‘Truth and Time Against the World’s Wrongs’: Montagu Scott, Jim Case and the Lost World of the BrisbaneWorkerCartoonists

Dyrenfurth, Nick

Labour History: A Journal of Labour and Social History (2010), 99, (1), 115–148.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3828/labourhistory.99.1.0115
Language: English
Pages: 34

Abstract

In a 1920 book celebrating the famed labour movement cartoonist Claude Marquet, his long-time editor, Henry Boote, told of how, ‘every week tens of thousands of men and women derived from [his] vivid imagery keen satire instruction on all the vital questions’. This was a compliment Boote might have paid to a number Marquet’s cartooning comrades: the Brisbane Worker duo of Montagu Scott and Jim Case, or the well-known London-based Australian Will Dyson. Comparatively speaking, the Queenslanders have been neglected by labour historians. Yet, beginning with Scott, the Worker cartoonists set the stylistic and thematic template for the likes of Marquet and Dyson. Unashamedly populist, with a fiercely racialist take on working-class politics, their propaganda constituted an important part of the precocious success enjoyed by the Queensland and federal Labor parties before the catastrophic events of World War I.

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Endnotes

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21.Montagu Scott, ‘The Devil We Have’, Boomerang, 3August1889. Google Scholar

22.Montagu Scott, ‘Imperialism Vetoes the Immigration Bill’, Boomerang, 6April1888. Britain represented by the figure of ‘Policeman Knutsford’ reproaches her in a symbolic nod to Britain’s diplomatic sensitivities as regards China: ‘See here, young woman! If you do anything so un-British as shooting, I’ll push my bayonet through you.’ Scott was here drawing upon another, an earlier and no less infamous anti-Chinese image,E.M. Murray’s‘Wake, Australia Wake!’(Boomerang, 11February1888), which showed a pig-tailed Chinese man with a knife between his teeth entering the bedroom of a sleeping Queensland beauty. Google Scholar

23.Montagu Scott, ‘Where are the Police?’, Boomerang, 4August1888. Scott’s commentary directly reacted to the Normanton anti-Malay riots of the same year. See Jacqui Donegan and Raymond Evans,‘Running amok: the Normanton race riots of 1888 and the genesis of white Australia’, inJournal of Australian Studies, no.71, 2001, pp.83-98. Google Scholar

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27.Markey, ‘Race and Labour in Australia’, p.347, and, more generally,Markey, The Making of the Labor Party. Google Scholar

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32.Ross McMullin, The Light on the Hill: The Australian Labor Party, 1891-1991,Oxford University Press,, 1992, p.26. Google Scholar

33.TheWorkerboard first met on 14 February 1890. It consisted of Gilbert Casey (chairman), Albert Hinchcliffe (treasurer), Charles Seymour (secretary), Matt Reid and W. Mabbott. In 1893, Blackwell was replaced by W.G. Higgs. Having won a seat in the Queensland parliament in 1899, Higgs resigned, passing the editorial baton to Charlie Seymour who subsequently appointed Frank Kenna to the position. When Kenna entered parliament in 1902, H.E. Boote edited the paper until 1911. Seymour once again took charge before Jack Hanlon was appointed, holding the position from 1915 to 1943 (AWU, The ‘Worker’s’ First Seventy Years, pp.22and23). Google Scholar

34.Mark Hearn andHarry Knowles, One Big Union: A History of the Australian Workers’ Union,Cambridge University Press,, 1996, pp.102, 106. Google Scholar

35.Guyatt, ‘The Publicists’, p.250. Google Scholar

36.AWU, The ‘Worker’s’ First Seventy Years, p.23. Google Scholar

37.SeeSimon Booth, Picturing Politics: Cartoons of Melbourne’s Labour Press, 1890-1919, UnpublishedPhD thesis,University of Melbourne,School of Historical Studies, 2008, andDyrenfurth andQuartly, ‘All the World Over’, pp.6.13-6.17. OnQuiz, seeMahood, The Loaded Line, p.217. Google Scholar

