, Japanese, Maltese and a large number of Chinese and Indigenous Australians, as well as Spaniards. He delighted in the cosmopolitan sentiment, writing that on ‘Saturdays, when the people generally go to the town, one can see groups of every class, talking their national languages’.52 Radical Spaniards took great pleasure in the social cohesivity that existed in this environment. In the practical absence of a state, and its divisive rhetoric of national destiny, workers from all backgrounds could come together without conflict. Yet, Torrents worried that a more lasting cosmopolitanism would be impossible without more tangible and lasting social and political connections. He was angry that those in authority continued to privilege Anglophone speakers, and blamed this on people’s relative lack of education. He wrote drily to the Australian intellectual Nettie Palmer that the local

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Greeks were not exactly descended from Aristotle or Plato. He considered them ‘ignorant and vicious. The Maltese suffer from the same condition’.53 Only by investing in education for migrants and workers would Australia reach its potential and become transformed in a reflection of Faure’s aspirations. As a consequence, and while there was solidarity among the workers, Torrents worried that more profound intercultural connections remained relatively weak. Life in the north was not one of constant despair, despite the demands of the work. Hard labour meant that relaxation time was cherished. This became all the more so as roads and transportation facilitated more opportunities to meet local family and friends. Paronella Park exemplified this trend. José Paronella had been born in 1887, in a small Catalan village outside Barcelona, where his family had grown olives.54 Paronella had earned his passage money to Australia by working in Italy, Switzerland and France, and arrived in Queensland in 1912. By the late 1920s, after cutting cane and speculating in mines, Paronella bought undeveloped scrub very close to Torrents’ own plot of land in the small township of Mena Creek. Together with his wife, they built a complex that became known as Paronella Park. The building was constructed in a consciously Spanish style, with a crenellated castle, grand staircase, and stately house that overlooked beautiful Mena Creek falls. By the 1930s, the park contained a theatre, cinema, tennis courts, café and pool, and was frequented by a broad c­ ross-­section of the local community. From its inception, the park was a particularly important venue for local Spaniards. It not only hosted Spanish dances; its technological achievement and beauty were a source of pride both to local Spaniards and to the broader community, providing a visual statement of their culture and cosmopolitan diversity. Paronella’s political views were not anarchist and, while he was opposed to the dominance of organised Anglophone trade unions, he was happy to court priests and local politicians to further his business.55 He was certainly not a lover of government intrusion, however, and refused to pay income tax on principle. This changed only when the government fined him £1,000 in 1924, and denied him r­ e-­entry to Australia until he had paid.56 As Paronella makes clear, not everyone in the local Catalan community was overtly political; many shared a deep distrust of government and questioned its right to interfere in private life.

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Conclusion The decades following Federation were years of economic and social transformation in northern Australia. The Spanish community had initially been based overwhelmingly in the cities of Melbourne and Sydney but, from 1900, many from Catalonia began to drift to the northern townships, following friends and family who had arrived in 1907 as part of an organised group. These northern communities were far from centres of political authority and at the farthest reaches of what was then European development. For the Spaniards, many of whom came from Spanish cities undergoing significant industrial conflict, this distance offered ­new-­found freedoms that they were determined to take. Notwithstanding these opportunities, there were also serious dislocation and hardship in their new lives. The intensity of the weather and isolation from each other was initially bewildering, and challenged their imagined status as Europeans and anarchist thinkers. Yet the camaraderie of others, the presence of Spaniards and the sheer diversity of the communities inspired them to stay. The harshness of their work reinforced a hostility to capitalism that had been learned in Spain. It also offered hope that the Utopia that they craved might finally eventuate.

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In Search of Industrial Justice

Spaniards came to Australia intent on securing a life that was free from the violence and oppression of Spain. The desire for freedom from police harassment and government surveillance was closely related to their desire for fairer and more equal workplaces and economic markets. Many new arrivals had been involved in political protests and industrial action in Spain, and they brought their experiences in Europe with them to Australia. Study of their working lives in Australia dispels any notion that the migrants’ sense of vulnerability in a new country might have rendered them passive, and instead emphasises the connectivity that the migrants consciously fostered with other workers worldwide. The pursuit of dignity in the workplace was central to migrants’ continuing activism in Australia. They had left a country that was grappling to come to terms with a ­post-­imperial vision of itself as a modern European country, and that was increasingly entangled in the global networks of capital and commerce. Instead, the migrants hoped for a life in which the profit from labour remained within the community. This rural Utopia was believed to be the means to overcome decades of industrial conflict, and set the basis for a new world in remote northern Australia that could be based on freedom, equality and justice. The migrants’ attempts to craft a new model for a fairer society should be seen in the context of the particular isolated agrarian region in which they found themselves. The major industry was ­sugar-­cane farming, which relied on a system of labour that was more closely aligned with the plantation systems of the southern USA than the southern Australian states. For much of the previous century, farmers in northern Australia had relied on Pacific Island labourers to carry out the b ­ ack-­breaking field work in atrocious

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conditions. These workers had originally been taken from their homes largely by duress or duplicity, and few were able to return voluntarily. As part of the new Australian Federation in 1901, the first Federal Parliament passed legislation that forbade Pacific Islanders’ employment as indentured labourers and required all Islanders to leave the Commonwealth by the start of 1907. Faced with the collapse of their industry, farmers urgently needed to find alternative sources of labour. Few believed that northern Europeans could carry out the work in hot and humid conditions, and so attention instead focused on southern Europeans.

Taking to the fields The economic consequences of the forced withdrawal of Pacific Islander labour preoccupied many in the ­sugar-­dependent north. The management of the dominant Colonial Sugar Refining Company (CSR) entertained ‘grave doubts, even stark unbelief, as to the possibility of profitable employment of white men in field work in the tropics’.1 British cutters felt degraded by the work, and resented the low accommodation standards that Pacific Islanders had been obliged to tolerate. The Report of the Royal Commission on Sugar Industry Labour in 1906 had noted that ­non-­British labour from Europe was perceived to be ‘unreliable, transient, and unpredictable, frequently demanding higher wages and seldom fulfilling their contracts for the season’.2 Nonetheless, there appeared to be little choice and most farmers reluctantly accepted the need to import southern Europeans, whom it was hoped would be more suited to manual work in the harsh sun than British workers. Farmers delayed action until the last possible moment, when it ceased to be legal to use most Pacific Island labourers. At that point, CSR arranged the migration of 335 Piedmontese workers from northern Italy, whom it was hoped would arrive in time to participate in the harvest for 1907. Growers not only considered northern Italians to be good workers, but also approved of their general reluctance to join Australian trade unions. They also felt some reassurance that, while not exactly north European, the Piedmontese would at least not be from the d ­ ark-­skinned south of Italy. Unfortunately for CSR, the Italian government became concerned and blocked the scheme at the last moment. In

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desperation, the company’s agent turned to the northern Spanish region of Catalonia. Although CSR was concerned that Catalans would be a more obvious circumvention of the government’s definition of northern Europeans, the cutting season was fast approaching and the company resolved to proceed regardless.3 CSR offered Catalans free passage, hoping to encourage volunteers seeking a new life. Eager to secure the scarce labour, participating farmers also undertook to contribute £5 to offset the travel costs of each man they received. Farmers were nonetheless wary of the new group, and managers at the crucial mills in which cane was processed had to exercise considerable persuasion. The manager at one mill in the small town of Macknade noted a contractor who was typical of many farmers, and who declared that he would only apply for British men to cut the cane: ‘Under no circumstances would he allow one of [the Catalans] on his property or have anything to do with them, though he admitted he had no former experience of this class of labour, but they had all an equally bad reputation.’4 CSR’s head office was only marginally more enthusiastic. Rather than ask the state government to subsidise the Catalans’ migration (as they had done with contemporary groups of Britons, Scandinavians and Austrians), the company informed the Queensland Premier, William Kidston, that ‘in deference to public opinion we are willing to bear the entire cost of their introduction, and in addition the whole balance of their expenses’.5 The company had little choice, such was its urgent need for labour. The new workers arrived in Brisbane on 9 July 1907. Of the ­ninety-­eight people on board, none of the Spaniards were women. After a brief stop in Brisbane, the migrants changed ships to the Wakefield and sailed directly to the city of Townsville, over 1,000 kilometres north, arriving on 12 July. From Townsville they were sent to four CSR mills that were dotted in small townships spread throughout hundreds of kilometres of coast, and that were barely connected by land. Despite every effort being made to prevent the men from absconding and returning south, at least five had disappeared before the group arrived at the mills. Although they were later discovered and sent back to the northern ­sugar-­cane fields, few growers wanted the recalcitrant men on their farms.6 The mills at the townships of Goondi, Macknade and Victoria were each sent approximately thirty men in the first instance, where they

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were billeted overnight. The next day, farmers arrived to choose their men and take them to their farms. Attitudes in the sugar industry were cautious. Mill owners’ initial reactions were positive, and the Spaniards ‘created a favourable impression, [being] willing to get to work at once, all desiring to improve themselves’.7 Farmers and growers were less optimistic. The mill manager at Macknade continued to struggle to manage perceptions of the new arrivals, and was relieved to have fewer than anticipated, feeling sure that ‘we would have difficulty in getting rid of any more Spaniards, as I hear several of the contractors were going to object to them’.8 ­English-­speaking workers were particularly (and predictably) hostile, believing that the Spaniards’ arrival undermined their own ability to bargain with employers from a position of strength. The newly founded Australian Workers’ Union (AWU) felt that the newcomers were likely to suppress wages and provide a n ­on-­ unionised workforce for farmers. Journalists sympathetic to these workers’ complaints noted farmers’ later difficulties with the indentured Spaniards gleefully, and reported that ‘it serves them right, as they refused good steady men work before the arrival of their Spanish pets’.9 The Spaniards’ own sense of foreboding and growing concern was also becoming a recurring problem for all concerned. The Spaniards’ arrival in Queensland occurred at a particularly inauspicious moment. The gradual erosion of the Pacific Islanders’ presence in the cane fields had been matched by the progressive growth of Anglophone unionism in the industry. During 1906 and 1907, sugar workers’ unions were formed at the small northern towns of Mossman, Innisfail, Ingham, Ayr and Proserpine. Largely ineffectual in the improvement of working conditions, the small sugar unions were rapidly consolidated by the much larger AWU the following year. From this position of increased influence, relations between unionised workers, farmers and mill owners became steadily more acrimonious. The first major strike occurred in 1909 and was repeated to great effect in 1911. Importantly for the Spaniards, foreign workers were central to British Australians’ complaints, and unions blamed new migrants for having caused a perceived decline in conditions. The 1911 strike focused on British labourers’ refusal to work under the Master and Servant Act as indentured labourers. Much of the social frustration and tension that developed during the

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strike was expressed through increased violence towards n ­ on-­ British migrant workers. The Anglo–Australian workers simultaneously ­re-­asserted their social and industrial superiority, and disassociated them from those southern European labourers who remained indentured and tied to their employers. Spaniards rapidly acclimatised themselves to this atmosphere of industrial unrest, and used Catalan models of protest to contest their indentured status from their arrival in 1907. On their first arrival in the cane fields, and in accordance with the growing practice among British Australian cane cutters, the men from Barcelona formed their own cutting teams of ten men, which could then be chosen by farmers to work their fields. The mill manager at Goondi recounted how he had assisted the new arrivals to form two groups of ten and one of eight, ‘three farms to each group and their farms adjacent, so that the men could easily work together if necessary, and would be more content living close to one another’.10 Such proximity was to prove an unintended boon when organising industrial protest. Demonstrating a similar sensitivity to more established European cane cutters, the Spaniards immediately complained at the b ­ arrack-­style accommodation that had been allotted to them. Having being told at the outset that farmers would provide accommodation, the men were angered to find that this did not include basic necessities such as bedding. CSR had arranged for an interpreter to accompany them, and to visit the new arrivals twice weekly in the initial period to defuse any early difficulties. It was hoped that this expense would not be necessary for long, but events were to dictate that he stayed for well over a season to resolve the repeated objections that were raised. Two weeks after the Spaniards’ arrival, they were felt to be ‘doing as well as can be expected for a start. Those cutting cane are now averaging something over the 1¼ tons per day, per man, and are apparently contented with their lot and food, etc.; so far having given no trouble’.11 Farmers were less impressed, however, and one, named Sauzier, commented angrily that his six men contained no agricultural labourers, but instead comprised one blacksmith, one carpenter, one railway station master, one town commission clerk and two violinists.12 The carpenter deserted within a month, asserting that he was no labourer.13 Unsurprisingly, few of the men were accustomed to rural work and local newspapers reported that ‘the majority [of Spaniards] that came to the Herbert are laid up

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with swelled hands, sore feet and other bodily ailments’.14 In a portent of the future, Sauzier’s group summarily refused his order to cut cane and would only carry out general farm work or weeding.15 More serious disagreements began within a month of their arrival. It seems unlikely that the Spaniards were aware of the stringent controls that employers were permitted to use regarding their labourers. Even in Catalonia, there was no equivalent for the ease with which an employer could compel labourers to work, dictate their hours and legally prosecute them for failure to comply. Migrants quickly complained to mill managers that they had not understood the contracts that they had signed in Barcelona (and that they claimed had been explained to them only by an interpreter).16 Farmers’ steadfast refusal to modify their demands about working conditions only aggravated the situation, and even the mill managers noted that some farmers’ behaviour was c­ ounter-­ productive.17 Spaniards’ experiences in Barcelona provided an unwelcome context for the farmers’ actions, where employers had deliberately exacerbated already precarious livelihoods by their belligerent neglect of workers’ conditions. The Spaniards’ initial responses tended to be a brief strike to demonstrate their anger, before returning to work.18 The lack of improvement soon provoked them to leave their employers though. Most were forcibly recalled and prosecuted, although some were so troublesome that farmers willingly released them from their contracts.19 In such cases, many left the cane fields to work on the railways or the docks that were the main points of communication and infrastructure in the north.20 Others, such as Salvador Torrents’ sponsor, left the north and sought work instead in southern cities such as Melbourne. Although local farmers hoped that the fear of prosecution would force the Spaniards to submit to their authority, the decision to prosecute inflamed situations, and revealed the reality of power under the indentured labour system. Not long after their arrival, farmers decided that more punitive measures were needed to act as an exemplar and to control the Spanish men. One man was singled out for prosecution, outraging the remaining Spaniards. As a result, whole gangs went on strike to demand that the case against him be dropped or that the whole gang be arrested in solidarity.21 Spaniards’ response to attempts to control them was assertive and unequivocal. Three different farmers reported that they had

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now armed themselves in the fields with daggers and revolvers, and refused farmers’ orders.22 Such actions recall the Catalan experience of workplaces as sites of contested authority, rather than pieces of property. Farmers felt compelled to reciprocate, and armed themselves with loaded rifles and revolvers before entering fields where Spaniards worked.23 One farmer, Lacaze, reported that his Spanish workers had almost rioted when he had attempted to reinstate a cook against the cutting gang’s wishes. The group’s spokesperson had rushed at Lacaze with a knife, forcing the farmer to brandish his revolver to defend himself. Since Lacaze refused to back down, all the Spanish cutters on his farms went on strike and appealed to the mill for mediation. When Lacaze prosecuted the ringleader in court (with the full support of CSR), the man failed to appear and was consequently arrested. The Spaniards in his gang again went on strike until he was released and reinstated, forcing Lacaze to break down. This not only challenged the ­ English-­ speaking trade unions’ monopoly on industrial organisation, but also inscribed the Spaniards’ own experience of models of workplace ­self-­organisation and social support into the north. Lacaze’s experiences were not an isolated instance, but formed part of a pattern of Spanish workers’ organisation in the north. In response to farmers’ increasing recourse to legal and state institutions, Spaniards organised meetings at which they formed local associations that were more able to coordinate action.24 Frustration was not confined to a few isolated farms, and the mill manager at Macknade noted that dissatisfaction had spread to the more isolated Spanish gangs working at the nearby Victoria mill. Discontentment remained tangible throughout October and November, albeit without major incident. By early December, it was noticed, with concern, that four Spaniards were travelling the large distances from gang to gang throughout the north.25 As a result, some days later, local Spaniards simultaneously requested that all their contracts be cancelled, and went on ‘­go-­slows’ while they waited for a response. When CSR refused, all Spaniards walked off their jobs in a coordinated protest designed to cripple production. In Goondi, the mill manager bewailed the fact that all t­ wenty-­nine Spaniards in his locality downed tools at the same time.26 Newspapers reported similar action from Spaniards near Innisfail, Cairns and the mills surrounding Ingham.27 When arrested, those in Geraldton disrupted court proceedings so seriously that extra policemen had

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to be sent from almost 100 kilometres north in Cairns to protect against violent riots.28 So many Spaniards were arrested that ‘there were too many to hold in Innisfail so . . . the ­ring-­leaders were sent to Stewart’s Creek’, 1,000 kilometres south in Townsville.29 CSR felt sure that the trade unions were behind the Spaniards’ militant organisation, and that the AWU was attempting to consolidate its ­new-­found influence. Immediately following the arrival of the mysterious four travelling Spaniards, Spanish workers at Goondi petitioned the mill manager. He did not believe that they had any specific complaints but conceded that they objected to being tied down by an agreement which they termed a ­‘black-­fellows agreement’ (evidently a phrase given them by some Labour Unionist), and said that they would still work amongst the farms, but wished to be free to move from farm to farm, according to the inducements offered in the way of good masters and better pay.30

These comments confirm that Spaniards shared many workers’ escalating anger regarding the application of the Master and Servant Act and its enablement of indentured labour. Complaints about trade unionists agitating among the Spaniards were not new, and the Macknade manager suspected that trade unionists had arranged Spaniards’ original meetings in September.31 Managers felt that the AWU could contact the Spaniards easily, ‘as not only are there one or two Italian labourers in the district that speak Spanish well, but also some of the men themselves speak French’.32 The mill managers’ reference to Italians and trade unions is not convincing. Although it is possible that Italians had joined the local trade union and were given the responsibility of encouraging Spanish participation, this is unlikely. Unions were generally hostile to European migrants in leadership roles, and would have been unlikely to encourage meetings composed of only Spaniards and Italians without a controlling British presence. If the Spaniards’ protests had been part of a broader unionist offensive, the failure of workers from other backgrounds to join the Spanish protests is conspicuous. It is more likely that the protests were modelled on Catalans’ experiences of a­ narcho-­syndicalist strikes and protest in Barcelona. The sense of victimisation and solidarity among the Spaniards reduced the scope for mediation and increased the likelihood of more familiar Catalan tactics of industrial protest. The disputes at

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the Lacaze farm in August 1907 centred around a group of four men, ‘whom the other men say are anarchists in their own country and the police there put them in our way to get them out of the country’.33 While the general level of activism in Barcelona made it unlikely that the men would quibble with political labels, this was the first time that the arrivals’ political beliefs were recognised by the surprised and worried authorities. It is likely that Italians communicated with the Spaniards. While Italians were rarely members of ­English-­speaking trade unions, there was a strong contemporary anarchist presence in the north of Italy and a number of Italian anarchists moved to Australia after the First World War. The mill managers noted that Italians and Spaniards were exchanging literature, and assumed that it was of trade unionist origin. Again, while it is possible that the AWU had provided Italians with material to distribute, it seems more likely to have been an example of the anarchist passion for didactic pamphlets and periodicals. Given the importance of reading as a vehicle for radical personal emancipation, it is highly probable that the anarchists in the group brought reading materials with them. If they did not, they certainly imported it at the earliest possible opportunity. When Spaniards walked away from their employers in December, they rightly assumed that farmers would allow them to leave without prosecution, given the impending end of the season. Farmers had complained to CSR for some time that they would happily forfeit the money that they had contributed to the Spaniards’ passage, just to be rid of them.34 Any notion of repeating the migration scheme was doomed to fail. Such was the hostility towards the group that managers anticipated that few farmers would apply for any overseas labour at all in the coming year, given the ‘widespread feeling of distrust with regard to imported labour’.35 Most of the men from Barcelona decided to stay in the north, to work and purchase businesses of their own, and to bring family and friendsout there. Nonetheless, the importation of Catalan models of industrial protest, based on armed altercations and mass incarcerations, was to leave a lasting impression on the group.

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Fighting in the bush The need to populate northern Australia was a permanent worry for Australia’s policy makers. The United Kingdom’s use of its overseas influence to secure settlers was a recurrent pattern throughout the British Empire, and Australia sought to use the British network of consuls to secure her own interests. It was most often used to ensure that new migrants were of British origin, but inadvertently also became central to the garnering of another early group of Spanish migrants to northern Australia. This settlement of Spaniards was to have spectacular consequences as a result of Australian attempts to secure a population of Welsh migrants who had settled in Argentina some years previously. Argentina had offered incentives and ­short-­term leases in an attempt to encourage further migrant settlement. As a consequence, there were approximately 4,000 Welsh in the southern Chubut Province by 1914. Although largely arid desert, the Lower Chubut Valley was fertile when irrigated and, with a healthy dose of bombast, was described as the ‘pride of the Argentine government’.36 On the ground, however, the Welsh had been forced to compete aggressively with newly arrived Spanish migrants for what limited free land remained.37 Weary of the struggles, Welsh settlers initially accepted with alacrity Australian overtures to settle in that country’s north. The Australian government had sent an agent to encourage Welsh emigration from Argentina, and emphasised the patriotic opportunities for those returning to the British Empire to secure Australia’s north.38 Australia’s Minister for External Affairs undertook to set aside adjacent plots of land in the Northern Territory for the Welsh if they agreed to the scheme.39 One Spaniard, who would later join the group, noted in his diary that the agent had affirmed that ‘land implements, g ­ oing-­concern farms, would be given. The chance of a lifetime if you were a willing worker. A rosy future was pictured for everybody. Free passage there, to be ­re-­paid at your convenience’.40 The misunderstandings inherent in this description would come to haunt the expedition. Despite high hopes, relatively few Welsh settlers agreed to move in the final instance. This was surprising for authorities, since groups of Patagonian Welsh had migrated to Australia three times before and were viewed popularly as model settlers. While only ­twenty-­eight Welsh agreed to sail for Australia on this occasion, 112

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of the eventual passengers had recently arrived in Argentina from Spain. In contrast to the Welsh, who were from three extended families, the Spaniards travelled in small families and forged strong bonds within the group. Many had only recently arrived in Chubut Province from Buenos Aires, and lacked other connections in Argentina. Daniel Martinez’s travels were fairly typical of the group. He had been born in a small village in Navarre and moved to Argentina with his wife in 1906. He first worked in Buenos Aires, before moving south to the nearby province of Río Negro for three years. By 1911, he had moved to the port of Bahía Blanca. He continued to move in the local region, working in a number of labouring jobs before settling in Chubut Province in 1913.41 Some of the Spanish passengers had lived in Argentina for over a decade,42 but most had been in the country for only a couple of years.43 Unlike Martinez, a large majority had been born in Catalonia or Andalusia. In Argentina, migrant workers also worked in conditions strongly influenced by Spanish anarchism. Workers there had become increasingly disenchanted and angered by the closely controlled state apparatus of government. This anger had been compounded for migrant workers, who were rendered potentially vulnerable by the effects of an increasingly virulent Argentine nationalism. Although the Argentine press’s characterisation of all Catalan immigrants as anarchists was an obvious exaggeration, many in Buenos Aires were concerned by the anarchists’ presence.44 The steady immigration to Buenos Aires from Catalonia meant that Argentine anarchism was often portrayed as second only in influence to that in Spain. The Australian government was aware of some of these developments in Argentina. S ­hare-­ croppers had been in open rebellion in many parts of Argentina in the preceding years, where they had taken to forming workers’ cooperatives. These were often organised on socialist principles that had been derived from northern Italian peasant leagues, similarly known for c­ ommunity-­ based organisation. Lawyers, acting on behalf of between 5,000 and 6,000 Italian–Argentine members of the recently formed Argentine Agrarian Federation, had requested permission to migrate to Australia in 1915.45 The Australian government’s firm rejection was strongly influenced by reports of the group’s violence and a­ nti-­ government rhetoric during protests in Argentina during 1912 and 1913.

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Concern was not confined to ­share-­croppers and small farmers, and anarchism was also known to be widespread in the railways being built in the Chubut Valley. Those Spaniards who had lived in Chubut for some time were similarly attuned to L ­ eft-­wing radicalism. Emilio Duran’s family and neighbours would gather each night to listen to extracts being read from Marx and to debate local and international news. Duran later claimed, somewhat irritably, that even as a child he had had ‘already read about all the isms – nihilism, anarchism, socialism, communism, syndicalism. Actually then I was very much engrossed in reading a writer by the name of Karl Marx’.46 These migrant railway workers were famed throughout Argentina for their ­anarcho-­syndicalism, and a number of them subsequently moved to Australia on board the Kwantu Maru. There was already considerable tension between the radical Spaniards and the Welsh as a result of the competition for access to land, but it escalated throughout the voyage to Australia. Having hastily agreed to leave in 1914, the prospective migrants rushed to sell their farms before the ship’s departure. Before they could embark, however, the Australian government suspended the scheme following the outbreak of the First World War. The effect was ruinous, and families who had been obliged to sell their farms at below market value were now forced to rent expensive accommodation while they waited for further information.47 Despite fears that Australia’s employment market could no longer absorb the migrants, pressure in federal Parliament eventually forced the government to allow the arrival of the prospective settlers.48 There had long been tensions between the Welsh and Spanish migrants in Argentina, but relations deteriorated further once the groups began to live in close quarters on board the ship to Australia. While Spaniards asserted, vocally, that the Welsh were devious and unduly privileged, the Spaniards were characterised as unruly radicals by the ship’s authorities. Anger on board centred on disputes over cooking, after the Spanish cook was removed and replaced by a Welshman.49 Each group claimed that the other’s food was inedible, but the important position of cook provided an individual with access to scarce resources of food and drink. Spaniards later accused the Welsh of deliberately having served them reduced portions, with the remainder being available only for sale.50 The Welsh used a drunken brawl between two Spaniards over

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a game of cards to demonstrate to authorities on board that the Spaniards had a proclivity for violence.51 The complaint failed to take into account that organised fights were a regular feature of entertainment on the long voyage, but determined the Spaniards’ reputation for years to come in government records.52 The Spaniards clearly felt victimised by the Welsh monopoly of powerful positions on board, and complained that the sick and elderly were denied water, including that the doctor neglected a Spanish baby, named Marina, who had been born during the voyage.53 Spanish men were repeatedly confined for violence. The captain characterised Spanish complaints as being caused by men who deliberately set out to cause trouble simply because they had ‘nothing to do but to agitate’.54 Such claims of unruliness are undermined by the elections that the Spaniards conducted for their spokesperson, giving that individual an authority that even the Australian government would recognise.55 Despite the men’s agitation, it was the Spanish women who prompted most of the confrontations against the captain and crew. The women, and their large families, had been central to the group’s attractiveness to Australian authorities. In the face of apparent threats to these families, caused by food rations, women stepped forward to assert their maternal authority. Their protests generally focused on the quality of food provided, as well as access to health care for families and children. The care afforded to one mother was so poor that she required hospitalisation on arrival in Darwin some weeks later.56 On arrival in Auckland, the Spanish women rejected both the captain’s order to remain on board and the New Zealand authorities’ strict immigration controls. The women equipped themselves liberally with firearms, and forcibly commandeered a launch to explore the city and purchase fresh food and tobacco.57 Despite the captain’s anger, they repeated their actions on the ship’s arrival in Melbourne. Here again, the Spanish women demanded that the captain purchase fresh vegetables for the remainder of the trip.58 When he refused, they staged a ­sit-­down protest to block access to the wharf and refused to r­e-­embark. Duran recalled the events that unfolded in the fractious atmosphere: One of the sailors tried to stop one of the women but she hit him with her handbag. Whatever she had in it, she knocked him unconscious. There was a hell of a t­ urn-­up. The women and kids were on the wharf

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and the men aboard. So the captain told the men that if the women wanted to remain on the wharf they could as he was casting off.59

The women’s central demand was that the captain purchase additional fresh food, and was dismissive of his refusal on the ground that only two days’ voyage remained. The ­ stand-­ off continued in an escalating atmosphere of recrimination. Only when the captain began to cast off without the women were the Spanish men shamed to act, taking custody of the captain and crew. Mediation from terrified police (who demanded ­back-­up before coming aboard to talk with the Spaniards), and the renewed incarceration of key Spanish males enabled the vessel to proceed. Significantly, it was the wife of one of the frequently incarcerated protesters, Trinidad Garcia, who assumed a central leadership role in the group. Both Trinidad and her husband were proud radicals who later became actively involved in the northern anarchist community. The dispute in the Melbourne docklands was sharpened by the assistance of Antonio Martinez, a wharf labourer and Spanish resident, who acted as interpreter in the dispute.60 Australian officials were dismissive of Spanish complaints, until the Italian consul communicated similar claims made by a number of Italian passengers. Complaints grew more aggrieved over time, and were worsened when the Department of External Affairs accidentally left the Spaniards’ funds in a bank account for months without any attempt to refund it.61 The leading Spanish protesters were not inarticulate, and quoted authorities ranging from Theodore Roosevelt to Karl Marx in an attempt to strengthen their cases to the authorities. Despite their eloquence, the new arrivals struggled to influence those in government that their reputation for disregarding authority had been acquired unfairly. The outbreak of war had radically altered industrial relations in the Northern Territory, and the Administrator in charge of the Territory no longer believed that work existed for the settlers on their arrival.62 Territorians were immediately hostile to the new arrivals, and believed that they had been sent to dampen wage increases and take servicemen’s jobs. This hostility to n ­on-­ Anglophone migrants was long standing, and serious tensions had existed between locals and those of British and Chinese heritage. While most Chinese had left after the start of the White Australia policy, their departure had created the conditions by which the

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AWU had courted confrontation with employers to improve wages. ­Non-­British migrants were largely ­non-­unionised and were widely perceived to pose a challenge to the AWU’s control of the workforce. As soon as the Spaniards’ ship docked, local workers staged a large protest on the wharf. Spaniards felt scared, intimidated and physically threatened. As a result, they would enter Darwin only armed, with rifles, pistols and knives brandished.63 Such provocative actions only further alarmed locals. The Spaniards’ tense relationship with the local AWU did not dissipate. In a wartime context of increased xenophobia, the union loudly criticised the Spaniards for refusing to contribute a portion of their wages to the AWU’s Patriotic War Fund.64 For Spaniards, issues about the relative merits of war and pacifism were less relevant than the union’s attempts to withhold a part of their wages for the fund without their permission. Only when the matter came to the attention of the ­anti-­unionist Territory Administrator, John Gilruth, was the matter resolved. Such debates were not unimportant for the Spaniards, given that their wages provided their only income, and their savings lay frozen by the Department of External Affairs. To make matters worse, their initial settlement needs and welfare had been delegated to the local Welsh society, which was uninterested and of no use to the Spaniards. Without support from fellow workers or the Welsh, they struggled to establish themselves in the harsh local conditions. Conditions for families were very poor. The migrants lived in one tent per family for several months, with there being insufficient permanent accommodation to house them. The tents were unable to withstand the Northern Territory’s violent storms, and on at least one occasion were swept away totally. In that instance, the Martinez family of seven children, wife and husband were left without any shelter at all.65 Members of the family were furious, given that they believed that they had been guaranteed land, accommodation and employment. The adult son, Miguel, would become prominent in organising protests against workers’ conditions during the decades that followed. His wife, Dolores, was also an important community member, intervening to contain disputes between other members. Their anger at the Australian authorities was to prove long lasting. The Administrator had hoped to employ the arrivals from Argentina to construct an o ­ ft-­ delayed railway from the distant township of Pine Creek to Darwin, but his plans were compromised

