AN ACTIVIST FOR ALL SEASONS
by Rowan Cahill
During his lifetime Robert Daniel “Bob” Walshe (1923-2018) was
many things, variously factory labourer, soldier, communist, organiser,
activist, pamphleteer, teacher, editor, publisher, historian, educationist,
environmentalist. He was the author/co-author/editor
of some forty books.
Born in Sydney’s Eastern suburbs in 1923, Walshe once
described his family life as “not very harmonious”. His father, a milkman in
the Bondi area, was a severely wounded World War 1 veteran, in and out of
hospital during the 1920s. To his mother, Walshe credited his lifelong love of books.
Outdoors there was joy, and Walshe, his two brothers and sister enjoyed their
childhoods in the environs of Bondi and Bronte beaches, and Waverley Park.
Leaving school at 14, Walshe obtained labouring work in a butter
factory, which he hated, then work with
another employer as a clerk on the proviso he undertook a correspondence
accountancy course, which he also hated. World War 11 came as a relief and at
18 he signed up at the Holsworthy Camp (Sydney) as a cook, before joining the
AIF when he turned 19. After training, he was assigned to an Ambulance unit in Darwin
where he saw out the war. His brothers also signed up, his elder brother
captured in the Fall of Singapore, spending the rest of the war as a POW in
Japan.
With about one in six Australian soldiers actually seeing
action against the enemy, military authorities resolved to fill their spare
time with activities, and an innovative program of liberal education was
introduced. This was delivered by the Army Education Service via lectures and a
huge range of cultural activities, and Salt,
a popular topical/current affairs/literary journal. Both enterprises became
sites of communist activity. During the war thousands of members of the Communist
Party of Australia (CPA) joined the armed forces, estimations ranging from
between 4000-6000. Following the legalisation of the CPA in 1942, communists in
the Army operated more or less openly, and within the bounds of military
regulations conducted leftist meetings, circulated communist literature, and recruited
members. Walshe was radicalised in this milieu and joined the party.
POST-WAR RETRAINING
Demobilised, Walshe had a brief stint as a farm worker, then
took advantage of the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme designed to
help integrate discharged members of the armed forces back into civilian life.
Enthused by the cultural activities he had been exposed to in the army he
decided to further his education, matriculating (Sydney Technical College,
1946), then attending Sydney University (1947-51) and graduating with Honours
in History and the Diploma in Education. From then until 1964 he taught English
and History in secondary schools in the Sutherland Shire south of Sydney.
During the late 1940s, newly weds Bob and wife Pat (née
McEvoy), a nurse, moved to the Sutherland Shire, a favourite destination
amongst Sydney lefties. In those days it was on the outskirts of Sydney,
connected to the city by rail, land was cheap, and relaxed local regulations
permitted owner-builders to erect simple wooden framed fibro clad dwellings,
and live in them as they completed a house. The Walshes stayed in the Shire for
the rest of their lives, Pat dying in 1989 after 42 years together.
At university, Walshe significantly developed his organisational
skills, primarily as President of the NSW Council of Reconstruction Trainees,
an outfit he had a role in organising, its aim to operate as a trade union and
protect and advance the welfare and interests of the thousands of ex-service trainees
undergoing studies. He was successful
and effective in this role, and engaged in lobbying at the highest levels with
politicians and bureaucrats. During this time he produced a 46-page booklet
titled Student Work for Progress
(1947). Its recommendations about how to successfully organise from below have
not dated, while his advocacy for females and arguments against what he termed
the “mid-Victorian conception (of the) essential inferiority” of women were
well ahead of the time.
In July 1947 Walshe was amongst the fourteen students
arrested during a protest in support of Indonesian nationalism outside the
Dutch Consulate in Margaret Street, Sydney. A photo of Walshe being arrested by
members of the thuggish Squad 21 was prominent in the Daily Telegraph’s coverage
of the protest. When Walshe appeared in court, he was wearing his ex-service
association badge. According to historian Alan Barcan, Walshe’s main concern
about being arrested was if his future mother-in-law saw the newspaper photo;
he feared her negative reaction.
