Laurie Aarons papers and sound recordings, ca. 1900-2005

fonds

ca. 1900-2005

Textual Records, Graphic Materials, Nonmusical Sound Recordings

877013

8.44 metres of textual material (40 boxes and 2 outsize boxes), including 3 sound discs (gramophone records) 45 rpm, and 8 albums and photographs
1 sound disc - analog, 33 1/3 rpm - 24.5 cm

Laurie Aarons (1917-2005) was a member of the third of four generations of the Aarons family who played leading roles in the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). He was a powerful advocate for de-Stalinisation of the party and was CPA National Secretary from 1965 to 1976.

Born in Undercliffe in inner-city Sydney in 1917, Laurie moved with his parents and younger brother, Eric, to Melbourne as a young boy. Here he became close to his grandparents, Jane and Louis Aarons, Jewish immigrants from the United States and Britain who had earlier been active in both the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and the far more radical Victorian Socialist Party. When the CPA was formed in 1920, Jane and Louis became foundation members in Melbourne in 1921 and were among the early Australian communists to visit the Soviet Union.

In the mid-1920s Laurie’s father, Sam Aarons, moved to Sydney with Laurie, while Eric stayed in Melbourne with their mother. Sam soon also joined the CPA and became a prominent figure in the party’s local activities. In the mid-1930s Sam took the arduous journey from Australia to Spain to volunteer for the International Brigades formed to assist the Spanish Republic to resist Franco’s ultimately successful uprising against the elected Popular Front government. Sam later became a senior CPA official in both South Australia and Western Australia and a member of the Central (later National) Committee along with his two sons.

After leaving school and home at the age of 14 to become a ‘professional revolutionary’, Laurie became politically active, first in the Young Communist League and soon after he joined the CPA. He spoke at CPA public meetings in Bondi and the Domain and was active in the Boot Makers’ Union as he worked in his father’s boot repair business.

He married Caroline Arkinstall in 1945 and they had three sons (Brian, John and Mark) over the next few years. In 1946 he was sent to Adelaide as assistant metropolitan secretary and in 1948 to Newcastle as district secretary. In early 1952 he shifted back to Sydney as state secretary of the NSW branch, the largest and most important in Australia. Soon after he emerged as a national leader, joining the CPA’s powerful Secretariat of four and working closely with the General Secretary, Lance Sharkey, and Chairman Dick Dixon. From the mid-1950s he travelled widely on party work, including to New Zealand, Indonesia, India, Italy, France, Britain and the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries. In 1955-1956 he led a party delegation to study for fifteen months at a special school established in Beijing by the Communist Party of China.

Laurie was elected CPA National Secretary in 1965. In 1967, he delivered his first report as national secretary to the CPA’s triennial national congress. The Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 deeply shocked Laurie. There was a resultant rapid and sharp deterioration of the CPA’s relations with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and a deep split among the CPA’s membership. At the CPA’s 22nd Congress in 1970, the membership overwhelmingly endorsed the positions taken by Laurie and the big majority of the party leadership. One of the most significant decisions taken at the Congress was a major reform initiated by the CPA leadership which required that key posts could not be held by the same person for more than six years. As a consequence, Laurie stepped down from that post at the CPA’s 25th Congress in 1976 at the relatively young age of 59.

In the late-1970s and early 1980s Laurie turned his considerable knowledge of the CPA’s decades-long involvement in struggle to good use when he became an oral historian. He travelled almost the entire length and breadth of Australia recording hundreds of hours of recollections of veterans and activists of the CPA and the wider Labour Movement.

Reference:
Contextual note compiled by Mark Aarons, including sources consulted by him, available at MLMSS 7924/Box 1

SERIES 01
Laurie Aarons personal and political papers, ca. 1900-2005

SERIES 02
Various sound recordings from the Laurie Aarons papers, ca. 1971-1998

See Series level records for further information and call numbers