LEN FOX the journalist,
artist, social activist and Mona Brand, his playwright-partner, lived
up The Cross for some fifty years. Fox met Mona Brand through the Sydney
Realist Writers' Group and the couple married in 1955. Their small terrace
in Little Surrey Street was a remarkable home where culture lived with
socialist politics. Like many intellectuals and émigrés
they were comfortable with The Cross’s mix of cosmopolitanism and
working class realism. Mona Brand’s plays were performed at the
New Theatre in St Peter’s Lane, Darlinghurst.
Len Fox’s paintings, sketches and posters
reveal his commitment to the human face of socialism. The generation
of Australians drawn to communism in the 1930s and 1940s, like Len
Fox and Mona Brand, emerged from an indigenous humanist radical tradition
and, more often than not, were at odds with the cold, dogmatic men
at the top.
Like many in his generation, the Great Depression
had a profound impact on Len Fox. After teaching at Scotch College
in Melbourne for 4 years, he went overseas where, in Germany, he saw
the signs of Nazism rising and, in London, he witnessed the hunger
marches. Fox returned to Melbourne in 1934 and joined the Movement
against War and Fascism (active 1932–1939).
His began writing for the Movement’s journal World Peace and inaugurated
a prolific career as a journalist with a pamphlet co-written with friend
Nettie Palmer, titled Spain! (1936).
To spread the word about the imminent catastrophe
looming over Europe, the anti-fascist movement invited Egon Kisch,
the Czech writer and participant in the European avant-garde, to lecture
in late 1934. The five months of Kisch’s stay galvanised conservative forces. He was refused
entry at each port as a ‘prohibited immigrant’ but managed
to lecture to packed halls. During this confident time of the broad left
period following the Dimitrov Report, Fox, now secretary of the anti-fascist
movement, joined the Communist Party, remaining a member after Cold War
paranoia took hold in the 1950s “to fight Stalinism from within”.
Fox sketched over his lifetime, preferring
to think through images. His adored uncle was the painter Emanuel Phillips
Fox (1865-1915) and painter Ethel Carrick Fox was his aunt. Len is
the little boy in the sailor suit in E. Phillips Fox’s The Arbour (1911, National Gallery
of Victoria) a graceful image of a middle-class Jewish family in a spring
garden. He took up oil painting in the mid-1940s after classes with the
Studio of Realist Artists. His graphic work quotes others he admired,
especially his newspaper colleagues, cartoonists Tom Challen and Herbert
McClintock, while his modest paintings have a singularly utopian air.
He saw himself as a commercial artist, only holding an exhibition for
his 90th Birthday. The strength and honesty of political images and messages
from this not too distant era, contrast with our age of spinmeistery
and ‘outfoxing’.
The exhibition includes rare remnants of the
popular but ephemeral ‘poster
exhibitions’ held in union halls and workplaces in from the 1940s
to 1960s. Often material was destroyed because of the consequence of
membership of often banned (‘proscribed’) organizations.
Homes were sometimes raided for ‘incriminating material’.
These are artworks literally from under the bed.
Looking back, in his Australians on the Left
(1996), Fox saw that these long struggles against racism and nuclear
weapons, and for Aboriginal rights, workers' rights and the environment,
brought significant successes. Communism failed but fascism was beaten
in Germany. Fox wrote "We
failed to give socialism a human face" but the Party “helped
bring Australia out of its insular cultural cringe to the Tories".
Faith Bandler said at Fox's funeral service in January this year, "He
helped renew our faith in people."
Media: Drawings use combinations of pencil, crayon, poster paint or
watercolour on paper. Oils are on canvas board or canvas.
1. PEACE & CIVIL RIGHTS, 1950–1967
Fox’s painting, Love, showing two children with a dove, the symbol
of the international peace movement since Picasso’s Guernica (1937)
was one of 100 works submitted to the Peace Art Prize Exhibition held
in conjunction with the Youth Carnival for Peace and Friendship in 1952.
Thousands queued to view works, first at the Ironworkers' and then at
the Waterside Workers Federation headquarters. When artist Lloyd Rees
awarded the prize to a post-impressionist style painting, Tribune fumed
that 'formalism' had triumphed over 'realism', exposing the gaps between
the increasingly insular central committee, party press and artists.
Later Fox wrote the poem Brown Child and White
Child (1957) which reads: “Brown
child and white child/ spoke to each other/ And the worlds that they
said/ were Sister … Brother.” The years campaigning for
civil rights which culminated in the "Yes" vote campaign in
the 1967 referendum, are recorded by Len Fox and Faith Bandler in The
Time was Ripe: A History of the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship, 1956–69,
(1983). These anti-colonial and anti-racist campaigns were in parallel
with opposition to Australia’s military involvement in Vietnam,
lasting over eleven years (1962–1973).
Love, 1952. Oil, 62 x 51. Peace Art Prize exhibition and Blake Prize
entry.
Brown Child and White Child, no 2, 1959–1960. Oil, 76 x 60.
Peace for our Children, c. 1959. 76 x 50 cm.
