Terry Irving charts the politics of early twentieth century Australia through the life of writer and polymath Vere Gordon Childe.

Vere Gordon Childe (1892–1957) was one of Australia’s most distinguished scholars and public intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century. The son of an Anglican minister, Childe was a brilliant student and won scholarships to both Sydney University and Oxford. He made a major contribution to Australian politics in 1923 with the publication of How Labour Governs, which provided a stinging critique of the relationship between the political and industrial (trade union) wings of the labour movement; it was a lament of labour betrayed.

He is also an important figure in archeology and prehistory, publishing major, seminal works over a 30-year period. Childe was a polymath with a holistic approach to knowledge and produced major writings on the relationships between archeology, history, politics and science. His What Happened in History, published in 1942, was a bestseller and introduced archeology to a popular audience.

Author Terry Irving was a student listening through a side door when Childe received an honorary degree from Sydney University in 1957. In The Fatal Lure of Politics Irving set himself the task of situating Childe’s writings in the context of broader intellectual currents in the first half of the twentieth century. Possibly because he is a labour historian, and Australian to boot, Irving devotes more time to How Labour Governs than he does to Childe’s archeological scholarship, an approximately 70 to 30 per cent split.

Childe was an independent free thinker possessed of an acute, critical mind. As he was finishing his studies at Sydney University, he and fellow student Bert Evatt, a future High Court judge and leader of the Australian Labor Party, campaigned for Labor in the 1913 state election. Childe spent most of World War I in Oxford and was an outspoken critic of the war, especially conscription, censorship and the loss of civil liberties. This brought him to the attention of security services, first in Britain, then Australia, who kept him under surveillance throughout most of his life. Irving has drawn on these files.

Because of his anti-war stance Childe found it difficult to find employment in Britain after completing his studies at Oxford. He returned to Australia, but his attempts to establish a career at Sydney University were thwarted by interference from security services. Childe travelled to Queensland and secured low-level clerical work in the office of Edward Theodore, premier of Queensland from 1919 to 1925, who later had the misfortunate to be federal treasurer at the beginning of the Great Depression. While in Queensland, Elton Mayo of Hawthorne Studies fame, originator of the human relations approach to managing (or more correctly ‘manipulating’) workers, recommended Childe for a tutoring position at Queensland University, a position he didn’t take up.

Childe returned to Sydney and obtained a job as private secretary to New South Wales Labor leader John Storey, who was premier of a minority Labor government from 1920 to 1921. Childe was subsequently appointed as a research and publicity officer in the office of the New South Wales agent general in London. Childe lost this position following the formation of the Nationalist government of George Fuller at the end of 1921. Following his dismissal, he spent the next three or so years anxiously looking for regular employment in the UK.

Childe turned his mind to archeological research – he had studied the subject at Sydney University and Oxford – and turned out a number of publications that established his career. In 1925 he published The Dawn of European Civilization and in 1927 was appointed the Abercromby Professor of Archeology at Edinburgh University, a position he held until 1946. He then became director and professor of the Institute of Archeology in London. While in London Childe lived in the same apartment block as Agatha Christie, with whom he played bridge. He resigned his London post in 1956 and returned to Australia where he died the following year.

Irving situates Childe in the maelstrom of socialist ideas of the first half of the twentieth century. He says:

This is a book about the central place held by socialist politics in his life, and his contributions to the theory of history it entailed. It is also about the conflict in socialist politics between radical democracy and parliamentary social democracy, for Childe… the latter… was fatal to socialism.

Irving examines Childe’s intellectual relationship with socialism, communism and Marxism, and paints Childe as a heretical Marxist. By this he means Childe used Marxist insights to understand the world and processes of change, rather than seeing it as a doctrine that one followed with religious fervour. Childe’s basic approach was to research and collect information and draw conclusions from it; what scholars call induction. He saw history as an ongoing series of struggles between protagonists that created new ways of interaction. Irving says of Childe:

… the future was open, historical materialism was incomplete, and Marxist intellectuals needed freedom from party diktat… History should not be interrogated with predetermined ends in mind.

Irving quotes Childe as saying, ‘Magic is a way of making people believe that they are going to get what they want, whereas religion is a system for persuading them that they ought to want what they get.’ Childe rejected the views of utopians, Marxist and non-Marxist alike, while embracing Marxist notions of agency and struggle.

Irving sees Childe’s major contribution to socialist thought in How Labour Governs as his engagement with the reality of a Labour Party in power and its ability, or more correctly, inability, to help pave the path to socialism. Childe had the advantage of having been an insider to party political events in both Queensland and New South Wales and brought this knowledge to such debates.

Given this, the book may have benefited from an introductory chapter on the broad themes Irving wanted to pursue. However, if there is a weakness in The Fatal Lure of Politics it is that Childe is a vehicle to examine socialist thought during these years rather than providing an understanding of his inner life. Childe only appears briefly in the first 80 pages, with a pronounced bias to contextual background. (The book comes more interesting as World War I ends.) This omission may be because Childe destroyed his personal papers when he retired. But Irving has not indulged in the type of induction that Childe himself would have employed to try to understand the person as well as his thought.

The Fatal Lure of Politics begins with an account of Childe’s return to Australia in 1957 and his suicide – he threw himself off a cliff in the Blue Mountains. In the final chapters Irving provides more information about this. Childe had an overriding inferiority complex, was socially awkward and never seems to have experienced love. Given the absence of any women in his life, some contemporaries speculated he was homosexual, but Irving dismisses this. In his early teens Childe spent two years suffering from polio, and while Irving doesn’t speculate, it may be that this period was when Childe developed his life of the mind and chose to hide himself in thinking and writing. On his return to Australia he was suffering ill health. He had never saved or owned property – his indulgences were cars, a sweet tooth, some alcohol, tennis, bridge and walking – was running out of money on an inadequate pension and had no one to care for him. So, he threw himself off a cliff. His suicide note spoke of the old being parasites, blocking the young, and supported euthanasia. This left me with an overwhelming sense of sadness; he seems to have spent all his life feeling lonely and unloved.

Terry Irving is to be congratulated for the extent of his research and scholarship in drawing our attention to one of Australia’s early outstanding scholars and public intellectuals. He also provides valuable information on developments in Australian universities and Australian historiography. I suspect, though, that The Fatal Lure of Politics will only be of interest to specialists with an interest in labour history, archeology and those well versed in the nuances of socialist thought in Britain and Australia in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Terry Irving The Fatal Lure of Politics: The life and thought of Vere Gordon Childe Monash University Press 2020 PB 424pp $39.95.

 Braham Dabscheck is a Senior Fellow at the Melbourne Law School at Melbourne University who writes on industrial relations and sport. He recently completed a history of the Rugby League Players’ Association.

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Tags: archeology, Australian politics, How Labour Governs, labour politics in Australia, marxism, political thought, socialism, Terry | Irving, The Dawn of European Civilization, The Fatal Lure of Politics, Vere Gordon | Childe, What Happened in History