The Eatocks were a family of Aboriginal communists who fought for Aboriginal and working-class rights. At the head of the family was Lucy Eatock, who, attracted to radical working-class politics during the great strikes of the 1890s, became an activist against conscription in World War I and subsequently a communist matriarch who led her large family in the fight against evictions and the 1930s depression-era austerity imposed on the working class in Sydney.
Lucy, whose life is documented in Delusions of Grandeur, a history of her family written by her granddaughter Joan, believed in working-class politics that sought to achieve equality against all the divide and rule politics that capitalism threw up. She became a member of the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World and then the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and was determined that all of her family were to become revolutionary militants, throwing them into the battle against Australian capitalism.
Born in 1874 in rural Queensland, Lucy came across the shearers’ union as she served meals in the shearing shed. Militant shearers spoke of the benefits and lessons the Australian Shearers Union brought them: equality, solidarity and the collective struggle of the working class. Lucy also learned the impact of class struggle on ordinary people.
The shearers, when on strike and picketing, promoted a “them and us” attitude, identifying the boss as the enemy of workers fighting for their rights and interests. This attitude was not confined to the shearers but common to huge swathes of the Australian working class in the 1890s, as major class battles broke out, including the maritime strike of 1890, the miners’ strike of 1892 and the shearers’ strikes of 1891 and 1894.
Unfortunately, the strike wave eventually ended in defeat, but those strikes bore out what Lucy had learned from the shearers: that there is a class battle between those at the top of society, who live lavishly, and those at the bottom, who are exploited and oppressed.
After Lucy married Aboriginal stockman William Eatock in 1895 and the first of their nine children was born, the Eatocks moved between NSW and Queensland to find work. Constantly moving in rural areas was dangerous for the Eatocks, because such areas in Australia then were more overtly racist and massacres of Aboriginal people were still known to happen. When Lucy’s children went to school, the threat of child removal by the Aborigines Protection Board was a constant concern. The Australian state at the time was removing Aboriginal children from their families, creating what became known as the Stolen Generations. The children taken away from Aboriginal families frequently became servants and labourers for non-Indigenous families or wards of the state.
In defiance of all this, Lucy began to become more politically active. She participated in the anti-conscription campaigns during World War I. The anti-war sentiment in the working class that had built up by 1916, as workers were sent into the meat grinder of war while their bosses profited, climaxed in the fight against the referendums put on by Labor Prime Minister Billy Hughes to establish conscription for the war effort abroad.
The two referendums were defeated, a victory for workers pushing back against a war that had sent workers across the world to their deaths. During this time Lucy also joined the Industrial Workers of the World and, following that organisation’s destruction, the Communist Party, fostering her ideas of the working class needing to fight for equality amongst all—women, men, black and white.
In the 1920s Lucy worked in Sydney, where on Sunday afternoons she would go to Speakers’ Corner in the Domain. Speakers’ Corner was a popular site where individuals of many political persuasions would stand on a soapbox and argue their politics. Speakers’ Corner is where Lucy first came into contact with the CPA.
A CPA member, on the soapbox, argued the need for socialism and what it would bring for working-class people—the CPA member ended each passage of his speech with “under socialism everything will be peaches and cream!” The playfulness of the speech was engaging for Lucy, even more so when conservative watchers yelled out, “I don’t want peaches and cream!” Unlike this response, the argument for socialism invigorated Lucy to become a speaker herself against the ills of capitalism and, eventually, a member of the CPA.
Lucy’s membership of the CPA and constant rabble rousing in the streets of Sydney made her a known figure to workers, and to the police and state. In Sydney Trotskyist Nick Origlass’ biography, written by Hall Greenland, a Glebe detective sergeant claimed that Lucy was “one of the principals in all communist disturbances in the city and suburbs”. In an article titled “Who’s Who in Communism: The Complete List”, Smith’s Weekly, a pro-war newspaper, listed Lucy and her sons and daughters as prominent communist agitators and organisers.
Lucy’s children Lindsay, Noel, Alex, Adam and Roderick followed their mother’s example, subscribing to revolutionary socialist politics, and becoming union militants in the brickyards, factories and building sites where they found work. They joined the CPA and were prominent socialist activists in their own right.
Lindsay stood as a Communist Party candidate for the 1930 NSW state election. She was a powerful orator whose speeches could draw crowds to block roads. Arrested at an unemployed demonstration in November 1930, she was charged with riotous behaviour, assault and damage to a constable’s watch. Despite eight days in jail as a result, she later wrote that, if necessary, she would do it again.
