As Ross McMullin points out in his lively chapter, ‘Leading the world; 1901-16’, in 1904 Dawson was to be part of Australia’s first federal Labor government, led by Chris Watson. This talented, all-male group included future prime ministers Billy Hughes and Andrew Fisher, along with the great arbitrationist Henry Bournes Higgins. The latter is the only person ever to serve in a Labor ministry who was not a member of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party (FPLP).

With two obsessive editors of the calibre of Senator John Faulkner and Professor Stuart Macintyre, it comes as little surprise that the twenty-nine contributions to True Believers are of steadfastly high quality. Inevitably, some chapters are more fascinating than others. The two that stand out to this reader are ‘Rats’ by John Iremonger, coincidentally the book’s publisher, and ‘Splits: Consequences and Lessons’ by co-editor John Faulkner.

As the ALP’s current Leader in the Senate and a long-time member of Caucus, Faulkner is in a unique position to assess the three major splits in the 100-year history of the FPLP. These catastrophic splits, which kept the ALP out of office for decades, occurred in 1916 over the issue of military conscription, in 1931 as a result of differing responses to the Great Depression, and in 1954-55 when the party was challenged to produce an appropriate response to the purported threat of Communism.

Faulkner’s chapter in True Believers is scholarly, well-written and judicious. It is also extremely engaging. Thus, notwithstanding federal Labor leader Dr H.V. Evatt’s previous alliance with the anti-Communist Industrial Groupers, Faulkner chronicles how, in early September 1954, Evatt savagely turned on the Groupers and in particular the Melbourne-based friend of Archbishop Daniel Mannix, B.A. Santamaria.

After describing the Groupers to Caucus as ‘treacherous liars’ and ‘paid informers’, on 5 October 1954 Dr Evatt publicly accused them of disloyalty. They had, said the ‘Doc’, deliberately undermined ‘a number of Labor’s selected and endorsed candidates, with the inevitable and intended result of assisting the Menzies Government’. In consequence of an unsuccessful and highly acrimonious attempt to oust Evatt as party leader, a federally installed anti-Group Victorian Executive, in early 1955, expelled seven Grouper-aligned federal parliamentarians. These MPs formed a breakaway party, the Australian Labor Party (Anti-Communist), which was the harbinger of the Democratic Labor Party (DLP), whose preferences kept the ALP out of office until 1972.

In the House of Representatives in June 1955, during a vote to suspend him, the fiery Sydney-based radical Laborite Eddie Ward attacked leading Catholic Victorian Grouper Stan Keon, the MHR for Yarra, in the following memorable manner. Ward, an inveterate follower of ex-NSW populist premier J.T. Lang, angrily exclaimed: ‘Go on, you rat. You are just a low, yellow cur, that is all you are, you sanctimonious humbug. Get over on your right side, you rat. I don’t want you voting for me. You never were a Labor man.’

As Faulkner rightly points out, Ward’s statements were widely reported throughout Australia, ‘despite being expunged from Hansard by the Speaker in an effort to prevent further publicity’.

Significantly, John Iremonger’s pithy chapter centres on the Split of 1954-55. Parenthetically, it also contains a superb two-page analysis of ex-Queensland ALP premier and Jim Scullin’s federal treasurer, ‘Red Ted’ Theodore, and his nemesis, ‘Stabber Jack’ Beasley.

Iremonger’s portrait of B.A. Santamaria, who began his lifelong political engagement at Melbourne University at the time of the Spanish Civil War, is particularly splendid. In 1935, Santamaria admired both Mussolini and General Franco as defenders of Christian civilisation; a decade later, the youthful Catholic defender of fascism, who had gained exemption from military service, ‘had become the centre of a concerted campaign to rid the unions and the ALP of communist influence’. As Iremonger puts it: ‘Generalissimo Franco’s admirer accepted the task with enthusiasm. The crusade would fight fire with fire.’

Indeed, Santamaria himself admitted that he modelled the structure of what later became known as ‘the Movement’ on Communist cadres. In his memoir, Against the Tide, Santamaria explained it thus:

The Communist organisational method has stood the test of effectiveness, and my proposal was that we should copy it … my thought was that the battle to defeat Communist power in the Labour Movement – whether in the Labor Party or the trade unions – should be essentially one of cadre against cadre, cell against cell, faction against faction.

As Iremonger explains, the Movement’s field of action ‘soon expanded beyond the unions, where it made substantial gains through the Industrial Groups, into the FPLP’.

The prime vehicle for this expansion were seven Victorian members of federal Caucus: Stan Keon, Jack Mullens, Bill Bourke, Jack Cremean, Tom Andrews, Bill Bryson, and Robert Joshua. Only Joshua, a MHR from Ballarat, was a non-Catholic. After pointing out that a core of the seven ‘including Keon, Mullens, and Andrews, lunched regularly with Santamaria’, Iremonger justifiably concludes, ‘all were eager to carry the crusade on to the floor of Caucus, and ready to use any means at their disposal to achieve their ends’.

The influence of the Movement lasted beyond the election of Gough Whitlam in 1972. Thus due to ‘the fag-ends of the DLP’, the first Whitlam Government could not command a majority in the Senate; it was only the double dissolution of May 1974 that saw its political obliteration.

The last three decades of the ALP’s rich and turbulent history are extremely well covered in the rest of the book. This especially applies to those domineering and electorally successful Labor leaders: Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke, and Paul Keating.

 The many changes to Caucus practice, which occurred during the Whitlam and Hayden years, are superbly documented by veteran journalists Paul Kelly and Alan Ramsey. Similarly, details of Bob Hawke’s successful challenge to Bill Hayden are cogently presented by Ramsey, as is the Keating challenge to Hawke by Mike Steketee. In his contribution, ‘Labor in power: 1983-96’, Steketee also offers a convincing analysis of the concerted move toward deregulation and globalisation which occurred under the leadership of Hawke and especially of that mercurial protégé of Jack Lang, Paul Keating. Yet given the abnegation of many traditional Labor ideals involved in the movement to unfettered free trade and so-called ‘economic rationalism’, it is darkly ironic to me that it was Keating’s stirring victory speech that gave renewed currency to the phrase ‘true believers’.

To the ALP faithful, Geoffrey Barker’s upbeat chapter, ‘Rejection to Recovery: 1996-May 2000’, gives realistic cause for electoral optimism and political hope. It is certainly true that Kim Beazley is neither a patrician nor a populist nor an over-the-top orator like Whitlam, Hawke, or Keating. But the current federal ALP leader is a fundamentally decent human being who actually cares, not just about economic development, but about human values and social policy. Indeed, many of the signs are already there that, when he wins the next election, Kim Beazley is likely to prove a more effective, substantial, and distinctly Labor prime minister than either Hawke or Keating. Yet Beazley’s style of leadership is at the same time much more inclusive and unifying than his predecessors. In this context, it is surely worth remembering that during the acrimonious split of the 1950s, it was largely through the efforts of Kim Beazley Snr that, unlike Queensland and Victoria, the ALP stayed fundamentally united in Western Australia.

True Believers is a fine book, well-researched, clearly written, and beautifully produced. It should be in every secondary school and tertiary library in Australia.