Secret Societies
The Knights of Labor
and other
Australian Secret Societies
as the 19thc became the 20th.
honeycombed with secret societies, guilds and
brotherhoods, some under episcopal patronage, yet all
secretly instilling the false doctrine of
soul-destroying error that underlies Romish
ritualism. ..Ritualists were un-anglican, un-english,
anti-Reformationist and Anti-Christ.
This Association leafleted and campaigned for help from like-minded Protestants to oppose 'the present ritualistic wave..overflowing the Colony.' Clearly, the secret fraternal 'trappings' had not died. In addition to that which was being celebrated in churches, the gathering evidence insists that there was, in fact, a lot of Australian 'secret work' going on, in the bush and in the cities, quite apart from the Masons.
It is well known that Irish nationalism achieved a potent symbolic and practical success when the Yankee whaler Catalpa, funded, apparently not through Fenian circles, but through Clan na Gael ('The Irish Race') and the Irish Republican Brotherhood [IRB], snatched six prisoners from Fremantle authorities and returned them to the northern hemisphere in 1875. Also known as 'the United Brotherhood' this Clan was organised in clubs or numbered branches, with public names, in the fraternal fashion. Originally the result of a secession from New York Fenian networks and known as the 'Knights of the Inner Circle', the Clan/United Brotherhood strictly enforced secrecy to guard against infiltration:
Both the IRB and the Fenian Brotherhood were organised
in small, well-disciplined circles..Each circle was
designed for up to eight hundred members and was
commanded by men identified not by title but by
letters. At the head of each circle was a centre,
referred to as...A; assisting the centre were nine
captains, or B's, who in turn had a staff of
sergeants, or C's.
Its elaborate initiation ceremonies involved blindfolds, tied hands and an oath:
..(We) are Irishmen, banded together for the purpose of
freeing Ireland, and elevating the position of the
Irish race. The lamp of the bitter past plainly points
out our path, and the first step on the road to
Freedom is Secrecy…
After the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, Irishmen happily acknowledged the thread of organisational connection from the Clan, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and the (US) Ancient Order of Hibernians back to the 'Circles' and 'Centres' of 18th century fraternities.
That the very old, shared fraternal heritage was being maintained is clear. In 1885, the Newcastle, NSW, branch of the Operative Stonemasons Society was still 'making', ie initiating, new members. When branches of the Progressive Society of Carpenters and Joiners were being established in regional NSW, a list of intending members and their initiation fees were being collected and forwarded to Sydney. Tylers, or Door Guardians, operated at meetings of the Sydney Coal Lumpers, which was not established until 1882, of the United General Laborers' Association of Newcastle and of the United Laborers Protective Society of NSW in 1892. This last body included in its assets for 1892: banner boxes, books, regalia and other lodge property to the value of £110 out of a total of £146/12/-.
Laffan has recently shown that the Orange affiliations of labour activists in the Hunter Valley from the 1860's on is 'quite remarkable in number and variety' and that it remained so well into the 20th century. As he rightly says, this finding runs 'contrary to a number of well-established assumptions about the Australian labour movement.'
For the period before the emergence of the Labour
Electoral Leagues in 1891, many labour activists were
Orangemen. Amongst the region's largest union, that of
the coal miners, many of the elected positions both at
a lodge and district level, were filled by Orangemen.
Newcastle's 1891 8-Hour Day 'Sports' were held under 'Wallsend Rules'. This strongly-fraternal, mining community was the home of 'Miners' Home Refuge', thought to be the largest GUOOF lodge in the colony, perhaps the world at the time. Not too many years before it had been insolvent but under hard-headed leadership its membership passed 500 in the early 1890's. It fostered a branch for juvenile members from 1876 and instituted a Ladies Temple, the 'Southern Cross', in 1891, before the Order officially admitted women.
Francis 'Frank' Craig was at the heart of all these developments. He had been involved with 'Miners' Home' since its founding in 1868, and its officers included his brother, Robert Fergus Craig. Wallsend Lodge appears to have had no banner or to have been very keen on spending money on processions, making exceptions for funerals, but just after 'Frank' Craig died in 1893, two banners were procured.
In 1895, 'Miners' Home Refuge' refused to adhere to directions issued by Hunter River District officers, and with a neighbouring miner-based branch, Lambton's the 'Rose of Australia', was expelled from GUOOF altogether. The following year, after thirty years of experience in GUOOF, and specifically over a detail of benefit conditions seen as 'not being in accordance with their requirements nor the spirit of Odd Fellowship', these two branches established a totally-new Order, the 'Australian Odd Fellows' Union' [AOU]. It followed the usual fraternal form, in structure and in its Rules, until its lodges re-joined Grand United in 1905.
While Archibald was absent in the UK in 1884, 'the editor' of The Bulletin (Traill?) was made a founding member of the 'Fraternity of Mutual Imps'. This secret society was founded in the early 1880's, under the motto, 'Friendship and Hospitality' by HT Towle, conductor of the orchestra at the Theatre Royal in Sydney using the nom-de-plume, 'HW Harrison.' It was formed for the purpose of:
promoting intercourse and cementing the bonds of
friendship between members of the Dramatic, Lyric,
Musical and Literary Professions.
