The Spanish Anarchists of Northern Australia by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Australia & New Zealand, Europe, Great Britain, General, Spain & Portugal, Oceania
ISBN: 9781786833099
Google: reyVDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Published: 2018-10-15T00:44:26+00:00

International debates

Scholarship about Australia has traditionally been preoccupied with the continent’s distance from Europe and the Americas, implying its insulation from conflicts and isolation from global debate. Certainly, Australia’s distance from Europe was a significant part of its appeal to the northern Spanish community. Distant from intrusive governments, and able to develop nature in their own communal image of development, they hoped to live their lives in freedom. This physical distance did not mean that the migrants ceased to feel connection with events in faraway locations. Indeed, dialogue with former homes was the object of considerable emotional effort and labour. The Spanish migrants engaged in ongoing debates with friends and family members throughout the world, and these debates helped them to formulate a language with which to make meaning and to challenge the preconceptions of their neighbours.

Engaging in meaningful debates that had practical outcomes was central to anarchist practice. The close-knit physical communities and social milieu of Barcelona, Lyon and Paris provided a means to sustain the men in cities that were often hostile to their ideas. Such options were not viable in northern Australia. While not losing their radical identity, the migrants did become progressively more isolated from the social structures that had originally nurtured this aspect of their identity. Removed from the close social environment of urban Catalonia or Buenos Aires, the migrant community tried to connect spaces in which they could safely discuss their beliefs by means of letter writing.

Torrents’ early experiences in France and Spain meant that he was particularly comfortable with the semi-clandestine world of anarchist publications. The published word was crucial to anarchists, who were committed to self-improvement through education. Torrents had quickly found social spaces that echoed the anarchist networks of Catalonia while he was in Paris. He was a regular visitor at the printing houses of anarchist and radical journals, such as L’Idée Libre, which he had then used to build contacts and find employment in the French capital. When able, he also contributed to the journals’ publishing with his time and words. His political and social connections expanded rapidly through such work, helped by the substantial Spanish community in the French capital. In keeping with the broader anarchist rejection of aesthete intellectualism, Torrents described himself as ‘a peasant, not a writer’.94 He laughingly recalled one of the numerous occasions on which he was arrested by police: ‘Me! Dangerous? I have never used any arms other than paper. Whenever the police would search me, they found only journals and pamphlets in my pockets.’95

This level of connectivity would prove to be unsustainable in northern Australia, where the smaller population was spread across large distances. With visits to the regional centre of Innisfail being possible only occasionally, activists could never reconstruct the close-knit radical communities that underpinned their memories of Catalonia. Anarchist networks were sustainable in cities such as Paris, Lyon and Buenos Aires because of comparable high-density urban social spaces in which factories and symbols of civic authority remained a tangible and inescapable aspect of daily life.

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