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immediately when more than the anticipated number of Spaniards arrived. The federal Ministers for Home and External Affairs became involved as concerns grew that the migrants would indeed have to work on reduced rates to accommodate this.66 Single men were sent to work separately from their families, who were based several hundred kilometres from the Northern Territory capital of Darwin, near the isolated township of Pine Creek. Single Spaniards were infuriated that they were repeatedly without food or water, even when they reached their destination,67 and had to walk for days in harsh scrub to find sustenance without financial recompense.68 The Spanish families then living at tiny Pine Creek demanded that their pay be increased or that they would stop work. The engineer refused their request, and a s­tand-­ off ensued. In an attempt to force the Spaniards, the engineer cut off their credit at the local store. Panicked and refusing to be victimised, the Spanish women summoned the single men from up the line to help them. The single Spaniards commandeered a ballast train, and arrived in Pine Creek provocatively armed. In company with the similarly armed married men, they successfully used aggressive force to threaten the local authorities. One blew up the telephone wires to Darwin with a shotgun, and ‘the rest marched on to the only constable stationed in the town and told him that, unless he forced the engineer to release food for the people, they would hang the engineer, then take over the shop’.69 Understandably, the engineer backed down and increased wages. The Spaniards’ work experiences did not improve, and their preference for combative tactics that challenged Australian work practices remained. Many of those who had worked on railways in Argentina were accustomed to the use of ­ anarcho-­ syndicalist confrontational tactics in negotiations with management. Once the single Spaniards returned to their work, they were angered to find that they had to buy their own picks and shovels, and went on a ‘­ go-­ slow’.70 With no change in management attitudes, the men returned to Darwin, where they appealed to the Administrator to intervene. When this also failed, they burned their picks and shovels in protest. ­Forty-­one of the men were still idle a month later. The Spaniards unanimously rejected the authority of the newly appointed supervisor, and instead elected to continue with the former man and choose their own place of work to build the railway.71 The

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Minister for Home Affairs, King O’Malley, was surprised by the Commonwealth Railway’s rapid change in attitude towards the volatile Spaniards, who had hitherto been described as ‘exemplary workers’, and was considering an inquiry into the situation as it unfolded.72 Life remained extremely difficult for the Spaniards living in the Northern Territory. As a term of their passage, the men had been obliged to work on the railways for one year, or forfeit the significant sum of £8.73 Despite this, two men, Pedro Diaz and Pedro Cuesta, were so desperate at conditions and eager to leave that they sailed from Darwin on board the Empire in April 1916. They were later found destitute in Newcastle, New South Wales, after a sea journey of more than 4,500 kilometres. Others, such as Fausto Martinez, Antonio Vendrell and Eduardo Molina, left to work at the large ­meat-­packing factory, Vestey’s, in Darwin during January 1916.74 Vestey’s provided the only real source of alternative l­arge-­scale employment in the Territory, particularly once servicemen returned after the war. The factory went bankrupt in 1920, though, and large numbers of migrant workers were once again without means to support themselves. In the meantime, women had taken it upon themselves to build new homes from scratch in the Darwin suburb of Parap, supplementing their household incomes with produce from hens and washing other locals’ clothes. The AWU decided to capitalise on widespread public anger towards the confrontational Administrator Gilruth in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, and organised a major protest of more than 1,000 people to march on his official residence at Government House in 1918. The protest, known as the Darwin Rebellion, has generally been seen as part of the AWU’s ongoing tension with the Administrator. It was not only groups closely aligned with the union who participated, however. Angered at the lack of government assistance, in the wake of high unemployment, a broad group of ­non-­English-­speaking migrants also marched on the Territory Administrator’s residence. The Spaniards were at the forefront of the protest, and marched singing ‘The Internationale’. When the Administrator proved obdurate and refused to hear their demands, the protest became more agitated. While they were not initially violent, marchers did burn an effigy of Gilruth and pushed past fences to rush at Government House. Feeling that they were under threat from the government machine

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guns that had been positioned close by, the Spaniards charged the defences surrounding the placements and pushed the guns down the steep slope.75 The vulnerable and worried Administrator requested that a Royal Australian Naval ship be brought into Darwin Harbour at the earliest opportunity to restore government authority. Subsequent investigations into the incident focused on the tension between the Administrator and the trade union. Such a focus framed the debate in terms of representative democracy and British systems of arbitration. These acts of silencing the presence of ­non-­Anglophone leaders reassured southern power brokers that British identity continued to be consolidated in the distant north. They did not fully reflect reality in the north. Meanwhile, the Administrator hastily arranged for boats to send the increasingly problematic Spaniards to Cairns, where it was hoped that they could find work cutting cane. Some, such as Antonio Villalla, had already moved to north Queensland in 1917, and he was able to orientate the new arrivals. Others relied on the help of the already settled group of Catalans who had arrived in 1907.76 Some stayed in the north for only a few months to gather information and resources, before they moved south for Melbourne, but many remained or soon returned to the north Queensland coast.77 Once in Melbourne, members of the group tried to force the federal government to pay for their return to South America. The community worked hard to lobby government officials through the Spanish and Argentinian consuls, and eventually secured a meeting with a government official. In recognition of her position of leadership, Trinidad Garcia was chosen to lead the negotiations, despite there being men among the group who spoke better English. The Garcia family had sought suitable work in rural New South Wales, to no avail, and was determined to secure its return to South America. Trinidad attempted to argue that, having been promised farm land, the group had been left without any support and almost destitute. Her argument failed, and no assistance was provided to the group. Her failure was to cause significant tensions within the community for many years. Eventually realising their failure to convince ministers, most returned to the relative support offered by family and friends in north Queensland.78

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Securing equality Fascinated by the rich cultural diversity of the north, Spaniards engaged with other ­like-­minded groups across ethnic and political divides in the north. One of the first such groups to provide a pathway to a broader network of radicals was the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The IWW had been founded in Chicago in 1905, after exasperation with trade unions’ failure to improve working conditions. The group dismissed both industrial arbitration and parliamentary democracy as being inherently corrupt, and instead favoured revolutionary syndicalism. Its frustration resonated widely, and gave momentum to those on the social periphery who felt excluded and disenfranchised by their daily lives in the USA. Their ideas spread throughout North America, and eventually crossed the Pacific to Australia. The IWW creed was carried by sailors and workers through the major ports as ships sailed south from Vancouver and San Francisco through the USA to Valparaíso in Chile. From there, organisers sailed to New Zealand and on to Australia. The popularity of the IWW, commonly known as the ‘Wobblies’, in Australia sharply increased during the First World War. Helped by the huge publicity that surrounded the h ­ igh-­profile arrest of a number of its members in 1916, the IWW capitalised on a­nti-­ establishment sentiments during the bitter a­nti-­ conscription debates that divided Australia in the First World War. During the 1917 election, crowds of up to 12,000 listened to Wobbly critiques of capitalism and warfare in Australia’s major cities. Men like Tom Barker electrified crowds before he was forced to leave the country, whereupon he followed the shipping route back to Chile. In an attempt to mitigate government hostility, the IWW moved from overt political agitation to emphasise radical social reforms. The group rapidly declined in influence in major capitals once the government proscribed membership in July 1917, but it retained an influence for some years in regional centres, distant from government authority. Spaniards’ empathy with the group is unsurprising, given that much IWW ideology derived from ­anarcho-­syndicalism. Military censors in Queensland worried that the Wobblies were ‘gradually getting control of local workers’ groups’.79 Long after the IWW had ceased to be politically relevant in the southern states,

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many northern workers retained sympathy for its ideals and the group drew particular support from southern European migrants. In 1921, an unidentified IWW leader working in the Queensland port of Mourilyan galvanised local waterside workers to hold an unauthorised strike, while a further twelve IWW sympathisers harangued a union official with quotations from their library of IWW and ‘communistic’ literature.80 The union official was left in no doubt that the local branch ‘did not give a . . . [sic] for the Federation, State Executive, or Arbitration, as they were strong enough to carry without the sanction or support of others’.81 The town was a major settlement area for Spaniards, and a number of them worked in the docks or volunteered in informal workers’ centres. It is hard to imagine that they were not involved in such protests. The IWW deliberately targeted migrants and workers from n ­ on-­ English-­speaking backgrounds. Wobbly activists in one inland town wrote to a follow sympathiser that ‘there is a great quickening into life of the migratory workers here in Queensland, and the implications are most hopeful for the future of Industrial unionism’.82 European migrants were especially disenchanted with the racism and prejudice that existed in the trade unions, and gravitated towards the IWW.83 Wobblies liaised with Russian migrants in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, and the two groups distributed bilingual publications together in Queensland.84 In the key northern sugar centre of Ingham, Germans were involved in the Wobbly movement, importing ‘subversive literature’ that drew authorities’ attention.85 The titles give little doubt as to the political sympathies of the men, with Alexander Berkman’s Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist drawing particular attention.86 Other IWW sympathisers in the same town attempted to lead the Italian community in a series of controversial petitions to oppose conscription in Italy in 1918.87 In early September 1921, the inflammatory Smith’s Weekly published a report on foreigners’ attempts to ‘Bolshevise Queensland’.88 The report focused on the Spaniards, whom it claimed ‘have no religion and acknowledge no authority. Their disordered minds tell that everything standing for order should be swept away’.89 The intelligence services gave predictably little credence to the overtly xenophobic article. They noted that foreigners rarely took the lead in public strikes, which were in any case concerned with industrial conditions rather than revolution.90

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The authorities were correct that Spaniards did not generally lead IWW protests, but they were certainly involved in its organisation. The many Spaniards who had worked on the Argentine and Northern Territory railways found ready employment in Queensland’s own expanding rail network. As in Argentina, there were acknowledged ‘IWW elements . . . amongst the [northern] railway workers’.91 Jesús Rosende had arrived from Argentina and worked on the Pine Creek railway.92 After leaving the Northern Territory, he worked on the railways around the Queensland coastal port of Mackay, where he remained a w ­ ell-­known IWW sympathiser as late as 1923.93 While in the inland mining town of Mount Cuthbert, Rosende had helped to develop the local IWW cell that later went on to stage a series of disruptive strikes. Along with others such as Felix Palmada, Rosende was known to empathise with his politically involved friends who remained in Argentina. He was in regular correspondence with South American radicals until the 1940s, when his status as a ‘very ardent supporter of Marxist principles’ was noted with concern by police.94 In 1918, two other Spaniards, Frank Bilboa and Peter Villalabetia, were deported to Chile for their participation in the b ­ y-­then illegal IWW. Soon after, José Manuel was identified as an active IWW member in Innisfail.95 They were not alone, and Spaniards used their experiences overseas to assume senior positions in Australian radical groups. In 1918, one Irish–Australian strike leader sought advice about the use of dynamite for industrial sabotage from ‘expert agitators’ from Spain who were known to be aligned with the local Workers’ International.96 The Spaniards’ involvement in the IWW, and their commitment to ­community-­organised industrial action, had tangible effects in the northern communities and gradually came to focus on community control of the vital sugar mills. Over time, the narrow coastal strip of cultivated land became more extensive through development, as ­sugar-­cane farms expanded and migrants began to purchase their own land. The region remained isolated from the rest of the country, but one aspect troubled many locals. The various mills, on which farmers relied to process their harvested cane, had become monopolised by the CSR. Such dominance gave the company the power to influence and curtail the unique social and activist character of the northern townships. This tension came to a crisis point in 1927. The communist author Jean Devanny bitterly recorded CSR’s deliberate policy of

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preventing sympathetic small farmers supporting cane cutters’ attempts to improve wages.97 Spaniards particularly resented this, since many had sponsored the cutters to come to Australia and maintained friendships with them. Despite differences on how best to defend their interests, most Spaniards agreed with radicals such as Duran and Torrents that the mills represented ‘total corruption. Most employees sold themselves to whomever they owed most. They had lost human dignity’.98 Torrents felt that the eventual 1927 strike was the product of sheer physical exhaustion, with workers desperate to retain some control of their lives. He wrote a series of deeply critical articles that he sent to European anarchist periodicals, in which he detailed the workers’ exploitation and mill owners’ avarice. Torrents wrote that farmers were so consumed by market values that the cane cutters were treated worse than animals and machines, whose fixed market value at least demanded some respect.99 The strike related to a 1922 decision by the Queensland state government to reduce the minimum wage and increase hours. Industrial action was eventually triggered by a CSR mill’s decision only to employ workers who had not complained about employment conditions, and to reject ­better-­experienced labourers who had actively protested. As positions between management and strikers hardened throughout 1927, the dispute spread from the mills to the cane fields.100 Tensions increased as the strike was called, and violence towards ­non-­union labour escalated rapidly. The entrenched ethnic divisions between Anglo– and n ­on-­ Anglo–Australian strikers rapidly became clear. While almost all Anglo–Australian workers were union members, few n ­on-­ Anglophone migrants empathised with Australian trade unions. Instead, they preferred informal c­ ommunity-­based organisations that were ­non-­hierarchical and more distant from collusion with authorities. The threat of widespread violence increased when a British union member, Jack Hynes, was shot dead by an unknown Italian. Authorities supported the mill owners’ claims that the strike was escalating out of control and sent police reinforcements to reassert their dominance. Hynes’ death revealed the scale of ethnic division between workers in the north, though, with cooperation between British and overseas migrants now overtly strained and ethnicity framing disputes about whether the union was exerting itself sufficiently to protect the interests of workers. There was an

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embedded belief among the ­English-­speaking community that it had a prior claim to scarce work, and that southern European migrants reduced wages by working outside the union agreements that controlled the industry. European workers’ vulnerability to violence was undoubtedly increased by Hynes’ murder and subsequent recriminations against southern European migrants. Unionists positioned ­look-­outs on high buildings to watch for approaching trains, which were frequently filled with Maltese and Greek migrants who were believed to be strike breakers. In the anger that followed Hynes’ death, three newly arrived Maltese migrants, suspected of working outside union conditions, were dragged from their train and severely beaten.101 The government and media used the incident to characterise trade unionists as irrational and violent,102 but the community divisions were more complex. Spanish strikers alleged that mill owners had paid Maltese locals to act as n ­ on-­unionised workers who would add pressure on workers to end their strike.103 Concerned by claims that they were losing control, the AWU restrained E ­ nglish-­speaking workers but its authority to control sympathetic southern European strikers was much more constrained. No Spanish cutters chose to defy the call to go on strike. However, Spaniards did defy the union hierarchy and refused to return to work when the union subsequently withdrew its support from the picketers. The participation of large numbers of Spaniards in the continued ­non-­sanctioned strike reveals a committed hostility to the emerging economic system in the north that was perceived to undermine social justice. The Catalan Joe Donatiu was already a successful cane farmer and mill director by the time that the union lost control of the strike. He sought to minimise his financial losses, and chose to disregard local pressure and work at the mill himself. His decision to defy the strikers had serious consequences, and he complained that he was repeatedly intimidated and threatened with assault on return journeys home.104 Donatiu was among the wealthiest members of the local community, and his action signalled growing divisions among the Catalans, between cane cutters and farm owners. Donatiu had not arrived with either the 1907 indentured labourers or the Kwantu Maru Argentines, and distanced himself from radical politics.105 Nonetheless, he was acutely aware of Catalan traditions of confrontation in industrial disputes.

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As various Spaniards became involved in the leadership of the now unsanctioned strike, police sought to use Donatiu as an intermediary to communicate with the picketers.106 Spaniards had allegedly assaulted various farmers who had similarly attempted to defy the strike,107 and one arrival from Argentina, Emilio Duran, became an official interpreter for the strikers.108 Duran disregarded union directives to cooperate, and responded only to majority decisions by the local strike camp committee. Another Spanish picketer, Miguel Martinez, joined the strike camp and similarly disregarded AWU directives that urged restraint. Like other strikers, Martinez engaged in direct action to pressure farmers.109 The style and extent of their cooperation with local strikers in defiance of the AWU directly referenced anarchist models of industrial dispute in Spain. There was a serious risk that protesters’ continued intimidation of those who returned to work would generate more widespread violence in the north. Duran later recalled that strikers had armed themselves with ‘all kinds of firearms from pistols to shotguns’.110 Newspapers further south became increasingly concerned about events in the north of the country,111 and police alarm grew when they intercepted cases of revolvers destined for renegade protesters.112 Although they did not eventuate, police were also aware of strikers’ plans to seize the mill by force and return it to its earlier model of cooperative ownership.113 Spaniards wholeheartedly supported this plan for community ownership to break corporate mill owners’ stranglehold on the industry. When police arrived at Martinez’s camp, they found ‘bundles of gelignite tied together, each of three packets and met with fuse and caps. There were another dozen sticks of prepared gelignite and five detonators in the bundle’.114 All were hastily thrown out of Martinez’s kitchen window as the police arrived, and no-­ ­ one claimed ownership. The explosives had initially been acquired to clear new cane fields of stumps, but had become destined for criminal damage by the time that they were discovered. Duran remembered the strikers’ decision that if ‘the position looked like going against us, [and in defiance of union directions] we should blow up the vital parts of the mill’.115 Although the strike was eventually defused, it remains a revealing example of the endurance of radical politics and its application by Spaniards to local issues.

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Conclusion In the most taxing of circumstances, isolated culturally and physically from those able to give them assistance, the Spaniards turned to the models of industrial protest that they knew most intimately. They drew on their prior experiences in the factories of Barcelona, the railways of Chubut and the ports of Buenos Aires to contest and challenge authority and perceived injustice. They did not acquiesce in the presumed authority of employers, government or trade unions, but demanded ­community-­based groups that represented all workers, regardless of ethnicity. In so doing, they cooperated with groups such as the IWW to challenge the emerging social and political consensus in the north. Their actions were pragmatic in response to circumstance. However, they were deeply informed by anarchist approaches to conflict resolution that derived from many years engaging with critical debates and thinkers in Europe. Chapter 4 explores how these approaches found tangible expression in the north.

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Sugaring the Revolution

The Spaniards in northern Australia were fiercely committed to maintaining their independence and dignity as humans, deserving of respect in all matters pertaining to work and the economic substructure that informed social and industrial relations. These struggles included violent strikes to contest the connections between farmers’ ownership of land and their control of labourers on it, and challenged governments to protect workers’ rights rather than cede to trade unions. In an increasingly globalised economic climate they also sought to hamper the capacity of big businesses to control local communities through the creation of monopolised mills and transportation. Their anger was driven by what they viewed as the corruption and cruelty that were prevalent in Europe, and a desire to create a more equitable world far from the centres of political and financial power. Their actions displayed a sustained resistance towards authority and antipathy to the effects of capital throughout the world. Those with whom the Spaniards clashed may well have felt a sense of shared frustration at the new arrivals’ pugnacious refusal to accept the authority of those in power. This sense of frustration was often borne out of a lack of understanding of the intellectual connections that informed the Spaniards’ attitudes. Hidden from the public space and E ­nglish-­ language debate, the north of Australia was alive with ­cross-­cultural debates that drew on centuries of political engagement. Northern Spaniards debated among themselves how to correct economic ills, but also engaged with French, Italian, Maltese and others from a wide variety of backgrounds. Many Spaniards were immersed in global debates throughout the S ­panish-­speaking world surrounding individual and social activism, and many had expended considerable efforts to

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become literate in order to understand how best to effect the transformation of society. There was little local consensus about how this might occur, mirroring disagreements that occurred between S ­ panish-­speaking radicals globally. What was clear was that their strong commitment to activism was not unreasoned. It was grounded in their everyday experiences in Europe, Latin America and Europe, and was consciously articulated as part of a global tradition of revolutionary anarchist thought. This global debate was long standing, and encompassed the cities and intellectual centres of multiple continents. These urban debates were a concrete reality and grounded in a lived experience for the migrants. Yet, this urban paradigm grew increasingly brittle in northern Australia. The notion of a rural Utopia had not been absent from these debates, given the large numbers of agricultural migrants searching for work in Spain’s major cities. However, the vision of the tropical s­ugar-­ cane fields summoned an entirely different, but no less vibrant, imagery to mind. Cuba, and its attempts to free itself from economic and political servitude, provided a powerful paradigm of tropical dystopia to ­Spanish-­ speaking radicals globally. For those in Australia’s north, it offered an alternative vision of Europeans’ presence in the tropics from that trumpeted by the White Australia policy and attempts by Anglo–Australians to consolidate British culture in the southern continent.

The search for Utopia The role of the environment on the human condition has a long history of recognition in anarchist and radical histories. The debates resonated with the newly arrived Salvador Torrents on his landing in the Australian ports of Fremantle, Adelaide and Melbourne. Their carefully planned cities and opportunities for ­working-­class betterment seemed a powerful endorsement of the connections between environment, economics and the prospects of individual emancipation. Conversely, Torrents’ arrival in the isolated tropical rainforest of the north appeared laden with portents for the dissolution of his sense of intellectual selfhood. Only with time and a degree of economic independence would the north’s emancipatory potential appear clearer. By that time,

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conversely, its parallels with the sugar economy of Cuba had also become more established as mill ownership became increasingly separated from workers, farmers and local communities. The Spaniards had willingly left behind the cities, ports and railways of Spain and Latin America. The conditions in those regions had often been horrific, and the work was brutal and confrontational. It was part of a class struggle, however, in which the future of Europe lay in what was assumed to be the inevitable transformation and victory of the proletariat. Mills existed in northern Australia as factories to process sugar cane, but the European presence in the landscape often appeared profoundly fragile. The result was that labour often appeared to be less about a battle for ­working-­class progress than about an attempt to imprint European civilisation on a hostile natural and ‘undeveloped’ environment. The ­sugar-­cane fields required ­back-­breaking work in searing heat, and afforded comparably few of the opportunities for community organisation seen in Barcelona or Buenos Aires. Cuba had been a part of the Spanish imagination for so long, with its large tropical s­ugar-­cane fields, that it was able to provide an obvious and immediate point of reference for the new arrivals. No sooner had one man disembarked in the north than he sought to return to the industrial ports of Argentina, declaring, with disgust, that ‘the work done [in the north] was done in Cuba by the blacks. He said we might as well try to get back to Argentina and live like white people’.1 The Cuban example was one of horror and ­semi-­ indentured labour in which the Spaniards’ statuses as intellectual, white man or skilled worker were all called into question. Cuba had been a central part of the Spanish Empire until as recently as 1898. Important economically, it was even more crucial psychologically for those who viewed Spain’s empire as a symbol of her world power. For opponents of empire, it was a symbol of decadence, exploitation and unhappiness. Spain’s role as imperial ruler in Cuba was synonymous with a desire to uphold the historically defunct model of monarchy and plutocracy, denying the development of even middle classes through the power of corrupt oligarchs who controlled industry. The extractive and exploitative nature of the economic substructure in the island had meant that radicals had long been interested in its potential to be remade afresh and its wealth redistributed to the producer. Relatively few in Cuba embraced the extent of economic change that was advocated

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by Spanish radicals, and many hoped instead for a degree of prosperity and improved conditions under the USA’s protection. Nonetheless, the image of colonial exploitation and social impoverishment remained synonymous with the Cuban ­sugar-­cane fields in the minds of Spanish radicals. Torrents wrote a number of short stories and morality tales that accentuated the difference between the old and new worlds, in order to portray a youthful Australia that was firmly (and hopefully) integrated into the ­Spanish-­speaking radical world. These stories echoed literary genres that were common throughout the S ­ panish-­ speaking world, and were based on oral traditions among Cuban Americans, known as cronistas. Such authors perceived themselves as community moralists, who bore witness to the migrant community.2 It would have been traditional for such cronistas to be read out in guest houses to visitors. Although there is no direct evidence of this occurring in Australia, it is likely that men such as Torrents shared their stories with family and friends in the numerous guest houses and cafes that existed in northern towns, as did their counterparts elsewhere in the Latino/a world. Torrents wrote a number of short stories that evoked Cuba. In one short story from 1916, ‘Fruits of a Civilised World’, Torrents describes migrants’ lives in Cuba and their subsequent descent into ill health and moral abjection on their return to Spain. Back in Spain, and far from the work in Cuba, two friends (named Liberty and Paradise) are unwillingly driven to violence as figures of authority deny them the means to attain basic human dignity. Conditions in urbanised Spain foster moral and physical impoverishment, and the lessons for the reader or ­ would-­ be emigrant are clear. While Torrents described the arduous nature of life, far from Spain there were real opportunities for redemption and growth. The characterisation of colonies, and particularly Cuba, as representing a potential liberation from capitalist pressure was not novel in anarchist thought and neither was radicals’ use of Spain as a representation of decadence and corruption. Yet, Torrents used Cuba as a foil to conceptualise northern Australia specifically. More particularly, he used it to connect industry and racism. Like Cuba, Queensland had been a sugar colony based on divisive race relations. In ‘Fruits of a Civilised World’ Torrents provides explicit asides that link the oppression of black Cubans with Australians’

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attitude to ­non-­whites. By the late 1920s, northern Australia, like Cuba, had dashed the hopes of radicals and failed to develop cooperative economic projects, instead becoming dominated by monopolistic corporations. Torrents penned a lengthy piece to ‘Acracia’, a personification of anarchist liberty. Saddened by the corporatisation of their northern communities, he mused that ‘I do not know what day nor in what form you will appear in front of my view. That which I know, is, when my time passes, I will be more in love with you . . . and today I cannot live without your image’.3 The yearning with which he wrote is not surprising, given his lifetime of sacrifices and struggle. Although committed to an anarchist Utopia, he did not believe in pontificating about what such Liberty would eventually look like: an endeavour that would ostracise those with different views. His future vision was simply ‘To combat everything that hinders my path to my liberty’.4 This included opposition to anything that he believed hindered humanity’s capacity to stand in unity with each other, and that created division between people and communities. As would be expected, radical migrants differed in a number of ways. Italian anarchists believed that the doctrine of direct action was most suited to Australia’s north.5 In the words of the communist author Jean Devanny, ‘[t]hey want what they call “hurry up”. Nearly all of them tend towards anarchism yet they follow directions implicitly’.6 Her disparaging attitude to anarchism was a sign of its collapse among Anglo–Australian radicals by the 1930s, but it retained significant appeal among south European Australians. At moments of industrial tension, Italian activists such as Francesco Carmagnola deliberately taunted local police and overturned farmers’ trucks to block roads.7 The anarchist organiser Francisco Fantin also travelled north from Victoria to become an important political figure in Queensland’s Italian anarchist community. There were sizeable populations of Italian anarchists in cities such as Cairns and large towns such as Ingham. Torrents rejected any notion of collective violence or the untargeted use of lawlessness. He felt that such actions were excuses for stealing ‘and other foolishness’ that would do little to liberate people.8 Yet, this was not the same as accepting that all change had to be achieved through legal means. In one later memoir he recalled a conversation in Lyon with fellow anarchists, during which he asked provocatively ‘are we not all illegalists? Does not all we

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believe run contrary to legality? This oppressive society exists through legality, surely we want to do away with all its symbols and systems?’ 9 Such beliefs were to find difficult expression in Australia. Spanish anarchists remained uncomfortable with direct action, and emphasised the importance of education to achieve social revolution. Few migrants were literate on their arrival in Australia, but radical traditions in Spain placed a high premium on education’s potential for individual emancipation. Anarchist doctrines that emphasised education and ­non-­violent social change enjoyed a resurgence in Spain during the 1930s.10 The Spanish community in Lyon had long supported these initiatives and Torrents’ decision to sponsor the migration of a number of Spaniards with connections to Lyon reinforced these trends further.11 As Spaniards became integrated into Queensland’s social fabric, those who learned to read made widespread use of the local libraries that serviced local workers.12 Community groups ensured the diffusion of newspapers and pamphlets that emphasised the emptiness of democratic promises from capitalists, and drew on an increasing sense that violent protests had failed to improve life for Spain’s poor.13 Only Torrents has left a detailed record of his views on the emancipatory potential of s­elf-­ education, but correspondence reveals that his ideas were shared by a number of others in the northern community. Many of his ideas had originally been acquired during his time in France, during which he had nurtured his deep respect for Sébastien Faure. Faure, a French anarchist, was a strong influence on many in the northern community, and a number attributed ­near-­biblical reverence to his analysis.14 Faure’s emphasis on pacifism and education had a particularly profound impact on the young men that lasted long after they arrived in Australia. In contrast to local communists in the north, they argued that a new political or economic structure would not cause people to respect each other. Since society comprised individuals who were already imbued with the capitalist ethos, Torrents argued that ‘society will not change until men have changed’, and that education would be core to this transformation.15 Only when individuals ceased to accept the corruption, nationalism and superstitions of a capitalist society could a true socialist revolution occur in society.16 One of Faure’s most influential disciples in Spain was Francisco Ferrer, who had founded the Escuela Moderna in Barcelona in 1901, and the school was based on Faure’s principle of teaching

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students’ practical skills and the recognition of the economic structures that determined the inequity across the world. Ferrer firmly believed that ‘every academic subject was an avenue for discussing the exploitation of labourers by capitalists, by the state, and by the church’.17 After his execution in 1909, Ferrer acquired totemic status among Spanish radicals, and northern Spaniards recalled his importance to their political development: The speech of Francisco Ferrer still remains engraved in my brain. Among other things he said, ‘We came here to let the people of this town know we rationalists intend to open a rationalist school here. The rationalist school teacher, his obligation is to teach your children only the things that science considers most near the truth. All the superstitions are out of our programme’. 18

In a call for w ­ orking-­class solidarity, Torrents recalled Ferrer’s teaching that ‘all people must be interested in the w ­ ell-­being of humanity. Otherwise you always be slaves of a minority’.19 Many Spaniards in the north of Australia viewed Ferrer’s doctrine as being directly applicable in their new homes, and the most likely means to end the state’s racism and oppression. The north’s distance from authority, and lack of established patterns of state of religious authority, created opportunities for the anarchists to use education and reasoned debate as a tool to make a new world. Much of northern Spaniards’ emphasis on education was connected with their anger at the Catholic Church’s control of education in their country of birth, which was perceived to hold back economic development in order to further the needs of the elite. Even n ­ on-­anarchist sympathisers in the northern Spanish community identified the Catholic Church with continual attempts to hamper democratic progress in favour of fearful superstition, and evoked the infamous Spanish Inquisition to characterise the religious institution’s nefarious role on communities’ moral fabric throughout Spanish history.20 Torrents shared this intense hatred of priests. In part, this derived from his family experience of having had an uncle imprisoned for not doffing his hat at the passing of a Corpus Christi procession. Torrents recalled his horror at visiting his uncle in prison, and seeing the subjugation of honest men as a means to reinforce what he understood to be a superstitious and cruel system of beliefs. He greatly disliked his religious grandmother’s credulous beliefs. Yet,

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he was particularly struck by what he believed to be the hypocrisy of priests, condemning those ‘who preach with gestures, fomenting war. Always with their humility and their false religion, they have devastated nations’.21 For Torrents, priests were ‘the most brutal [people] in the world’.22 He believed that their pernicious presence in the education system sustained ignorance, ‘the mother of servitude’,23 and impaired the unity of the working classes to transform society.24 Torrents had helped to found Mataró’s first Modern School, based on Ferrer’s principles in order to undermine the city’s reactionary elements and advance the rationalist and anarchist cause.25 He recalled with bitter pride that he was one of the founding committee members, the president later being singled out by Nationalist forces in the Spanish Civil War and killed.26 Community members, such as Raymundo Jordana, had themselves been educated in Mataró’s rationalist school.27 Although rarely academically distinguished, the teachers’ idealism and integrity ensured that the schools were in high demand. With no feasible means to found a similar school in the north, the Spanish migrants were forced to send their children to whichever schools were available, with little distinction made between the relative evils of education by religious or state institutions. The Rationalist Society provided Queensland’s closest approximation to the debates fostered in Ferrer’s schools and the working men’s societies of European cities. Torrents was a ­long-­ standing member of the Rationalist Society of Brisbane, which he felt came close to replicating Faure’s vision of proletarian solidarity that could achieve global peace and overthrow the capitalist system.28 Torrents sought to raise Ferrer’s profile in Queensland and wrote an article for the Rationalist in which he recalled Ferrer’s speech at Premià de Mar. Torrents recalled that Ferrer had urged ‘we must educate our children so that when they grow up they know for themselves what reason is. The duty of the people is to study right and wrong for themselves’.29 The use of education as a tool for moral awakening and as a vehicle for social change was to remain something close to an obsession for Torrents throughout his life. One of Torrents’ short stories helps to provide more detail about how religion, education and capitalism were discussed in the context of the anticipated rural Utopia.30 The story began in a mountain village of Catalonia, and criticised how the priests there

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used the authority of the Catholic Church to condemn those ‘who do not live by the rules of the Holy Mother Church’. The story began with a sermon against the unfortunate villager Pablo, decried by the parish priest as ‘a bad man, sent by the devil, who will burn in the fires of hell’. The sympathetic hero is ostracised by superstitious elderly women reminiscent of Torrents’ own grandmother, who would make the sign of the cross to denigrate Pablo as they passed him. In contrast, Pablo continued to live happily in the natural environment, ‘not submitting to the sky’ or social prejudice, with animals and a plot of farming land. The story described how Pablo’s son grew up learning about land and animals supplied by his proud father. When villagers again attempted to shame the young hero, he responded with pride about his work on the land, affirming that ‘I work the land, which is more useful than the works of a hundred lords, all your works are words and we cannot live on words’. In this way, Torrents affirmed his distrust of those who taught education without connection to practical skills, and reaffirmed his own belief that he could attain intellectual status through his work. In the face of village hostility, the hero of Torrents’ story is eventually forced to leave his rural home to find work in Barcelona. The horrors of the capitalist system become clear, as Pablo works a series of increasingly demeaning factory jobs that distance him ever further from the dignity of his rural labour. He becomes associated with a radical group, which supports him financially and emotionally, and which initiates a process of ­ self-­ realisation and personal transformation. Forced to live on the streets, with barely enough food to survive, he sees a group of soldiers training. Whatever his material difficulties have taught him, Pablo cannot believe that a human would acquiesce in walking, turning and acting on the command of another. Although he attempts to find concrete means to change this world with the support of a workers’ club, Pablo remains unconvinced that its plans for direct action were feasible or desirable. Instead, he returns to seek peace through his village. There he hopes to overcome embedded social prejudice and ‘to live independently, taking every opportunity to increase the clarity of the mind as the only means to change the current regime’. In short, revolution could only triumph over prejudice, superstition and oppression through the emancipation of the individual. Nowhere was that more likely to happen than in close communion with nature through rural work.

