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

82
No matter what excuses Brady made publicly and no matter what faith he still overtly
retained in the cp-operative settlement as a practical application of collectivist and
socialistic principles, he must have had private doubts. He wrote to a friend on the
staff of the Brisbane Worker:
I did my level damnedest to make the Mallacoota scheme a success and it just
about beggared me. I have got to admit that the management down there
proved bad. I was up to my neck in the political morass here at the time and
could not give it my personal supervision. But even if I had, I doubt if it could
have been converted into a success. I had a good strong sympathetic socialist
committee which also did its best. My conclusions are that these utopian
schemes within the Capitalist system are not possible. 1
If it proved nothing else, the Mallacoota Community Farm experiment proved that
Brady had sufficient faith and belief in his convictions – in the theoretical principles
of collective socialism – to believe in their practical application. He was, in the good
Australian phrase, willing to “have a go”. His courage deserves some credit; his
intention to help the unemployed deserves a great deal of credit. It provided one more
item of evidence that Brady was humanitarian in outlook and sympathetic in practice.
1 Brady to John S. Hanlon, 24.1.1934, in National Library.