A CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY OF EDWIN JAMES BRADY - Mallacoota ...

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Brady’s interest in politics was practically a life-time one and his connection with
politics in Australia was long and often stormy and filled with personal bitterness and
disappointment. But his early interest had been a rather casual affair. On his visit to
the United States in 1880-82 he constantly argued with young Americans about
political issues, vigorously defending the Australian system of government against
attack. Some of the American ideas influenced him, at least temporarily, for he
confessed that “from the age of fifteen I spent most of my spare time trying to convert
my associates here to republicanism”. 1 But while attending Sydney University and in
addition reading politics and philosophy he deepened his interest both in theoretical
issues and in the literature of social problems. Some of Lawson’s poetry in particular
affected him deeply. He was only nineteen when he began to read his work:
I was secretly swatting Karl Marx at the time and I veritably believe that
‘Faces in the Street’ impelled me as much as Das Kapital to join and
subsequently lead the first Australian Socialist movement. 2
Ernest Lane, recalling the days when he roomed with Brady in Woolloomooloo,
referred to “Faces In the Street” as a revolutionary poem that thrilled every rebel in
Australia, making its author “a vital force in the fierce battle of life which was to rage
fiercer than ever”. 3 He also tells how he and Brady looked to poetry for their
“revolutionaries”. Listing Burns, Byron, Whitman, William Morris, Swinburne’s
earlier poems and Shelley, Lane recalls how they “devoured their revolutionary
thoughts and aspirations and felt comradeship with all the great ones of the earth”.
Brady’s burgeoning political and literary interest was further stimulated by contact in
1889 with Ernest Blackwell, editor of The Centennial Magazine and a mile socialist.
Blackwell printed one of Brady’s earliest prose contributions – “The Clerk and the
Capitalist”. 4 In this article Brady takes the example of a typical Australian worker of
the period, one Edgar Appleton Smith, and follows his career through four stages;
firstly as an office boy and junior clerk with a firm of merchants in the city at twentyfive
pounds a year; secondly as a franchised citizen in the same monotonous position,
being paid one hundred pounds yearly and being vaguely aware of economic injustice
as it directly affects him; thirdly as a married man on a salary of a hundred and fifty
pounds, paying off a home, financially strained in his weekly commitments. The
fourth stage of Smith’s occupational progress comes abruptly and harshly. Through
no fault of his own, at his employer’s whim, he is dismissed, placing his very
existence in jeopardy. After much grovelling he is re-employed, but spends the rest of
his life with no real security, no real freedom and no union to look after his interest
and prevent his victimisation. On this framework, Brady makes out a rather
conventional argument for socialism. He deplores the existence of monopolies and
the type of society which allows them to exist, makes a spirited plea for unionism as
one of the necessary defences of the employee, and pointedly puts the first argument,
one of many to follow, for socialism, evidencing a faith in this political doctrine
which was to be his guiding star for the rest of his life.
1 Brady to Carroll, 21.10.1946, in Mitchell Library.
2 Archibald manuscript, p. 117
3 Dawn to Dusk, p. 21.
4 September 1890, pp. 93-96