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Community debates For Torrents, only education could create the true conditions for a revolution that would free individuals and create true communities. In so doing, he positioned the state as the source of evil in a morally dichotomous world. Just as authoritarianism was dehumanising and evil, so libertarianism would create freedom and respect. Yet Torrents was much less certain about how to affect the change needed to reach this goal. Would Utopia be achieved by individual action or collective struggle? What of the role of a m ­ ulti-­ethnic society in oppressing diverse individuals? In the end, he pushed many of these debates to one side in the belief that his reasoned protests against exploitation meant that he was ‘preparing the road for others, as others prepared the road for us’.31 The inevitable progression of history would sweep the cause forward. His belief in the eventual triumph of the working class became harder to enunciate coherently as increasingly diverse traditions and generations came to live in the north and as global events proceeded apace. Torrents had begun to engage in fraught debates about the differences between anarchism and communism as early as 1916. While these debates would accelerate after the Russian Revolution, differences between the anarchist and communist approaches to revolution were already powerful undertones in the community. Torrents sought to minimise differences by going to the core of the ideologies, when he asked What is communism? An economic system in which the individual, free from all ties and servitudes, not having to augment the owning class, nor the state, nor the country, could be armed with all his faculties, free to consume, free to produce. An economic system in which the state of consciousness will permit every individual to express themselves and to associate with other individuals. That, for me, is what I understand by anarchism and communism.32

He continued that ‘[i]t has been demonstrated that individual property creates authority. The anarchist is therefore against property, and I know of no other means to remove property than to put it in common. The anarchist is therefore communist, but antiauthoritarian’.33 As would become clear, this superficial reconciliation could not withstand events globally as Spain began its descent into civil war.

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For Torrents, as for other anarchists, the role of the individual was crucial to any debate regarding revolution. The communists argued that the proletariat held the exclusive means to transform society, whereas anarchists argued for a less restrictive understanding of those central to achieving revolution. For the latter group, tightly knit local communities that were committed to equality could provide networks capable of transforming the economy and political authority. They argued that such a society would better preserve the rights of the liberated individual. Prior to the rise of Stalinism in the 1930s, Torrents sought to evade the differences between the two competing radical world visions, arguing that it was little more than a ‘word game that all leads to the same end’. Events during the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Stalinism were to shake him profoundly, and would cause him to repudiate this view in old age. Nonetheless, he was clear in his rejection of any vision of the individual standing in isolation from the surrounding society, commenting that ‘[p]ure individualism is a myth. The individual cannot live without the support of other individuals, the anarchist is against the state, but not against society, because he cannot live without her [sic]’.34 In Australia’s north, such assertions were not mere platitudes, but the expression of tangible rural communities that relied on each other in times of crisis. Indeed, and in the spirit of blurring the difference between radicals, Torrents argued that a true communist worked for the community and that idealistic libertarians could not be considered revolutionary without a real cause to fight for. While the individual’s liberty from authoritarianism underpinned the aims of the revolution, individuals could transform society only once they were freed from ignorance so that they worked for the good of others.35 Throughout the world, workers were generally pragmatic in their choice of ­Left-­wing ideology, and were often drawn to movements able to deliver immediate results. Those in the north who had lived in Argentina had been particularly exposed to the influence of anarcho-­ ­ syndicalism. Syndicalists placed greater emphasis on economic organisation to overturn the state through the revolutionary use of unions, rather than those anarchists who emphasised personal liberation in order to lead social change. Torrents was again reluctant to embrace any distinction that might weaken an encompassing understanding of what anarchism might

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become. Like many on the radical Left, he was hostile to trade unions that sought to engage with the capitalist system though. While they argued in favour of improved suffrage and incremental change within the system, Torrents argued that this was fundamentally flawed, as the unions’ actions perpetuated economic and racial oppression. He recalled his frustration at those who vocally asserted that they wanted to improve the conditions of the enslaved workers, without wanting to do away with the institutions that had created the foundations of the workers’ slavery.36 Torrents retained an enduring preference for direct action that would transform everyday life in the s­ ugar-­cane fields. He was not opposed to locally based unions, but worried at the a­ ll-­encompassing claims of trade union supporters. He wrote that ‘[f]or many anarchists, syndicalism is a means to arrive at the implementation of anarchy. For others, syndicalism is a distraction from arriving at the emancipation of men . . . Thus for some it is a means to arrive at the end, for others a denying a means’.37 He did not believe that the trade union movement was without merit, but could not see how a force that pitted opposing tendencies together would be able to resolve the legitimate needs of the individuals contained within it.38 This was especially true in the trade unions of the north, where power was controlled hierarchically, and in a manner that protected Anglo–Australians’ authority over others. Over time, acrimony between anarchists and communists became increasingly hard to ignore. Prior to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, however, the strong, ­close-­knit northern communities provided a means to deaden the impact of divisions between communists and anarchists. Within the ­sugar-­cane fields, debates about the relative merits of individualism, ­anarcho-­syndicalism or communism lacked immediacy. Far more pressing were debates about who protected workers from the immediate dangers of working in the fields, and who would protect their dignity as white men in the tropics. The Spaniards’ lives in northern Australia were part of a global pattern of ­sub-­tropical societies dominated by the sugar industry. Just as Australia’s ­sugar-­cane industry was situated in the country’s relatively undeveloped n ­ orth-­east, close to its ­much-­feared Asian neighbours, so other ­sugar-­growing regions were similarly situated on imperial and racial borderlands. Fiji had begun to consolidate its identity as a separate British colony, but had significant cultural

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and economic ties with its fellow imperial subjects in Australia. Like northern Australia, it had fraught ethnic relations as Indian labourers had been migrated to work in the industry alongside local workers. As in Australia, there was deep scepticism as to whether north Europeans could sustain the industry without assistance from other ethnic groups. In Cuba, the sugar industry was a similar site of racial division and distinction. It was also a site of contestation between imperial Spain, the USA and local power brokers, particularly with regard to their relations with large m ­ ulti-­ national corporations that increasingly dominated the global industry. The controversial dominance of big business in the sugar industry was at the heart of debates about how these regions were to develop. While state authority was sometimes distant or weak in north Australia, representatives of industry were regularly able to exert a powerful influence on local events. The implications of this became increasingly troubling for the northern Spaniards, who chafed under the controls of CSR. The company’s presence and influence was further consolidated by the growth of globalisation. Sitting on an as yet undeveloped beach in the north, Torrents gazed out to sea as he wrote in his diary. Where once there had been a seascape almost empty of human presence, he now saw lines of ships filled with sugar leaving from Mourilyan Harbour. Reflecting, by extension, on his own connectivity with the world through the sugar industry, he wrote how the cargo vessels laden with sugar symbolised the inherently unfair system of global capitalism, which left food rotting on docks while others starved under oppression. This connectivity and reliance had also come at significant personal and social cost. From the 1920s, Anglophone workers had placed increasing pressure on mill owners to prioritise the employment of ethnically British and Irish workers.39 In 1930, the AWU and farmers cooperated to introduce what was known as the British Preference policy. This required that at least 75 per cent of workers at any sugar mill be British subjects. Most troubling for the Spaniards, naturalised migrants from n ­ on-­English-­speaking backgrounds were excluded from the quota, which was applied on ethnic rather than legal lines. Widely perceived as an alliance of established interests against southern Europeans, the agreement caused great hardship and anger among those affected. A predictably irate Torrents wrote to

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Australian intellectual and writer Nettie Palmer that ‘it does not matter whether one is naturalized and has a union ticket, you are a Dago and have no right to live’.40 The policy further isolated the Spaniards from the trade unions, and established the Australian Communist Party’s position as the ­pre-­eminent political advocate for their social and industrial security. Moreover, the discriminatory policy provided a common cause to rally the various Spanish communities of the north. At the height of the British Preference policies that restricted Spaniards’ access to employment, Torrents sharply criticised Anglo–Australian workers’ unwillingness to take a stand against the racism that divided the workers.41 Instead, the men preferred escapism and compulsive gambling, leading Torrents to refer to them contemptuously as ‘that inert mass of degenerates’.42 Torrents cited authors such as Emile Zola and Marcel Proust to argue that Australians suffered from a ‘sickness’, in which a false sense of superiority could be maintained only through indolence and misogyny.43 While he believed himself to be well acquainted with the effects of capitalism and the oppressive state, Torrents was shocked by the overt racism created by the industry of northern Australia. How, he asked, could the British claim to defend and represent freedom, when they denigrated Indigenous Australians, ‘after robbing them, denying them every type of guarantee that are rendered to the whites’?44 He continued: ‘I remain amazed to see the blacks are not permitted to enter cafes with whites. This I know in Australia, the poor natives of the country after having been robbed of what is theirs. They kill them like rabbits. Today they send them to an island. The men separated from the women to extinguish the race.’ 45 This was not the casual racism of imperial legacy. Instead, it was vibrant and ­self-­sustaining, built on fear of ­non-­Europeans to the region’s north and the hierarchical industrial culture of a sugar region dominated by CSR. Torrents believed that Anglo–Australians’ insecurity and desire to elevate themselves above Indigenous Australians also manifested in heavy drinking and gambling.46 Torrents and Jordana had mocked Australian claims to have ‘civilised’ the Indigenous populations from their own first landing in Fremantle, given Anglo–Australians’ debauched behaviour, alcohol consumption and gambling.47 Torrents quickly became tired of being discounted

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as ‘a black man’ by a ‘bunch of drunks’,48 but the migrants nonetheless struggled to respond to their lowly status in Australia. Since many had come to Australia after a period in Latin America, their views on race were a complex assemblage that mixed acceptance of Creole divisions with criticism of imperial capitalist exploitation. Members of the ­Spanish-­speaking community rapidly realised, with surprise, that they were themselves perceived to be ‘inferior beings’ in the north.49 The community’s hurt at trade unions’ complicity in discrimination endured and Torrents wrote to friends in the USA fifteen years later to lament, witheringly, that, in northern Australia, ‘Latinos are considered blacks’ by virtue of their labour.50 British Preference was not fully implemented, but the implications of the new policy became immediately clear. Soon after its implementation, a Spaniard known as Serra was sacked as a result of the policy.51 Lorenzo Duran was furious that he was excluded from work and denied employment despite having been a naturalised British subject for over ten years.52 Although the cane cutters were worst affected, Spanish farmers perceived the racism that underlay the policy and rallied to support their fellow community members.53 Torrents echoed the complaints of those Spaniards who had arrived from Argentina, when he fumed that it was only when politicians wanted their votes that ‘we cease to be dagos (gringos as they say in Argentina) and deprecated as inferior races from the Mediterranean coasts’.54 By stoking racism that transcended class divisions, Torrents felt that the Queensland government and unions had manipulated Anglo–Australian workers to protect their own financial interests. Since the unions refused to adhere to principles of ­working-­class unity, only a rupture from the democratic capitalist system could protect migrants.55 The failure of trade unions to defend members’ interests sharpened Spaniards’ awareness of union’s entrenched racism. The 1934 outbreak of Weil’s Disease confirmed the union’s impotency and disinterest in challenging the status quo. The o ­ ften-­ fatal Weil’s Disease was spread by rats in the cane and easily transferred to cutters. Those affected risked death or debilitating ­long-­term incapacitation. Farmers could reduce the risk by burning the cane before it was cut, but CSR paid lower rates for burnt cane and many farmers prevaricated when faced with the loss of profit at a time of already depressed prices. Cutters called a strike in 1934 to

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pressure farmers to burn the cane in order to protect them, but the AWU again sided with the growers and mill owners. Migrant workers were left isolated and liable for retribution without others to support and protect them. Nonetheless, Spaniards took part in the wildcat strikes, and actively cooperated with local Italian anarchists to thwart the trade unions, although they did not take leading roles. Their participation became more poignant once a Spaniard, Pedro Goñi, contracted Weil’s Disease and became seriously ill.56 Goñi was close friends with the earliest radical settlers. He had been sponsored by Daniel Martinez (himself heavily involved in the action against South Johnstone Mill), and had later married Marina Villalba, who had been born on board the Kwantu Maru sailing from Chile.57 The Danesi brothers, prominent anarchist sympathisers and leaders of the local Italian Club,58 helped the Italian anarchist Francesco Carmagnola to organise protesters against the union during the Weil’s Disease outbreak.59 The Danesi brothers engaged the famous communist lawyer and later parliamentarian Fred Patterson as an adviser for their Foreign Cutters Defence League.60After a prolonged dispute, Carmagnola and local communists successfully defied the union, employers and police to force the farmers to burn their cane.61 The case would famously be fictionalised by the communist author Jean Devanny in Sugar Heaven as an example of ­ cross-­ ethnic collaboration and solidarity. The AWU’s refusal to support foreign workers and preferred method of dialogue and arbitration shocked many European migrants, whose experience of trade unions was far more confrontational. The Communist Party eagerly took advantage of the migrants’ disenchantment, and sought to harness their experience and organisational skills.62 By the mid-1930s, the Communist Party was seen by many migrants as the only local vehicle that was willing to defend the interests of all workers. Spaniards marched with communists in May Day parades,63 and the Communist Party vocally supported Spaniards who had been harassed by immigration officials.64 Migrants’ independent organisation was firmly in the tradition of the north’s ‘communist focused socialist activism’, in which communities defended their interests without reliance on institutionalised trade unions.65 In the face of hostile Labor governments and subservient trade unions, Torrents quoted IWW founder Eugene V. Debs approvingly and

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noted that ‘the freedom of the workers must be achieved by the workers themselves. So long as workers are like sheep and depend on some leader to shepherd them, they will be sheared’.66 Torrents remained extremely hostile towards unions that actively supported political parties embedded in structures that perpetuated that he believed to be economic slavery.67 He was typical when he argued that British Preference ‘only serves to create hostility between workers, and to benefit the capitalists’.68 Others concurred. Although obliged to purchase a union ticket in order to get clearance to cut cane, an infuriated Rosende routinely ripped it up in organisers’ faces.69 When Torrents attended union meetings to suggest alternative means to secure jobs and safeguard proletarian unity, he was angered by the rudeness of Anglo–Australian members who would peremptorily turn away to start their own discussion and disregarded his views.70 Spaniards acknowledged that the unions were ‘necessary yes, but not important. For the simple reason that they went over the other side of the fence too much’.71 Another felt that the AWU’s hierarchical organisation hampered action, and that it was ‘[a]lways the members [who] started the ball rolling with unauthorised strikes and, when victory is in sights, it steps in and reaps the honours’.72 In lieu of union protection, Spaniards strengthened their liaison across ethnically based groups to safeguard their interests against what they perceived to be deliberate humiliation.73 The need for additional protection to that offered by the trade unions sharpened from the 1930s, when the Great Depression affected Australia in earnest. Workers lost their jobs throughout the country and the north of the continent was not immune. The Depression created serious political and industrial discontent in north Australia that accentuated l­ ong-­ standing interethnic tensions. Large groups of unemployed migrants competed with Anglophone Australians in the search for scarce work; many of the former wandered throughout the north, lacking the family resources available to more established residents. At the height of the Depression, Torrents lamented the sight of ‘the flower of youth walking the roads, looking for work they have not found’.74 He viewed the capitalist system as one laden with hypocrisy that denied people a full experience of life by denying them work. He corresponded with a number of other Australian Spaniards to criticise the Federal Labor government that supported

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an economic system in which the state exported food but was unable to feed its own population.75 The experience of the Depression reaffirmed his belief that the poor could never escape the economic injustice of capitalism in a democratic system, because such politicians lacked the courage to act as radically as their rhetoric suggested. Many felt that the only option was to remove the corrupt politicians and restore the community to natural law. Anglo–Australian cane cutters in the north had become increasingly hostile to southern European workers during the interwar years. In part this was highlighted by the exponential increase in the number of Italians from the mid-1920s after the USA imposed quotas on the numbers who could migrate there. The Queensland government’s Ferry Report had already given official sanction to the belief that migrant workers undermined union conditions as early as 1925. It endorsed the view that ‘to obtain employment a foreigner will undertake to do the same amount of work in a day that a British worker can do, and that this is equivalent to an agreement to work longer hours, which he subsequently does without complaint’.76 Resentment increased towards southern Europeans, many of whom owned coveted farms and assets. This hostility was articulated through a series of symbolic and practical moves designed physically to exclude migrants who were deemed to be undesirable by the dominant E ­ nglish-­speaking community members. Such racism had pervaded the north for decades, as migrants worked long hours for employers only to pool reserves and clear land for personal use in their private time. As competition for work increased during the Depression, policy makers and unionists returned to this earlier hostile rhetoric, and sought to marginalise the foreign presence in the north and safeguard Anglo–Australian economic interests. Spaniards were sensitive to this increased social division. One, Raymundo Jordana, recalled the increasing tension in the small townships in which men met on weekends. He wrote that racial problems [were] an undercurrent. I know there were fights every weekend. But they occurred in the bars and so on, the hotels, you see. Where men drank and eventually somebody take exceptions to what somebody else had said. Bang! And they’d have fights, racial fights.77

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The racist subtext in many of the economic arguments was increasingly obvious, and Spaniards responded by further endorsing radical political critiques. These not only advocated proletarian solidarity across ethnic divides, but also bypassed the trade unions that were uniformly dominated by Anglo–Australian officials with links to the Labor Party. The Depression was only one crisis in a series of escalating ethnic tensions that framed the radical debates within the community. Radical political views were deeply embedded in a variety of community groups that crossed various nationalities. Devanny wrote glowingly of the flurry of activist organisations: ‘trains bore emissaries through [small towns]. In the barracks among the cane, arguments waxed and waned; misconceptions were exploded and solidarity cemented’.78 Radical community leaders used social groups to test for sympathetic political views that did not risk social opprobrium among Anglo–Australian groups. One communist Spaniard, Emilio Duran, noted that his participation in large numbers of sports and arts clubs allowed him to comment unremarked on a range of social topics of use to the local communist chapter.79 In addition to these local leaders, numerous speakers toured the north, and spoke to potential communist recruits at meetings designed to involve migrants, and which were frequently chaired by Spaniards such as Duran.80 The work was seasonal, and relied on maximising profits in the summer season. The gendered social networks of Barcelona, in which women’s voices were most commonly found, could not be easily replicated in northern Australia. Although farms were family owned, they relied on large teams of cutters to harvest the sugar cane. These teams were formed at the start of the season, and worked together to clear fields with machetes. The men lived together in barracks in the fields, often with one woman resident to assist with cooking and cleaning clothes. The barracks, where teams lived in the fields, offered an unusually fluid gendered space in which divisions between familial, domestic and work spaces were blurred. The increasing numbers of women were central to a broader array of potential social spaces that enervated the political discussions. Those couples who owned boarding houses and hotels found themselves propelled into leadership roles at the centre of local intrigue. Many future community leaders began to coordinate

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social networks through boarding houses where cane cutters would stay during weekends off work or in transit to elsewhere. While these businesses were owned by men, they were overwhelmingly managed by women and run as extensions to a domestic space.81 For example, while her husband Tomas continued to work in the cane fields in 1927, the matriarch Teresa Mendiolea took on the running and management of their new boarding house in the large town of Ingham. Teresa came to be positioned at the centre of the local Spanish community, sponsoring hundreds of new arrivals and welcoming them to her boarding house on a regular basis. Clubs were an important space for the northern community, in which culture and politics could be freely expressed. In the 1920s, Torrents recalls Innisfail’s main ‘two or three Spanish eating houses that served for those same countrymen’.82 Pedro Goñi owned a club in Innisfail’s Ernest Street that was run by his wife, Marina,83 while Pascual Escuder operated another Spanish Club in Innisfail. In the town of Ayr during the 1930s, the Villanueva couple ran a similar Spanish Club, which became a political centre during the Spanish Civil War.84 Both Lombarte and Escuder were in regular receipt of anarchist periodicals from overseas, and both Goñis had strong connections with the radical Kwantu Maru Spaniards throughout their lives.85 Escuder actively sought to organise Spaniards along more overtly political lines and wrote public letters denouncing the influence of Catholic bishops. Politicised clubs were not confined to Spaniards. The Danesi brothers were prominent anarchists and owned Innisfail’s Italian Club,86 hosting receptions for returning service personnel from the Spanish Civil War.87 Clubs facilitated political debate, but were also sites for the exchange of information. Few of those who visited Innisfail or Ingham had homes in the town, and boarding houses were an important point of contact. Boarding houses acted as information hubs where migrant labourers’ mail arrived from Spain, and where political contexts were discussed. Spaniards did not rely exclusively on boarding houses run by their compatriots, but certainly preferred them.88 The firebrand protester Miguel Martinez ran a boarding house in Innisfail’s China Town,89 and Gabriel Sorli operated another important Spanish boarding house in Innisfail’s Ernest Street. Sorli had arrived in 1911 and bought a cane farm in 1915, only to become bankrupt after his farm was destroyed by the 1918 cyclone. Having worked with Duran and Casiano Madrid in

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gaming houses during the late 1920s,90 Sorli was well placed to make the move into running a boarding house in his retirement. Police reports recorded, hopefully, that Sorli was ‘a good citizen, [and] not inclined to associate’.91 Unbeknown to police until the Second World War, Sorli regularly received the anarchist newspaper Cultura Proletaria, and his most frequent guests were either involved in the International A ­ nti-­Fascist Solidarity organisation or close associates of its affiliates.92 Sorli was remembered within the community for regularly accosting Spaniards on street corners, and was known for his political radicalism.93 While many guests who listed his boarding house as a regular residence had no police records, the highly politicised Sorli did not refrain from discussing politics with those who boarded there.

International debates Scholarship about Australia has traditionally been preoccupied with the continent’s distance from Europe and the Americas, implying its insulation from conflicts and isolation from global debate. Certainly, Australia’s distance from Europe was a significant part of its appeal to the northern Spanish community. Distant from intrusive governments, and able to develop nature in their own communal image of development, they hoped to live their lives in freedom. This physical distance did not mean that the migrants ceased to feel connection with events in faraway locations. Indeed, dialogue with former homes was the object of considerable emotional effort and labour. The Spanish migrants engaged in ongoing debates with friends and family members throughout the world, and these debates helped them to formulate a language with which to make meaning and to challenge the preconceptions of their neighbours. Engaging in meaningful debates that had practical outcomes was central to anarchist practice. The c­ lose-­knit physical communities and social milieu of Barcelona, Lyon and Paris provided a means to sustain the men in cities that were often hostile to their ideas. Such options were not viable in northern Australia. While not losing their radical identity, the migrants did become progressively more isolated from the social structures that had originally nurtured this aspect of their identity. Removed from the close social environment

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of urban Catalonia or Buenos Aires, the migrant community tried to connect spaces in which they could safely discuss their beliefs by means of letter writing. Torrents’ early experiences in France and Spain meant that he was particularly comfortable with the ­semi-­clandestine world of anarchist publications. The published word was crucial to anarchists, who were committed to s­elf-­ improvement through education. Torrents had quickly found social spaces that echoed the anarchist networks of Catalonia while he was in Paris. He was a regular visitor at the printing houses of anarchist and radical journals, such as L’Idée Libre, which he had then used to build contacts and find employment in the French capital. When able, he also contributed to the journals’ publishing with his time and words. His political and social connections expanded rapidly through such work, helped by the substantial Spanish community in the French capital. In keeping with the broader anarchist rejection of aesthete intellectualism, Torrents described himself as ‘a peasant, not a writer’.94 He laughingly recalled one of the numerous occasions on which he was arrested by police: ‘Me! Dangerous? I have never used any arms other than paper. Whenever the police would search me, they found only journals and pamphlets in my pockets.’95 This level of connectivity would prove to be unsustainable in northern Australia, where the smaller population was spread across large distances. With visits to the regional centre of Innisfail being possible only occasionally, activists could never reconstruct the ­close-­knit radical communities that underpinned their memories of Catalonia. Anarchist networks were sustainable in cities such as Paris, Lyon and Buenos Aires because of comparable ­high-­density urban social spaces in which factories and symbols of civic authority remained a tangible and inescapable aspect of daily life. In northern Australia, activists were physically isolated from fellow anarchists, and the symbols of state were replaced by the presence of the sugar industry. They remained distant from the constant intrusion of state authority, but confrontation with employers provided a daily reminder of the injustices of the market. This distance enabled activists to express their convictions publicly with less fear of direct retribution, although the monopoly of CSR remained. The quandary for men such as Torrents was how to express their ­long-­ standing convictions in the local space, while maintaining a sense of authenticity and connection to international anarchist groups.

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Maintaining an active role in international debates was axiomatic to northern anarchists’ identity. While they were fully immersed in the local environment and its particular industrial disputes, the significance of these disputes made sense only when situated in its global context. With limited access to civic space, Spaniards became regular users of the informal local libraries and booksellers in northern Australia.96 Torrents maximised the number of anarchist journals he received by diverting as much money as he could afford to pay for subscriptions,97 and, in addition to the French Par delà la Melée, he received the American Via Libre,98 and the Spanish Luchador, El Vidrio, and occasionally, La Publicidad.99 Cultura Proletaria was by far the most popular of the anarchist journals in the northern community. The paper was the USA’s ­longest-­running anarchist paper, and was published by w ­ orking-­class Spanish speakers in New York each week from 1910 until 1959. Officially, it cost 10 cents per issue, or three dollars for a year’s subscription, but editors accepted that its subscribers would not always be able to pay and continued to send copies regardless. Northern community members Torrents, Sorli and Juan Casanova all wrote columns for the paper on a ­semi-­ regular basis, and others also contributed less frequently. Cultura Proletaria’s distribution remained limited, although the paper was circulated among friends in the north once each person had read it. Torrents admitted that he had encouraged those Spaniards who made donations to Republican causes during the Civil War (1936–9) to subscribe to the journal as well.100 Men such as Santos Villacian explicitly linked his subscription with support for anarchist Republicans.101 After the Australian intellectual and author Nettie Palmer received her first issue of Cultura Proletaria, she wrote hurriedly to Torrents: ‘I wish I could talk it over with you! I can see how every page of it – on the growing of olives, on the collectives in Aragon, on politics, on political history – must mean so much to you.’ 102 Palmer’s vivid excitement was only a shadow of the Spaniards’ joy at the connectivity felt at receiving news and articles about home from family, friends and fellow exiles. The northern community eagerly portrayed its small community to Spanish emigrants in New York and globally, and wrote regularly in the widely disseminated Cultura Proletaria. Men, such as Torrents, were able to rediscover a degree of their former connectivity and purpose in this large, anonymous audience. Torrents’ regular

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references to having met Sébastian Faure or Francisco Ferrer confirmed to his readers, and to himself, that his current geographically peripheral position did not suggest political illiteracy or irrelevance.103 This renewed authority was partly because writers could assume a degree of sympathy in their readership, but also derived from the northern Spanish writers’ deliberate use of their Australian experiences in their articles. His articles came to refer to Queensland strikes and local industrial exploitation, placing them in a continuum of anarchists’ past struggles and anticipated futures. His articles sought to project Queensland into the conceptual mainstream of European anarchism, though, through his experiences of anarchism in Barcelona.104 Torrents’ friendship and l­ong-­term correspondence with the editors of Par delà la Melée and Cultura Proletaria reveal his continued empathy with European issues. One of Torrents’ articles recalled that he had recently ­re-­read some of Faure’s works ‘in the packets of journals our friends send to us’ from overseas. He took care to refer to his own ‘great satisfaction of hearing [Faure] in Lyon’ during the First World War. The article then went on to hope that among Australia’s many erstwhile political ‘saviours’ one might eventually prove to be ‘another Faure’ to take the country back to his original dreams. Torrents’ contribution to newspapers such as Cultura Proletaria was an important means of maintaining the transnational public space that connected him with global anarchist communities. His record is the only one in the community to remain available, but he was only one member of the northern community who wrote regularly for papers as a means of mediating between transnational and local networks. Others within the local community sought to proselytise to the local population more directly, and men such as Gabriel Sorli became ­well-­known fixtures on the street corners of Innisfail. Sorli’s haranguing style and rigid views were at odds with Torrents’ own beliefs, and the men became increasingly hostile. While the debate appeared esoteric to ­non-­Spaniards, their debates on the legitimacy of government drew on their sense of loss and isolation from the rapid political changes in Spain. Less confident with his English language skills, Torrents maintained his identity through a variety of alternative mechanisms that offered a means to contest state authority and capitalism. He wrote widely in Spanish (and occasionally in English), and his works were published in

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newspapers printed in Australia, France, Spain and the USA. More generally, and like many others in the community, he maintained ­long-­standing correspondences with friends and associates across Europe, the USA and Australia. Confident, and proud of their global experiences and connection, migrants found public speaking and advocacy far harder in Australia. Jordana remained profoundly isolated from public debates, and relied on his son to carry out complicated discussions on his behalf.105 As his English improved, Torrents was one of many radical Spaniards who wrote in the local press to argue political issues relevant to the Spaniards.106 He remained hesitant that he would appear ignorant, however, and often asked others to write on his behalf.107 Neither could he address large groups in English, and he felt ridiculed when attempting to participate actively in trade union meetings.108 Nonetheless, the moral imperative of advocating radical causes occasionally compelled the men and women in the community to address large groups, as would be the case with the coming Civil War in Spain.

Conclusion Despite enjoying the ­multi-­ethnic and cosmopolitan nature of life among migrants, Torrents was increasingly antagonistic towards the dominant Anglo–Australian community. The group monopolised positions of power in the community, whether government or industrial. The effects of this reached a crescendo for the ­non-­English-­speaking community during the industrial conflicts of the Depression era. From his earliest arrival, Torrents had been concerned by the power that E ­ nglish-­speaking Australians held in industry, and complained that they treated the Spaniards no differently to the Indigenous Australians. He remained alive to the dangers that racism posed to workers’ solidarity, viewing it as a construct of the state and capital. With a number of other Spaniards, he wrote regularly to the local papers to criticise examples of racism. He wrote to Palmer that ‘[o]ne of the biggest defects the Australian people suffer is that they have been taught that they are superior, and this has grown (as with all the nations of Europe) and they see foreigners as inferior beings’.109

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Torrents did not accept that racism was inherent to Australia, but rather that capital and the state had come to define the criteria for membership in the community. He readily acknowledged that life in northern Australia was better remunerated than he could ever have hoped for in Europe. Yet, he was profoundly critical that life had become defined by how much money a person earned and the profits one made.110 In such a situation, it was inevitable that human life became devalued and aligned with capital. Rather than benefit from the results of their labour, Torrents argued that people became brutalised and dependent on alcohol as a means to cope. He wrote to a hypothetical ‘fellow peasant’: ‘brother labourer, you work in the fields so that the seeds can grow at the cost of your sweat . . . You work for yourself without profit because you can’t eat the wheat that you create’.111 If capitalism became the defining factor of community belonging, he worried that the opportunity to transform the nature of belonging and human emancipation would be lost. The result was that ‘those who are born here barely know they’re born. Those who are not born here are treated as blacks. While they think themselves superior, they have nothing to be envious of and little practical means to emancipate themselves’.112

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5

The Spanish Civil War

The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 was an understandably formative moment in the lives of the northern communities. The conflict was to resonate profoundly across broader Australian society, amplified by religious and cultural sectarianism and growing concern at the influence of communism in Australia. The civil war’s outbreak was greeted with great concern by the fervently ­pro-­Republican Spanish communities in the north. During the late 1920s, the community had expanded beyond the initial group of radicals, most notably to include a large number of Basque farmers. Despite not necessarily sharing political views, all groups were united in their support for the Republican government. For the anarchists, what had occasionally appeared as debates about workplace conditions and incidental change in the cane fields became a matter of life and death as they contemplated the fates of friends and family in Spain. Experienced activists stepped into public space to assume prominent roles in local organisations, and many others sent support through family networks. The events compelled local anarchists to organise support for Republican Spain and to reach beyond their immediate S ­ panish-­speaking communities to do it.