TEACHER AT LARGE
As a school teacher Walshe was instrumental in helping organise
the History Teachers’ Association (NSW), and was its Chairman 1962-63. Curriculum
change was in the air as the influence of Sydney University’s conservative
historian Sir Stephen Roberts was replaced by new curriculum thinking in NSW. In
time for the early 1960s, and arguably helping radicalise a generation, the new
Leaving Certificate (senior school) History course aimed at understanding the
‘modern world’ from the Enlightenment onwards. Innovatively, much of the world
beyond Europe was included. Economic history was introduced, and terms like
liberalism, fascism, communism, nationalism studied. The notion of ‘class’ also
got a run. The curriculum encouraged the study of cause and effect, and emphasised
the idea that study of the past could help one understand the present. In the
hands of teachers who were up to it, student initiative and research beyond
set-texts was encouraged.
Some best-selling and long-lasting texts emerged from the ranks
of this generation of HTA teachers: the two volumes of World History Since 1789 edited by James Hagan (later Professor James
Hagan, Wollongong University, doyen labour historian), and The Student’s Guide to World History by Walshe. First published in
1962, Walshe’s book was revised four times, reprinted eight times, and encouraged a self-directed approach to the subject and
its processes. The last revised edition was in 1980. Published
accounts of lessons by HTA members during its early years indicate teaching
techniques and initiatives that would still be regarded as innovative and
dynamic two decades later.
Initially Walshe could not find a publisher for his Student’s Guide, so he self-published.
Emboldened by the success of the book he formed his own company, Martindale
Press (Sydney) in 1963, and left classroom teaching. With Martindale he embarked
on an innovative, extensive and successful programme of educational and academic
publishing before selling the company to an international publishing interest
in 1970. Martindale illustrates a solution constant in Walshe’s life: if there
is a blockage of some kind, and you can’t get somebody to fix it, then figure
out a way forward and do it yourself.
While not privy to his financial situation, it is apparent
post-Martindale that Walshe’s need for full-time employment was no longer a
necessity. Gradually, then fully, volunteer activities took over. Further, from my dealings with him and from
watching him work, including him commissioning me to revise the final edition
of his Student’s Guide (Longmans
1980), when endeavours he deemed worthwhile needed funds or help with
operational/equipment costs, the money became available.
WRITING RADICAL
HISTORY
 |
| Bob Walshe (right) with friend and comrade Jack Mundey, Green Bans pioneer, at a recent Eureka celebration (Photo: Phil Smith) |
Within the CPA Walshe was recognised as a significant intellectual
talent, and his historical skills were utilised. While still teaching full-time
he produced a series of detailed historical notes for leftist trade unions on events
like Eureka Stockade, the 8-Hour Day, the Tolpuddle Martyrs. In 1954 he had a
key role in organising Sydney’s celebrations for the Centennial Commemoration of
the Eureka Stockade uprising. For this he produced a 32-page booklet on the
Eureka events and their significance, and two original and significant pieces
of scholarly research on Eureka published in the scholarly journal Historical Studies of Australia and New
Zealand (1954). These latter are still being cited by historians. Walshe’s
interest in Eureka was life-long. He later produced a book (2005) on the
uprising as part of Australia’s democratic evolution, revisiting and extending
his original research. From 2004 onwards was a main facilitator of the annual
commemoration of Eureka in Sydney.
In 1956 Walshe produced a 62-page booklet on the radical
origins of Australian democracy, Australia’s
Fight for Independence and Parliamentary Democracy. As Terry Irving and I
have argued, in these booklets and some 90-pages, Walshe laid down the
foundations for the radical study of democracy in Australia, the common thread
the idea of popular struggle. At that time the new profession of academic
history writing paid little attention to Australia, dissolving our history into
that of Britain. The development of government organisations in the nineteenth
century colonies was called ‘the coming of self-government’, as if it were a
natural process. There was little interest in seeing the process as a contest
between the colonies and Britain, and even less on seeing it as contested
within Australia.
Writing to me in 2012, Walshe explained his approach to
history. Historians, he wrote, need to find
“times in the past when the best of humanity, struggling against
privilege, greed, oppression, war, find reason to affirm again the confident
humanism of the Enlightenment, its critical rationalism, its exciting science,
its faith in giving direction by democratic agency to society’s incessant
change, thereby to release energy in a reader to be active in the cause of
human betterment”.