Framed Group:
Atom Bomb Target? c. 1952. Peace Council, printed poster, 36 x 255 cm.
Children of Hiroshima, Japanese Peace Film. Roneo poster.
Right Wrongs Write YES for Aborigines! Referendum to afford full Citizenship
Rights to Aboriginal Australians, 17 May 1967. Printed poster.
Greetings! 1959. Artwork for Len Fox and Mona Brand Christmas card.
Peace, late-1950s. Artwork for May Day.
Journalist Wilfred Burchett recruited Fox and
Brand to help the Vietnamese with English translations. For two years
Fox worked as copy journalist at the Hanoi News Agency and Mona for
the Voice of Vietnam. This was the new Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s
optimistic interregnum following the defeat of the French army at Dien
Bien Phu. A ceasefire agreement, backed by the international community,
was signed in Geneva, on 20 July 1954. This was a signal to other colonies:
the next to rise up was Algeria, three months later.
Fox’s drawing of a Hanoi typical street
scene is directly opposite their home. He was captivated by life on
the Red River, crafts and tribal peoples, sketching during the siesta
break. Fox wrote Friendly Vietnam and Brand wrote Daughters of Vietnam,
based on their experiences. On their return, the couple held exhibitions
and lectures about Vietnam.
Framed Group:
Map of Vietnam (showing its region and relation to Australia), 1956–57.
30.5 x 38 cm.
Hanoi Street Scene, 1956–57. 24.5 x 31 cm.
Untitled Portrait (traditional artist), 1956–57. 32.5 x 25 cm.
Untitled Portrait (male farm worker), 1956–57. 32.5 x 25 cm.
I forgot to take a gun, c. mid-1960s. 30.5 x 38 cm.
Vietnam Forum—Vietnam the Continuing War, c. mid-1960s. Printed
poster.
Fox campaigned for decades to have the flag
of the Eureka Stockade in the Ballarat Art Gallery authenticated and
recognised as the dramatic symbol of the Australian struggle for political
democracy. In 1954 Fox edited a year-long Eureka Centenary for Tribune’s
cultural section. He self-published The Strange Story of the Eureka
Flag in 1963, concluding that this was the authentic flag. He provided
more evidence in Eureka and Its Flag (1973) and The Eureka Flag (1992).
Fox was vindicated when, in 1996, a sketchbook of watercolours by Charles
Doudiet, painted on the goldfields in the 1850s turned up. It included
sketches of the flag exactly as described by Fox. This November is
the 150th anniversary.
The model for Fox’s portrait of Peter Lalor, the 27-year-old Irish
engineer who called for volunteers to “defend their rights and
liberties” against a Colonial autocracy, is the Woolloomooloo seaman
who invited Fox to sketch him as he stoked engines.
After Eureka, trade unionism arose quickly, achieving the 8-Hour Day
for many tradesmen in 1856. It was in the Ballarat-Bendigo district that
miners formed the first large-scale trade union in 1874 (Amalgamated
Miners' Association) and this spread to shearers in the same region,
and then to other workers. After defeat of these unions in the strikes
of 1890, the Australian Labor Party was formed.
'On guard at Eureka, 1854, 1954. Oil, 76 x 61 cm.
Exhibited Sulman Prize, Art Gallery of NSW, 22 January–27 February
1955 (cat. 42).
The Wealthy Classes have a very different tradition, c. mid-1950s. Painted
poster, 64 x 52 cm. Verso: ‘Howard Fast goaled in NSW’.
Pig Iron Bob Menzies, c. 1952. Painted poster, 64 x 52 cm.
Spirit of Eureka, 1854-1954, 1954. Painted poster, 64 x 52 cm. Verso: ‘Lawrence
goaled for asking that his people were treated like human beings’.
When Fox moved to Sydney in 1940, he began
an extensive career as a journalist for left-wing papers. He started
with the State Labor Party’s
weekly paper Progress: The voice of State Labor (1940–45) and moved
to the weekly Tribune (1946–55). Progress was the left’s
standard-bearer during the Second World War as Tribune was banned over
many of these years. Fox said afterwards: "We acted as though we,
and only we, could plan the future," he wrote, "as though world
socialism was just around the corner. We ignored the rumblings of the
Cold War ... we ignored reality."
After Vietnam, Fox worked for the Miners’ Federation
weekly paper Common Cause from 1958 under long-serving editor Edgar
Ross. When Ross retired, Fox took over until 1970. Fox resigned from
the Party in 1970 to write an account of the cultural struggles within
the Australian Communist movement in Broad Left Narrow Left. By then
the Party had become a truly democratic broad left organisation. The
Party dissolved itself in 1991 as it was felt it was too identified
with vanguardism to play an effective role.
Group 1:
Glen Davis Shale Mine Stay In, c. 1954. 25 x 30.5 cm.
Pitt Top Meeting, Aberdeen, 268 Dismissals, c. 1955. 27.5 x 38 cm.
Both drawings made while accompanying Sydney New Theatre strike entertainment
groups.