The Spanish Civil War Spain had undergone rapid change in the years following the first migrants’ departure for Australia in 1907. The severe repression that had existed in the years following 1909, and which had enervated and horrified so many, had been replaced with a new system of control and governance that was sustained by Spain’s rapidly industrialising economy. The First World War had been a period of

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economic growth in the migrants’ former homes in Barcelona and nearby surrounding towns and villages. Spain’s neutrality had offered the country the opportunity to profit from warring nations’ need for arms, and its factories had rapidly expanded. Yet, the economic growth overwhelmingly benefited those who owned the factories rather than the urban poor. As the city’s population boomed with newly arrived migrants, men with w ­ ell-­known reputations for political radicalism and protest were frequently unable to secure regular work. Those able to find work used the increased demand for Spanish goods to agitate for improved employment conditions. Many of the better conditions that were secured were ultimately lost due to rapidly accelerating inflation after the end of the war, and industrial tensions rose commensurately. The years following the end of the First World War saw a return to ­pre-­war levels of industrial violence that focused on an increasingly polarised Catalonia. The intense unrest of the s­ o-­called Trienio Bolchevique (1918–­21) revealed that these tensions were not confined to the ­north-­west of the country. All over Spain, peasants and workers violently protested and attacked symbols of state authority. In the face of rising tensions, the king suspended Spain’s already corrupt democracy and imposed a dictatorship led by General Primo de Rivera. Primo de Rivera’s rule initially appeared to be successful in stabilising politics and the economy, and the 1920s were a period of investment in infrastructure and growth of the middle class. However, he failed to address the underlying issues of inequity in Spain and his position became increasingly tenuous until he lost sufficient political support to rule in 1930. His chosen replacement was no more successful, and the king eventually lost confidence in his own ability to maintain his throne. After the monarch fled the country, Spain was declared a Republic in 1932. The event was greeted with surprise and great joy across Spanish migrant communities globally, and many celebrated what they hoped would be a period of new hope. This moment of hope glossed over the very real differences between progressive forces in Spain. Socialists were committed to parliamentarianism and gradual change, while those on the radical Left were committed to remaking Spanish society entirely. Notwithstanding these differences on the Left, the Republic quickly polarised between forces of conservatism and those in favour of rapid change. Its centre parties proved to be insufficiently strong to

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generate a consensus around ‘Republican ideals’. Every election appeared to be a seminal moment for both sides’ existential survival, and tensions continued to rise dangerously. Governments found themselves unable to maintain pace with demands for major restructuring of the economy, or to contain fears from reactionary forces that Spain’s core identity and territorial integrity were being destroyed. Spaniards in Australia greeted the monarchy’s fall in 1932 with glee, and pored over any news from the new Republic.1 The early years of Republican government marked a sharp decline in Spanish immigration to Australia. Many were able to renew and increase their contact with networks of friends and sympathisers in former homes. The number of migrants who sought to return to Spain increased rapidly with the declaration of the Second Republic, and a number sent their children back to Spain to experience the new era first hand.2 At the start of the Second Republic, Celia and Eliseo Zamora, of the northern town of Tully, were sent to Spain by their antifascist father, to learn how ‘to become a Spaniard’.3 In 1936, the Spanish military attempted a military coup to bolster conservative forces, echoing earlier patterns of military pronouncements that drew on the army’s perceived role as the nation’s defender of last resort. The coup did not succeed in rapidly toppling the government, but it did trigger the start of overt conflict and precipitated the commencement of what would become the Spanish Civil War. Volunteers from Spain and throughout the world joined to support the Republican army, as the conflict steadily spread across the country. The result was a long and cruel conflict in which both sides engaged in bitter fighting and the boundaries between civilians and combatants became unavoidably blurred. The children of north Australian Spaniards, Eliseo and Cecilia Zamora, were trapped in Spain when the coup occurred. Eliseo had been with relatives in rural Spain on the outbreak of the Civil War, and remembered his flight from an anticipated forced conscription into the Nationalist army as the rebels advanced on his aunt’s village. After he returned to Queensland, Eliseo became a proud supporter of the Communist Party,4 and would travel with his brother to listen to iconic communist politicians such as the state Member of Parliament Fred Patterson. Eliseo’s sister Celia was in Madrid on the outbreak of the war, and recalled the excitement of attending political meetings to hear the legendary communist

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Delores Ibárrui, or ‘La Pasionara’, debate vigorously with other radicals.5 On the advice of the British Embassy, Celia was evacuated within the first few months of conflict to meet her brother in Valencia, from where they travelled to Marseilles and home to Queensland. Celia also continued her passion for L ­ eft-­wing politics after her return, and became active in the Tully Spanish Relief Committee, designed to support Republicans in Spain, and maintained friendly contact with local communists until the late 1970s.6 While some Spaniards did enlist in support of the Nationalist insurgents, the majority of the Nationalist recruits were already in the armed forces, had been forced to join, or were from Spain’s colonial territories. The Nationalists were also notably aided by the governments of Italy and Germany. The Republican government struggled to end the insurgency, and was greatly hampered by the French and British decision to freeze its assets, as well as by the unhelpful characterisation that the government was seeking to introduce a communist regime that favoured Moscow. Many civilians from other countries enlisted in support of the Republicans in response, forming the famous International Brigades with the hope that defeating the Spanish Nationalists would halt the spread of fascism globally. From the standpoint of Australia, these debates, and the course of Spanish history, appeared to be fateful. Anarchists and communists shared a radical milieu in northern Australia, and were both broadly defined by their opposition to the capitalist state. The Communist Party had established itself particularly successfully in Queensland, and had considerable social currency with a number of Anglo–Australian workers. Although the police consistently worried about an organised ‘Anarchist Party’ in northern Australia, anarchists never formed an effective platform from which to publicise their views.7 Communists had been politically marginal in Catalonia when most of the northern Spaniards had left their home, and they had been insulated from many of the tensions between anarchists and communists that emerged over time. Torrents did not see local communists as a threat during the 1920s, but rather as additional sympathisers who complemented his desire to abolish capitalism. He liaised closely with the local communist leadership, and frequently held informal debates with them.8 Although he distanced himself more firmly only once the Stalinist tendency for rigid

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hierarchical controls became clear, another Spaniard headed the local communist cell in the town of Innisfail until he resigned in protest at the party’s centralised control structure.9 The Spanish Civil War (1936–9) provided Torrents with the opportunity to project his memories of Catalan anarchism directly into the Queensland environment and, once his hostility to Australian communists strengthened, provided a means to contest the latter’s dominance in northern Australia. Torrents’ correspondence with family and friends in Europe demonstrates a continued desire for connection. Wartime letters were received with particular appreciation when they referred to the expansion of anarchist spaces, such as the cherished news that Mataró’s anarchist athenaeum had ­re-­opened.10 Radical Queenslanders of all cultural backgrounds saw the Civil War in Spain as an apocalyptic battle between fascist elites and workers, who were seeking to liberate themselves from capitalist oppression. In this new context of civil war, Torrents’ hitherto private correspondence with friends and family in Catalonia and France assumed a public importance. North Queenslanders Ernesto Barrato, Jack Franklin, Jose Ruiz and Maria Ruiz all wrote letters to friends in the far north that were similarly subsequently published in the communist North Queensland Guardian.11 Torrents also forwarded such letters to Australian intellectual Nettie Palmer as triumphant celebrations of the anarchist social revolution. One such communication declared that the Catalans were in the throes of social revolution, and were ‘determined to conquer or die; we will conquer, for we have both truth and power on our side . . . We shall replace [capitalist oppression] by an era of liberty and justice’.12 Torrents’ memory and experience of Catalan radicalism became a central platform to local Spaniards’ reassertion of independence from Australian communists.13 Despite their visceral anger at the military’s decision to ignore the democratically elected government and to launch its coup, the illegal action appeared to offer radicals a genuine opportunity to ‘bury forever all the old Spain with its crimes and pillage – for this was what the sword of reaction and the cross of clericalism represent’.14 Others concurred that the coup’s aftermath offered an opportunity permanently to end central government intrusion that supported ‘the savage treatment by the domineering [capitalist] class against the masses’.15

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Australian society as a whole became gripped by the unfolding conflict in Spain. Conservatives viewed the Nationalist forces of General Franco as being synonymous with the defence of Christian civilisation against atheistic communist forces. The Catholic Church in Australia led those groups that supported the Nationalists, arguing that they represented a timeless Spanish commitment to Christianity in the face of barbarism. In contrast, an alliance of L ­ eft-­ leaning groups presented the conflict as a microcosm of the global struggle between democracy and fascism. For this group, a Nationalist defeat in Spain would represent a shattering reversal for militarist and capitalist dictatorships across the world. Much of radicals’ antipathy derived from their personal experiences of the Church in Catalonia. Simmering anger towards the Church’s role as the moral support for a rapacious capitalist state had caused workers to target Church property during the violent Semana Trágica in 1909. The violence of 1909 subsequently assumed legendary status in Barcelona, and became an integral part of the city’s proletarian identity. Anarchists, socialists and moderate Republicans all deplored the Church’s continued attempts to subvert the free speech that was seen to be intrinsic to the new Second Republic’s future success. The Church’s partisan and divisive role in the Spanish Civil War confirmed this attitude. Local Spaniards in northern Australia received regular correspondence and newspapers from Spain that confirmed their belief that an immoral Church was prepared once again to fight to thwart the country’s democratic progress. The Church symbolised the main agent of persecution for the northern community’s political beliefs. The impact of this was remembered decades later by community members who were children at the time. ­Long-­since retired after decades working the land, they remember the many images that appeared in newspapers at the time that ‘the bloomin’ stinkin’ Pope [was] blessing the soldiers that were going to kill’ troops off fighting for Republican government.16 They recall their parents’ great pleasure in telling local Australian priests about the practical experiences that had generated these views, haranguing them on street corners.17 Anticlerical correspondences from Spain were received with a credulity and horror that repeatedly referenced p ­ re-­ conceived ideas of a resurrected Spanish Inquisition that was being unleashed

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violently on the population. Recurrent rumours in the community, suggesting that nuns interred the corpses of their illegitimate children in church walls, became seared in the memories of the local children for decades to come. One member of the community vividly recalled receiving such periodicals from family members in Spain. The sketch of soldiers bayonetting the mummified corpses of children was seared in her memory for life.18 The ­pro-­Franco position of the Australian Catholic Church only confirmed the community’s hostility to organised religion. There had been some effort to involve Spaniards in the local Catholic churches, but efforts floundered on the migrants’ emphatic and l­ong-­standing hostility to organised religion and superstition.19 Few would brook any contact with the Church, and many of the Spaniards believed their refusal to become involved in local churches prompted Australian Catholics to blacklist them and refuse them employment. The language echoes that of shadow organisations carrying out a covert war of subterfuge. Emilio Duran worked at South Johnstone Mill, and bitterly remembered the Anglo–Australian Catholics beginning to develop ‘operations’ in South Johnstone to marginalise the radical men and protesters.20 When he refused to donate money to their cause, he believed that Catholics manoeuvred successfully to have him fired. It was in this context of bitter local rivalries and hostilities, believed to be the forefront of an urgent global moral contestation, that the Spanish Civil War unfolded in northern Australia. The Civil War presented immediate practical concerns for those with friends and family who remained in Spain. Migrants garnered as much information about the Civil War as they could through letters and correspondence from Spain. From Catalonia, Maria Ruiz wrote to her sister in Queensland about the dangers facing her enlisted son. The letter was then circulated throughout the community. Its language displays the widely held belief that the Civil War was part of a global struggle between fascism and proletarian emancipation, and Maria’s heart ached ‘for our noble and heroic people who are defending the freedom and liberty of the world’.21 Australian communists, who printed the only available radical newspapers in English, edited the letters to ensure that rebel attacks on civilians and hospitals generated support for communism. From 1936, Trini Garcia wrote to ‘A. Guerra’ from the Spanish political group Nueva España Antifascista to receive

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alternative news that she might distribute locally.22 Such sources of information were inherently uncertain and irregular, though, and contributed to José Ruiz’s complaint to Trini’s husband Jack that the ‘proletariat of the world’ were indifferent to international solidarity and Spanish suffering.23 Many Spaniards sought to correct shortfalls in the media, and devoted themselves to galvanising the generally sympathetic but poorly informed Queenslanders of northern Australia. Australian Spaniards angrily concurred with overseas commentators that the French and British policies of n ­on-­ intervention hampered Spain’s elected government in its fight against facism, and ultimately caused it to lose the war.24 Spaniards in Innisfail appealed to their compatriots throughout Australia to pressure governments to lobby the British establishment.25 Jack Garcia and Torrents simultaneously urged trade unions to express their solidarity with Spanish workers.26 Ray Jordana remembers Spaniards’ disbelief that their dreams of an emancipated Spain could be shattered by British and French duplicity and s­ elf-­interest.27 Locals’ normal contact with relatives in Spain, and the sense that they had been denied the opportunity for solidarity in forming democratic government, caused a genuine and enduring anger among the northern communities. Although Spaniards in the north sought to maximise their contact with Spain, the lack of accurate information was a constant complaint. The communist North Queensland Guardian gave greater coverage to the Civil War than most papers, but antifascist migrants thirsted for more detailed and accurate information. In early 1938, the Melbourne communist Ken Coldicutt toured north Queensland to raise money for Spanish Republicans and screened films such as the iconic They Shall Not Pass. Coldicutt later recalled, the exhilaration of screening his films to passionately antifascist audiences, including many migrants from Italy, Spain and Yugoslavia; of hearing the roars of execration and shouts of ‘Abasso Il Duce’ whenever Mussolini appeared on the screen, and of speaking to audiences who hung on his every word.28

The strength of emotional responses derived not only from the film’s novelty, but also the physical appearance that the distance that separated migrants from the conflict had temporarily collapsed, enabling them to express their anger to protagonists directly and shout their solidarity with suffering compatriots.

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Antifascists were infuriated by the bias in the mainstream media in favour of the Nationalist rebels, whom most Spanish migrants viewed as fascist puppets. James Duhig, Catholic Archbishop of Brisbane, urged people to disregard any cables that favoured the legal Republican government. His advice was to invert any terminology in the media that designated Nationalists as rebels, and instead to view the Republican government as having been elected fraudulently.29 Instead, he stated that the Republican government consisted of nothing but dangerous vigilantes seeking to attack peaceful Christians. Communists attempted to counter Duhig and invited him to a public debate, but the archbishop curtly rejected their offer.30 Spaniards tried to refute the local Catholic Bishop of Cairns, who also spoke of his admiration for General Franco’s ­anti-­communist crusade. Pascual Escuder wrote an open letter to the bishop ‘to correct such a misleading and ridiculous statement’ of support.31 Rather than accept that Franco was the only alternative to ‘hoards [sic] of barbarians’, Escuder lambasted the general as the ‘spawn of the devil’.32 Such efforts had only minimal impact in mainstream papers, however, and the media bias against the Republican government steadily accelerated from 1938. Jordana spoke at length about how the lack of information posed particular difficulties for local Spaniards. ‘All we knew was what you could read in the papers, which wasn’t very much. The papers didn’t report very accurately, in fact most inaccurately, and certainly biased. . . They were definitely slanted towards Franco. Always.’ 33 Spaniards were sensitive to the media bias, and believed that basic facts like geography were misrepresented to emphasise Nationalist advances and minimise Republican gains. The media ‘got mixed up and ballsed up, and you knew they didn’t know what they were talking about. It was alright for those who didn’t know anything, but it was pretty much slanted’.34 Spaniards had to be guided and informed by the very sketchy reports, which ‘were all contradictory, meant really nothing . . . get them together and you’d have got nothing. In months we just knew that the struggle was on that purpose’ [to defeat the Nationalists].35 With so little verifiable information, sensationalism and grotesque h ­alf-­ truths became commonplace and were passed orally between community members.36 A number of Australians joined the International Brigades and went to Spain to fight on behalf of the Republican government.37

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Seeking to distance the government, the ­Attorney-­General and future Prime Minister Robert Menzies stated that Australia had no real interest in fascism’s defeat by communism nor in fascists’ victory.38 Menzies’ misconception that the war was a dichotomous battle between communists and fascists was extremely common throughout Australia. The firm supporter of Republican Spain and friend of Torrents, Nettie Palmer, noted, with irritation, that people’s most common response abdicated their responsibility to act and disregarded any moral imperative to support the Spanish people. She pithily summarised people’s response as being to say ‘We don’t know what to think, do we?’ 39 The progressive characterisation of lawlessness throughout the Republican zone caused many Australians to support Franco, and Catholic Australians raised substantial subscriptions to hamper the spread of communism. As well as Anglo–Australians, a number of Spaniards returned to Spain to fight for the Republic. Ray Jordana, son of Juan Jordana who had arrived with Torrents, believed that his decision to fight was initially a desire to escape the ‘parochial and closed’ north of Australia.40 Once in Melbourne, though, Jordana was ‘thrown into contact with people who thought and taught about the Spanish Civil War. As the Blackburns did. And of course then I became involved in a moral sense’.41 Jordana had met the son of prominent Labor politician Maurice Blackburn previously, and after renewing contact with him became increasingly involved with the Blackburn’s extensive L ­ eft-­wing circle. Blackburn brought Jordana to public lectures, where he met Torrents’ friend Nettie Palmer. She noted his Catalan background and felt that he was a ‘charismatic chap, good to meet’.42 From then on, Jordana found himself drawn into public meetings, the biggest of which was at the Princess Theatre in March 1937,43 at which he spoke on ‘the Spanish struggle . . . [and] on my desire to get there’.44 Palmer participated in the same meeting and praised Jordana’s ‘good, clear moderate speech’.45 Jordana was denied an Australian passport when he applied to leave the country to fight in Spain. Bureaucrats told him that it was because of a technical error that had lain dormant and irrelevant since his arrival in Australia in 1921.46 For Jordana, the government’s obfuscation was further evidence of a latent hostility towards those who wanted to join the International Brigades. Instead, Jordana was forced hastily to arrange a Spanish passport to allow his travel.47

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Jordana’s decision to fight in Spain was the product of moral commitment, but it was not impulsive and he was aware of the limits of any individual’s contribution.48 He served in the International Brigades once in Spain, but became frustrated with them and soon moved across to what he believed to be the more efficient communist forces. Jack Garcia was another northern Spaniard who returned to fight for the Republicans. Garcia had originally arrived in Australia on board the Kwantu Maru, and lived in Queensland with his wife and daughters. Although his wife, Trini, had long been emphatically associated with anarchism, Jack’s politics were steadily drawing closer to communism as the main vehicle for revolution and he joined a state ­sub-­committee for the Communist Party of Australia in Queensland.49 Although he remained firmly L ­ eft-­wing and ­anti-­ authoritarian, on his immediate return from the Civil War he shared Jordana’s disgust at the manner in which some of the Republican forces were organised.50 His convictions had been sufficiently firm for him to become a political commissar for communist forces in Spain. Like Jordana, his action in Spain brought him under the suspicion of the Australian intelligence authorities on his return to Australia. While Jordana was almost interned as a result of his Civil War presence in Catalonia, Garcia largely escaped harassment by the Australian government until the hysteria regarding communists engulfed Australia following the Second World War.51 Garcia and Jordana were not the only Spaniards from the northern community to fight for the Republicans. Bartholomew Blanchart, – like Torrents, a former resident of both Essendon in Victoria and Mataró – retrospectively justified his decision to fight in Spain because he wanted ‘to assist the Spanish people to have the same freedom that I enjoyed in Australia. My whole aim was to fight against fascism. I felt that by helping the democratic government in Spain I was helping Australia’.52 Angelo Plaza had lived in Queensland since 1924, and similarly returned to Spain to fight Franco.53 Another, Rosendo Sala, had arrived in the early 1920s and became a naturalised British subject in 1929, but returned to join the Republican forces on the Civil War’s outbreak.54 Commitment was not confined to members of the Spanish communities who had been born in Spain, and A ­ ustralian-­ born northerner Salvador Barker also left Australia to fight with the Republicans.55 All were

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driven by the injustice of events in Spain, understood and conceptualised through their experiences in Australia.

Spanish Relief Committees The Spanish Civil War energised diverse groups of L ­ eft-­ wing Australians throughout the country. Australian authorities had long been concerned by political organisation among migrant communities in the isolated north. They had long been confused by the difference between anarchism, communism and a­ nti-­imperialism, even before the added complexities of the Civil War. Much of the police confusion derived from anarchists’ vehement denial that they were a political group. The fervent anarchist Juan Jordana repeatedly denied his membership of a political organisation,56 rejecting accusations that anarchists were a party in any conventional sense. Worried intelligence sources noted that groups were ‘spreading this doctrine of anarchism among the workers’.57 The involvement of radical Anglo–Australians in the campaign to support Republican government complicated authorities’ existing confusion even further. Communist influence in the Australian Spanish Relief Committees (SRCs) to support Republican Spain posed serious political issues to both Spaniards and the wider Australian community. The Security Services deemed Ray Jordana’s opposition to capitalism to be synonymous with ­‘anti-­British sentiments’.58 Although Jordana had taken the oath of allegiance, intelligence officers continued to monitor him, following a muttered comment that was overheard by a third party that ‘the time is not far distant when they will do away with sovereign heads. They are only parasites’.59 Miguel Torrente’s antifascist statement ‘that Italy and Germany and Spain would soon be one country and would drive the British to the ends of the earth’ was assumed to be hostile, although it was almost certainly an attempt to justify greater British action to support Republican Spain.60 Police attempts to distinguish between anarchism and communism were almost n ­ on-­existent, and Antonio Canet’s ‘communist tendencies’ were held to be s­elf-­ evident despite the fact he was under investigation for importing anarchist newspapers.61 Police noted with confused interest that the prominent local Spaniard Gabriel Sorli was ‘known to be an anarchist, opposed to fascism’.62

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Serious divisions between local Spanish communists and anarchists became entrenched as a result of the Spanish Civil War. Torrents was happiest when engaged in meaningful political argument, and would spend hours vigorously arguing with local communists from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Torrents rejected the regimentation of the Communist Party and was unapologetic in criticising them for this. Despite this, the communists recruited additional supporters much more effectively than the anarchists, and identified possible sympathisers such as the Basque Goicoechea and Constanza families.63 One such recruit, Emilio Duran, recalled [t]he fact that I was a reasonably good speaker, plus secretary and librarian of the School of Arts, secretary of the Rugby Club, Soccer Club, and Hockey Club, president of the Swimming Club, Ambulance Committee Member and Disputes Committee member might have had a lot to do with my being recruited early.64

Such ­well-­connected members were highly valued, given their ability to move and communicate across language groups. Once initiated, Duran became a key part of the local communist organisation. He recalls that he was one of the two core cell members, who were responsible for local activity. Although Duran controlled accounts and records, [n]ever, at any time, was I to appear in the open . . . Never, at any time, did any of [the fourteen members] have any inkling that I was a Party member, let alone being the Cell leader. At all times Tiger Ryan was the supposed leader.65

Fights between local Republican and Nationalist supporters were rare, since there were so few of the latter in the northern community.66 More common were fights between Spaniards and Italians, whose army was fighting in Spain in support of Franco. In March 1938, four Basques from the town of Home Hill (at least one of whom was a member of the Communist Party) were cautioned by police after driving into town purposely to fight Italians, whom they attacked as ‘no time dirty dagos’.67 Echoed by Nicholas Echevarria’s cries of ‘Down Mussolini! Down Franco! Down Hitler!’, Bonifacio Bilbao sought to explain to concerned local policemen that his ‘mother and father and relations [were] getting shot in Spain by Franco. How would you like it if your people were down in Sydney and getting shot by someone down there?’ 68 Although convicted,

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his appeal seemed to work. The brawl was not deemed to be racially motivated, and the fine imposed by the court was light. Nonetheless, social tensions and emotions continued to rise. Many of those concerned by events in Spain formed SRCs to raise money to help the beleaguered and internationally isolated Republican government. The Sydney SRC assumed a leadership role nationally and liaised with Spain’s Republican consulate to gain what it hoped was the addresses of all Spaniards resident in Australia.69 The relationship between the Sydney consulate and the Sydney SRC was not always amicable, and personal differences prevented deeper cooperation.70 As a consequence, the Sydney SRC focused on fund raising through Anglo–Australian L ­ eft-­wing groups. Members organised an annual Spanish Week to coordinate and maximise media exposure throughout Australia, for example.71 The friend of northern Spaniards, Nettie Palmer, was a prominent member of the Melbourne SRC and supported efforts to broaden its appeal. She became frustrated at members’ increasing introversion and reliance on ‘old faithful’ supporters,72 as well as committee members’ preoccupation with administrative detail rather than attempting to change public opinion.73 Palmer primarily organised fund raising that focused on Anglo– Australians. She nonetheless recalled with pleasure travelling to Bendigo in rural Victoria to meet ‘a group of Catalans from Coloma on the Murray, [who were] emigrants growing tomatoes’.74 This small group of Catalan gardeners was distanced and detached from the main market gardening community of Catalans in Melbourne. After successfully encouraging them to raise funds to support the Republicans, Palmer commented pointedly that they were ‘using their brains thanks to Ferrer’,75 in a reference to their anarchist knowledge of the same man who continued to inspire Torrents. Although the group was small, they were part of the broader networks of Spanish anarchists that existed throughout Australia. The northern community of Spaniards was disproportionately influential in the SRC movement, and sixteen of Australia’s ­twenty-­one SRCs were in the state of Queensland.76 Nonetheless, Sydney (and, to a lesser extent, Melbourne) sought to establish a hierarchical system of leadership that was relatively unchallenged in the war’s early stages. Northern Spaniards, such as Antonio Villanueva and the Puentes family, wrote to the Sydney SRC in 1936 for advice on how to set up local SRCs. Trini Garcia was encouraged

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to set up an SRC in Innisfail, and she too duly started a correspondence with the Sydney committee.77 The efforts were successful in developing a network of SRCs in the state and, by mid-1937, enquiries to Sydney were predominantly from functioning SRCs rather than interested individuals. In the second half of 1937 alone, Sydney received correspondence from different and geographically disparate SRCs in the northern Queensland towns of Silkwood, Innisfail, Mourilyan, Rockhampton, Giru, Ayr and Tully.78 Sympathetic organisations, such as the Queensland Rationalist Society, Brisbane’s Russian club, the Movement Against War and Fascism in Cairns, Women’s Progress Clubs in the northern centres of Home Hill and Townsville, and the Queensland Women’s Peace Movement also all wrote to the Sydney SRC for information in 1937 alone. Much of the revenue from Queensland’s SRCs derived from speakers who had been sent north from Sydney and Melbourne. On one tour, Ken Coldicutt asserted: the most spectacular of all results for country towns with films for Spain were obtained in north Queensland, covering the sugar towns between Mackay and Mossman, as well as the Atherton Tableland. Over a period of six weeks, 28 screenings took place, attendances were more than 10,000 and collections about £580.79

Enthusiasm was not confined to Spaniards, and southern European workers’ broadly antifascist perspective was leavened with Australian communists’ organisational expertise. Communist presence in the antifascist, antiwar movement was amplified by the influence of communist front organisations such as the Movement Against War and Fascism and Women’s Progress Clubs. Significantly, Innisfail’s SRC, where the majority of radical Spaniards lived, did not conform to this model of acquiescence to Anglo–Australian leadership from Sydney. Torrents gradually became more overt in his criticism of the influence that he felt northern SRCs allowed local communists.80 Many flourished through such direction, though, such as the Ayr SRC that developed under the leadership of local publican Antonio Villanueve.81 Debates between anarchists and communists in Spain became more pointed as the Civil War progressed. The two groups had clashed violently in Barcelona in May 1937, when the communists moved decisively to marginalise anarchists.