1956 AND ALL THAT
Bob was a voracious and active reader. Seldom did he read
without pen and paper at hand, underlining sections of text, making marginal
notes, inserting notepaper comments to himself, all duly dated so he could keep
track of his own thoughts. He read widely, each reading a deep engagement. This
was a lifetime habit. A few garage boxes of publications (books, journals,
pamphlets) he gave to me from the 1950s, show that his reading at the time went
well beyond the narrow confines of literature many CPA members limited themselves
to, an international mix including writings by ex-communist and Trotskyists.
Bob once claimed his questioning of communism went back to 1951, and I do not
doubt this. But one did not give up on an organisation if you believed there
was a chance of changing things from within.
In 1956 things came to a head. In February that year Premier
Krushchev delivered a ‘secret speech’ to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union criticising Stalin and exposing his crimes. The speech was
reprinted in full by the New York Times
in July, and the CPA tried to suppress discussion of it. Many CPA members
regarded it as a forgery. Jim Staples (later Justice Staples of the
Conciliation and Arbitration Commission ), a close comrade of Walshe, obtained a
copy of the article, and together they studied it. Satisfied it was not a forgery,
they did their utmost within the party to have it discussed openly. The final
straw was when they republished the speech in an 80-page roneod booklet and
circulated it within the party. Both were subsequently expelled, part of an
unwilling and willing exodus of people that decimated the ranks of the CPA.
Adrift in many ways, post-1956 Walshe read widely on
religion and philosophy, embarking on an intellectual and spiritual quest akin to
that evident in The Perennial Philosophy
(1946) by Aldous Huxley, an intellectual Walshe regarded highly. During the
1980s Walshe found intellectual sustenance in journals produced by scholars and
practitioners of humanistic psychology. The outcome of his quest was the
creation of a personal inner sense of peace-in-conflict, of centeredness, and
stability. Keys to its maintenance involved dialogues with himself via regular
private journal entries, and frequent, if not daily, sojourns with nature,
walking/strolling in the bushlands of the Sutherland Shire.
Walshe’s time in the CPA was a significant teacher, and he
left with principles that informed the rest of his life: that organisation was
the key to effecting change in the face of the intractable; that a small cadre
group could have impacts beyond its size; that collective action was the way to
bring about social change and address issues of concern; and key to all of this
was the centrality of the printed word – in all organisations Walshe was
subsequently involved with, the printed/published word figured prominently, as
a means of creating a sense of community, and as an educational and
organising/mobilising tool.
THE WRITING PROCESS
Beginning in 1969, Walshe began teaching writing to adults
in what became popular classes at the Sutherland Shire Evening College. Since
his post-war student days and as an writer/activist, teacher and publisher, he
had given considerable thought to writing,
coming to see it as a process and not as a one-shot wonder. Writing was also a means
of gaining self-knowledge, and integral to an individual’s thought processes.
In short, writing was personally empowering. Further, it was through engaging
in the writing process that language skills and literary appreciation could be
developed.
For Walshe, writing should be a democratic process; everyone
could be a writer – it was not a process just for elites and specialists. Demanding
yes, but not impossible. During the 1970s he became influenced by the paradigm
shifting work of American educationist Donald H Graves (1930-2010) who had also
come to these sorts of conclusions.
Subsequently Walshe developed and promulgated his ideas and
approaches via two organisations he was instrumental in helping form. Within
the English Teachers’ Association of NSW (ETA), The English Teachers’ Writing
Group, a small, informal, ginger group of classroom practitioners he chaired, that
met during the 1970s to write and to discuss
‘writing’ and teaching practice generally. Walshe had a dictum: if you were to
teach students how to write, you too had to be ‘a writer’. One demonstrated in
the doing, not by the saying. In one way or another, the members of this group
subsequently influenced classroom and curriculum practice through their own
published writings, editorial initiatives, conferences, and careers.
Not that Walshe was universally popular. He invited me to
join the Writing Group during the early 1970s, having liked an article I had
published in the ETA Newsletter. I
was a young classroom teacher at the time, new to the school teaching game. The
invitation by letter turned up out of the blue, and I mentioned it to my Head
Teacher. He advised me not to associate with Walshe; it was a bad career move
he reckoned. So I accepted the invitation, and went to the peaceful cloistered
environs of St Scholastica’s College in Glebe, Sydney, where the outfit met
once a month on Friday evenings. The Group was ‘catholic’ in the secular
meaning of the term, drawn from state and private institutions, denominational
and secular, a manifestation of Bob’s embracive ability to work with
diversities of people in the achieving change. Meeting up with Bob, becoming
part of the Group, and my subsequent association with him, were life-changing.