38.Livingstone Hopkins, ‘The Labour Crisis’, Bulletin, 16August1890(SeeDyrenfurth andQuartly, ‘Fat Man v ‘The People”, pp.31-120). Apart from American imagery, he is clearly drawing on Scott’sBoomerangimage of Capital and Labour from the previous year which itself alluded to Aesop’s fable of two goats that butted heads (Montagu Scott, ‘One of them must lie down or – ’, Boomerang, 13April1889). On the historical background andfin de siécleeconomic and cultural factors surrounding the cartooning choice of Fat Man, seeDyrenfurth andQuartly, ‘Fat Man v “The People”’, pp.37-40andDyrenfurth andQuartly, ‘All the world over’, p.06.12. Google Scholar

39.Dyrenfurth andQuartly, ‘All the World Over’, p.06.6. Google Scholar

40.Montagu Scott, ‘The Spirit of the Times’, Boomerang, 13September1890. See alsoMontagu Scott, ‘Which One Will Get Up First?’, Boomerang, 30August1890. Google Scholar

41.Montagu Scott, ‘Why Don’t They Drop Him?’, Worker(), 17April1897;Montagu Scott, ‘The Middle Man’, Worker(), 12January1895;Montagu Scott, ‘The Bushwhackers’ Brigade’, Worker(), 20January1900. Google Scholar

42.Montagu Scott, ‘All the World Over’, Worker(), 23May1903. Google Scholar

43.Michael Leach, “Manly, True and White’: Masculine Identity and Australian Socialism’, inGeoff Stokes(ed.), The Politics of Identity in Australia,Cambridge University Press,, 1997;Dyrenfurth, ‘A terrible monster’, pp.91-96. Google Scholar

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45.Montagu Scott, ‘It Blocks the Way’, Worker(), 30September1905. Google Scholar

46.Montagu Scott, ‘Falstaff Up To Date’, Worker(), 8May1893. Google Scholar

47.Montagu Scott, ‘Labour’s Empire Day’, Worker(), 26May1906. Google Scholar

48.Chinese immigration was virtually eliminated by the Statebeforethe White Australia policy of 1901. Between 1888 and 1901 Australia’s Chinese population fell from about 50,000 to about 32,000 (Keith Willey, ‘Australia’s Population’, inCurthoys andMarkus, Who Are Our Enemies?, p.5). Google Scholar

49.Montagu Scott, ‘Up for vagrancy, Or what may soon happen in Queensland’, Worker(), 25July1896. See also Scott’s image of a rural town dominated by Chinese; ‘The Yellow Agony (‘A VIEW IN CHINA? – Oh dear, no! – It’s only the main street in one of our inland towns’), Worker(), 16January1897. In an image from the previous year the racial invader is Japanese, literally fanning out across Queensland (‘The March of the Jap’, Worker(), 16May1896) and, from 1897, a sword-wielding Japanese robber enters the bedroom window of a female White Queensland‘A Coalition Government: A Coalition with the Japanese to ruin Queensland’, Worker(), 31July1897. Google Scholar

50.Montagu Scott, ‘The Curse of Cheap Labour’, Worker(), 20January1900. Google Scholar

51.Robin Archer, Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States?,Princeton University Press,, 2007, p.58. Other variants of this argument appear inMarkus, Fear and Loathing, pp.211-219, andMarkey, The Making of the Labor Party, ch. 10. Google Scholar

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53.Mahood suggests that the Goanna might be Ebenezer Murray (Mahood, The Loaded Line, p.237). He also appeared to pen other anti-Semitic and anti-Asian images under the ironic pseudonym, ‘S.F. Grifelwaite’. Google Scholar

54.The Goanna,‘The Money Lender to the Unemployed’, Worker(), 11June1892. SeePeter Love, Labour and the Money Power: Australian Labour Populism 1890-1950,Melbourne University Press,, 1984, pp.6, 37-38. For a broader reading of anti-Semitism on the Left, seePhilip Mendes, ‘Left attitudes towards Jews: Antisemitism and Philosemitism’, Australian Journal of Jewish Studies, vol.9, no.1, 1995, pp.7-44. Google Scholar

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58.On social democratic labourism, seeDyrenfurth, Heroes and Villains, ‘Introduction’, andNick Dyrenfurth, ‘What should Labor stand for?’, inNick Dyrenfurth andTim Soutphommasane(eds), All That’s Left: What Labor Should Stand For,UNSWP,, 2010. Google Scholar

