A Lovable Rogue
This month the Sydney Harbour Bridge will be closed as a hundred thousand people walk over it to commemorate the 75th anniversary of it opening in 1932. Everybody remembers the sword wielding New Guard member who slashed the ribbon before the Premier, the controversial Premier Jack Lang. One of the main causes of the political controversy was a Churches of Christ minister.
1932 was probably the worst year in Australia’s European history. The country was divided against itself as never before or since. The depression hurt almost every family. Unemployment was high. Homelessness was increasing by the week. Eviction riots occurred in all the inner suburbs. Crime reached an all time high. Clashes between the strikers and the police left bloodied and dead on both sides especially after the Rothbury Riot when 45 men ended up in hospital. Jack Lang the “Big Fella” was calling for impossible loyalty and the New Guard, 20,000 strong, opposed the elected Government. Right wing extremists clad in Ku Klux Klan robes with black hoods terrified people and bashed people in their beds. The Razor gangs and criminals held sway. The Governor, Sir Phillip Game, used his reserve powers to dismiss the elected Premier and the Government. Gerald Stone’s new book, “1932” put it in perspective.
Jack Lang is one of Australia’s most written about politicians. For twenty years, one of his most ardent admirers and supporters was a Churches of Christ minister who at other times strongly opposed him. This minister was the most political minister of religion in the nation’s history, was for thirty year the most influential power in the Australian Labor Party, and one of the major reasons behind the later split in that party leading to the formation of the DLP.
John Smith Garden, known as Jock (1882 – 1968) was born in Scotland, son of a fisherman, who became a sail maker as a youth. He was influenced by the Glassites and other Scottish theologians of the Campbell-Stone movement.
His elder brother James, also a sail maker, migrated to Australia in the 1890s; the rest of the family joined him in Sydney in 1904. In 1906 Garden was a Church of Christ minister at Harcourt Church of Christ, Victoria. He married a Scotswoman according to the rites of Churches of Christ. They moved to NSW where he preached in various Churches of Christ until he accepted appointment of the Laclean Baptist Church.
By 1909 Jock Garden was a member of the Labor Party. He was in Sydney for the 1913 elections as the Labor candidate for Petersham. He was unsuccessful. He then lived at Paddington attending the Church of Christ there.
He became the president of the Sailmakers’ Union and its delegate on the Labor Council of New South Wales, which was to be his power base until 1934. By 1918 he was its secretary. He failed as a Labor candidate at Parramatta in the 1917 State elections.
Bede Nairn, his biographer, says Garden was an ardent fundamentalist, who remained attached to Christianity as a deacon of the Church of Christ. His belief in the ‘lowly Nazarene’ was a vital part of his populist radicalism, and in 1918 he defended ‘the workers’ against Presbyterian charges that they were ‘steeped in infidelity and disloyalty’. His early opposition to gambling and smoking decomposed but not his aversion to drinking. His oratorical style, seasoned by a ripe Scots burr, ranged from beguiling to ranting, adaptable to the pulpit, the Trades Hall and the Sydney Domain: often his speeches were incoherent harangues, but seldom ineffective.
He was a great reader of non-conformist and radical writing, including Marx and Lenin especially after the 1917 Russian revolution. He was courageous, generous and romantic. His ideas reflected his enthusiasm and eclectic longings, and nourished his determination to succeed; it he could not make people pious, he would make them better off.
In the inter-union conflicts, Garden consolidated his position on the industrial wing, and at the Labor Council led an activist majority of its executive, soon known as ‘The Trades Hall Reds’. He was a member of the Socialist Party of Australia and of the Industrial Socialist Labor Party. In November 1920 he announced the formation of the Communist Party of Australia, which he had initiated with W. P. Earsman. Garden moved the ALP to the far left.
In 1922 Jock Garden attended the Second Communist Congress in Moscow, and euphorically claimed that ‘1000 Communists were influencing 400,000 members of Australian trade unions, and could even direct the Labor Party’. He said 11 out of 12 executive members of the Labor Council were communists. He was elected to the Executive Committee of the Communist International (Comintern). While overseas he provoked his European communist comrades by taking an active part in a Christian revivalist meeting for Churches of Christ in Scotland.
Following Lenin’s advice, Garden and other communists worked in the Labor Party in order to ‘whiteant’ it. Garden was elected to the ALP executive. Garden kept his militant reputation intact by serving fourteen days in gaol ‘for the right to free speech’.