But it was through The Primary English Teachers’ Association
(PETA) that Walshe had most impact. From 1972-83 he was honorary editor for
PETA. During this time a flood of attractive publications and teaching aids,
accessible in terms of language and price, streamed from PETA into the nation’s
primary and secondary classrooms. Variously authored, edited, or commissioned
by Walshe, the majority of this material gave voice to classroom practitioners,
their contributions prominently credited. In his own right, Walshe became
regarded as an authority on the teaching of writing, his work cited nationally
and internationally in teaching and scholarly publications, influencing curriculum
changes in Australia well into the 1980s. Eventually Walshe’s approach was
skittled by neoliberal educational changes, ‘genre’ based approaches to the
teaching of writing, the impact of postmodernism on school curriculums, and by
the dictatorship of ‘testing’.
Walshe’s roles in the HTA in the 1950s, and later in PETA
were manifestations of his belief and insistence that curriculum creation,
development, implementation, and teaching practice, should not be left to, nor
regarded as the preserves of, elites of politicians, bureaucrats, academic
experts. Education should not be a top-down process; teachers should have a
major and active part in these processes too, as creators/contributors from
below, from the grassroots.
ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISM
By the early 1970s, Walshe had become concerned about
environmental issues. Environmental campaigning occupied much of the rest of
his life. With Milo Dunphy and several others he established the Total
Environment Centre in 1972, with Dunphy at its head. In 1989 he produced with
Helen Dufty the educational poster Greenhouse
Alert! aimed at young people, a copy of which was sent by the Federal
government to every school in Australia. Increasingly the Sutherland Shire
became the focus of his activities, as the world came to the Shire – international
oil and logistical interests, desalinators, sandminers, all intent on developments
in Botany Bay that threatened fragile ecologies, plans to store nuclear waste
at Lucas Heights, a proposed ‘mega tip’, an airport expansion at Towra Point…..Walshe
threw himself into campaigning, organising meetings, drafting motions, lobbying
politicians and local councillors, leading protests, addressing rallies, writing
articles and letters for the local press, producing newsletters….in 1991 he was
the foundation chair of the Sutherland Shire Environment Centre. In 2006, aged
83, he was active patron of two environmental centres, and convenor of eleven
community organisations. When he was
awarded an Order of Australia in 1998 for ‘services to education and the
environment’, he regarded it as a campaign asset, tacking it to his name in all
his future campaigning.
Walshe believed you could tackle global problems by addressing
their manifestations at the local level where there were chances of actually
winning. The act of engaging with issues, of organising and campaigning, could empower
people. Moreover, a win for a cause at the local level could spur activists to
go further, giving them confidence and abilities to address other, bigger, issues
beyond the local. And when there were losses, and there were, these need not
lead to despondency if you had created a genuine sense of cooperation and
community within the campaign organisation, something Walshe was a skilled in
helping create.
The sort of campaigning Walshe encouraged and helped develop
was always articulate, backed by thorough research, resourced, and highly
visible, thus becoming inspirational and educational to others not directly
involved, well beyond the local area. Associated
with Walshe for close to three decades, activist Phillip Smith recalls Walshe
as being able to draw people together, and as being “calm and determined and
excited and controlled and strategic and supportive, all at the same time.”
THE END
Bob died in Royal Prince Alfred Hospital (Sydney) on 6 March
2018, following a fall. By accounts, it was a peaceful end, those close to him
holding his hands, another reading to him from one of his favourite poems, Banjo
Paterson’s ‘The Man from Snowy River’. Somewhere during the last few stanzas,
he ceased breathing. It was 8.15pm. There were many tributes to the man post-mortem,
variously attesting to his modesty, his kindness, thoughtfulness, intelligence,
mostly from people who knew him from his
environmental activism. Few knew the full extent of his activism and impacts,
because the thing about Bob was he was not a walking CV; his activism was not
ego-driven in the modern ‘selfie’ sort of way. Rather he helped others to become
the people they could become, and let them take the credit warranted. Writing
in 2002, Alan Barcan described Bob as “a model activist”, while Terry Irving
and I writing in 2016 attempted to capture him and his activism by describing
him as “the most famous person you do not know”.
24 March 2018.
