Barbara Bound
Barbara Bound died early in the morning of March 6 in hospital in Hobart, Tasmania, after fighting cancer for the last 20 months. She was honoured with a large funeral on March 8.
Barbara Dawson grew up in St Marys and was educated at St Michaels Collegiate School, Hobart. After a brief stint working in a bank, she trained as a nurse at the Launceston General Hospital. Becoming an active member of the Nurses’ Federation there marked the start of an adult life devoted to principles of class solidarity and social justice.
This commitment continued after her marriage to Max Bound in 1955 and during the late 1950s and early ’60s Barbara played a key role in establishing the Union of Australian Women in Tasmania.
While she was active in the UAW, Barbara was also elected as President of the Mothers Club and a member of the executive of the Parents and Friends at Springfield Gardens State School.
During those years she stood as a candidate for the Glenorchy Municipal Council. Her election leaflets indicated that she held these positions, and also that she was a member of the executive of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Tasmanian Secretary of the UAW and a member of the Tasmanian State Committee of the Communist Party of Australia. Although not elected, she received a very respectable vote, this at the height of the Cold War, a time of rampant paranoid opposition to progressive social and political movements.
In 1966 Barbara led a group of Australian Communist Women who visited the Soviet Union. There was much which impressed her there. However her experiences of some negative aspects of life in the Soviet Union influenced her own thinking and she, as was her nature, was utterly frank in reporting on this. As Max would be the first to admit, Barbara’s experience there had an important impact on his thinking, and on the Party and its supporters in Tasmania.
While in Moscow Barbara was contacted by the Union of Australian Women National Committee to represent the UAW at an international peace conference in Stockholm. There she had lengthy discussions with a group of Vietnamese women delegates who spoke of what was happening to the their people as result of the latest foreign invasion.
On returning, Barbara, in her capacity as Tasmanian Secretary of the UAW, organised Hobart’s first anti-Vietnam War demonstration. It was small but so was the level of active opposition to the war at that time. Later, of course, many others joined in and, realising the popularity of the cause, ALP politicians jumped on the bandwagon. It is well known that Neil Batt boasted to his parliamentary colleagues that a quota of voters followed him down Hobart’s main street in one anti-Vietnam War demonstration, but that Barbara Bound had beaten him to it, and done it out of a sense of justice and compassion, not for personal popularity.
A further request from the UAW national committee was for Barbara to represent the UAW at a Conference on working women in Rome. At this conference, as at the one in Stockholm, she spoke of the impact made on her by not only the Vietnamese but also the African and Indian women. While in Rome, she also managed to get herself (as part of a large crowd) blessed by the Pope. Snubbed by Eric Reece, copied by Neil Batt and blessed by the Pope.
By the early 1970s Barbara was trained as a teacher and was elected to the executive of the Tasmanian Teachers Federation for the next 11 years. She represented the Tasmanian Teachers Federation at several national meetings concerned with early childhood education.
During a rally in Franklin Square in support of a better deal for public education, there was a small group of hecklers, one of whom yelled at the assembled crowd, who were a varied assortment of students, teachers and parents, "You’re all Commos!" Immediately Barbara grabbed the microphone, introduced herself as the Communist Party State Treasurer, and said, "If that’s the case I wish they’d all pay their membership fees."
In the early 1970s Barbara also became a member of the National Committee of the CPA, which had in the late 1960s become highly critical of the Soviet Union’s actions in attacking the people of Czechoslovakia and had taken an independent position on foreign affairs.
In 1975 she was a member of an Australian Teachers delegation to China. She was impressed by aspects of life in China, including the way in which Chinese kindergartens functioned, the quietness of the trains and the cleanliness of the streets. When it became known that she was a member of the CPA, her Chinese hosts became noticeably less enthusiastic.
It was typical of Barbara that, as a Communist, she adopted a stance which was independent of, and unwelcomed by, the world’s two largest Communist Parties.
She was self-effacing, a person whose instincts were co-operative rather than individualistic, but for all that she was her own person. For most of the years I knew Barbara, had I been asked to sum her up in one word, I would have chosen "formidable". I see no contradiction in describing her as both self-effacing and formidable, because it was her principles and her commitment to others that gave her such strength.[1]
NOW WE THE PEOPLE
In July 2001, endorsers of the SEARCH Foundation's NOW WE THE PEOPLE conference in Sydney included Barbara Bound.
"STATEMENT REGARDING ABORIGINAL LAND RIGHTS"
In April 1986 several hundred attendees of The Broad Left Conference in Melbourne signed an add in the National Times "STATEMENT REGARDING ABORIGINAL LAND RIGHTS".
Signatories included Barbara Bound.