Comrade Roberts

aEURO The female members should be rooted on the workshop floor.aEURO So wrote Trotsky, in answer to a letter from Comrade Origlass asking for the best contribution female party members and fellow travellers could make to the class struggle. Trotsky was master of five languages but was clearly unfamiliar with Australian double entendre. Kenneth Gee was one of the young Australians who followed the Trotskyite flame in the 1940s. His memoirs tell the story of a middle class boy so fervid for a better world that he rejects the Labor Party, the Langites, the Leninists and the Stalinists and hitches his star to the tiny Sydney cell of the Fourth International. He becomes Comrade Roberts, a man who transforms himself from a bright-eyed young solicitor to a boilermakeraEURO (TM)s labourer on the Sydney waterfront. 'We Trotskyites were a mixture of genuine Depression-hardened proletarians, with a residue of declassed intellectuals, idealists, dreamers, born losers, power-seekers, thugs, neurotics and drunks, and we operated with a combination of cold rationality and political lunacy, as these pages may reveal'. His is a vastly entertaining tale of life in Sydney in the Second World War, of work on the docks, in factories, as maker of hearses; and of meetings and schisms and the overthrow of capitalism. Significant figures such as John Kerr, Jim McClelland and Laurie Short walk the pages with many others like Big Andy, Maisie the barmaid and Comrade the Rev. Bradley, boot clicker aEURO caring for a thousand solesaEURO . In later years Comrade Roberts reverted to the law and became Kenneth Gee QC, a member of the Sydney Bar, and one of Her MajestyaEURO (TM)s judges in the District Court of New South Wales.