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Anglo–Australian communists, who happened to be based in Barcelona in 1937, accepted the communist explanation and perpetuated the representation of anarchist treachery when they wrote home to Australia. The daughter of Nettie Palmer, Aileen Palmer, was a nurse in Spain at the time. Her letters, written to her influential parents and others, made clear her support for the central government and communists and her distrust of the anarchists. Aileen Palmer’s highly critical views of decentralised popular control and of anarchists’ military efforts ‘provided a foundation of [her parents] Nettie and Vance’s own analyses in Australia of the civil war in Spain. It was a basis from which they wrote their articles and speeches for the Spanish Relief Committee’.82 Nettie and Vance undoubtedly valued their daughter’s opinion, but were also provided with a steady stream of analyses from the anarchist perspective, as Nettie debated with Torrents throughout the Civil War. His input can be inferred from articles in which she publicly quotes letters that Torrents had forwarded to her.83 Nonetheless, Nettie Palmer’s confusion at Popular Front factions remained. She sought to understand ‘some papers sent from Innisfail by Torrents [which she grappled to categorise as] ­ Franco-­ Spanish, I mean French and Spanish, anarchist – Popular Front news’.84 The 1937 clashes between anarchists and communists in Barcelona seriously impaired cooperation within northern Spanish communities, although ideological barriers were less insurmountable at the local level. In common with many anarchists, Torrents supported the introduction of a form of economic communism, but vehemently rejected the Stalinist insistence on hierarchical control.85 He was infuriated by the comments of the prominent Australian communist Lawrence Sharkey in the radicals’ Worker’s Weekly newspaper, however. Sharkey avowed ‘since the fascist revolt, the Communist Party has tirelessly watched over the unity of the People’s Front, guarding it against the attempts at disruption by the ­counter-­revolutionary Trotskyist P.O.U.M. and the small anarchist section known as the “Uncontrollables”’. Sharkey’s article continued to claim provocatively that the war had taught most anarchists a m ­ uch-­ needed lesson on the requirement to submit to communist control and ‘the futility of the anarchist conceptions and the correctness of Marxist–Leninist teachings’.86

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Australia’s Spanish anarchists imported their own papers from Spain and France, which suggested a radically alternative interpretation to that forwarded by the communists. Anarchist articles argued the communists’ prioritisation of political conformity rather than social change had been achieved ‘at the cost of the interests that we are defending in the war and the possibilities which they offer our revolutionary and creative spirit’.87 The hostility endured long after 1937, and Australian intelligence officers reported during the Second World War that anarchists in the north still ‘contend that they compromised their principles in the Civil War for the sake of achieving a united antifascist front, only to find themselves betrayed by the Communists’.88 The recriminations between anarchists and communists in Spain prompted radicals in the northern town of Innisfail to found the Australian branch of the International Antifascist Solidarity. Headed by Francisco Martinez, who had arrived on board the Kwantu Maru from Argentina, the International Antifascist Solidarity described itself as a democratic movement that was open to all nationalities (although it was overwhelmingly Spanish in membership). The group reveals the northern response to political tensions in Spain, and doubled as the local SRC branch. However, it refused to submit to Sydney SRC’s imposed authority and acted to limit communists’ interference in its decisions. The local leadership was informed by the northern community’s instinctive support for anarchist organisational models. At the end of the Civil War in September 1939, Innisfail’s International Antifascist Solidarity alone continued to raise money totalling £13 11s. 6d, much of it from the same local residents who received anarchist newspapers from overseas.89 Most of these locals provided direct financial support, and the Innisfail group largely shunned the pattern of information evenings and ­fund-­raising dances used in southern states. Innisfail SRC generally used the International Antifascist Solidarity title in an effort to distance itself from the S ­ydney-­ dominated SRC network, and declared that it had launched ‘a manifesto calling the attention of all the world’s liberals to form the International Antifascist Solidarity’.90 Innisfail’s International Antifascist Solidarity committee consistently emphasised its Spanish heritage and denigrated communists’ s­elf-­ interested posturing. Members were emphatic that they were not communists, but locally

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organised democrats,91 seeking to ‘bring our grain of sand to make the dyke intended to stop the avalanche of fascism!’ 92 They took pride in the fact that the group was not organised by men and women ‘who sit down along side of sugar fields and sentimentalise about Catalonia without knowing the facts. It [. . .] is at all times in direct communication with Spain.’ 93 The International Antifascist Solidarity claimed to disregard party affiliation, and rejected the conditionality of help from trade unions, the Labor Party or communists.94 Torrents, who was the International Antifascist Solidarity secretary, deliberately denied any distinction between Spaniards’ commitment to Australia and their current overseas political focus. He declared that the formation of the International Antifascist Solidarity showed that, 30 years after we began to live in this country, the majority have always been on the side of those who fight for justice. Today when the fascist storm has risen on the horizon, the Spaniards ought to come together to form part of the ‘International Antifascist Solidarity’ group, thereby helping to reduce the terrorist atmosphere which closes around our heads, and to prepare the way for a freer and more secure life.95

International Antifascist Solidarity pamphlets and advertisements distanced the group from what it perceived to be the rigid and doctrinal parameters of communist organisations, from whose programmes ‘the free exposition of thought is erased’.96 The group rarely criticised communists publicly, though, and instead drew attention to its common interests in the global struggle by the working class against fascism.97 Nor did they refuse all cooperation with Australian SRCs. Its members certainly attended tours by speakers such as returned Civil War nurse Mary Lowson, which had been organised by Sydney SRC. Torrents hosted the communist Ron Hurd during his tour of the north in September 1938, although this was likely due to Hurd’s acquaintance with Torrents’ friend Nettie Palmer.98 Yet the group did not attract large numbers of Anglo–Australians, although the vast majority of local Spaniards were members. Sydney SRC became concerned by the Innisfail group’s rising profile, and spent considerable effort trying to limit its independent initiatives. In Innisfail during a film tour, the Sydney SRC member Ken Coldicutt reported on the International Antifascist Solidarity cell to the Sydney communist, Phil Thorne. Coldicutt told Thorne:

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I came in touch with it while I was there [in Innisfail] and saw some of its vague Anarchist propaganda, but did not take it very seriously. Since then however, it has been launching Spain appeals in opposition to the existing SRCs and has been sending circulars all over Australia asking for [donations].99

Trini Garcia had certainly begun to travel throughout the north to raise money for Spanish Republicans at trade union meetings, and contacted Catalan settlements throughout Australia.100 She used opportunities to address unionists to publicise her group actively,101 and distributed International Antifascist Solidarity pamphlets to sympathetic activists.102 Coldicutt angrily condemned Innisfail International Antifascist Solidarity, since ‘apart from the fact that it is splitting Spanish Relief, it is an organisation which [. . .] will form the basis for Trotskyist anarchy. The leading spirits seem to be the Garcias and the often recalcitrant . . . Innisfail SRC’.103 Conflict between Sydney SRC and Innisfail International Antifascist Solidarity reached a crisis regarding the distribution of collected funds. Innisfail provided a disproportionately large contribution to Australia’s SRC effort, and wielded considerable influence with other antifascist groups in the northern community. From early 1937, Innisfail International Antifascist Solidarity decided to divide the funds that it raised between Sydney SRC and the umbrella anarchist International Antifascist Solidarity group that was based in France. After Sydney protested, Innisfail International Antifascist Solidarity sent all its funds directly to anarchists in France and Spain. Sydney sought to use communist influence in the local trade unions to force Innisfail International Antifascist Solidarity to submit to its dominance. In 1938, the secretary of the Innisfail Trade and Labour Council wrote to Trini Garcia, then the local International Antifascist Solidarity president: Dear Comrade, In reply to your letter dated 4 Oct. 1938, I have been told to inform you that we have serious complaints about the way in which your committee sends money. You send it to an organisation in France instead of sending it to the National Relief Committee in Sydney. My council cannot send you any help until we are sure that the money collected will be sent directly to its destination. Fraternally yours,104

Other trade unions articulated similar concerns that the money raised would fund groups ideologically hostile to organised

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socialism and communism. Declining to donate to groups unaligned with Sydney SRC, the Railway Union (ARU) expressed concern that sending donations individually would not ‘guarantee the money would go to the workers, and [had] the greatest suspicion that it may be used to further dissension and disruption fostered by anarchists with whom the majority of the ARU had no sympathy’.105 Torrents was incensed by Sydney’s attempts to restrain the International Antifascist Solidarity, which confirmed his perception of communists’ urge for control regardless of the desire of local communities. In the 1940s, he wrote to the New York anarchist newspaper Cultura Proletaria, regarding Australian communists’ duplicity during the Civil War: for many months our committee sent what the ­so-­called ‘national’ committee in Sydney requested. It published in newspapers that the Innisfail committee was one of the best; we enjoyed the best qualities.106

Although he claimed that Sydney had basked in the reflected glory of Innisfail’s fund raising, Sydney strenuously denied local groups freedom of choice in how money was spent. Torrents wrote, with deep sarcasm, that ‘using our total freedom, because we thought that we had a right to it, we had the idea to send the money that we had collected directly to France’.107 It is of particular significance that Spaniards did not bypass Sydney to send their contributions to Britain’s umbrella Spanish Relief organisation. Instead, their funds were forwarded to France and Spain’s anarchist umbrella organisation, the National Confederation of Labour– Iberian Anarchist Federation (more commonly known by its Spanish acronym CNT–FAI). Local Spaniards furiously refuted Sydney’s claim to be the only group that was able to direct funds overseas. As Torrents declared, with characteristic aplomb: ‘That was it! We lost all the good qualities we possessed. The money that we were sending will not be “correctly used.” They muttered all sort of lies against our action’.108 Innisfail Spaniards were justly proud of the large amount of money raised by the relatively poor rural community. Torrents recalled that on one Christmas Day alone, a group raised £18 that was given to the International Antifascist Solidarity committee. On New Year’s Eve a week later, a rare decision to hold a Spanish Relief Ball raised a record £28 more. A total of £88 had been cabled from

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Innisfail to the International Antifascist Solidarity office at Marseilles during the preceding six months. Even though ’90%’ of the money had been raised by local Spaniards, the communists, ‘those lovers of democracy for whom “freedom” is before all else’,109 rejected the local community’s authority to forward the money, since it was not ‘by the right channel’.110 The rupture between the two groups became complete and irrevocable.

Conclusion The horrors of the Spanish Civil War compelled members of the northern community to organise to support family friends who were in danger. It brought to fore the dangers that they had long believed to be an inherent component of the capitalist model, revealing the cruel reality in the land of their birth. As their joy at the declaration of the Republic turned to anger and fear, so they were able to draw on their experiences to seek information from family and friends in Spain, Europe more generally, and the capital cities of Australia. Anarchism had long been a characteristic of community debates, but this was recast as a defining feature in opposition to communism and its demand for regimentation and acceptance of party strictures. Although small, the community was galvanised to organise and raise funds that were some of the most effective in the country. The International Antifascist Solidarity had proved the northern Spaniards’ capacity to organise politically, but individuals’ isolation and the community’s small size hampered the groups’ continued operations. Once the immediate prospect of Republican victory faded, the International Antifascist Solidarity struggled to justify its existence and faded away to include only a core membership.111 Older community members maintained their anarchist sympathies, but resistance to Franco’s Nationalist government became increasingly focused on the Communist Party that was blamed for the Republican defeat and had attacked the northern community’s sincere efforts to help their compatriots in Spain.

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After the Civil War

The collapse of the Republican government, and subsequent creation of the Nationalist dictatorship under Francisco Franco, was deeply traumatic and distressing to the northern Spanish community. Whereas it had previously hoped to return to a new Republic, it now found itself in a form of ­self-­imposed exile from a government immersed in the extrajudicial killing of its opponents. Franco’s consolidated grip on power disorientated the global radical community, and hampered its projection of a coherent and purposeful identity. While the northern community remained in contact with family members and close friends, Franco purposefully shattered the social networks in Spain through which the community’s identities had been articulated and sustained. Franco’s ‘New Order’ decreed the radicals to be part of an ­anti-­Spain that was excluded from the national community, and their exclusion (however painful) was understood. Far harder to understand was their difficulty in contributing to political debate in an Australia that was rapidly changing. Over the years, and as the Franco regime moderated its hostility to dissidents somewhat, some of those living in Australia did return to Spain in their old age. However, their sense of leading a world revolution that would transform the lives of the working class would be forever destroyed by the shock of defeat and imposition of dictatorship. They did not give up on their dreams for a revolution that could be led by the liberation of the mind, however. Indeed, one paradoxical consequence of the Republican defeat was a significant increase in the global population of radical Spanish emigres and refugees. The concomitant growth in newsletters appeared to offer some opportunity for the isolated migrants to reposition themselves for a form of individual liberation in the ­post-­Civil War world.

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The Second World War The Second World War brought the north of Australia to the centre of the country’s political imagination. Administrators had long worried about the region’s strategic vulnerability to attack from the north. As the Japanese advanced south through Asia, concerns about Australia’s capacity to defend itself grew sharply. This ceased to be hypothetical in February 1942, when Darwin was bombed by Japanese forces with a loss of almost 1,000 lives. A worried government suppressed news of the event, but it was to be only one of a series of sustained Japanese interventions on the Australian coast and mainland. Fear of Japanese invasion shocked the Australian government, and galvanised the public into acting. Troops fighting in distant spheres of war were recalled, and others were conscripted to defend the country and its neighbouring territories. The community in the north was similarly called to defend Australia, and although a number were in reserved occupations many children of the original migrants fought to defend their country of birth. Many children of the original, and now increasingly elderly, migrants saw active service against Axis forces. Jordana had only recently returned from a French concentration camp when Australia and Japan entered into conflict. The Australian government suspected Jordana of being politically subversive, and rejected his application for naturalisation. He nonetheless enlisted in the air force, and served in Papua. Jordana’s service against fascism during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War was a source of great pride for Torrents (whose close friend was Ray’s father). Torrents’ correspondence with Palmer frequently mentioned their shared acquaintance with the younger Jordana. In the letters, Jordana’s efforts are compared with those of Palmer’s own daughter Aileen, who was now a nurse in wartime London. Jordana was far from the only Spaniard to enlist, and Torrents wrote to a local paper in the 1940s to correct one local’s derogatory opinion of Spaniards in particular. He wrote that ‘I only want to let you know that I am a farmer, we are three partners in the farm, and two of them are in the army’.1 Anglo–Australian service personnel were particularly antagonistic towards migrant communities in Australia, whom they accused of gaining from soldiers’ sacrifice. One serviceman complained to a paper: ‘did you ever hear of a Spaniard (and there are plenty of

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them in the north) going away to fight or lending a bob to the war loan?’ The following letter to the editor highlights Spaniards’ continued pride in their ethnic and political identities. In an example of anarchist autodidactic writing, the letter reads: My friends Mr. Escuder of Cairns, Mrs. Garcia of Innisfail, Mrs. J. C. Ballini of Tully have given you the names of our lads [who are enlisted]. As the Spaniards of the north we are extremely ignorant of the International Affairs, we expect from your kindness you will give us the explanations in the following points: Do you know which government it was who lent the money to Germany for his rearmament? Could you tell us who lent the money to Mussolini in order to kill antifascists? Have you any idea who sold Czechoslovakia to Hitler? Could you tell us who supported the criminal governments of Germany and Italy when they went to Spain to murder the antifascists there? Please Mr. Jones we are waiting your answer.

The hostility to migrants extended beyond Spaniards, and the government’s decision to intern Italian antifascists alongside their fascist supporters was greeted with dismay by their friends in the northern communities. Torrents expressed his concern for the welfare of interned radicals to Nettie Palmer, who endorsed his comments and forwarded a translation to the Council for Civil Liberties (of which Torrents was also a member). The Council’s President, Brian Fitzgerald, Vance Palmer and L ­eft-­ wing parliamentarian Maurice Blackburn all became prominent members of peak bodies designed to secure the release of interned antifascists. In the face of Anglo–Australian hostility, northern Spaniards volunteered to help on the farms of the struggling family members of interned antifascist Italians. Those whose political views were widely known in the community faced particular hostility from the broader E ­nglish-­ speaking community. Before his enlistment, Jordana was subjected to a whispering campaign based on his alleged refusal to stand at the local cinema during the national anthem, leavened with s­ mall-­town gossip about his private life. Local police were almost successful in

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their attempts to persuade authorities to intern him immediately, and Jordana was forced to rely on w ­ ell-­placed friends to counter the claims. Another former member of the International Antifascist Solidarity group, Miguel Torrente, was interned. Despite his known record of brawling with Italians during the Civil War, police described Torrente as a ­‘well-­known local fascist having ­anti-­British feelings’.2 Police seized his lapel badge as key evidence of Torrente’s fascist sympathies. The International Antifascist Solidarity badge at the centre of the controversy ‘was the facsimile of a clenched fist grasping a dagger, both ends of which protruded on each side of the clenched fist’. Police assumed that it depicted the Italian fascist salute, and used it to justify immediate internment,3 despite Spain not being a member of the Axis forces. The bemused Torrente lamented from his wartime internment camp that ‘I have never been a fascist or a member of a fascist organisation in my life, and in fact I am and have for years past been a member of the Australian Section of the International Antifascist Solidarity and have worn a badge of such Solidarity’.4

Refugees from Spain The end of the Second World War left the northern community confronted by a radically different situation compared with the hopes of a decade earlier. A Nationalist military government controlled Spain, and was far stronger than the monarchical dictatorship that had preceded the Second Republic. The Republicans’ loss in the Civil War had devastating human consequences that went beyond ideological division. Thousands of Spanish Republicans were either dead or separated from their families. Refugees had fled Spain in enormous numbers, and many had languished in French and German concentration camps. Thousands more had been left destitute in a ­war-­torn France. Members of the community were horrified when the Australian government refused to recognise their impoverished compatriots as Displaced Persons, despite (and in large part because of) their obvious history of fervent antifascism and implied sympathy for communism. Although some Spanish refugees reached Australia after being processed by the International Refugee Office in Rome, few were so lucky.

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Large numbers of Republicans had crossed the Pyrenees to reach safety in France after the Nationalists captured Barcelona in 1939. Overwhelmed and hostile towards the new arrivals, the French authorities placed the refugees in hastily erected camps. Ray Jordana from Innisfail, who had left Australia to fight in Spain, was one such refugee and was placed in the concentration camp at ­Argeles-­sûr-­Mer. He had been released only after he persuaded the French that he was a British subject, although he held no such passport. The French defeat to the Germans in 1940 had further intensified pressure on the displaced Spaniards, whom the Conservative Vichy government castigated as dangerous radicals. Those who would later settle in Australia recalled the search for shelter and food during the war years, and the constant movement in order to escape the attempts by the Vichy government to send Spanish refugees to concentration camps in N ­ azi-­ controlled Germany. After the war, many future refugee and exiled Spaniards congregated in the southern French city of Toulouse in anticipation of the delayed invasion of Spain by the Allied forces. The refugees were reassured by their proximity to their former homes, and many had worked in the city as part of the large Spanish community prior to the war. They drew strength from sections of the French populace that emphasised the Spaniards’ connections to the already iconic French Resistance. Although this support remained limited, Spaniards derived great pride from their ­self-­perception as symbols of the struggle for a just humanity . . . [Those waiting in Toulouse] carried an obligation, a moral duty to be principled and committed, to live up to the expectations of those who had supported their struggle.5

Many would later migrate to Australia. One such man, John Garcia, asserted retrospectively that ‘[a]ll of us . . . who were brought up in this environment were marked for life’.6 This idealism was a defining characteristic of those morally and physically excluded from Franco’s Spain, and pervaded the northern Spanish communities until the dictator’s death. Many sought to remain close to Spain during the 1940s, in the hope that an Allied invasion would remove Europe’s last fascist dictator. Once it became clear that this would not happen, many more antifascist Spaniards settled in Latin America than chose to

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migrate to Australia. Many displaced children of Republicans were sent to settle in the Soviet Union or United Kingdom. Some of these would migrate to the north of Australia at a later stage. Baudelio San José, for instance, fled Spain as a child and lived in the Soviet Union from 1937 until his journey to Queensland in 1956.7 Dolores Dodeles Krauss fled Barcelona and moved to communist Budapest where she subsequently married a Hungarian. They fled the Soviet satellite after the Revolution in that country was crushed in 1956, and subsequently settled in Brisbane as part of Australia’s large intake of Hungarian refugees at that time.8 Such movements speak to the global legacy of the populations displaced from Spain, but few joined the ageing community in the north. The exiles who did come to Australia failed to organise coherent political activities once in the country, hampered by their small population, ideological fragmentation and the fervent ­ anti-­ communism of the federal government. One complained that ‘the few Spanish exiles coming from the Civil War era, some with anarcho-­ ­ syndicalist ideology and other Republicans, did not understand us’.9 Although an ­anti-­Franco club was established in Melbourne, it was fractured along the same fissures that had incapacitated the Republican forces in Spain, and with a small population and large distances between farms, no comparable club was established in the north. Newly arrived Republicans from Spain realised that they were more likely to be accepted into Australia if they minimised their antifascist past. Many arrived as family members of established migrants, and disagreed with Franco’s dictatorship, but were not identified explicitly as political exiles. Some who arrived on economic visas left Spain for Australia because of frustration that the Franco government castigated its opponents as dangerous communists without providing an alternative means for freedom of expression. Others had been ostracised from communities and colleagues in Spain because of family histories of Republicanism during the Civil War. In the midst of continued and serious shortages of food and work, the memory of occasional food packets from Australia received during the Civil War prompted many to seek sponsorship for migration from Australian relatives. Radicals warmly welcomed the few exiles who did reach the north after 1945. For the northern community, these exiles embodied the pain and suffering that Spain had to undergo before the country

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would eventually be emancipated. The Cairns Post connected the Spanish refugees’ predicament directly to the continued narrative of the Second World War, and wrote, sadly, that all of them are looking homeward longingly – looking for the day when fascism will be ended in Madrid, just as it was born there when Hitler and Mussolini sent their soldiers . . . The ‘underground’ carries on wherever there is a single Spanish exile.10

Such sympathies among the Australian mainstream media rapidly eroded as the Cold War developed. For the northern community, the knowledge of a global community of exiles caused them great concern. Torrents empathised strongly with the group of refugee Republicans based in San Francisco, organising donations to be sent to them from Australia. Similar efforts from the community led to money being forwarded to support refugees and their children in New York. He continued to correspond with American editors and radical umbrella groups for updates on the refugee groups’ vulnerable situation. One editor’s reply reinforced the sense of solidarity among the radical S ­ panish-­speaking community by the late 1940s, when he described the refugees who remained in New York: ‘They are the children of comrades and meet in our Social Centre. They only give us a small donation . . . However we are friendly and have no disagreements in this family.’ 11 Only one substantial group of Spanish exiles settled in Queensland, without prior family or social connections. All four families that comprised the cohort had lived in France prior to their arrival. Valentin Guerrera was the dominant figure in the group, and had been born in Barcelona in the turbulent days of November 1909.12 Valentin was the group’s first member to arrive in Australia, and he entered the northern state of Queensland in early 1950. He immediately sent back to the French industrial city of Metz for his sister Gines, and wife Teresa Lanau. As had many Spaniards, the Guerreras had spent the Second World War travelling throughout France without documentation and their two boys had been born in the country during the war. The family moved into a property in a new housing commission estate in the state capital of Brisbane, thousands of kilometres from the main Spanish communities in the north. Soon after, Teresa’s elderly mother and nephew, Justa and Gerard Lanau, also moved from France to live

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with the couple. Teresa’s sister had also joined them from Europe by 1954, soon after which Justa died. The young Gerard Lanau promptly changed his surname to Guerrera, consolidating the family unit by taking the name of ‘the only [father] I’ve ever known’.13 The Guerreras’ and Lanaus’ journey to Queensland had been sponsored by another recent Spanish arrival, Juan Solas. Solas and his wife Rosa were born near Almeria in Andalusia in 1911 and 1910 respectively. Like many others, they had worked in both France and Spain during the 1930s, but left Spain when Franco seized control and never returned. They married in France in 1937, by which time they already had a ­two-­year-­old daughter. The Solas family had been sponsored by Joseph Barker of Zillmere, and arrived in June 1951. It is likely that the Solas family were part of a group of 300 French workers, who came to Brisbane to erect 750 ­French-­made ­pre-­ fabricated homes in the suburb of Zillmere. All the Spanish males had prior experience in the French construction industry, and Solas remained after the project was completed, urging Valentin Guerrera to join him. Juan and Rosa moved from Zillmere to purchase a boarding house close to the city centre, which gave them the security and accommodation required to sponsor further Spaniards who remained in France.14 Teresa’s brother, Agustin, arrived from France within the year, and sponsored his ­ sister-­ in-­ law Montserrat, and her family in October 1952. The family of José and Montserrat Martinez, with their daughter Elise, had travelled throughout France for almost fifteen years by the time they arrived in Australia in late 1953. José was provided with a French identity card after he refused a Spanish passport, instead stating that he was ‘a refugee from Spain’.15 His wife and daughter were similarly registered as Spanish refugees on their entry into Australia. Life was not easy for the group, and there is no evidence of direct contact with either the northern Spanish communities or Spaniards in Sydney and Melbourne. Within just one year of his arrival, Valentin moved to French Noumea to find work. Gerard and José followed him after the building firm ceased operations in 1953. Valentin and José both struggled to negotiate the bureaucracy required to send their earnings from Noumea to their family in Brisbane, but Montserrat managed to save sufficient capital to follow her husband some years later, while Elise stayed to work in a

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Brisbane factory.16 The Martinez couple left Noumea after having another daughter, and moved to Buenos Aires, which remained a centre for radical L ­ eft-­wing politics at the time, although they returned to Brisbane in 1964 as Argentine politics continued to polarise under the influence of m ­ ilitary-­ backed governments. Without a secure means of financial support, José again left for Noumea before returning in 1968.17 Throughout their life in Queensland, the families remained notably detached from the main northern Spanish communities and were unable to access either moral or financial support. Their information networks were focused on France and Latin America, with Queensland being isolated from their familial, political and social imaginary. Over the years, and as the Franco regime moderated its hostility, some of those living in Australia did return to Spain in their old age. However, their sense of leading a world revolution that would transform the lives of the working class would be forever destroyed by the shock of defeat and imposition of dictatorship. They did not give up on their dreams for a revolution that could be led by the liberation of the mind, however. Indeed, one paradoxical consequence of the Republican defeat was a significant increase in the global population of radical Spanish emigrés and refugees. The concomitant growth in newsletters appeared to offer some opportunity for the isolated migrants to reposition themselves for a form of individual liberation in the p ­ ost-­Civil War world.

Moving out of politics Enervated by a misinformed media, Spaniards in the north had initially believed that the end of the Second World War would presage an armed intervention to restore Spain’s Republican government in exile. The state broadsheet, the ­Courier-­Mail, articulated the commonly held view that Franco’s continued existence posed a threat to British imperial interests, and wrote, with foreboding, that ‘[s]o long as [Franco’s Spain] exists, there will always be the danger of a treacherous blow, whilst its whole conception of the new Europe is in direct opposition to our own’.18 Although Australia remained publicly opposed to Franco’s regime until the late 1950s, the USA became convinced of the need for a strong anti-­ ­ communist bulwark in Madrid and urged the British

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Commonwealth to moderate its hostility. Northern radicals gradually realised that a­ nti-­communism had been prioritised over any ‘moral’ or democratic commitment to overthrow Franco. Once it was clear that there would be no invasion, concerned migrants began to plan to visit relatives and friends from whom they had been estranged for at least a decade, since the outbreak of Civil War in 1936. In lieu of trustworthy media reports, members of the northern community relied on hearsay, and the little information that they could garner from friends who remained in Spain. They were particularly concerned by rumours of local power struggles, which penalised and imprisoned former supporters of the Republican government. Many were affected by Spain’s Law of Political Responsibilities, which had been passed retrospectively in 1939. It was not only former members of political groups that the law made liable to prosecution; members of groups opposed to the Nationalist insurrection were now liable to be summoned before specially convened courts. Prosecution frequently extended from politicians to include ­share-­croppers or those whose lifestyles were deemed to be suspicious by the new government. Ordinary citizens in Spain recognised the new configuration of power and many identified ­pro-­Republicans to the police, with suspected ­Left-­wing families subsequently ostracised from local communities for years to come. During the decade after the Civil War’s end, men, women and children were jailed, and tens of thousands were shot peremptorily and buried in mass graves without record. Spaniards in the north of Australia heard of friends who had been seized, but had no details, and were forced to conjecture on the silence their letters now met.19 Only by returning could they gauge conditions in Spain with any accuracy. After his victory, Franco perceived unregulated movement as a potential threat to government authority, and moved quickly to impose a gamut of restrictions on the movement of goods and people. When the northern Queenslander Joaquin Bisbal returned nervously to visit his elderly parents in 1948, the Civil Guards’ extensive regulatory powers made a profound impression on him.20 He recounted to worried friends on his return to Queensland that, while travelling, he had been stopped repeatedly and required to show permits for items ranging from petrol and oil to car tyres. His experiences were not isolated, and corrupt and obstructive bureaucrats dominate the memories of those who returned to

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Spain in the immediate p ­ ost-­war years.21 Even those who consciously distanced themselves from politics found that family members’ stories of violence reinforced a latent hostility towards Franco and his vision for Spain. After the war, many families r­e-­evaluated cherished plans to return to Spain as successful migrants, and instead sought to reunite their families by bringing them to northern Australia. Faustino Martinez had arrived on the Kwantu Maru in 1915 with his wife and family, but had initially struggled to make a living in the north.22 In 1924, the family returned to the village of their birth in Navarre. In common with many other returning migrants, their memories of Spain while in Australia no longer corresponded to the reality of life in Navarre, and they came back to north Queensland in 1929. Before Faustino and his wife Anselma had left Australia, they had ceded control of their Mourilyan farm to their eldest sons, Daniel and Lorenzo, who were subsequently able to sponsor their parents’ return in 1929. The elderly Faustino and Anselma had again returned to Navarre in 1934 with their three daughters. Elisa and Josefa had immediately returned to Australia after just seven months, but Bianca remained in Navarre to care for her parents.23 When the Civil War began in 1936, they had been trapped in the Nationalist zone and unable to leave. Although they survived, Faustino was too frail to leave Spain and died in 1948. With any thought of his own return to Spain now forgotten, Daniel managed to sponsor his sister and s­ eventy-­year-­old mother’s return to north Queensland the following year, where they settled on the family’s Mourilyan property.24 After the immediate needs of family and close friends who wished to leave Spain had been met, migrants’ social networks sought to use chain migration urgently to bring wider family and neighbours to safety in Australia as well. Those who had friends who were too poor to migrate and who lacked family members in Queensland approached community elders, such as Teresa Mendiolea or Pascual Badiola. Such individuals would then forward money on the assumption that it would be paid back over time.25 Although the Department of Immigration occasionally raised concerns about the number of Spaniards who were to stay in one property, they rarely blocked migration if employment was guaranteed in the rapidly expanding sugar industry. Basques had established a strong position in local industry, and worked hard to lobby and convince officials

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that the increasing p ­ost-­ war migration from Spain should be embraced. While Basques (both communists and n ­ on-­communists) had become relatively affluent and well established, Catalan radicals had far fewer large properties that could be used to sponsor family and friends in need. Key Catalan sponsors, such as Bruno Tapiola, were successful businessmen who were able to offer employment, but few could provide such scope and consistency of opportunity.26 Former internee Miguel Torrente was one of the few radicals able to sponsor ­post-­war migrants, but the scale remained limited by the fact that few of the radical Catalan farmers had been as commercially successful as the Basques. They had migrated decades earlier, but were hampered from the start by their indentured status as labourers, and a lack of community networks to pool their resources and acquire farms. Nonetheless, the Spanish communities in Innisfail and Mareeba retained their reputation for anarchism, and ­like-­minded refugees from eastern Europe continued to aim for the towns well into the 1950s.27 Isolated from Spain for over a decade, the Spanish community had been unable to recruit younger family members to whom they could transition the work of running the farms and who would inherit their properties in time. Yet, many of the earliest Spanish settlers were eager to retire by the 1940s. Poor health that derived from their childhood in industrial Spain, and the harsh working conditions of the tropical north, accelerated natural decline.28 Bisbal’s sponsorship of two young married couples from Catalonia in the late 1940s was typical. By the time of the application, he was aged s­ ixty-­three and had developed a ‘prosperous farm’ of 75 acres and assets of £6,000.29 Although he had a son and daughter, his business depended on reliable cheap labour throughout the season and could not be sustained by his children alone. His case was not unique and of the 532 Queenslanders recorded as born in Spain in 1954, more than half were over ­forty-­five years old.30 The northern community was particularly sensitive to any alleged prejudice against L ­ eft-­wing immigrants, following statements by the Immigration Minister Arthur Calwell, who had visited Europe in 1947 to encourage Displaced Persons to migrate to Australia. Although Australian officials welcomed R ­ ight-­wing migrants from the formerly independent states of the Baltic who were fleeing the Soviets, Calwell reiterated the government’s refusal to accept

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Spaniards who had fled the Nationalist purges after the Spanish Civil War. Torrents fumed when he heard the decision: ‘Oh what temerity! He knows full well that in this time, the majority of Spaniards who met him in France were antifascists, but he lacks the courage to be frank.’ 31 Spaniards barely gave perfunctory attention to denunciations of the communist repression in eastern Europe that were issued by the USA and its allies, and which appeared utterly disingenuous given that the same governments gave tacit support to Franco’s violations of Spaniards’ democratic freedoms and human rights.32 With little hope of a new influx of l­ ike-­minded Spaniards, and no means to return and fight themselves, the radical northern community struggled to find a way to engage meaningfully with the reconfigured Spanish politics of the Franco era. Torrents could not find a positive explanation for the federal government’s preference for ‘the totalitarians of the Baltic lands and the exfascist Italian friars’.33 Writing to Nettie Palmer, he complained that he could not understand the Australian government’s ‘humanitarianism’ towards Europe’s displaced population. As evidence, he cited the explicit prejudice against ‘the Spaniards because they fought against “the pious Franco”’.34 Torrents hoped that the new Baltic arrivals might share at least some ­anti-­capitalist sentiment, and tried to enlist their support. In one conversation that Torrents felt to be typical, a refugee from the Baltic states resolutely stated his preference for corporatist government over Marxist alternatives. To Torrents’ total disgust, the man stated succinctly: ‘Hitler no good. Stalin no good. Franco good. Perón good.’ 35 Radical Spaniards retained their commitment to the Second Republic, and were horrified by the gradual rehabilitation of Franco’s Spain. As the Cold War became entrenched, the USA and its allies viewed Franco as a necessary bulwark against the Soviet Union. As Franco agreed to the presence of NATO military assets in Spain, so British hostility to his claim to Gibraltar was set aside. Franco’s international rehabilitation enabled overseas investment in Spain, and the country’s living standards rose accordingly. His alliance with the USA and economic improvements dampened any lingering hopes for his overthrow by either the remaining partisans in Spain or an Allied army. Spaniards in the north viewed international tensions during the Cold War as a product of democracies’ ­self-­interested exclusion of

