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Australian Books

Communists down under

15 January 2022

9:00 AM

15 January 2022

9:00 AM

The Party - The Communist Party of Australia from heyday to reckoning Stuart Macintyre

Allen & Unwin, pp.512, $42.50

When I was a fifteen-year-old student at Melbourne High School, I tried to join the Communist Party of Australia. One afternoon after school in June 1959, outside the Bryant & May match factory in Richmond, I met a CPA organiser, who I later found out was a leading operative, Rex Mortimer.

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Ross Fitzgerald AM is Emeritus Professor of History and Politics at Griffith University. His most recent books are the Grafton Everest adventures The Dizzying Heights & The Lowest Depths, co-authored with Ian McFadyen, and a memoir Fifty Years Sober: An Alcoholic’s Journey, both published by Hybrid Publishers, Melbourne.

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