J. T. Lang, the new parliamentary Labor leader, also resented Garden’s attacks on his colleagues, and in May 1925, Labor won the elections and Lang became premier. Garden had become a conspicuous target of the Nationalists, as personifying the ‘red menace’ of the Labor movement. By 1926 now living at Maroubra, he announced his resignation from the Communist Party. He could not reconcile his Churches of Christ beliefs with the Communist system and he concluded that the party had little political future. Garden insisted we had to forgive those who persecute us as did Jesus Christ.
But he founded many organizations and publication advocating far-left policies while being on the executive of the Red International of Labor Unions. More than anyone else, he was responsible for the foundation of the Australasian (Australian) Council of Trade Unions in Melbourne in 1927.
The Lang-Garden front was consolidated, while the Australian Workers Union added to conservative propaganda that the Labor Party under them was revolutionary and anti-Australian.
On 13 June 1928 Garden was arrested and charged with incitement to murder. It was alleged that in a speech on tactics in the marine cooks’ strike he had said the ‘scab cooks may lose their balance. In which case the water is damp, the sea is deep, and dead men tell no tales’. He was acquitted in August. In January 1929 he rejoined the Labor Party. He was active in the timber strike that year. In July he was accused of conspiracy in connexion with the strike, but was discharged. He was granted continuity of membership in the Labor Party in April 1930 to enable him to contest the Sydney Municipal Council elections; he won and sat for Flinders Ward in 1930-34.
In March 1931 he was ‘counted out’ by communists at a meeting of the unemployed in the Domain. He was in the thick of Lang’s struggle with the Labor Prime Minister J. H. Scullin to enforce the half-baked ‘Lang Plan’ which Lang’s devotees saw as a nostrum to cure the Depression: Garden debated it with D. R. Hall in August (a fellow Scot, a fellow Labor Party member, and a member of the Chatswood Church of Christ).
As part of the lawless turmoil of the era, 1932 he was brutally attacked with pipes and large spanners in his home by eight men, members of the Fascist Legion, and part of the New Guard. They trained in in KKK black-hooded gowns. He was saved by his two sons and two savage guard dogs. Mrs Garden fainted, but on recovering, bathed the wounds inflicted by a guard dog on one of the attackers and made him a cup of tea! In the morning, one of the sons drove the attacker to his home. The police raided the offices of the New Guard and found plans to kidnap and ransom the Premier and the whole Cabinet! That caused a sensation and led to the closing of the right wing group but not until Parliament broke down in riotous conflict.
In the 1933 State Labor conference, Garden demolished much of the traditional Labor structure and proclaimed Jack Lang was “greater than Lenin” which became a famous title for Lang (biography by Miriam Dixson 1977).
By the mid thirties, Lang’s power was waning and Garden’s with him. In 1934 he stood and was elected to Federal Parliament. In 1936, in a fight over the ownership of Labor radio station 2KY, Garden was again expelled. He was aging handsomely. Older church members remember him preaching with graying wavy hair, his style was ‘fervent, declamatory, thunderous’. Colin Bowser states his mother described him as “Scurrilous, but then again, Mum would have said that of anyone who supported Jack Lang!”
In 1942-47 Garden was employed, by the left-wing firebrand Eddie Ward, the Federal minister for Labour, as liaison officer between him and the trade unions. Garden had known Ward for a long time as a fellow participant in the frantic Labor politics of Sydney.
In January 1948 Garden was charged with his son Harcourt and others, with forgery and falsification in connexion with certain 1944-45 financial dealings in New Guinea timber. 50,000 pounds was involved. He was found guilty on one charge and was sentenced to three years gaol. Garden implicated Ward and alleged that Harcourt Garden was his dummy in the transaction. In December all were acquitted, and in June 1949 Ward was exonerated by a royal commission. In March 1957 Garden and his son were charged with fortune-telling; they were joint proprietors of the astrology weekly magazine, Review; the case was dismissed after it had been said that a client had paid 3 3s. for a horoscope he had not received.
Garden died in hospital on 31 December 1968 and was cremated after a Church of Christ service. In the words of the historian Susan Marsden, “a lovable rogue, who was untrustworthy, unvindictive and generous to a fault.”
REV THE HON DR GORDON MOYES. A.C., M.L.C..