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radical alternatives from the scope of legitimate political debate. In December 1947, Torrents declared his scepticism that capitalist democracy could ever deliver true emancipation, and noted bitterly that despite all of ‘the promises of the world’s saviours to the low classes, none have been accomplished’.36 Promises of money to fund consumption through the Marshall Plan would only entrench a ‘crisis of virility as much as of spiritualism and morality’.37 Torrents was adamant that trying to resurrect capitalism’s excesses would not fashion Europe anew and would only lay the seeds for future wars. From the poverty of ­ post-­ war Europe, Torrents dreamed that Europe’s disenfranchised workers might create a Utopia ‘of a pure spirit’ that could destroy the ‘immaterial monstrosity’ of the confected conflict between communism and capitalism.38 Torrents did not view the United Nations any more positively, given that it institutionalised the corrosive nation states that anarchists opposed so strongly. He noted derisively that the Atlantic Charter freedoms lay ‘still born in the bloody lap of capitalism . . . The New Order, that deceptive catch cry of a ­hard-­pressed capitalist class, is forgotten’.39 While the USA and the Soviet Union prepared for a third world war, anarchists in northern Australia sought to distance themselves from both groups. Torrents rejected outright the notion that the United Nations might facilitate peace between the two superpowers – instead, accusing it of providing a mask to hide the tragic reality of capitalism’s inherently bellicose nature. For Torrents, it was little more than a stage on which capitalist politicians fooled electorates. He applauded sarcastically when Australia’s Foreign Minister Herbert Evatt spoke to the United Nations, whom he judged ‘one of the best actors when the “farce” [of creating lasting peace] was performed’.40 The Spaniards were equally opposed to the regimented excesses of ­post-­war Stalinism. Australia’s wave of ­communist-­led strikes after the end of the Second World War had disgusted anarchists, who felt that the protests were used for political gain rather than workers’ emancipation.41 Torrents loathed the Australian Communist Party’s tactics, and reserved particular ire for its leader, Lance Sharkey. Spanish complaints about the Stalinist orientation of the Australian Communist Party under his direction were of long standing, and Emilio Duran had resigned from the party in the 1930s over its centralisation and disregard for workers’ local needs.42 The northern community still remembered the

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communists’ attempts to control the International Antifascist Solidarity, and recalled how Sharkey had mocked the anarchist fighters during the Civil War. Torrents responded to Sharkey in kind, and ridiculed the politician’s demagoguery and naive acceptance of positive Soviet pronouncements despite the obvious oppression in eastern Europe.43 However disturbed they were by reports from the Stalinist puppet states in Europe, members of the northern community nonetheless would not endorse the capitalist democracies that refused to remove Franco and relegated their own family and friends to life in a dictatorship. Spaniards were angry that the Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies used the Cold War to craft a domestic consensus that eroded free speech. As the division between the capitalist and communist worlds appeared ever more entrenched, Australian political debate became obsessed with the fear of infiltration by Soviet spies and communist fifth columnists. This was particularly acute in the north, where the powerful Queensland Labor Party split in two regarding claims of communist influence. The result was widespread concern at communist views, and a silencing of ­Left-­wing radicals desperate to retain their employment and social networks. Torrents railed against this covert regulation of free thought, which he argued rendered Australia as barely different from east European dictatorships.44 Others such as Jack and Trini Garcia, whose home was searched by security forces concerned that they harboured communist sympathies, agreed that enforced ­self-­ censorship degraded Australia’s democracy.45 Torrents argued that the fear of ­non-­conformity enabled the Prime Minister’s use of alarmist rhetoric against ‘atheistic communist’ groups that allowed him to ‘molest’ his opponents.46 The ageing Torrents lacked the capacity or energy to attack Australia’s capitalist democracy publicly. Privately, however, he continued to rail against initiatives such as the failed 1951 Australian referendum to ban the Communist Party. In a private letter to his ­long-­time friend Nettie Palmer, he described fury that politicians had reframed national debate so that any opposition or criticism from the Left equated to support for Stalin.47 Anti-­ communist rhetoric in the 1940s and 1950s lauded a stereotypical, and Anglo–normative ‘Australian Way of Life’. Such constructs pressured migrants to display overt social conservatism, implying that such actions and beliefs were synonymous with loyalty to Australia. Needless to say, this proved disorientating to the

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northern community, who believed that it had been fighting to improve Australians’ lives since the 1920s. The ‘Australian Way of Life’ trumpeted the benefits of the British political system and social hierarchy to new migrants, and sought to marginalise the public expression of migrants’ political views and prior experience that risked disrupting this cultivated sense of being a British outpost. The public support for ­anti-­communism may have aided ­post-­war migration for many eastern Europeans, but Spanish Australians found it divisive and confusing after the trauma of the Civil War. The result was enduring, and was remembered long afterwards by community members. The grandson of Salvador Torrents recalled, almost ­fifty-­five years later, that during ‘the Fifties and the Red Scare, “Reds Under the Bed” and all that type of bullshit, everybody sort of moved out of politics’.48 The community would never recover its political profile. Duran angrily suggested that one consequence of the Red Scare was that some of the wealthier Spanish cane farmers reached discrete arrangements not to employ known radicals who might lead industrial disputes that would implicate themselves along with other local Spaniards.49 Men such as Duran and Jordana could not afford to be ostracised in this manner, and henceforth generally expressed their political views only in private.50 Prominent local communists deliberately reduced their visibility. The son of one friend of Duran and Torrents, whose father was a communist, ‘went to Korea to atone’ and affirm his patriotism publicly.51 The retreat from proselytising in public was gradual, but many who had experienced the Civil War continued to view politics in absolute values of right and wrong until their deaths. Denied public expression of their views, Spaniards in the north continued to write journal articles to satisfy their passion for politics and society. Torrents was particularly interested in the difference between the anarchist newspaper Cultura Proletaria’s criticism of east European repression and the Australian Democrat’s ­pro-­ communist praise for east Europeans’ freedom of assembly.52 He wrote to the editor of the Australian Democrat to demand proof of such ‘liberties’. There only exist [sic] freedom for the ‘rulers’. The Opposition have only the right to shut their mouth. Otherwise it is the Concentration Camp and squads waiting for them. We in Australia are living in a rotten ‘Capitalist System’ with all the miseries and injustices caused by it. But for the present we have the right to

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read ‘The Australian Democrat’ and ‘Guardian’ too. While the People of Russia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Greece, Spain and others have only the right to read what the ‘Redeemers’ like.53

Torrents was quite certain that, just as true democracy could never occur in a capitalist system, neither could it flourish in a o ­ ne-­ party state. The lack of a free press particularly angered him, given that it denied people the ability to become sufficiently informed in order to exercise basic democratic rights.54 Only by education through free debate could genuine revolution occur. Torrents did not believe that the prospects for the p ­ ost-­war world were wholly bleak, and believed that change was still possible. He agreed with Palmer that the world was better than in their youth, both ‘morally and mentally’, as education improved and rationalism spread globally.55 One northern anarchist, Juan Casanova, wrote of his weariness at governments’ continued disregard as to whether they were representative of popular opinion or connected to a diversity of people, despite having campaigned to raise awareness of this for decades.56 Torrents reassured him that in Spain, as in Australia, ‘with all the immense amount of miseries, of sacrifice and of global universal, the spirit of emancipation lives and endures’.57 Although there was no imminent revolution, he was sure that workers would refuse to defend capitalism if it came to war. Indeed the revolution moved inexorably closer, as rationalist education gradually improved and became more common as a fragile peace endured. Torrents continued to situate Cold War tensions in the context of a l­ ong-­term progression towards workers’ emancipation that the migrants’ ageing bodies would in no way retard.58 Unable to accept that so many had suffered in vain, there was a marked reassertion of teleological history among the northern community, despite the fact that the future victory no longer appeared to be imminent.

Accessing the global network Although the referendum to ban the Community Party failed, the federal government used an array of measures to harass supporters of radical ­Left-­wing groups. One of these was attempts to hamper freedom of speech by disrupting imported materials. These acts were at the heart of the disorientation that the ageing radical

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Spaniards felt as they worked to maintain one of the community’s final connections to their global movement. Torrents deplored what he perceived to be repeated attacks on Australian liberties, and energetically supported anyone whom he felt sought to undermine the bureaucratic hegemony of politicians in their gilded parliaments.59 On behalf of the remaining radicals, he urged Australians to question the political settlement constantly or else accept that they would ‘always be slaves of a minority’.60 Whatever their political persuasion, Torrents felt that all people must retain ‘the right to expound our thoughts without seeking permission from anyone’.61 The constraints around the Spaniards’ political statements in public space made newspapers one of the most important vehicles for the continued expression of the community’s views and identity. The press had been a crucial source of symbolic identity for anarchists in Spain, and Franco’s destruction of p ­ re-­war Republican socio–political networks elevated its importance still further. One particularly clear example in 1945 demonstrated how the fallout from the Civil War continued to resonate in the local community, and was focused on one of the Spanish Republican governments in exile. Torrents engaged in intense dispute with fellow radical Gabriel Sorli about events in Buenos Aires (although neither man had visited the city). Sorli refused to speak to Torrents after the latter praised Conservative politician Ángel Ossorio y Gallardo for supporting Juan Negrín’s Spanish government in exile in the Argentine capital.62 Instead of discussing with Torrents directly, Sorli wrote an open letter to a newspaper in the USA to condemn capitalist participation in Spanish republicanism. Sorli dissected Ossorio’s speech to demonstrate the politician’s duplicity and lack of ideological rigour.63 It was left to the New York editor of Proletarian Culture to mediate between the two Australian men, and to write and explain their rift to the radical Spanish community in Paris.64 The remarkable cultural landscape that is revealed by the exchange demonstrates Australia’s place in the broader discussion of political ideals and its continued centrality to migrants’ identity. It also reveals the rifts and rigidity that were coming to characterise ageing community members. The significance of importing Cultura Proletaria had altered by the late 1940s, and it was no longer primarily a supply of information, but rather a source of identity and affirmation for the isolated

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northern radicals. Domingo Lombarte looked forward to receiving his copies, when he would reminisce with Torrents about their political actions since they first met on board the ­northern-­bound Osterley in 1915.65 In an important corrective to the wealth of information that Torrents has left for historians, police noted that it was the solitary Pedro Careaga who acted as Cultura Proletaria’s ‘local agent’, not Torrents.66 Police realised Careaga’s involvement only when he wrote to New York, concerned that he was unable to forward locals’ payments. He asked for help, as ‘we are many subscribers and some are asking my advice, but I cannot tell them what to do’.67 The Spanish community became alarmed in 1947, as the issues of Cultura Proletaria became more sporadic. The response is instructive of their continued commitment to freedom of speech, but was also a late example of coordinated action to defend a core element of their identity. They were initially unsure whether the government had prohibited the newspaper’s importation or whether it was an inadvertent administrative error in the newspaper’s office in New York. Torrents felt sure that it was a mistake in the USA, since the Australian Labor Party was then in government and had revoked an earlier ban by the Conservative government, and Spaniards had otherwise received the newspaper for over twenty years without unexpected difficulty.68 A number of local Spaniards attempted to renew their subscriptions at local banks in Australia, but some were successful and others were refused. A bank employee told Torrents that the journal was not prohibited and accepted his money. In contrast, an Ingham bank refused Juan Casanova, and informed him that Customs had told them the paper was ‘completely prohibited’.69 Federal police immediately registered his attempt, and worried that the northern ‘anarchist cell’ might reappear if Spain again descended into civil disturbance.70 Other Spaniards also tried to get publications from the S ­ panish-­language press in the USA, but the banks similarly refused to forward their money. Torrents wrote to his trusted friend Nettie Palmer for advice, since if ‘the Liberals prohibited it [it would] not surprise me, but I cannot conceive that the Labor Party follows and prohibits it too’.71 Although Torrents was a member of the Council for Civil Liberties, his poor standard of written English made him reluctant to write to the group’s president. Instead, he asked Palmer to do so on behalf of the whole community, to see ‘if it is possible that in a

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country governed by the Labor Party they prohibited L ­ eft-­wing literature’.72 In her letter to the organisation’s president, Brian Fitzpatrick, Palmer described the paper as ‘rather dull because, like most anarchist journals, it is concerned so much with abstract morality; [although it] has some very good writing occasionally’.73 The minister’s reply to Fitzpatrick, suggested that the northern community’s problems were ‘probably just an unfortunate incident of the shortage of dollar exchange’.74 His response was entirely unsatisfactory, as the community found itself cut off from the last remaining radical ­Spanish-­language journal that placed its ideas into the public domain.75 Torrents thanked the Council for Civil Liberties for its help, but was deeply angered by what he felt was the Labor government’s duplicity. He rejected any notion that the then Sterling Crisis was related to imports like Cultura Proletaria, and argued that it was a consequence of hostility between capitalist states.76 He was wearied and bewildered that a Labor government would refuse radical literature for financial expediency. He declared its members to be hypocrites, who had banned the paper purely because it contained political views contrary to their own.77 Members of the community felt that they were once again under attack, and projected their difficulties against a broader context of capitalist aggression. They railed that while the government had sufficient money to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on warplanes, they could not receive the journal to save ‘the fabulous sum of a few dozen pounds each year’.78 Radical Spaniards mounted a ­letter-­writing campaign to appeal against the decision, although Trini Garcia noted, with exasperation, that the Labor Senator Benjamin Courtice refused to reply to any of her letters.79 The lobbying was successful, and in 1948 Torrents was again able to write an article and receive the corresponding issue in which he celebrated the tenth anniversary of Palmer’s paean to the Australian volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, Australians in Spain.80 In late 1948, the group wrote to the American editor for information about the large numbers of Spanish exiles who had moved to San Francisco.81 Cultura Proletaria was not only a source of news but an important conduit through which their membership of the global radical Spanish community was sustained and affirmed. The Innisfail International Antifascist Solidarity continued to help to support stranded Spanish refugees, although its work was much

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diminished in the 1940s. Nonetheless, in 1947, sixteen local Spaniards raised $41.57 for Spanish refugees in the USA. Seeking to avoid unwanted attention from increasingly hostile authorities, they sent the funds to the USA in batches of £2.82 Younger members of the northern community remained opposed to Franco, but the older arrivals who had personally experienced the great moments of Spanish anarchism steadily withdrew into themselves. In the late 1940s, radicals such as Torrents and Sorli still spent their Saturdays in Innisfail debating politics, and encouraging young migrants to send money to refugees.83 The small circle of elderly friends became dispirited by their lack of success in the face of local hostility, however, and increasingly confined themselves to writing letters. Much to Torrents’ disgust, he accused the younger men, who had been expected to assume leadership positions, of finding it more prudent to withdraw to their family farms. Torrents termed them ‘Sancho Panzas’ to the dying group of ‘Don Quixotes’, and was anguished by his belief that even Ray Jordana (who had fought in Spain) now appeared to place profit above morality.84 In one of his last letters, Torrents complained to Palmer that he felt that she was the only person left alive who could understand his youthful hopes for changing the world.

Conclusion Without new arrivals who could reinforce their political views, older ­Left-­wing radicals became progressively more isolated from other local migrants from Spain and elsewhere. Their isolation was all the more profound since Spanish radical groups in the north never fully recovered from the Civil War’s aftermath, which had destroyed the networks and aspirations that had underpinned Spanish culture prior to the war. The ageing radicals expended considerable efforts to maintain their membership of global networks of radical refugees and exiles who had fled Spain after the Republican collapse. They wrote in newspapers, raised funds for causes dear to their hearts, and read vociferously. The development of the Cold War considerably constrained their capacity to engage in radical debate. Feeling betrayed by communists and outraged at the capitalist ­post-­war reconstruction, many retreated from public advocacy. Others continued their

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private correspondence with friends in Australia and overseas, seeking to advance secularism and social equity at a time at which public religiosity and corporatisation were to the fore. Angry at these developments, but unable to change them, the original migrants gradually died of old age and ill health. Torrents himself died, aged s­ixty-­six, in 1951, after a brief illness caused by heart troubles during which he fretted about his enforced inactivity and continued to read extensively.85

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7

Conclusion

The migration of Spaniards to Queensland accelerated rapidly in the early years of the Cold War. The sugar industry’s expansion placed enormous demands on the seasonal labour supply, and local businesses lobbied for formal migration arrangements with European countries that would increase the pace of new arrivals. One such country was Spain. Radical ­Left-­wing locals in the north of Australia were deeply uncomfortable with any contact with Francisco Franco’s government, but found themselves marginalised in the face of strong support from lawmakers and prominent farm owners. Federal Senator Ignatius Armstrong had begun to lobby for the acceptance of 200 Spaniards in April 1956. Although there was too little time to conclude negotiations for the 1957 season, the government in Canberra concurred that there was great potential for organised migration from Spain to the northern cane fields in the future. The federal Minister for Labor, Harold Holt, consequently visited Madrid to facilitate the arrival of 500 Spaniards during 1958.1 The first group of Spaniards to arrive through the intergovernmental agreement proved highly popular with northern farmers, and efforts were immediately made to increase the number of migrants for future years.2 A large proportion of new arrivals were from the Basque Country, buoyed by the large number of Basque farmers in Queensland, but many others arrived from throughout Spain. Proportionately few were from Catalonia, and none of the new arrivals was overtly political. The result was a rapid distancing of the elderly anarchists from the new migrants, whose apparent acquiescence to Franco was viewed with horror by older residents. Despite support for a migration agreement, the Australian government remained notably hesitant about Spain’s international

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rehabilitation under Franco. Sydney’s Spanish ­Consul-­General was an outspoken member of Spain’s nationalist and populist Falange.3 His public criticism of the treatment of Spanish migrants aggravated the Australian government significantly, and caused a souring of relations between the countries. As a consequence, and despite the successful conclusion of an agreement in 1958, diplomatic contact between Canberra and Madrid remained limited until the late 1960s. The 1958 labour migration agreement could not survive for long without diplomatic and institutional support, and collapsed in 1963. By that stage, the influx of recent migrants had transformed the northern community’s social and political networks irrevocably.

A new form of Spanish migration New employment opportunities in the expanding sugar industry generated significant growth in the ­Spanish-­born population of northern Australian in the early Cold War period. This was driven by the rapid growth in Basque chain migration as well as by the intergovernmental agreement. Established Basque families in the north provided extensive help to newly arrived migrants, and reinforced the general impression that Basques conformed to the stereotype of h ­ ard-­working north Europeans. Queensland Basques used their large farms and reputation for hard work to lobby the Queensland Cane Growers’ Council to further increase Basque immigration. The Council was happy to oblige, and liaised closely with local Basque families when it contacted governments and the Spanish ­Consul-­General in Sydney.4 The impression of industrious Basques did not, however, extend to other Spaniards in the region. Many new migrants sought boarding houses on arrival in the north, as they had in the ­pre-­war years. Many of the older settlers now ran hostels, or used their large farmhouses to provide temporary accommodation to new migrants. Other less wealthy individuals also disseminated information about employment opportunities to the migrants. Eliseo Zamora, who had fled Spain with his sister during the Civil War, provides a typical example. Zamora owned a garage and milk bar in Tully, which placed him at the nexus of Anglo–Saxon and migrant communities. He was a frequent point of first contact for local Spaniards in search of work.

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Although he sponsored a number of migrants to Australia, he acted more generally as a point of contact to disseminate employment information and distribute mail from Spain. As a result, he was at the centre of the transient community of workers, often surrounded by over a dozen Spaniards clamouring for his assistance.5 The demographic origin of migrants in the north shifted markedly in the Cold War era, and became an increasingly obvious source of division within the community. The Australian government had requested expressly that selection teams be restricted to the Basque Country, but the Spanish government firmly opposed this and sought to increase emigration from Spain’s impoverished south instead. Although migration documents make it clear that the Spanish successfully thwarted Australian aspirations, the scheme continued to be publicised in Australia as one that involved only northern Spaniards. While chain migration reinforced the number of Basques in the north, the agreement sharply increased the proportion of arrivals from southern and central Spain. Nonetheless, northern media continued to suggest that the new agreement consolidated earlier patterns of migration, and that most of the new arrivals would be ‘hardy people from the north of Spain’.6 The government reassured voters that efforts to boost the labour force were not placing the White Australia policy at risk by attracting ­dark-­skinned southern Europeans. Immigration officers in Brisbane noted, with relief, that the first arrivals were ‘completely Caucasian in appearance’.7 Efforts to attract Spaniards were not predicated solely on their assumed industriousness as north Europeans, though. Paradoxically, given the community’s radical history, the renewed migration of Spaniards to Australia was also championed by the Catholic Church. The head of Australia’s Federal Catholic Immigration Council, Monsignor George Crennan, had facilitated informal diplomatic contact between the two governments prior to the migration agreement’s signature. Crennan had met the Spanish Foreign Minister in October 1955, and had spoken with Spain’s Falangist ­Consul-­General on a number of occasions, to increase migration.8 Their influence extended to the practical implementation of the eventual agreement. The Catholic Church enjoyed an exceptionally close relationship with the Spanish government, and the Spanish Catholic Migration Commission operated at both regional and parish levels to select and endorse possible migrants to travel to

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Australia. Given that parish priests required that families had strong Catholic credentials, few (if any) migrants with a history of political radicalism were selected. The Catholic Church was eager for the scheme to expand and include female migrants as well as male labourers. Crennan devised the ‘Plan Marta’ scheme to attract young, single Spanish women to Australia, where they would be trained for domestic service with Australian Catholic families. Parish priests in Spain again championed the programme, encouraging women to apply and referring those whom they thought appropriate to the Spanish Diocesan Migration Committees. The women promised to spend two years in domestic service (although this was not legally binding), and the Australian government undertook to help them find work if necessary. Although highly gendered in its conception, many of the women hoped that the plan would free them from the strictures of Spanish life and provide an opportunity for adventure. Nonetheless, the involvement of the local parish priests ensured that the women were regular churchgoers in a manner that radical community members in Australia’s north emphatically were not. The majority of Plan Marta migrants were allocated to southern states, but a number were sent directly to Queensland. Of f­orty-­ three identifiable records, eighteen had been born after Franco’s seizure of power. Seventeen further women would have been aged less than five at the outbreak of war, and would also only have been able to remember Franco’s rule. Only eight were aged over t­ hirty-­ five. While Queensland Spaniards had become overwhelmingly Basque by the early 1960s, the Plan Marta women were predominantly recruited from the central Castilian regions and metropolitan Madrid. With a largely conservative Castilian cultural outlook, the women’s presence in the ­close-­knit far northern communities was generally awkward, and few integrated successfully. The established Spanish communities in the north nonetheless greeted the women’s prospective arrival with great excitement. Despite the majority being from Castile, the first group of those who travelled to the north of Queensland were in fact Basque, with family connections in the northern region. Amparo Undiano’s experience were typical. She travelled the roughly 1,500-kilometre route from Brisbane to the town of Ingham immediately upon her arrival in 1960. Her fiancé had cut cane in the north in the previous year, deciding to settle in the area after a brief visit to Western

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Australia. She travelled north with a friend whose brother also cut cane in the region, and who planned to stay there permanently. With few Spanish women in the dispersed northern townships, the women entered a m ­ ale-­dominated society that was far more socially isolated than that they had left in Spain. The Catholic Church attempted to remain in contact with the women to ensure that they had employment and adequate accommodation, but was rarely successful. Instead, local families such as the Mendioleas sought to encourage the women to stay in the region once they arrived. Locals realised that most women were remaining in the southern states, and that they would travel north only if they could be convinced that it was economically viable and secure. Female members of the Basque Balanzategui family assumed a leadership role, and proactively sought to procure the women ‘employment avenues’ as domestics in local hotels and private homes. Women soon felt isolated, however, and most drifted south relatively quickly, to friends in Sydney and Melbourne. The active participation of the Catholic Church and the Franco government increased fears that new arrivals’ political sympathies would be monitored. All migrants who applied to travel on the scheme were screened by the Spanish government for histories of industrial or political unrest.9 Migrants were issued with a certificate that declared political suitability and loyalty to the regime. Although the Spanish Emigration Institute was primarily interested in the selection of migrants with relevant skills, there is little doubt that it also removed those who were liable to embarrass the regime once freed from the police state apparatus. Most migrants who applied for the scheme had been raised exclusively in the Franco state, and tacitly accepted the regime’s existence. The involvement of both the Spanish Labour Department and the Spanish Emigration Institute was well known, and success required either impeccable employment credentials or bribery from those with family histories of dissent. Northern Spaniards’ hostility to Franco was part of a broader political distrust of the centralised Spanish state. L ­ ow-­level contact between Queensland Spaniards and representatives of Madrid was occasionally unavoidable. In 1964, for example, the fervently p ­ ro-­ Franco ­Consul-­General and member of the Falange, Dr Ramon de la Riva, travelled north to visit Queensland’s Spaniards in the wake of the collapsed migration agreement.10 Otherwise, the communities

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remained pragmatic and cautious in their contact with the ­Consulate-­General in Sydney. On the rare occasions when political expression occurred publicly, it remained focused on Franco. During one celebration in Ingham, when one of the new arrivals ‘got up and said “Viva Franco!”, he got crucified [by local Spaniards]’.11 While such opposition to Franco had been general prior to the 1958 agreement, by the late 1960s a broad spectrum of opinions existed as to Spain’s political future. Attitudes to Franco were the catalyst for continued tensions within the Spanish communities, where migrants’ memories and ­post-­war experiences differed radically from the historical narratives now taught in Franco’s Spain. Older settlers remained perplexed by the new arrivals’ acceptance of his government. New settlers experienced the Franco regime as a dynamic and fluid construction, while l­onger-­standing residents remained ­pre-­occupied by the defining trauma of the Civil War.

Hidden legacies of a radical past The sugar industry was transformed by rapid mechanisation from the early 1960s. Without any further need for seasonal cane cutters, the number of new migrants from Spain plummeted. The ­post-­war dominance of Basques within the northern Spanish communities became permanent, and the children of the radical Spaniards were instead gradually absorbed into the broader local community. Their parents’ histories were no longer told within a group of migrants who were eager to conform to Cold War assumptions of what constituted a ‘Good Australian’, and who were conscious of the commercial implications of being construed as ­Left-­wing radicals during the Cold War. Even as the Cold War hysteria declined, the radical histories of the north became progressively obscured and lost. The region’s cultural diversity was championed, but devoid of the political narrative that had once been at its heart. The Innisfail region, where most radical Spaniards lived, was one of the last to carry out mechanisation in 1965. The number of cane cutters required in the region immediately halved, and continued to slump thereafter.12 New Spanish migrants did not initially realise the changed situation, and continued to believe that they would find ­well-­paid jobs with ease. Many were intensely distressed to

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discover that they were instead required to spend prolonged amounts of time in migrant holding camps. Over a fifth of Spanish inmates stayed in the camps for over twelve months, and a further quarter were obliged to stay for over six months. Newspapers in Spain lambasted what they felt was Australian duplicity for having reneged on promises to provide housing and minimum wages. The Spanish ­Consul-­General went so far as to urge all migration between the two countries cease until employment was readily available. Attitudes to Franco’s Spain remained the cause of tension between new arrivals and older settlers. Many of the pioneer migrants resented the relatively high level of government support now offered to migrants, and felt that it symbolised the new arrivals’ lack of commitment to their adoptive society. Established settlers did offer support, but many felt that the new arrivals’ cultural values were at odds with the Spain that they remembered in their youth. Conversely, newer migrants felt that the older residents’ political views and overt hostility to Franco’s government were somewhat suspicious.13 The expectation that the newer arrivals might return to Spain at some point in the future affected not only intergenerational interactions, but also the development of new cultural associations and clubs. Earlier Spaniards had socialised in informal clubs that were closely associated with political discussions and owed much to Catalan traditions of café politics and the politicised interwar society of northern Australia. The children of these migrants were more likely to join Anglo–Saxon groups such as Rural Youth or Junior Farmers, though, reflecting their new social and commercial priorities. Older settlers continued to meet and play card games and music, but their memories became increasingly disconnected both from the lived realities of Spaniards and from opponents of Franco. The experiences of these older migrants were part of the disintegration of the global interwar anarchist networks during the 1960s. While new networks would arise, and new fractures with the communist world would occur, the social connections lacked the intensity of those who had lived through the Spanish Civil War. Neither did the radical movement have the same expression throughout the ­Spanish-­speaking world. In Spain and throughout Latin America, military dictatorships aggressively attacked and sought to destroy radical activists and their groups. Within Australia,

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the government worked to limit the extent of communist and anarchist ­Left-­wing organisations. Political organisations dominated by ­ non-­ Anglo–Saxon migrants were viewed as being especially subversive, and a betrayal of the compact for new lives that had been offered to migrants by the Australian government. The violent repression of L ­ eft-­wing activists in Latin America would result in a new wave of politically aware S ­ panish-­speaking refugees and migrants arriving in Australia from the 1970s. Tens of thousands of refugees from Chile and Argentina were subsequently joined by migrants from the Southern Cone of Latin America, who sought new lives in Australia. From the 1980s, more refugees arrived from Central American countries such as El Salvador and Guatemala. Many of these new arrivals were concentrated in the south of the country. However, a number settled in northern centres such as Brisbane, from where they sought to reach out to radical student groups with whom they were united in opposing American imperialism and capitalism. Over time, they formed solidarities between S ­ panish-­speaking nationalities throughout the country. These new Spanish speakers did not connect with the children and grandchildren of the original radicals of northern Australia. The Spanish retain a visible presence in the north, but it is most obviously a built heritage that recalls an idealised and luxurious Spain. The large building and surrounds of Paronella Park, designed and built in the interwar period by the Catalan migrant Jose Paronella, are now at the heart of the region’s tourism. With its grand staircase, crenellated walls, and pool, the park makes a powerful statement of the wealth that was available for those migrants who successfully worked the sugar cane. Such sites draw attention to the prominence of Spaniards in the northern communities. The grandeur and ostentation of Paronella Park distract from the original hopes of many in the community that a new world of equality might have emerged in Australia’s north, far from the violence and inequality of Spain and Europe.

Conclusion ­ panish-­speaking migrants, from Spain and Latin America, have S travelled to Australia since before the country’s Federation in 1901. In that time, they have been actively involved in developing industry

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and landscape in the north of the continent. Australia’s north was transformed in the ­half-­century that followed 1901. Rainforests gave way to large s­ ugar-­cane farms along the coast, and the region’s isolation was greatly reduced by airplanes, bridges and highways that connected the region with the south of the country. Cooperative mills and small farms were replaced by corporate organisations and large complex farms. Gangs of seasonal cutters disappeared in the face of mechanisation and ­large-­scale industrial investment. The tiny jetty at Mourilyan, at which Salvador Torrents had landed decades before, was transformed into the point of departure for ships transporting sugar from northern Australia throughout the world. The transformations meant that much of the north would have been barely recognisable to the early settlers, who had arrived from Barcelona in 1907. Their desire to escape the corruption and violence of Europe had inspired others from Spain to join them, subsequently travelling the long distance from Europe through the Indian Ocean to Sydney, before continuing to the tropical rainforests of northern Australia. Distant from government and corporate interests, they explored concepts of equality, cooperative ownership and the value of labour. Their thoughts consciously connected Australia with the ­Spanish-­speaking world of Spain, Argentina, Cuba, Chile and the USA. The gradual incorporation of the north into the world economy, through the production of sugar, would transform life in the region. Even so, few in the community were prepared for the shattering experience of the Spanish Civil War. This galvanised local Spaniards to organise and advocate publicly, drawing the attention and ire of government authorities in the process. The Republicans’ defeat in the war transformed the northerners’ social networks into global resources to resist capitalist democracy, and community members wrote to friends throughout Europe and the Americas to advocate for change. The Cold War abruptly ended their hopes of revolution, as did their advancing age. The world had changed enormously by the time of their deaths, but they remained hopeful for the possibilities for a new world – a world in which access to education and health would be universal for all, and where the dignity of labour was assured.

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Notes

Chapter 1   1 B. J. Coman, ‘La Austrialia del Espiritu Santo: Captain Quirós and the Discovery of Australia in 1606’, Quadrant, 50/5 (2006), 60.   2 Oskar Spate, The Spanish Lake (Canberra: ANU ­E-­Press, 2004).   3 Marilyn Lake and Vanessa Pratt, ‘“Blood Brothers” Racial Identification and the Right to Rule: The Australia Response to the S ­ panish-­American War’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 54/1 (2008), 16-27.  4 Chris Ealham, Class, Culture and Conflict in Barcelona, 1898–1937 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), p. 25.   5 José C. Moya, Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).  6 Moya, Cousins and Strangers.  7 Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).   8 ‘The Herbert River,’ North Queensland Register, 26 August 1907, 67.   9 Diane Menghetti, The Red North: The Popular Front in North Queensland (Townsville: James Cook University, 1981).

