Graham Smith

Graham F. Smith was a factory worker, teacher, education reformer and trade union leader in South Australia, with a strong commitment to democracy, social justice and equality. He was a member of the Communist Party of Australia from 1944 until his death in 1989.

He left school with the Leaving Certificate in 1939 to work in the Bank of South Australia. It was while he was a clerk in the bank’s Naracoorte Branch that his political radicalism was awakened through his realisation that the teachings of the Church conflicted with his own observations of the world. That assessment was reinforced through his readings on the arms trade, international politics and socialism and the comradely support of Phil Howlett. His politics were further transformed through war service.

Called up to the AIF in June 1943, he served for 39 months in New Guinea and Indonesia, first as a surveyor and then in the Army Education Corps. He participated in discussion and reading groups in the army, focused largely on the socialist promise of the post war reconstruction project. At the end of 1944, he joined the CPA in his unit and was demobbed in 1946, resolutely committed to world peace, international solidarity and the transformation of Australian society.

Initiating his life-long love of learning, Graham enrolled at Adelaide University in 1946, where he enjoyed student politics, continued his peace work and supported the CPA’s campaign for Indonesian independence. He married Sally Smith in 1947. As the Cold War deepened, Graham struggled to obtain secure full-time work, because of his political beliefs. In 1951, he responded to the Party’s directive to ‘build revolutionary momentum through industrial work’, by joining Perry Engineering’s Railway Workshops at Islington.

His wages at the Railway Workshops were low and the Party work unrelenting. He was coping with Australia’s pervasive culture of ‘redbaiting’, while working with others to resist Menzies’ attempts to ban the CPA, continuing his work in the peace movement and participating in intense local government politics in Marion. All the while, he was maintaining his conscientious work as a shop steward for the Federated Ironworkers’ Association at Perry Engineering in the face of the National Civic Council’s white-anting tactics in the union movement. He recognised later that this was a very difficult time for his growing family. For this and other reasons, Graham charted a new direction by becoming a schoolteacher in 1956.

Appointed initially to primary and then to secondary schools, he became widely respected by colleagues and students alike for his innovative, inclusive teaching. In 1960, he was elected on a reforming platform to the executive of the South Australian Institute of Teachers (SAIT).

During the 1960s, he was the prime architect of a successful campaign for wage justice for the teaching profession, including the introduction of equal pay for women. The remarkable ‘Better Education’ campaign achieved a revolution in community and political recognition of the value of teachers’ work and proper state governance and investment in education. He also led innovations in school curricula; his textbook revolutionised social studies, as Craig Campbell has noted, “through an insistence that secondary schools and teachers had a responsibility to bring students into a critical interaction with their contemporary society”.

A crucial success was his professionalisation and mobilisation of SAIT, forming it into a powerful teachers’ union and a force within the wider trade union movement. In all of these respects, Graham’s leadership effected advances in teachers’ conditions and the modernisation of education policy in other states, extending ultimately to the 1972 Whitlam Government’s reform agenda and the Australian Education Union’s formation in the 1980s.

Between 1972 and 1981, Graham lectured in social science at the Western Teachers’ College (later the South Australian College of Advanced Education), though he continued his valued association with teachers’ unions, education boards and the United Trades and Labour Council (UTLC). It was during this period that he married Leonie Ebert, also a teacher and trade unionist. When Leonie was promoted in 1981, Graham retired to become ‘main house person’ to the family, which now included young Naomi.

The balance of Graham’s political life was substantially devoted to the peace movement, through his membership of the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), People for Peace and the UTLC’s Peace Council. He remained an active trade unionist (including supporting Leonie Ebert who was, for a time, SAIT President), carried out part-time teaching and work within the CPA. Amongst support for Australian tours of other prominent socialist and liberation leaders, he organised the 1987 visit to South Australia of the South African ANC representative, Eddie Funde, and was active in solidarity work with teachers in the Philippines and elsewhere. Along with many others, he was deeply saddened by splits in the CPA, especially after 1968, and with the communist movement’s decline in following years.

Graham observed in his autobiography that “I have chosen to contribute to our history by being an active participant in it”. That, manifestly, he did, to the enduring benefit of us all. It is especially fitting that his legacy has been celebrated through the Graham F Smith Peace Foundation, which advocates for peace through the arts and education, founded and ably led by Leonie Ebert for the last 30 years.

Communist memoir

On Thursday 26 November 2015, Professor Barbara Pocock and Associate Professor Craig Campbell launched Graham F. Smith’s memoir – "Speak Up, Reach Out: A life to reckon with".

A lifelong activist and educator, Graham Smith’s memoir is a microcosm of Australian politics and society at a particularly volatile time, seen through the eyes of a storyteller who was both compassionate and analytical.

The Second World War, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the political, economic and social upheavals of post war Australia, and Sir Robert Menzies’ (failed) attempt to outlaw the Communist Party of Australia – Graham lived through these events and made influential contributions to them all. He was involved in and committed to the struggles of the marginalised and impoverished – as a communist in mid-twentieth century Australia he became one of the marginalised. But he, as Barbara Pocock has said in her contribution, ‘was never a hater. Always a builder, and much more likely to meet division with humour than criticism’.

CPA South Australia candidates

In 1991 the Communist Party of Australia stood three candidates in South Australia - John Wishart, Graham Smith and Linda Gale.

CPA candidate

The Broad Left Conference

The Communist Party of Australia, Association for Communist Unity and others organized The Broad Left Conference, which was held 1986 28th-31st March, at the NEW SOUTH WALES INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY Broadway, Sydney.

Graham Smith was among the list of sponsors.