This year James Cook University celebrates its proud legacy in historical research, writing and publishing through the Studies in North Queensland History Collection. In partnership with the JCU College of Arts, Society and Education (CASE), the Library has made available online, free digital versions of a selection of diverse works – both published books and unpublished theses all originating from the JCU History Department. To complement this showcase a new series of blog posts will provide a fresh response to each work through the contemporary lens of a prominent practicing historian. In today’s post, Dr Jon Piccini (Australian Catholic University) writes about The Red North by Diane Menghetti, published in 1981 by the JCU History Department.
On the 3rd of May 2025, Australians emphatically rejected Peter Dutton’s tilt at the Lodge. His Queensland seat of Dickson flipped, making the former Queensland Police officer the only opposition leader to have lost their own seat. Away from the spotlight, another remarkable turnaround unfolded in the Division of Leichardt, a far north Queensland electorate where former basketballer Matt Smith won a 10% primary swing to the ALP.
If Australians know anything about North Queensland (and that is a big if) it is that the climate is warm and the politics reactionary. See: the Katter family’s generational hold on the seat of Kennedy. How, then, does Smith’s win make sense? The retirement of a long-term member aside, it is useful to look at history. And there is no better place to start than with Diane Menghetti’s The Red North. Published some 40 years ago, and written about happenings that transpired in the 1930s, The Red North tells us a lot about what really makes North Queensland so different.
The Red North was the third volume in JCU’s Studies in North Queensland History series and continued a radical tone set with 1979’s Race Relations in North Queensland (edited by one Henry Reynolds) and a Douglas Hunt’s history of the labour movement. It is helpful to see Menghetti’s book, which began life as an honours thesis that won the University Medal, as a fusion of these two areas.
 |
| Strike march, Tully, 1935. Photographer unknown, NQID 3171, NQ Photographic Collection, JCU Library Special Collections. |
Labour movement mythology is redolent with rats, usually metaphorical. However, it was the rat-borne Weil’s disease which sparked the strike wave of 1935 around which Menghetti’s book is focused. Burning the cane prior to harvest offered a solution, however the Colonial Sugar Refinery and Canegrowers Association opposed industrial orders to mandate it, even if workers accepted a pay cut. The cane cutter’s representatives, the all-powerful Australian Workers Union, opposed the ‘wildcat’ strikes that resulted. To many workers, this made them indistinguishable from the bosses. Strikers in September 1935 held a banner featured rodent-like caricatures of the AWU and Canegrowers leadership beneath the slogan: “war on all rats!”
What elevates Menghetti’s book above being a worthy labour history is its displacement of the strikes as her key narrative ballast. The tone is set early on. Opening The Red North again, I was struck by its “Chronology of Events”, which signposts not events in North Queensland but those at the international and national level. The Bolshevik Revolution, Spanish Civil War and Japanese invasion of Manchuria sit alongside changes in Australian governments and (lacklustre) policies towards the fascist powers.
 |
| Railway strike at the Waterside Workers Union headquarters, Townsville, 1925, Image courtesy of State Library of Queensland. |
This is because the events Menghetti chronicles cannot be understood without that international referent. Madrid and Ingham might be geographically distant, but their context was shared. The Communist Party of Australia long had a base in North Queensland’s sugar and mining towns, despite Moscow’s erratic policy course, and it was here that the 1935 Popular Front policy found its strongest antipodean expression. In 1935, more than half of CPA members in Queensland were from the North, which also provided some 1/3rd of all Australian volunteers for Republican Spain.
One reason for this was the remarkably ‘multi-cultural’ nature of the northern workforce. This included Spaniards and Yugoslavs, but the majority were Italians, of whom about 23,000 arrived in North Queensland during the 1920s. These “Mediterraneans” were perceived by the Queensland Labor government and the AWU that shored up its rural support base as racially inferior to “Nordic” peoples of Britain. The AWU’s Brisbane-based leadership, which refused to take on Italian members, was an easy target for Communist Party militants.
 |
| May Day procession, Bowen, ca. 1930. Photographer unknown, CityLibraries Townsville. |
The conflict between Communists and the AWU took on gargantuan proportions. Menghetti notes how “in 1936 the [Communist] Workers Weekly devoted more words to A.W.U. Secretary Clarrie Fallon than to any other individual, including Hitler.” But the smaller, everyday happenings are just as important to Menghetti. She pays particular attention to how the Party’s strike committees brought together Anglo and Italian migrants on an equal footing, an “important stage in the breakdown of racist attitudes”.
This was evident in lots of little ways. Fundraising dances were hosted, where the “almost unprecedented sight of Australian girls dancing with Italian men became commonplace”. Menghetti also highlights the important community roles played by migrant women more broadly, who formed part of a “remarkably strong and independent women’s movement”. Strike materials were, for the first time, published in Italian, and agitational speeches were translated. Southern Europeans, who had long “been considered alien and black and therefore beneath contempt”, became friends and comrades.
The Popular Front’s heyday was in the 1940s, when Fred Paterson became the only communist ever elected to Australian parliament. But Menghetti shows us that win was facilitated by a thriving far left culture that had been assiduously cultivated in north Queensland’s cane fields and mining towns over the previous decade, facilitated by mutual aid and the overcoming of mutual suspicion. If we take on Menghetti’s lessons today, maybe the North can be Red once more.
Dr Jon Piccini, Australian Catholic University
Comments