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61.Montagu Scott, ‘The Clutch of the Money Power’, Worker(), 22April1899. Google Scholar

62.Lenore Layman, ‘Fighting Fatman Fetteration: Labour Culture and Federation’, inMark Hearn andGreg Patmore(eds), Working the Nation: Working Life and Federation, 1890-1914,Pluto Press,, 2001, p.48. Google Scholar

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65.Montagu Scott, ‘Labor’s Xmas Gift to the Commonwealth’, Worker(), 14December1901. SeeDyrenfurth, Heroes and Villains, ch. 3. Google Scholar

66.Montagu Scott, ‘On Guard’, Worker(), 10November1906. Google Scholar

67.Montagu Scott, ‘The Federal Situation’, Worker(), 7May1904. Google Scholar

68.For more on this iconography and political sea-change, seeDyrenfurth, ‘Labor’s view of fusion’, inDyrenfurth andStrangio(eds), Confusion, pp.78-86. Google Scholar

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76.Jim Case, ‘Every Labour Vote Wanted!’, Worker(), 3October1912. Google Scholar

77.Jim Case, ‘The Fusion Army’, Worker(), 22January1910. See alsoJim Case, ‘Anti-National Guttersnipes’, Worker(), 9December1911, and the post-fusion image,Jim Case, ‘The Builder and the Destroyer’, Worker(), 10April1913. Google Scholar

78.Jim Case, ‘Economic Bloodsuckers’, Worker(), 1May1913. Google Scholar

79.Dyrenfurth, ‘Labor’s view of fusion’, pp.99-101. Google Scholar

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82.For example,Frederick Opper, ‘Willie and his Papa’, San Francisco Examiner, 7August1900. Surveys of this cartooning phenomenoncan be found inStephen Hess andMilton Kaplan, The Ungentlemanly Art: a History of American Political Cartoons,Macmillan,, 1968, p.124;Dewey, Art of Ill Will, p.124;William Murrell, A History of American Graphic Humor: 1865-1938, Vol. 2,Macmillan,, 1967, p.176. Google Scholar

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84.Jim Case, ‘Clear the way, ye Lords and Lackeys’, Worker(), 1January1910. Google Scholar

85.Jim Case, ‘Diverting his Attention’, Worker(), 6February1909. Google Scholar

86.Originally published in theAustralian Worker, it was reprinted as a leaflet with distribution running to one million copies.Vane Lindesay, ‘Australian Cartoonists and World War One’, inAnna Rutherford andJames Wieland(eds), War: Australia’s Creative Response,Dangaroo Press,, 1997, p.84. See alsoVane Lindesay andJohn McLaren, ‘The War Cartoons of Claude Marquet’, inRutherford andWieland, Australia’s Creative Response). Google Scholar

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88.Jim Case, ‘History Repeated – A Famous Ancient Ruse’, Worker(), 28September1916. Google Scholar

89.Nick Dyrenfurth, ‘Labor’s fusion legacy’, inDyrenfurth andStrangio(eds), Confusion, pp.293-96, andDyrenfurth, Heroes and Villains, ch. 6. Google Scholar

90.For instance,Will Dyson, ‘Now or Never’, Labor Call, 19October1916. Google Scholar

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93.Marquet similarly dispensed with his populist imagery of heroic rural workers after 1918, preferring to depict the ALP as a blue-collar, industrial worker (Claude Marquet, ‘Dignity and Impudence’, Australian Worker, 25September1919) who often engaged global capital in the more universal struggle between classes (Claude Marquet, ‘When They Meet’, Australian Worker, 24April1919). Google Scholar

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95.Jim Case, ‘Flicking them off’, Worker(), 10July1919. See alsoJim Case, ‘The Meddler’ Worker(), 10July1919. Google Scholar

96.Jim Case, ‘His Masterpiece’, Worker(), 8July1920. Google Scholar

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99.Jim Case, ‘Onward Christian Soldier’, Truth, 20March1921. Google Scholar

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101.Jim Case, ‘Will They Pull Together?’, Truth, 6March1921. Google Scholar

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