The younger children, Roderick and Noel, were a part of the Young Communist League, the CPA’s youth organisation, while all of Lucy’s children who were in Sydney battled against forced evictions during the Great Depression as members of the combative Unemployed Workers Movement (UWM), the leading organisation of the anti-eviction campaigns of the 1930s.
Living up to their notoriety of being communist disrupters, the high point of the Eatocks’ anti-capitalist activism in this period was their role in the anti-eviction movement and the UWM.
The Great Depression was a huge economic calamity. Capitalist crisis destroyed the living standards of working-class people. By 1932, unemployment reached 29 percent, with unemployed workers often unable to pay rent and dependent on a demeaning dole system for the necessities of life. For many Aboriginal people, there was no dole, just meagre food rations. The NSW state initiated swathes of evictions—as late as 1935, five and a half thousand orders of ejectment were made by the NSW courts.
In response to this horrific reality, the communist-led UWM was created as an organising body for radical workers and unemployed people to fight back against evictions. The Eatocks were part of many anti-eviction struggles in working-class suburbs like Redfern, Glebe and Bankstown, where they were met with violence. At the infamous Bankstown anti-eviction riot in 1931, Alex Eatock was shot by police and then imprisoned for eighteen months.
The following year, after the Glebe dole riot in October 1932, where Lucy, then almost 60, was whipped by a police inspector for attending, Noel Eatock was handed the heaviest prison sentence of any unemployed activist—even though there was extensive evidence he was not present at the time of his alleged offence.
The riot was a protest of unemployed people against the application of the “means test” for the dole. The “means test” was a state assessment of those applying for the dole of their families’ finances, savings and possessions to determine whether they would receive the dole. This was a humiliating process in which the NSW state often drastically cut benefits to unemployed people and families if any other income existed—even if that meant a child working or someone having a pension.
Noel was arrested on a charge of battering a police sergeant, receiving a two-and-a- half year sentence. The CPA published articles in its newspaper, the Workers’ Weekly, calling for Noel’s release and created the Eatock Defence Committee, focused on protesting and campaigning for Noel’s freedom. Noel’s arrest and the subsequent campaign for his release combined the struggle against the depression-era economic hardships with the right to protest.
However, in the course of the free Eatock campaign, the CPA slowed down the campaign and refused to organise further rallies and meetings. Joan E. Eatock, the biographer for the Eatock family, references that Noel and other CPA rank-and-file members became frustrated with the leaders of the party, who were also denying the right of its members to be involved in protests and meetings on local issues. Noel’s growing frustration with the CPA and the campaign to release him slowing down resulted in him associating with the Left Opposition.
The Left Opposition was created by Jack Sylvester, the campaign treasurer and founder of the Eatock Defence Committee, after he was expelled from the CPA in 1932. It was Sylvester who argued to Noel Eatock to join the Left Opposition, Sydney’s first Trotskyist organisation. The Left Opposition organised a “Release Eatock” rally in Glebe, and ran articles in its newspaper, the Tocsin, demanding the release of Noel and fundraising for the Eatock Defence Committee.
The CPA, by this point thoroughly Stalinist and run by leaders who took their politics straight from Moscow, abused the Left Opposition group for its affiliation with Trotskyist politics. The experience of the free Eatock campaign led Noel and Jack Sylvester to become partners in fighting the NSW courts and police. Other Eatocks like Lucy also left the CPA due to it dropping the campaign to free Noel and refusing to support the families of those who were arrested during the anti-eviction rallies in the 1930s.
Biographer Hall Greenland argues that the arrest of Noel Eatock and the campaign to release him were crucial in the formation of the first Sydney Trotskyist group. While it was tiny compared to the CPA, it was important that a space was created for the growth and development of a genuine revolutionary alternative to Stalinist politics, which had turned Marxism from working-class revolution into an apologist for dictatorial regimes like the USSR.
The Eatocks were targeted by the police and the state, but this did not deter them from fighting for workers and the oppressed, displaying militancy and courage. Later generations of Eatocks remained socialists and militants, from Lucy’s granddaughter Pat Eatock’s involvement in the setting up of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in 1972 to Pat’s children Cathy and Greg’s role, alongside Pat, in campaigning against Aboriginal deaths in custody in the 1980s, to opposing the racist Northern Territory Intervention from 2007.
Learning about the history of the Eatock family should be inspiration for new generations of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal activists to become radical socialists fighting for a better world. The Eatock family history contains an array of lessons, from understanding the class struggle and taking up the fight against the state, to not being cowed by the inevitable repression. We need more activists like the Eatocks—people willing to fight against capitalism and for a world controlled and run by ordinary working-class people. Whether you are Aboriginal or not, we have a world to win together.