Chapter 2  1 Judith Keene, ‘Surviving the Peninsular War in Australia: Juan de Arrieta – Spanish Free Settler and Colonial Gentleman’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 84/2 (1999), 41.  2 James Cameron, Adelaide de la Thoreza: A Chequered Career (Sydney: Foster & Fairfax, 1878), p. 15.  3 James Cook University Special Collection (hereafter ­ JCU-­ SC), Salvador Torrents Archive (hereafter STA), 5-10, ‘Impreciones de un viaje a Australia’.

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  4 Torrents, ‘Impreciones de un viaje a Australia’.   5 Torrents, ‘Impreciones de un viaje a Australia’.  6 Ealham, Class, Culture and Conflict in Barcelona, p. 35.   7 Torrents, ‘Impreciones de un viaje a Australia’.   8 Torrents, ‘Impreciones de un viaje a Australia’.  9 Torrents, ‘Impreciones de un viaje a Australia’. 10 National Library of Australia (hereafter NLA), Nettie Palmer Manuscript Collection (hereafter NPMC), 1174-1-7119, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 28 February 1947, Mena Creek. 11 Torrents, ‘Impreciones de un viaje a Australia’. 12 William A. Douglass, Azúcar Amargo: Vida y Fortuna de los Cortadores de Caña Italianos y Vascos en la Australia Tropical (Bilbao: Servicio Editorial Universidad del País Vasco, 1996), p. 81. 13 ‘The Spanish Invasion’, Brisbane Courier, 10 July 1907, 4. 14 ‘The Herbert River’, North Queensland Register, 26 August 1907, 67. 15 ‘The Spanish Invasion’. 16 NLA, NPMC, 1174/1/6335-40, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 18 March 1943, ‘Open Letter to my friend, Mrs. Nettie Palmer’. 17 NLA, NPMC, 1174/1/7119-39, 28 February 1947, ‘Amiga Nettie Palmer, ¡Salud!’. 18 NLA, NPMC, 1174/1/7650-4, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 31 March 1949, ‘Nettie Palmer Estimada Amiga ¡Salud!’. 19 ‘Nettie Palmer Estimada Amiga ¡Salud!’. 20 Sam Dolgoff (ed.), Bakunin on Anarchy: Selected Works by the ­Activist-­Founder of World Anarchism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1971), p. 76. 21 National Archives of Australia, Brisbane (hereafter NAA B), BP25-1, Alien Registration Form, Palmada F Spanish. 22 Queensland State Archives (hereafter QSA) , RSI1120-1-2, Innisfail Bench Records, 13 November 1924; QSA, RSI 1120-1-4, Innisfail Bench Records, 15 November 1927; QSA, RSI 1120-1-4, Innisfail Bench Records, 2 December 1927; QSA, RSI 1120-1-5, Innisfail Bench Records, 20 December 1927; QSA, QSA, RSI 1120-1-6, Innisfail Bench Records, 30 April 1929; NAA B, NAA B, BP242-1 Q30582 Part 2, Letter from Mourilyan Station to Officer in charge of internment at Brisbane Victoria Barracks, 13 May 1940. 23 Emilio Duran Memoirs (unpublished), 65. 24 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-7119, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 28 February 1947, Mena Creek. 25 JCU, STA, 5-7, ‘Cronicas escritas en mi intancia en el Norte de Queensland, Australia’. 26 Emilio Duran Memoirs, 53. 27 QSA, RSI 13214 4-1438, Alien Registration Forms. 28 Ramon Ribes, interview with author, 27 November 2004, Mossman.

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29 Dorothy Jones, Hurricane Lamps and Blue Umbrellas: A History of the Shire of Johnstone to 1973 (Cairns: G. K. Bolton, 1973), p. 297. 30 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 5-3, ‘“Memoriale de un Obrero” Costumbres de los españoles, en el Norte de Queensland (Australia)’. 31 Torrents, ‘Memoriale de un Obrero’. 32 QSA, RSI 1120-1-1, Bench Records Book, 1923–1924, Innisfail; QSA, RSI 1120-1-2, Bench Records Book, 1924–1925, Innisfail; QSA, RSI 1120-1-3, Bench Records Book, 1925–1927, Innisfail; QSA, RSI 11201-4, Bench Records Book, 1927, Innisfail; QSA, RSI 1120-1-5, Bench Records Book, 1927–1928, Innisfail; QSA, RSI 1120-1-6, Bench Records Book, 1929–1930, Innisfail. 33 Sébastien Faure, The Anarchist Synthesis, trans. Nestor McNab, 2011 www.anarkismo.net/article/20253?userlanguage=cs&save_prefs=true 34 Emma Goldman, Francisco Ferrer and the Modern School (Los Angeles: Library of Alexandria, nd). 35 Jean Maitron, Histoire du Mouvement Anarchiste en France, 1880–1914 (Paris: Société Universitaire d’Editions et de Libraire, 1955), p. 338. 36 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 5-13, ‘Conversaciones comentadoes [sic] sobres el ideal anarquico entres los compañeros de Lyon’. 37 Torrents, ‘Impreciones de un viaje Australia’. 38 Torrents, ‘Impreciones de un viaje Australia’. 39 Torrents, ‘Impreciones de un viaje Australia’. 40 National Archives of Australia, Canberra (hereafter NAA C), A3 NT 1916-48, ‘Report Upon the Argentine Immigration to the Northern Territory of Australia’, 1916, translation of original complaint by Eduardo F. Molina. 41 NAA C, A3 NT 1916-503, Letter from Spanish Consul to Minister of External Affairs, 13 January 1916. 42 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 5-1, Torrents, ‘Trabajando en el campo: Poesias Cronicas y Cuentos por Salvador Torrents’, 2 September 1917. 43 NAA C, A3 NT 1916-48, ‘Report Upon the Argentine Immigration to the Northern Territory of Australia’, translation of original complaint by Eduardo F. Molina. 44 ­ JCU-­ SC, STA, 5-6, Torrents, ‘Contrastes, Poesias por Salvador Torrents’, 23 March 1918. 45 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 5-6, Torrents, ‘Cronicas escritas en mi instancia en el norte de Queensland Australia, undated. 46 Torrents, ‘Impreciones de un viaje Australia’. 47 Torrents, ‘Trabajando en el campo: Poesias Cronicas y Cuentos por Salvador Torrents’. 48 Torrents, ‘Trabajando en el campo: Poesias Cronicas y Cuentos por Salvador Torrents’. 49 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 5-1, Torrents, ‘Impreciones a mi hermano J. Gabalda: Poesias Cronicas y Cuentos por Salvador Torrents’, 2 September 1917.

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Notes

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50 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 5-14, Torrents, ‘Noche de Tempestad’, 1918. 51 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 5-14, Torents, ‘Que cuadro’, 1918. 52 NLA, NPMC, 1174/1/7702-6, Letter from Torrents to Nettie Palmer, ‘Estimada amiga y hermana ¡Salud!’, 13 June 1949. 53 Letter from Torrents to Nettie Palmer, ‘Estimada amiga y hermana ¡Salud!’. 54 Joe Paronella, Interview with author, 28 November 2004, Kairi. 55 Paronella, Interview with author. 56 Paronella, Interview with author.

Chapter 3  1 G. Burgoyne ‘Coloured Labour Problems’, in Noel Butlin Archive Centre, Canberra (hereafter cited as NBAC), Colonial Sugar Refining Company Papers (hereafter cited as CSR Co.), Z303-32.   2 Doug Hunt, ‘Exclusivism and Unionism: Europeans in the Queensland Sugar Industry, 1900–10’, in Ann Curthoys and Andrew Markus (eds), Who Are Our Enemies? Racism and the Australian Working Class (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1978), p. 88.  3 NBAC, CSR Co., Z303-32, Telegram from E. B. Foster to CSR Co., Sydney, 3 April 1907.   4 NBAC, CSR Co., Macknade Letter Book, Z303-142, 13 June 1907.   5 NBAC, CSR Co., Z303-32, Letter from General Manager of CSR Co. to Premier of Queensland, 31 August 1907.   6 NBAC, CSR Co., Z303-142, Macknade Letter Book, 18 July 1907.   7 ‘Interstate: Geraldton’, 20 July 1907, North Queensland Herald, 6.   8 NBAC, CSR Co., Z303-142, Macknade Letter Book, 27 June 1907.   9 ‘Cane Cutting in the North’, North Queensland Herald, 7 September 1907, 4. 10 NBAC, CSR Co. Z303-142, Goondi Letter Book, 18 July 1907. 11 NBAC, CSR Co. Z303-142, Macknade Letter Book, 25 July 1907. 12 NBAC, CSR Co. Z303-142, Macknade Letter Book, 18 July 1907. 13 NBAC, CSR Co. Z303-142, Macknade Letter Book, 29 August 1907. 14 ‘Cane cutting in the North’, North Queensland Herald, 7 September 1907, 4. 15 NBAC, CSR Co. Z303-142, Macknade Letter Book, 12 September 1907. 16 NBAC, CSR Co. Z303-32, Goondi Letter Book, 1 August 1907. 17 NBAC, CSR Co. Z303-32, Goondi Letter Book, 12 December 1907. 18 NBAC, CSR Co. Z303-32, Goondi Letter Book, 1 August 1907. 19 NBAC, CSR Co. Z303-32, Goondi Letter Book, 29 August 1907. 20 ‘Dissatisfied Spanish Immigrants’, Brisbane Courier, 14 September 1907, 4.

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152 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42

43 44 45 46

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NBAC, CSR Co. Z303-32, Macknade Letter Book, 12 September 1907. NBAC, CSR Co. Z303-142, Macknade Letter Book, 8 August 1907. ‘The Herbert River’, North Queensland Register, 26 August 1907, 67. NBAC, CSR Co. Z303-142, Macknade Letter Book, 5 September 1907. NBAC, CSR Co. Z303-142, Goondi Letter Book, 5 December 1907. NBAC, CSR Co. Z303-142, Goondi Letter Book, 12 December 1907. ‘Interstate: Ingham’, North Queensland Herald, 7 December 1907, 6; ‘Interstate: Geraldton’, North Queensland Herald, 7 December 1907, 6; ‘Interstate: Geraldton’, North Queensland Herald, 14 December 1907, 6; ‘Interstate: Cairns’, 14 December 1907, North Queensland Herald, 6. ‘Interstate: Geraldton’, North Queensland Herald, 14 December 1907, 6. Emilio Duran Memoirs (hereafter cited as EDM), unpublished, 71. NBAC, CSR Co. Z303-142, Goondi Letter Book, 5 December 1907. NBAC, CSR Co. Z303-142, Macknade Letter Book, 5 September 1907. NBAC, CSR Co. Z303-142, Macknade Letter Book, 29 September 1907. NBAC, CSR Co. Z303-142, Macknade Letter Book, 8 August 1907. NBAC, CSR Co. Z303-142, Macknade Letter Book, 29 August 1907. NBAC, CSR Co. Z303-142, Goondi Letter Book, 13 February 1908. National Archives of Australia, Canberra (hereafter cited as NAA C), A3 NT, 1915-4128, series of untitled letters, undated. EDM, 6. NAA C, A3 NT, 1913-11163, Robert Williams, Report on the Northern Territory of Australia, September 1912. NAA C, A3 NT, 1915-4577, Letter from Minister for External Affairs to Italian Consul, 25 September 1915. EDM, 15. National Archives of Australia, Brisbane (hereafter NAA B), J25-190 1949-13659, Letter from Martinez to Department of Immigration, 7 April 1948; NAA B, BP9-3 Spanish Martinez F, Personal Statement by Alien Passenger; NAA B, BP9-3 Spanish Martinez J Personal Statement by Alien Passenger; NAA B, BP9-3 Martinez de Morentin J Personal Statement by Alien Passenger; NAA B, BP9-3 Martinez de Morentin E, Personal Statement by Alien Passenger. NAA C, A435 1946-4-6645, Statutory Declaration by Jesus Rosende, 21 December 1922; NAA C, A1 1927-9893, Statutory Declaration by Francisco Zuazo, 5 May 1927; NAA B, BP4-3 Spanish Rosende J, Application for Alien Registration. NAA C, A1 1930-24, Statutory Declaration by Amador Saez, 29 November 1929. José C. Moya, Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 307. NAA C, A2 1916-1711, Letter from Francisco Netri to the Minister of State for Commerce, 22 April 1915. EDM, 12.

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Notes

153

47 NAA C, A3 NT 1916-48, Letter from AWU Secretary Nelson on behalf of Eduardo F. Molina, 17 December 1915. 48 Mr Price, ‘Northern Territory Unemployment – Arrival of Settlers from Patagonia’, Hansard, House of Representatives, 30 June 1915. 49 NAA C, A3 NT 1915-4577, Memorandum from investigating officer of Department of External Affairs to Spanish Consul, 9 July 1915. 50 NAA C, A3 NT 1916-48, Letter from AWU Secretary Nelson on behalf of Eduardo F. Molina, 17 December 1915. 51 NAA C, A3 NT 1915-4577, Memorandum to the Department of External Affairs summarising passenger statements, undated. 52 EDM, 18. 53 NAA C, A3 NT 1916-48, Letter from AWU Secretary Nelson on behalf of Eduardo F. Molina, 17 December 1915. 54 NAA C, A3 NT 1915-4577, Memorandum to the Department of External Affairs summarising passenger statements, undated. 55 NAA C, A3 NT 1916-48, ‘Report Upon the Argentine Immigration to the Northern Territory of Australia’, translation of original complaint by Eduardo F. Molina. 56 NAA C, A3 NT 1916-48, ‘Report Upon the Argentine Immigration to the Northern Territory of Australia’, translation of original complaint by Eduardo F. Molina. 57 EDM, 21. 58 EDM, 21. 59 EDM, 21. 60 NAA C, A3 NT 1915-4577, Memorandum to the Department of External Affairs summarising passenger statements, undated. 61 NAA C, A3 NT 1916-48, ‘Report Upon the Argentine Immigration to the Northern Territory of Australia’, translation of original complaint by Eduardo F. Molina. 62 Mr Price, ‘Northern Territory Unemployment – Arrival of Settlers from Patagonia’, Hansard, House of Representatives, 30 June 1915. 63 EDM, 25. 64 NAA C, A3 NT 1916-503, Telegram from Territory Administrator Gilruth to Department of External Affairs, 24 January 1916. 65 NAA C, A3 NT 1916-48, ‘Report Upon the Argentine Immigration to the Northern Territory of Australia’, translation of original complaint by Eduardo F. Molina. 66 NAA C, A3 NT 1916-287, Letter from Department of External Affairs to King O’Malley, Minister of Home Affairs, 1 December 1915. 67 NAA C, A3 NT 1916-287, Letter from Commonwealth Railways to Department of Home Affairs, 25 November 1915,. 68 NAA C, A3 NT 1916-48, ‘Report Upon the Argentine Immigration to the Northern Territory of Australia’, translation of original complaint by Eduardo F. Molina. 69 EDM, 28.

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70 NAA C, A3 NT 1916-503, Letter from Commonwealth Railways to Department of External Affairs, 2 February 1916. 71 NAA C, A3 NT 1916-503, Letter from Commonwealth Railways to Department of External Affairs, 28 January 1916. 72 NAA C, A3 NT 1916-287, Letter from Department of External Affairs to King O’Malley, Minister of Home Affairs, 1 December 1915. 73 Michele Langfield, ‘Filching the Argentine Colonists: The Encouragement of Patagonians to the Northern Territory in the Early Twentieth Century’, Journal of Northern Territory History, 13 (2002), 41. 74 NAA C, A3 NT 1916-287, Telegram from Resident Engineer to Territory Administrator, 11 December 1915. 75 EDM, 58. 76 NAA B, BP4-3 Spanish Villalla A, Application for registration. 77 NAA B, BP4-3 Spanish Pascual A, Application for registration. 78 Queensland State Archives (hereafter QSA), RSI 13214-4-1438, Collection of alien registration forms. 79 NAA B, BP4-2 MF 1249, Censor’s comments on letter from Carter to Laidler, 13 June 1918, Cloncurry; NAA B, BP4-2 MF 1660, Letter from Jim Pope to E. Callard, 17 August 1918, Alligator Creek Meat Works. 80 QSA, RSI 13214-1-586, Report by Boyland of Waterside Workers’ Federation, Undated, Innisfail. 81 QSA, RSI 13214-1-586, Report by Boyland of Waterside Workers’ Federation, Undated, Innisfail. 82 NAA B, BP4-2 MF 1249, Letter from Carter to Laidler, 13 June 1918, Cloncurry. 83 NAA B, BP4-1 66-5-115, Parts 1 and 2, Letter from intelligence officer to Victoria Barracks, 20 January 1919, Townsville. 84 NAA B, BP4-1 66-5-115, Part 3, Resolution from the One Big Union Propaganda Committee, regarding members of the Russian Workers’ Association, 27 November 1918. 85 NAA B, BP4-2 MF 1251, Letter from T. Ryland to Ross’ Monthly, 24 May 1918, Ingham. 86 NAA B, BP4-2 MF 1300-1400, Letter from F. Ryland [sic] to Ross’ Monthly, 24 May 1918, Ingham. 87 NAA B, BP4-1 55-5-115, Letter from George Cluns to the editor of the Mirror Newspaper Co., 27 July 1918, Ingham. 88 ‘A Busted Revolution: Attempt to Bolshevise Queensland’, Smith’s Weekly, 10 September 1921, 1. 89 ‘A Busted Revolution: Attempt to Bolshevise Queensland’, Smith’s Weekly, 10 September 1921, 1. 90 QSA, RSI 13214-1-586, Police Report, 18 November 1921, Innisfail. 91 QSA, RSI 13214-1-291, Police Report, December 1919, Proserpine. 92 NAA B, BP4-3, Spanish Rosende J, Alien Registration Form. 93 NAA C, A435 1946-4-6645, Letter from Investigation Branch to Home and Territories Department, 16 February 1923, Mackay.

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94 QSA, RSI 13214-3-46, Police Report, 18 March 1940, Mackay. 95 QSA, RSI 13214-1-586, Report by Boyland of Waterside Workers’ Federation, Undated, Innisfail. 96 William A. Douglass, Azúcar Amargo: Vida y Fortuna de los Cortadores de Caña Italianos y Vascos en la Australia Tropical (Bilbao: Servicio Editorial Universidad del País Vasco, 1996), p. 148. 97 Jean Devanny, Sugar Heaven (North Carlton: Vulgar Press, 2002), first published 1936, p. 75. 98 National Library of Australia (hereafter cited as NLA), Nettie Palmer Manuscript Collection, 1174-1-7119, Letter from Torrents to Nettie Palmer, 28 February 1947, Mena Creek. 99 James Cook University Special Collection (hereafter ­ JCU-­ SC), Salvador Torrents Archives (hereafter STC), 5-18, ‘De Mi Cartera: Triste Recuerdos’, Salvador Torrents, 15 November 1927, El Vidrio. 100 ‘The South Johnstone Dispute: Preference Must Fail’, 10 June 1927, Townsville Daily Bulletin, 11. 101 QSA, RSI 13214-1-730, Police Report, South Johnstone, 15 July 1927. 102 ‘Disorderly Proceedings Alleged at Currajah: Men Pulled Off Train’, Northern Herald, 20 July 1927, 48. 103 EDM, 90; ‘South Johnstone Farmers Stand for the Right: Logic and Law on their Side’, Northern Herald, 29 June 1927, 44. 104 QSA, RSI 13214-1-741, Police Report, South Johnstone, 22 July 1927. 105 NAA B, J25-190 1962-3870, Immigration Application Form. 106 QSA, RSI 13214-1-730, Police Report, South Johnstone, July 1927. 107 QSA, RSI 13214-1-741, Police Report, South Johnstone, 17 August 1927. 108 EDM, 90. 109 QSA, RSI 13214-1-730, Police Report, South Johnstone, July 1927. 110 EDM, 90. 111 ‘What is Police Commissioner going to do about it? Strike Breakers Going About Armed’, Daily Standard, 1 July 1927, 1. 112 QSA, RSI 13214-1-730, Police Report, Babinda, 24 July 1927. 113 QSA, RSI 13214-1-730, Telegram from Mann, South Johnstone, 6 July 1927. 114 QSA, RSI 13214-1-730, Police Report, South Johnstone, July 1927. 115 EDM, 91.

Chapter 4   1 Emilio Duran Memoirs (hereafter EDM), unpublished, 53.   2 Nicolás Kanellos, ‘Recovering and Reconstructing Early ­Twentieth-­Century Hispanic Immigrant Culture in the US’, American Literary History, 19/2 (2007), 9.

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 3 James Cook University Special Collection (JCU_SC), Salvador Torrents Archive (STA), ST5-7, Torrents, ‘Querida Acracia: Cronicas escritas en mi intancia en el Norte de Queensland, Australia’.   4 ­JCU-­SC, STA, Torrents, ‘Trabajo leido en el centro emancipation anarchiste de Lyon: Mi Anarquismo’.   5 Gianfranco Cresciani, Fascism, ­Anti-­Fascism, and Italians in Australia, 1922–1945 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1980), p. 105.   6 Jean Devanny, Sugar Heaven (North Carlton: Vulgar Press, 2002), first published 1936, p. 135.   7 Gianfranco Cresciani, ‘The Proletarian Migrants: Fascism and Italian Anarchists in Australia’. Australian Quarterly, 51/1 (1979), 14.  8 Torrents, ‘Trabajo leido en el centro emancipation anarchiste de Lyon: Mi Anarchismo’.  9 Torrents, ‘Trabajo leido en el centro emancipation anarchiste de Lyon: Mi Anarchismo’. 10 Sandie Holguín, Creating Spaniards: Culture and National Identity in Republican Spain (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), p. 27. 11 NAA C, A261 1927-2982, Nomination form for Juan Vallbonas; NAA B, BP-9-3 Spanish Vallbonas J, Alien Registration Form. 12 Alan Frost Collection, Jordana, Interview with Alan Frost, Townsville, 1984, Tape 3. 13 National Library of Australia (hereafter NLA), Nettie Palmer Manuscript Collection (hereafter NPMC), 1174-1-6335, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 18 March 1943, South Mission Beach. 14 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-7119, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 28 February 1947, Mena Creek. 15 Torrents, ‘Trabajo leido en el Centro Emancipacion Anarchiste de Lyon’. 16 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 5-7, Torrents, ‘Por que somos individuos’. 17 Holguín, Creating Spaniards, p. 29. 18 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-6335, Open letter from Torrents to Palmer, 18 March 1943, Mena Creek. 19 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-6335, Open letter from Torrents to Palmer, 18 March 1943, Mena Creek. 20 Maria Trapp and Vince Cuartero, interview with author, 31 August 07, Innisfail. 21 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 5-1, Torrents, ‘Los mas brutos de la tierra: Poesias Cronicas y Cuentor por Salvador Torrents’, 2 September 1917. 22 Torrents, ‘Los mas brutos de la tierra’. 23 Torrents, ‘Trabajo leido en el centro emancipation anarchiste de Lyon: Mi Anarchismo’. 24 Torrents, ‘Trabajo leido en el centro emancipation anarchiste de Lyon: El Sindicalismo’.

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157

25 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-7119, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 28 February 1947, Mena Creek, NLA. 26 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-6324, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 16 April 1943, Mena Creek. 27 Jordana, Interview with Alan Frost, Tape 1. 28 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 2-8 Letter from Torrents to J. A. Dawson, Undated, Mena Creek. 29 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 5-18, Torrents, ‘Francisco Ferrer: A Rationalist Martyr’, July 1945, Rationalist. 30 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 5-2, Torrents, ‘Cuento: Viaje de un montaner a la capital Catalana por Salvador Torrents’, 29 July 1916. 31 Torrents, ‘Querida Acracia: Cronicas escritas en mi instancia en el Norte de Queensland, Australia’. 32 Torrents, ‘Trabajo leido en el centro emancipation anarchiste de Lyon: Conversaciones’. 33 Torrents, ‘Trabajo leido en el centro emancipation anarchiste de Lyon: Conversaciones’. 34 Torrents, ‘Trabajo leido en el centro emancipation anarchiste de Lyon: Mi Anarchismo’. 35 Torrents, ‘Trabajo leido en el centro emancipation anarchiste de Lyon: El Sindicalismo’. 36 Torrents, ‘Trabajo leido en el centro emancipation anarchiste de Lyon: El Sindicalismo’. 37 Torrents, ‘Trabajo leido en el centro emancipation anarchiste de Lyon: El Sindicalismo’. 38 Torrents, ‘Trabajo leido en el centro emancipation anarchiste de Lyon: El Sindicalismo’. 39 QSA, SRS 5384-1-107, Miscellaneous press cuttings regarding Italian and Maltese immigration to Queensland, 1925. 40 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-6324-32, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 16 April 1943, Mena Creek. 41 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 5-3, Torrents, ‘Formación de collas para cortar caña’, undated. 42 Torrents, ‘Trabajo leido en el centro emancipation anarchiste de Lyon: La Masa’. 43 JCU-­SC, STA, 5-3, Letter from Torrents to Nettie Palmer, ‘Amiga ¡Salud!’, 31 March 1949. 44 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 5-7, Torrents, ‘Cronicas escritas en mi infancia en el norte de Qld: Tristes recuerdos’, 1916. 45 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 5-1, Torrents, ‘Cuento: A mi hermano J. Gabalda’, 20 May 1917. 46 JCU-­SC, STA, Torrents, ‘Impreciónes de un viaje a Australia’, undated. 47 Torrents, ‘Impreciónes de un viaje a Australia’. 48 Torrents, ‘Impreciónes de un viaje a Australia’.

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49 NLA, NPMC, 1174/1/6335-40, Letter from Torrents to Nettie Palmer, ‘Open Letter to my friend Mrs. Nettie Palmer’, 18 March 1943. 50 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 5-4, Torrents, ‘Al 63 Aniversario de my nacimiento: Nuestro verano en Mission Beach’, 12 April 1949. 51 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 5-18, Torrents, ‘Desde Australia: El Problema Racial’, Undated, Cultura Proletaria (hereafter cited as CulP). 52 EDM, 82. 53 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-7119-39, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 28 February 1947, Mena Creek. 54 Torrents, ‘Desde Australia: El Problema Racial’. 55 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-6324-32, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 16 April 1943, Mena Creek, NLA. 56 Trapp and Cuartero, interview with the author. 57 NAA B, BP9-3 Spanish Goni P, Statement by alien passenger; NAA B, J25 1953-9939, Application for a passport. 58 Diane Menghetti, ‘North Queensland, ­Anti-­Fascism and the Spanish Civil War’, Labour History, 42 (1982), 71. 59 William A. Douglass, Azúcar Amargo: Vida y Fortuna de los Cortadores de Caña Italianos y Vascos en la Australia Tropical (Bilbao: Servicio Editorial Universidad del País Vasco, 1996), p. 133. 60 Dorothy Jones, Hurricane Lamps and Blue Umbrellas: A History of the Shire of Johnstone to 1973 (Cairns: G. K. Bolton, 1973), p. 357. 61 Diane Menghetti, ‘The Weil’s Disease Strike, 1935’, in D. J. Murphy (ed.), The Big Strikes: Queensland, 1889-1965 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1983), p. 206. 62 Devanny, Sugar Heaven, p. 58. 63 Joe Paronella, Interview with author, 28 November 2004, Kairi. 64 ‘Dictation Test: Spaniard Charged, Something Sinister Behind Charge?’, North Queensland Guardian, 5 June 1937, 2. 65 Nicole Moore, ‘Remember Love and Struggle? Reading Jean Devanny’s Sugar Heaven in Contemporary Australian Contexts’, Australian Literary Studies, 21/3 (2004), 12. 66 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 5-8, Scrapbook of annotated newspaper cuttings. 67 Torrents, ‘Trabajo leido en el centro emancipation anarchiste de Lyon: Mi Anarchismo’. 68 ­JCU-­SC, STA, Torrents, ‘Australia’, Undated, Unknown paper. 69 QSA, RSI 13214-3-46, Police Report, Mackay, 18 March 1940. 70 Torrents, ‘Australia’. 71 Vince Cuartero, Interview with author, 26 November 2004, South Johnstone. 72 EDM, 104. 73 QSA, SRS 5973-2-100, Open letter by ‘Il Comitato’, 15 July 1935, Ayr. 74 ­ JCU-­ SC, STA, 5-18, Torrents, ‘Desde Australia’, Undated 1930s, Unnamed Paper.

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159

75 Torrents, ‘Desde Australia’. 76 Alien Immigration Commission, Report of the Royal Commission appointed to inquire into the report on the social and economic effect of increase in number of aliens in North Queensland (Brisbane: Government Printer, 1925), 10. 77 Jordana, Interview with Alan Frost, Tape 4. 78 Devanny, Sugar Heaven, p. 73. 79 EDM, 111. 80 EDM, 109. 81 Bianka Vidonja Balanzategui, ‘Basking in a Different Sun: The Story of Conchi Mendiolea’, in Linda White and Cameron Watson (eds), Amatxi, Amuna, Amona: Writings in Honor of Basque Women (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2003), p. 33. 82 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 5-3, Torrents, ‘Memorias de un obrero: Costumbres de los espanoles en el norte de Queensland’. 83 Trapp and Cuartero, Interview with author. 84 Menghetti, ‘North Queensland, A ­ nti-­Fascism and the Spanish Civil War’, 71. 85 NAA B, BP242-1 Q25027, Police List of those receiving Cultura Proletaria, 21 November 1940. 86 Gianfranco Cresciani, ‘The Proletarian Migrants: Fascism and Italian Anarchists in Australia’, Australian Quarterly, 51/1 (1979), 12. 87 C. Danesi, ‘Italian Progressive Club: Mourilyan Anniversary’, North Queensland Guardian, 23 October 1937, 6. 88 NAA B, BP4-3 Spanish Alcaraz J, Alien Registration Form. 89 Trapp and Cuartero, Interview with author. 90 NAA B, BP9-3 Spanish Madrid C, Personal Statement by Arriving Alien; EDM, 10. 91 NAA B, BP242-1 Q25027, Letter from Innisfail Police Station to Criminal Investigation Branch, 11 January 1941. 92 NAA B, BP4-3 Spanish Marti B, Alien Registration Form. 93 Trapp and Cuartero, Interview with author. 94 NLA, NPMC, 1174/1/6083-9, ‘Sna Nettie Palmer’, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 6 February 1942. 95 NLA, NPMC, 1174/1/7650-4, ‘Estimada Amiga ¡Salud!’, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 31 March 1949. 96 Jordana, Interview with Alan Frost, Tape 3. 97 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-7836, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, Undated. 98 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 5-17, Collection of various newspaper clippings. 99 NAA B, BP242-1 Q25027, Letter from South Johnstone Police to Criminal Investigation Branch Brisbane, 17 December 1940. 100 NAA B, BP242-1 Q25027, Letter from South Johnstone Police to Criminal Investigation Branch Brisbane, 17 December 1940.

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101 NAA B, BP242-1 Q25027, Letter from South Johnstone Police Station to Criminal Intelligence Branch Brisbane, 16 December 1940. 102 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 2-4, Letter from Palmer to Torrents, 28 May 1948, Melbourne. 103 JCU-­SC, STA, 5-18, Open letter from Torrents to Palmer, ‘Carta Postal: A mi amiga N. Palmer’, Cultura Proletaria, 14 May 1949. 104 For examples, see J­CU-­ SC, STA, 5-18, Torrents ‘Desde Australia: Medio en Broma y Medio en Serio’; ­JCU-­SC, STA 5-18, Torrents, ‘Martyrdom of the Spanish People’, February 1947, Rationalist; ­JCU-­SC, STA 5-18, Torrents, ‘Australia’, Undated, Cultura Proletaria; JCU-­ ­ SC, STA 5-17, Torrents, ‘Desde Australia’, Undated, Cultural Proletaria. 105 Jordana, Interview with Alan Frost, Tape 3. 106 JCU-­SC, STA, 2-18, Letter to the Editor, Sunday Australia, Undated. 107 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-7186, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 19 July 1947. 108 Torrents, ‘Desde Australia’. 109 NLA, NPMC, 1174/1/7702-6, ‘Estimada amiga y hermana ¡Salud!’, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 13 June 1949. 110 JCU-­SC, STA, 5-7, Torrents, ‘Cronicas escritas en mi instancia en el norte de Queensland Australia’, undated. 111 JCU-­SC, STA, 5-1, Torrents, ‘A mi hermano campesino’, 2 August 1917. 112 Torrents, ‘Cuento: A mi hermano J. Gabalda’.