Miner (masthead logo of Common Cause), c. 1958. 23.5 x 19 cm.
Untitled (steam train at Central Railway), nd. Watercolour, 20 x 14 cm.
Output Up—Wages Down, printed chart drawn and complied by Len Fox.
Labor Research the Monthly Journal of the Labor Research Department,
September 1934. Printed flier, 19 x 19 cm.
Cartoons: A spectre is haunting Moscow; Untitled (refers to Khrushchev's
denunciation of Stalin in 1957. Hardliners called this a hoax.) n.d.
c late 1950s.
Group 2:
Untitled (camping, army surplus tents), late 1940s. 27.5 x 38 cm.
Untitled (man on ship shoveling coal into furnace), c. early 1950s. 27.5
x 38 cm.
Ship at Woolloomooloo Wharves, late 1940s. 24 x 36.5 cm.
United Action will Beat Menzies, early-1950s. Printed poster.
Fox took painting classes with Sydney’s Studio Of Realist Artists
(SORA) but saw himself as a commercial artist. Studio artists embraced
the optimism of post-war reconstruction advocating social realism, a
depiction of social issues critically by protest, satire, edification
of labour. They opposed ‘socialist realism’, the official
art policy in Soviet Union from 1934.
Sydney foundation members included CPA members
artists Rod Shaw, James Cant and Dora Chapman (Cant), Roy Dalgarno,
Herbert McClintock, Hal Missingham, Nan Hortin, Clem Seale and Bernard
Smith. By 1950 SORA’s energy
dissipated. When the artists' branch of the CPA dissolved in late 1940s
(due to presumed petit-bourgeois backgrounds) Fox and artist Evelyn Healy
convened the Commercial Artists' Association.
Len Fox writes: “Woolloomooloo by the late 1940s had become a
place of workers’ cottages, and for the artists of SORA it was
a happy sketching ground.” (Fox, East Sydney Sketches, 1990.) “The
houses seemed to be saying ‘This is Sydney: the real Sydney. We
have been condemned, but we live on.’ For many years they lived
on. Now they are gone.” (Sketches over 70 Years, 1999)
WOOLLOOMOOLOO - HOMES OR HIGH-RISE?
“By 1960 evictions were beginning and the whole region was in
danger from a redevelopment scheme. A Save The Loo Committee was formed.
Its cause at first seemed hopeless but the Builders’ Labourers
Federation and other leftwing unions imposed Green Bans. By the 1970s
part of Victoria Street was also under threat. But residents fought on
with, in the forefront, trade union leader Jack Mundey, Victoria Street
resident Mick Fowler, and newspaper editor Juanita Nielsen, who was murdered … Today
the leaders are honoured in place names. The stand by locals and the
NSW BLF led to the birth of a broad and powerful Green Movement.” (Fox,
East Sydney Sketches, 1991 and Sketches over 70 Years, 1999).
The Old Tree, near corner of Forbes and Cathedral
Streets, Woolloomooloo, 1948. Pencil, 32 x 40. “The tree was a local meeting point—double
the dole! Out with Menzies! Stop Fascism!”
The Old Tree, Woolloomooloo , c. 1950. Oil, 38 x 50.
Wooloomooloo by Night (Maison Brandy), c. 1950. Oil, 26 x 35.5 cm.
Wooloomooloo by Night, c. 1950. Oil, 25 x 33 cm.
Demolished Terrace Houses Wooloomooloo, late 1960s. Oil, 50 x 61 cm.
Last House in Wooloomooloo, late 1950s. Oil, 61 x 50 cm.
Fox was a prolific writer, publishing 38 books
including 6 books of poetry; over 20 penny pamphlets and union publications.
His first socio-political pamphlet was The Truth about ANZAC for the
Victorian Council of War and Fascism in 1936. Fox designed and illustrated
all his publications, a crucial aspect of attracting readers. These
small publications carried big dreams: "I thought it would have a big impact on the world".
(Australians of the Left, p. 130.)
Fox edited Depression Down Under (1989) and
Dream at a Graveside: The History of the Fellowship of Australian Writers,
1928–1988 (1989).
With Faith Bandler he co-authored the story of her father’s experiences,
Marani in Australia (1980) and The Time was Ripe: A History of the Aboriginal-Australian
Fellowship, 1956–69, (1983). His important history Broad Left,
Narrow Left (1982) is an account of the ups and downs of those involved
with the Australian Communist Party and Australians on the Left (1996)
was published on the eve of his 91st birthday. Other booklets were to
follow, including Glimpses of a Century and Sketches over 70 Years, a
collection of his drawings with commentary, both in 2000.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Mona Brand for her rigorous help and Jack Mundey who
opened the exhibition. Thanks also to Con Gouriotis (Casula Powerhouse),
Paddy Gorman (CFMEU Mining and Energy), Fiona MacDonald, Jack Mundey,
Peter Murphy, (Search Foundation), Ann Stephen, Andrew Tantau, Robyn
Tantau, Neil Towart (Labor Council of NSW), Peter Whitehead and Deborah
Vaughan.
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