Chapter 5  1 James Cook University Special Collections (hereafter ­ JCU-­ SC), Salvador Torrents Archive (hereafter STA), 5-18, Torrents, ‘¡Fue Alegría!’, 13 February 1932, Unnamed Paper.  2 Celia Gallego, Interview with Diane Menghetti, North Queensland Oral History Project, 1979.  3 Noel Butlin Archive Centre (hereafter NBAC), Amirah Inglis Collection (hereafter AIC), Q47-2, Eliseo Zamora, Interview with Amirah Inglis, Undated, Tully.   4 Gallego, Interview with Diane Menghetti.   5 Gallego, Interview with Diane Menghetti.   6 Gallego, Interview with Diane Menghetti.  7 Queensland State Archives (hereafter QSA), BP 289-1 Q25027, Correspondence between far north police stations and Criminal Investigations Branch, Brisbane.  8 Stan Oniandia, Interview with author, 26 November 2004, Mena Creek.

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Notes

161

  9 Emilio Duran Memoirs (hereafter EDM), unpublished, 109. 10 Torrents, ‘¡Fue alegría!’. 11 See, for examples, ‘Innisfail: A Letter from Spain’, North Queensland Guardian, 10 August 1937; ‘Spanish Patriots’, North Queensland Guardian, 30 October 1937; ‘Help Starving People Fighting Fascists’, North Queensland Guardian, 20 January 1939; ‘Poignant Appeal from Franco Victim’, North Queensland Guardian, 17 February 1939. 12 National Library of Australia (hereafter NLA), Nettie Palmer Manuscript Collection (hereafter NPMC), 1174-1-5082, ‘Catalan Fisherman to his Queensland Brother’, letter from Torrents to Palmer, undated. 13 NBAC, AIC, Q47-3, International Antifascist Solidarity Leaflet, undated. 14 Torrents, ‘Catalan fisherman to his Queensland brother’. 15 ­ JCU-­ SC, STA, 4-3, ‘Open letter from the Innisfail Spanish Relief Committee’, undated. 16 Ramon Ribes, Interview with author, 27 November 2004, Mossman; Maria Trapp, Interview with author, 26 November 2004, Innisfail. 17 Celia Gallego, Interview with Diane Menghetti. 18 Trapp, Interview with author. 19 Townsville Catholic Archives, 58-951, Proposal for an Italian, Spanish and Maltese Catholic Association in Ingham District. 20 EDM, 103. 21 ‘They Shall Not Pass: Spanish Patriots Write While Bombs Fall’, North Queensland Guardian, 30 October 1937, 1. 22 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 5-18, Trinidad Garcia, ‘Australia: A los Camaradas de Francia y de España’, 1936, unnamed paper. 23 ‘Poignant Appeal from Franco Victim’, North Queensland Guardian, 17 February 1939, 3. 24 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 5-15, ‘Notes and Comments: The Spanish Mystery’, H. G. Wells, April 1943, American Freeman. 25 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 5-17, ‘Españoles Residentes en Australia’, International ­Anti-­Fascist Solidarity: Australian Section, undated, unnamed paper. 26 ­JCU-­SC, STA, ‘De Australia’, Torrents, June 1938, unnamed paper. 27 Ray Jordana, Interview with Alan Frost, Innisfail, 1984, Tape 2. 28 NBAC, AIC, Q47-2, Handwritten notes on Coldicutt. 29 ‘Spanish Rebels: Dr. Duhig’s Views ‘Issues Misunderstood’’, Sydney Morning Herald, 2 September 1936, 15. 30 ‘Archbishop Duhig Refuses to Debate Spanish Question with Communists’, Worker’s Weekly, 2 October 1936, 3. 31 ‘Catholic Spaniard Describes Franco’s Bandits’, North Queensland Guardian, 2 September 1938, 4. 32 ‘Catholic Spaniard Describes Franco’s Bandits’. 33 Jordana, Interview with Alan Frost, Tape 5.

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34 35 36 37

Jordana, Interview with Alan Frost, Tape 5. Jordana, Interview with Alan Frost, Tape 2. Trapp, Interview with author. For more detail, see Amirah Inglis, Australians in the Spanish Civil War (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987); Judith Keene, ‘A Symbolic Crusade: Australians and the Spanish Civil War’, in G. Massa (ed.), La Mistica Spagnola. Spagna America Latina (Rome: Centro di Studi Americanistici, 1989), p. 151. 38 Carlos M. ­Fernandez-­Shaw, España y Australia: Quinientos Años de Relaciones (Madrid: Dirección General de Relaciones Culturales y Científicas Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores de España, 2000), p. 320. 39 NLA, NPMC, 1174-16-18, Nettie Palmer Diary, 17 October 1936. 40 Jordana, Interview with Alan Frost, Tape 2. 41 Jordana, Interview with Alan Frost, Tape 2. 42 NLA, NPMC, 1174-16-18, Nettie Palmer Diary, 11 November 1936. 43 NBAC, AIC, Q47-1, Handwritten miscellaneous notes. 44 Jordana, Interview with Alan Frost, Tape 2. 45 NLA, NPMC, 1174-16-19, Nettie Palmer Diary, 7 April 1937. 46 National Archives of Australia, Canberra (hereafter NAA C) , A659 1941-1-2088, Letter from Jordana to Department of Home Affairs, 17 April 1941. 47 Jordana, Interview with Alan Frost, Tape 5. 48 Jordana, Interview with Alan Frost, Tape 2. 49 NBAC, AIC, Q47-1, Handwritten notes from ‘W. W.’, 21 November 1936. 50 NBAC, AIC, Q47-3, Handwritten miscellaneous notes. 51 NAA C, A659 1941-1-2088, Innisfail Police Report, 14 November 1940; Jordana, Interview with Alan Frost, Tape 4. 52 Nettie Palmer, Australians in Spain (Sydney: Spanish Relief Committee, 1938), p. 28. 53 NAA B, BP4-3 Spanish Plaza A, Alien registration application. 54 NAA B, BP4-3 Spanish Sala R, Alien registration application. 55 Palmer, Australians in Spain, p. 28. 56 Palmer, Australians in Spain, p. 28. 57 NAA B, BP242-1 Q25027, Security Services Report, 24 July 1942. 58 NAA C, A659 1941-1-2088, Innisfail Police Report, 14 November 1940. 59 NAA C, A435 1946-4-676, Security Services Report, 13 September 1945. 60 NAA B, BP242-1 Q18337, Letter from Gordonvale Police Station to Police Inspector in Cairns, 14 June 1940. 61 NAA B, BP242-1 Q25027, Letter from Ingham Station to Criminal Investigation Branch Brisbane, 5 December 1940.

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163

62 QSA, RSI 13214-3-38, ‘Anarchist Party at Innisfail’, Security Services Report. 63 Interview with former Communist Party member, 1979, North Queensland Oral History Project, ID 116. 64 EDM, 111. 65 EDM, 111. 66 Onaindia, Interview with author. 67 ‘Police Court’, Home Hill Observer, 9 April 1938, 3. 68 ‘Police Court’, Home Hill Observer, 9 April 1938, 3. 69 NBAC, P15-3-1, Letter from R. Mas on behalf of Spanish Relief Committee to Spanish Consul, 1 June 1938. 70 NBAC, P15-3-2, Sydney SRC Minutes, VII, 25 July 1938. 71 NLA, NPMC, 1174-16-19, Nettie Palmer Diary, 22 February 1937. 72 NLA, NPMC, 1174-16-20, Nettie Palmer Diary, 10 March 1938. 73 NLA, NPMC, 1174-16-20, Nettie Palmer Diary, 22 February 1938. 74 NLA, NPMC, 1174-16-19, Nettie Palmer Diary, 26 October 1937. 75 NLA, NPMC, 1174-16-19, Nettie Palmer Diary, 26 October 1937. 76 Diane Menghetti, ‘North Queensland, ­Anti-­Fascism and the Spanish Civil War’, Labour History, 42 (1982), 67. 77 NBAC, AIC, Q47-3, Handwritten notes. 78 NBAC, P15-3-1, SRC Minutes 1937. 79 NBAC, AIC, Q47-2, Handwritten notes. 80 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 5-18, Torrents, ‘Australia’, Undated, Cultura Proletaria. 81 Unidentified former Communist Party member, 1979, North Queensland Oral History Project, ID 116. 82 Judith Keene, ‘A Spanish Springtime: Aileen Palmer and the Spanish Civil War’, Labour History, 52 (1987), 85. 83 Nettie Palmer, Spain! The Spanish People Present Their Case (Camberwell Junction: Citizen Printing Works, 1937), p. 5; for original, see NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-5082, Letter from Catalan fisherman to his Queensland brother, forwarded by Torrents to Palmer, undated. 84 NLA, NBAC, 1174-16-20, Nettie Palmer Diary, 15 May 1938. 85 ­JCU-­SC, STA, ST 5-13, Torrents, ‘Trabajo leido en el centro emancipation anarchiste de Lyon: Conversaciones’. 86 Torrents, ‘Trabajo leido en el centro emancipation anarchiste de Lyon: Conversaciones’. 87 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 5-17, ‘El Partido Comunista nos llevara a la catastrophe’, 1937, unnamed paper. 88 NAA B, BP242-1 Q25027, Letter from Intelligence Officer to Northern Command, 4 December 1941. 89 These were: G. Sorli, S. Torrents, J. Jordana, Boni, M. Fornes, P. Agostino, S. Olivier, P. D. Martini, V. Troiite, C. Estorgos, R. Rives, J. Astorquia, J. Izaguirre, J. Balbona, V. Oltra, F. Llansola, M. Cachorro, B. Masnou, J. Bisbal, M. Camarero, G. Vallacian, N. E. Coffi, P. G. Rafacalandis and

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J. Farro. For details, see J­ CU-­SC, STA, 5-17, Gabriel Sorli, ‘De Innisfail, Australia’, Cultura Proletaria, 5 September 1939. 90 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 5-17, ‘Españoles residente en Australia’, International ­Antifascist Solidarity: Australian Section, undated, unnamed paper. 91 NAA B, BP242-1 Q18337, Transcript of Objection to Internment Hearing, Miguel Torrente, 13 February 1941. 92 Torrents, quoted in Palmer, Australians in Spain, p. 29. 93 NBAC, AIC, Q47-3, International Antifascist Solidarity Leaflet, undated. 94 EDM, 115. 95 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 5-17, ‘Españoles residente en Australia’, International ­Antifascist Solidarity: Australian Section, undated, unnamed paper. 96 ‘Españoles residente en Australia’, International ­Antifascist Solidarity: Australian Section. 97 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 4-3 Trinidad Garcia, ‘Open letter from the Innisfail SRC’, Trinidad Garcia, undated. 98 ‘Innisfail: Spanish Relief’, North Queensland Guardian, 2 September 1938, 4. 99 NBAC, AIC, Q47-3, Letter from ‘KC’ to ‘PTT’, 26 October 1938. 100 ‘South Johnstone: Monthly Meeting of the AWU’, North Queensland Guardian, 12 August 1938, 6. 101 Gallego, Interview with Diane Menghetti. 102 NAA B, BP242-1 Q18337, Letter from I. O. Cairns to Northern Command, 28 November 1940. 103 NBAC, AIC, Q47-3, Letter from ‘KC’ to ‘PTT’, 26 October 1938. 104 NBAC, AIC, Q47-3, Letter from G. C. Wickbold to Trinidad Garcia, October 1938, Innisfail. 105 NBAC, AIC, Q47-2, ‘Loyalists Supported’, 1 October 1936, Argus. 106 JCU-­SC, STA, 5-17, Torrents, ‘Desde Australia’, Torrents, Undated, Cultura Proletaria. 107 Torrents, ‘Desde Australia’. 108 Torrents, ‘Desde Australia’. 109 JCU-­SC, STA, 5-18, Torrents, ‘Australia’, Torrents, Undated, Cultura Proletaria. 110 Torrents, ‘Australia’. 111 NAA B, BP242-1 Q18337, Statement made by Miguel Torrenti [sic], 12 December 1940.

Chapter 6  1 James Cook University Special Collection (hereafter ­ JCU-­ SC), Salvador Torrents Archive (hereafter STA), Torrents, 2-18, ‘Letter to the Editor’, undated, Sunday Australia.

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  2 National Archives of Australia, Brisbane (NAA B), BP242-1 Q18337, Letter from Gordonvale Police Station to Police Inspector in Cairns, 14 June 1940.   3 NAA B, BP242-1 Q30579, Army Headquarters to Victoria Barracks, ‘National Status of Internees Who Appeal’, 21 March 1941.  4 NAA B, BP242-1 Q18337, Notice of Objection, 3 November 1940, Gaythorne Internment Camp.   5 John Andres Garcia, ‘A Family Tale’, in Carmen Castelo (ed.), The Spanish Experience in Australia (Canberra: Spanish Heritage Foundation, 2000), p. 154.  6 John Andres Garcia, ‘The Spanish Democratic Centre: A Personal Experience’, in Ignacio Garcia and Agustín Maraver (eds), Memories of Migration: Seminar Proceedings, University of Western Sydney Macarthur, 4th and 5th September 1998 (Canberra: Spanish Heritage Foundation, 1999), p. 156.   7 NAA B, J25 1973-4235, Interview Report for Citizenship Application.   8 Queensland State Archives (hereafter cited as QSA), PRV 9264-1-3, Police Lists for Aliens Applying to Hold Land, 10 May 1957.   9 Claudio Villegas, ‘Recuerdos de un simpatizante del PCE’, in Garcia and Maraver (eds), Memories of Migration, p. 166. 10 ‘Spanish Exiles Found Adrift in Strange Lands’, Cairns Post, 4 January 1946, 4. 11 JCU-­SC, STA, 5-4, ‘Estimado compañero Gonzalez ¡Salud!’, Letter from F. Gonzalez to Torrents, 1948. 12 NAA B, BP25-1 Guerrera V, Application for Alien Registration Form; NAA B, J25-190 1950-12722, Application for Admission of Relative or Friend to Australia; NAA B, BP25-1 Guevara G, Application for Alien Registration Form; NAA B, BP25-1 Guerrera T, Application for Alien Registration Form; NAA B, J25-190 1951-8772, Application for Admission of Relative or Friend to Australia; NAA B, BP25-1 Lanau J, Application for Alien Registration Form; NAA B, J25-190 1950-12723, Application for Admission of Relative or Friend to Australia; NAA B, J25-190 1959-6526, Application for Admission of Relative or Friend to Australia; NAA B, J25-190 1956-14715, Application for Admission of Relative or Friend to Australia; ‘France to Zillmere: First Work Party Arrives Today’, ­Courier-­Mail, 3 January 1951, 3. 13 NAA B, BP25-1 Lanau G, Application for Alien Registration Form. 14 QSA, PRV 9254 1-2, Police Lists for Aliens Applying to Hold Land, 11 May 1955. 15 NAA B, BP25-1 Martinez Moncera, Application for Alien Registration Form; NAA B, J25-190 1969-851, Application for Certificate of Identity, 31 July 1953. 16 NAA B, BP25-1 Martinez ­E-­Spanish, Alien Registration Certificate.

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17 NAA B, J25-190 1956-9757, Application for R ­ e-­Entry Permit; NAA B, BP25-1 Martinez J, Alien Registration Certificate. 18 ‘Police Evaded Orders to Hunt Nazi Spies’, C ­ ourier-­Mail, 2 April 1946, 6. 19 National Library of Australia (hereafter NLA), Nettie Palmer Manuscript Collection (hereafter NPMC), 1174-1-6324, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 16 April 1943, Mena Creek. 20 Maria Trapp, Interview with author, 26 November 2004, Innisfail. 21 José Goicoechea, Interview with author, 4 August 2007, Brisbane. 22 Maria Trapp and Vince Cuartero, Interview with author, 31 August 2007, Innisfail. 23 NAA B, BP9-3 Martinez de Morentin J, Personal Declaration. 24 NAA B, J25-190 1949-13659, Letter from D. Martinez to Department of Immigration, 7 April 1948, Mourilyan. 25 Dolores Larrazabal, interview with author, 21 June 2007, Townsville. 26 For examples, see NAA B, BP25-1 Droguet B, Application for Alien Registration Form; NAA B, BP25-1 Droguet M D, Application for Alien Registration Form; NAA B, BP25-1 Fernandes Maria, Application for Alien Registration Form. 27 ‘An Interview with Jack the Anarchist (Jack Grancharoff)’, Radical Tradition: An Australian History Page, www.takver.com/history/sydney/ grancharoff.htm. 28 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-8045, Letter from Stan Onaindia to Palmer, 14 September 1951, Mena Creek. 29 NAA B, J25-190 1949-5129, Application for Admission of Relative or Friend to Australia. 30 Census of the Commonwealth of Australia (1954), vol. 3, tables 16 and 17. 31 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 5-18, Torrents, ‘Desde Australia: El Problema Racial’, undated, Cultura Proletaria. 32 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 5-4, Torrents, ‘My Philosophies’, undated. 33 Torrents, ‘Desde Australia: El Problema Racial’. 34 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-7702, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 13 June 1949, Mena Creek. 35 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-7702, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 30 June 1949, Mena Creek. 36 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 2-15, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, January 1948, Mena Creek. 37 ­ JCU-­ SC, STA, 5-15, M. Baruta Vila, ‘El Fracaso Capitalista de Reconstrucción Europea,’ Cultura Proletaria, undated. 38 Baruta Vila, ‘El Fracaso Capitalista de Reconstrucción Europea’. 39 JCU-­ SC, STA, 5-9, ‘Victory! For Whom?’, annotated scrapbook collection. 40 Torrents, ‘My Philosophies’.

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41 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 5-4, Letter from Torrents to Gonzalez, editor of Cultura Proletaria, undated. 42 Emilio Duran Memoirs (hereafter EDM), unpublished, 112. 43 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-7615, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 26 February 1949, Mission Beach. 44 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-7836, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, undated. 45 NAA B, BP242-1 Q25027, Letter from Commonwealth Investigation Service, 26 October 1949. 46 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-7836, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, undated. 47 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-7928, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 19 December 1950. 48 Stan Onaindia, Interview with author, 26 November 2004, Mena Creek. 49 EDM, 117. 50 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-7928, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 19 December 1950. 51 Onaindia, Interview with author. 52 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-7702, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 13 June 1949. 53 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 5-4, Letter from Torrents to the editor of Australian Democrat, 16 December 1949, Mena Creek. 54 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-7836, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, undated. 55 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-7836, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, undated. 56 QSA, RSI 13214-3-38, ‘Anarchist Party at Innisfail’, Police Department. 57 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 5-18, Torrents, ‘Postal de Australia: Al Viejo Compañero Casanovas’, Cultura Proletaria, undated. 58 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-6324, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 16 April 1943. 59 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-5605, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 15 September 1939, Mena Creek; NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-6324, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 16 April 1943, Mena Creek. 60 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-6335, Open letter from Torrents to Palmer, 18 March 1943. 61 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-7186, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 19 July 1947, Mena Creek. 62 JCU-­ SC, STA, 5-4, ‘Amigo Gonzalez’, Letter from Torrents to F. Gonzalez, editor of Cultura Proletaria, undated. 63 ­ JCU-­ SC, STA, 5-4, F. Gonzalez to Torrents, Cultura Proletaria, 27 February 1949. 64 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 5-4, F. Gonzalez to Torrents, ‘De New York’, 25 November 1948. 65 ­ JCU-­ SC, STA, 5-4, Letter from Torrents to Domingo Lombarte, undated, Mena Creek.

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66 NAA B, Q25027, Letter from Tully Police Station to Criminal Investigations Branch, Brisbane, 16 December 1940. 67 NAA B, Q25027, Letter from Tully Police Station to Criminal Investigations Branch, Brisbane, 16 December 1940. 68 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-7186, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 19 July 1947, Mena Creek. 69 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-7186, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 19 July 1947, Mena Creek. 70 NAA B, BP242-1 Q25027, Letter from Commonwealth Investigations Branch, 31 January 1947, Sydney. 71 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-7186, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 19 July 1947, Mena Creek. 72 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-7186, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 19 July 1947, Mena Creek. 73 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-7219, Letter from Australian Council for Civil Liberties to Minister for Trade and Customs, forwarded to Palmer, 6 August 1947. 74 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-7219, Letter from Australian Council for Civil Liberties to Minister for Trade and Customs, forwarded to Palmer, 6 August 1947. 75 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-7293, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 23 September 1947, Mena Creek. 76 JCU-­SC, STA, 5-18, Torrents, ‘Postal de Australia’, Cultura Proletaria, 17 April 1948. 77 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-7358, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 19 January 1948, Mena Creek. 78 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-7358, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 19 January 1948, Mena Creek. 79 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 2-17, Letter from Torrents to Brian Fitzpatrick, President of Australian Council for Civil Liberties, 1948. 80 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 5-4, Letter from Palmer to Torrents, 12 December 1948, Melbourne. 81 ­JCU-­SC, STA, 5-4, Letter from Torrents to Gonzalez, editor of Cultura Proletaria, 27 February 1949. 82 JCU-­SC, STA, 5-18, ‘Nota Administrativa’, Cultura Proletaria, 16 June 1947. 83 JCU-­SC, STA, 5-4, Letter from Torrents to Gonzalez, editor of Cultura Proletaria, 1948. 84 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-7928, Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 19 December 1950, South Mission Beach. 85 NLA, NPMC, 1174-1-8045, Letter from Stan Onaindia to Palmer, 14 September 1951, Mena Creek.

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Chapter 7   1 ‘Holt to Spain’, ­Courier-­Mail, 13 July 1957, 4.   2 ‘Spanish Basque Workers: Sought for Ingham’, Cairns Post, 15 August 1958, 9.   3 Ignacio Garcia, Operación Canguro: The Spanish Migration Scheme, 1958– 1963 (Spanish Heritage Foundation: Canberra, 2002), p. 74.  4 Letter from Herbert River District Canegrowers’ Executive to Department of Immigration, 31 August 1959, Ingham, National Archives of Australia, Brisbane, J25-190 1959-8902; Letter from Alberto Urberuaga to Bianka Vidonja Balanzategui, 21 August 2000, Durango, Bianka Vidonja Balanzategui Collection.   5 ‘Mr. Zamora’, 3 October 1964, La Crónica, 3.   6 ‘Spanish Migrants For Australia: Work in Queensland Sugar Industry’, Cairns Post, 22 January 1958, 1.   7 Letter from Department of Immigration, 8 November 1963, National Archives of Australia, Brisbane, J25-190 1967-16308.  8 Garcia, Operación Canguro, p. 20.   9 William A. Douglass, Azúcar Amargo: Vida y Fortuna de los Cortadores de Caña Italianos y Vascos en la Australia Tropical (Bilbao: Servicio Editorial Universidad del País Vasco, 1996), p. 216. 10 ‘Spanish Origin Families to Meet C ­ onsul-­ General’, Herbert River Express, 19 September 1964, 4. 11 Stan Onaindia, Interview with author, 26 November 2004, Mena Creek. 12 Douglass, Azúcar Amargo, p. 225. 13 Emilio Villanueve, Interview with author, 27 November 2004, Cairns.

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Index

Alcohol, Effects of 26, 42, 83, 95 Anarchism Confederación Nacional del Trabajo – Federación Anarquista Ibérica (CNT-FAI) 115 Cultura Proletaria 90, 92, 93, 115, 132, 134–6 Journals 91–2, 93 Legalism 74–5 Propaganda of the Deed 7 Short stories 41, 73, 77 Syndicalism 9, 56, 63, 80–1, 122 Argentina 8–9, 17, 34–5, 54–6, 80, 146 Patagonia 8, 54–6 Buenos Aires 55, 125, 134 Arrieta, Juan de 20–1 Badiola, Pascual 127 Barker, Tom 63 Blackburn, Maurice 105, 119 Calwell, Arthur 128 Catholic Church 4,6, 21, 76, 78, 101, 102, 104, 105, 141–3 Catholic Federal Immigration Council 141 Crennan, George 141 Duhig, James 104 Plan Marta 142 Quinn, James 21 Chile 8, 65, 146 Valparaiso 10, 63 Coldicutt, Ken 103, 110, 113, 114

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Colonial Sugar Refining Company 46–7, 49, 51–3, 65–6, 82–4, 91 Communism 33, 56, 64, 74–5, 79–80, 81, 88, 110, 129–32 Civil War tensions 99, 102, 108, 111–15 Communist Party of Australia / Australian Communist Party 83, 85, 98, 99, 100, 106 North Queensland Guardian 100, 103 Sharkey, Lawrence 111, 130–1 Stalinism 80, 99, 111, 130–1 Council for Civil Liberties 119, 135, 136 Cuba 6, 7, 34, 71–4, 82 Cyclones 31, 41, 89 Danesi, Luigi and Costante 85, 89 Devanny, Jean 65, 74, 85, 88 Displaced Persons 120, 128, 129 Donatiu, Claudio 34 Donatiu, Joe 67, 68 Duran, Emilio 56, 57, 66, 68, 88, 89, 102, 108, 130, 132 Duran, Lorenzo 84 Egypt 25 Escuder, Pascual 89, 104, 119 Faure, Sebastien 37, 43, 75, 77, 93 Ferrer, Francisco 29, 37, 75–6, 77, 93, 109

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180 Index First Nation Peoples 5, 12 Aboriginal Australians 12, 14, 19, 26, 41, 42, 83 First World War 8, 24, 29, 42, 53, 56, 63, 93, 96 France 24, 25, 28, 29–30, 37, 43, 120, 123-124 Argelès-sur-Mer 121 Lyon 74, 75, 91 Paris 30, 38, 91 Toulouse 29, 121 Garcia, Jack 103, 106, 131 Garcia, Trinidad 58, 62, 102, 109, 114, 119, 131, 136 Gold Rush 15, 22, 23, 32 Goñi, Pedro 85, 89 Goñi, Marina 57, 85, 89 Gras i Fort, Peter 22 Great Depression 86–8 Guerrera, Valentin and Teresa 123–4 Hurd, Ron 113 Immigration 20, 22–3, 32, 35, 36, 54, 55, 127–8, 139, 140, 145 White Australia Policy 12–13 Internal Spanish 8–9, 24, 141 Industrial Action 1909 48 1911 48 1927 65–8 1934 84–85 Industrial Workers of the World 11, 63–5, 85 International Antifascist Solidarity 112–16 International Brigades 99, 104–6 Japan 12, 118 Jordana, Juan 26, 30, 34, 83, 94, 107 Jordana, Ray 77, 87, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 118, 119–20, 121, 132, 137

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Kidston, William 47 Kwantu Maru 56–8, 85, 89, 106, 112, 127 Labor Party Queensland Labor Party 88, 113 Queensland Labor Party Split 131 Australian Labor Party 135–6 Lombarte, Domingo 89, 135 Martinez, Anselma 127 Martinez, Antonio 58 Martinez, Daniel 55, 85 Martinez, Dolores 59 Martinez, Fausto 61, 127 Martinez, Francisco 112 Martinez, Jose and Montserrat 124–5 Martinez, Miguel 59, 68, 89 Mendiolea, Teresa 89, 127, 143 Menzies, Robert 105, 131 New South Wales 20–1, 62 Newcastle 61 Sydney 10, 13, 16, 23, 27, 38, 109–10 New Zealand 12, 63 Auckland 57 Northern Territory 39, 40, 54, 58–61, 65 Darwin 39, 59, 61–2, 118 Gilruth, John 59, 61 Pine Creek 60–1 Vestey’s Meatworks 61 Palmada, Felix 33, 65 Palmada, Balbina 33 Palmer, Aileen 111, 118 Palmer, Nettie 83, 92, 100, 105, 109, 118, 119, 133, 136 Parer, Josep 22 Paronella, José 43, 146 Paronella Park 146 Philippines 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 22 Manila 3, 4, 10

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Index 181 Police 51, 58, 66, 68, 74, 85, 90, 108 Surveillance in Spain 29, 91, 126, 143 Surveillance in Australia 33, 65, 99, 107, 119–20, 135 Proust, Marcel 83 Queensland 15, 17, 19, 23, 26, 31, 39, 64, 73, 93, 100, 139, 140 Brisbane 13, 15, 27, 31, 33, 47, 122–5, 146 Innisfail 34, 35–7, 42, 48, 51–2, 65, 89, 93, 110, 112, 114, 128, 137, 144 Mourilyan 27, 31, 33, 36, 39, 64, 82, 110, 127, 147 South Johnstone 35, 102 Townsville 47, 52, 110 Racism 27, 64, 73, 76, 83–4, 87, 88, 94–5 Rationalism 74, 110, 133 Education 77 Rosende, Jesús 36, 65, 86 Ruiz, Maria 100, 102 Russia 7, 133 Revolution 64, 79 Second World War 90, 106, 112, 118–20, 123 Smith’s Weekly 64 Socialism 1, 9, 11, 55, 75, 85, 97, 115 Solas, Juan 124 Sorli, Gabriel 34, 89, 90, 92, 93, 107, 137 South Africa 12 South Australia Port Adelaide 38 Spain 9, 17, 20, 22, 24, 30, 33, 36, 45, 68, 71, 72, 73, 75, 117, 120, 122, 126–8, 129, 134, 139, 140–2 Andalusia 1, 8, 35, 55, 124 Barcelona 7, 8, 24, 25, 28, 31, 35, 37, 50, 52, 53, 69, 75, 78, 88, 90, 93, 110–11, 121, 122, 123

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Basque Country 23, 139, 140–1 Catalonia 1, 22, 28, 43, 47, 77, 91, 100, 145 Franco, Francisco 17, 101, 102, 104–5, 108, 116, 117, 121, 122, 124, 125–7, 129, 131, 134, 137, 139, 142–4, 145 Gerona 31 Invasion by Allied forces 121, 126 Mataró 26, 30, 77, 100, 106 Napoleonic Wars 4–5, 20 Navarre 55, 127 Second Republic 98, 101, 129 Semana Trágica 29, 76, 101 Trienio Bolchevique 97 Valencia 35, 99 Spanish Civil War 96–107 Spanish Relief Committees 107–16 Sri Lanka 25 Tapiola, Bruno 128 Thoreza Vega, Adelaide de la 21 Torrente, Miguel 107, 120, 128 Torrents, Salvador 25–7, 28, 29–31, 34, 35, 37, 38–43, 50, 66, 71, 73–8, 79, 84–6, 89, 91–4, 95, 99–100, 103, 105, 108, 110, 111, 113, 115, 118–19, 123, 129–33, 134–8, 147 Trade Unions 9, 11, 43, 46, 51, 62, 63, 64, 66, 69, 70, 81, 83, 84, 88, 94, 103, 113, 114 Australian Railway Union 115 Australian Workers Union 48, 52, 53, 59, 61, 67, 68, 82, 85, 86 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics 122, 129, 130 United Kingdom 10, 11, 13, 20, 24, 54, 122 Gibraltar 125-6, 129 Non-Intervention policy 99, 102, 103 United Nations Organisation 130

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182 Index United States of America 11, 12, 13, 31, 36, 37, 45, 73, 82, 87, 94, 125, 129, 130, 137, 147 California 4, 5, 10, 22 Haymarket Massacre 1 Mexican-American War 5 New York 8, 24, 92, 115, 123, 134, 135 San Francisco 20, 63, 123, 136 Spanish-American War [1898] 6, 7, 72 Vanuatu 3 Victoria 21, 32 Bendigo 23, 109 Melbourne 22, 23, 26, 38, 57–8, 62, 71, 105, 109, 122, 143 Western Australia Fremantle 23, 26, 38, 71, 83

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New Norcia 21-22 Workplace Exploitation 9, 10, 48, 50, 66, 70, 72–3, 78, 79, 84, 93, 97, 102 British Preference 82–6 Pacific Islander Labourers 45–6, 48 Report of the Royal Commission appointed to inquire into the report on the social and economic effect of increase in number of aliens in North Queensland (1925) 87 Report of the Royal Commission into the Sufficiency of Labour for the Sugar Industry (1906) 46 Zamora, Celia 98 Zamora, Eliseo 98, 140 Zola, Emile 25–6, 83

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