Lodges of Imps were established throughout New Zealand - in Christchurch, Wellington, Dunedin and Aukland, in 1881-2, and shortly after in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Hobart, Broken Hill and Adelaide. Some boasted their own neatly furnished rooms where members could meet to chat, reminisce, read the papers, or use the writing materials and other conveniences, as in many another 'City Club.' Paying members numbered between 350 and 400, making them financially sound. Melbourne Lodge, No 3 on the Grand Lodge Roll, opened in September, 1882, and still claimed 350 members in 1927.
The Installation and Investiture of the 'Arch Fiend' [Lodge Master] was 'a most imposing spectacle, never to be erased from one's memory.' Officers, members of the Council 'with all their war paint on', were installed to specially-composed music rendered by the conductors and players from professional theatres with vocals contributed by 'artists associated with the Opera Companies in town.' Some of the earliest concert programmes were reviewed in detail in The Bulletin, and as for ritual, it commented:
(Unless) you have nerves of steel and a head harder
than a billy-goat don't you seek for admission, for
the initiation ceremony isn't a bit funny, and the
candidate is bound to imagine that he is in hades or
the next door to it before he's halfway through the
ordeal.
The General Rules of the Imps show other executive positions as 'Past Arch Fiend, Steward, Tyler, Hon Treasurer and Secretary.' They also show four classes of membership and that 'the emblems, regalia, paraphernalia, etc,' were to be returned 'into safe keeping at the rising of the lodge.'
It is not accidental nor a sign of a personal quirk that labour leader and preacher at the time of the great Maritime Strike, WG Spence, saw trade unionism as 'a new religion', that he saw organisation as 'the first step essential to Society's salvation', or that he sent out 'missionaries' to 'convert' non-believers. Neither was it accidental that he used coercion and violence to back up his disciplined, hierarchical attitudes.
Spence and many other labour notables were initiated into the Knights of Labor at the height of the 1890's confrontation with capital. Imported from the USA in 1889 this fraternal society caught the imagination of dreamers, pragmatists and revolutionaries alike. Hand-written records show that during the most disturbed and turbulent months of 1892-3, the Knight's 'Inner Guardian' had led William Lane, Henry Lawson, George Black, Ernie Lane, Spence, and many others, past the Tyler, through Outer and Inner Veils to the 'Master Workman' seated inside 'Adelphon Kryptos' or the 'Assembly of the Secret Brotherhood.' There they were given passwords, one each for the Inner Veil and the Outer Veil, Travelling Cards, with another password, and were lectured on relations the Divine Creator and certain geometrical shapes had with justice, wisdom, truth, industry and economy. The Knight's motto, 'That is the most perfect government in which an injury to one is an injury to all' was increasingly popular on trade union banners. A brief guide for initiates, 'Secret Work and Instructions', describes the use of passwords, hand signs and response signals and insists that:
If there is any sign or portion of a sign, words or
symbols, in use in your local different from what you
find laid down here, discard the same at once.
A published 'Preamble' declared:
TO THE PUBLIC: The alarming development and
aggressiveness of great capitalists and corporations,
unless checked, will inevitably lead to pauperisation
and hopeless degradation of the toiling masses.
It is imperative, if we desire to enjoy the full
blessings of life, that a check be placed upon unjust
accumulation, and the power for evil of aggregated
wealth.. Therefore we have formed the Order of the
Knights of Labor..
Mary Gilmour was not a member but her coolness under pressure may have been among the reasons Lawson was attracted to her. She, apparently, kept watch on one occasion while Arthur Rae and other 'Knights' worked feverishly to remove a bomb allegedly planted by their enemies at Circular Quay in Sydney.
The US 'Grand Master Workman' of this brotherhood, Terence Powderley, was a Freemason and an initiate of other societies. Larry Petrie, arrested in July, 1893 for attempting to bomb the SS Aramac in Brisbane Harbour, is shown in the Sydney Assembly's records as Member No 59. A hand-written memo dated 25 October, 1893, to 'the Master Workman of Freedom Assembly' and signed by Frank Cotton, Thomas Bavister and Arthur Rae, among others, received the following as response to its request for a meeting:
This requisition was only handed to me practically on
Oct 30th the day named therein so of course the
meeting could not be called for that day..
[Peter]McNaught is away and the others either resigned
or left the country some for 'New Australia'..(For) a
special meeting for the purpose named no doubt you
will kindly do the needful.
Without naming him, 'Billy' Lane had spoken glowingly, of McNaught in April, 1892, in the Brisbane Worker, the paper he, Lane, edited before leading the New Australia movement to Paraguay:
The ex-editor of a North Queensland paper, the Master
Workman of a southern Knights of Labour Assembly, one
of the most popular of Australian lecturers and other
prominent persons in and out of the Australian Labour
movement are known to their friends as enthusiastic
Anarchists.
Anarchism, theoretical or practical, is another of the many aspects of real-time labour history which have been left severely alone by Labor's spokespeople. Globally blighted by the controversy around an 1886 explosion in Chicago and its aftermath known as 'the Haymarket Affair', anarchism in all its variations nevertheless achieved substantial credibility. The Knights in the USA received a substantial influx of self-described anarchists in the late 1880's and early 1890's. Lane, himself, equated anarchism with 'mateship' and put it at the centre of the vigorous debates then occurring over labour members of parliament and revolutionary action in his 1892 novel, Working Man's Paradise:
The Anarchist ideal is the highest and noblest of all
human ideals. I cannot conceive of a good man who does
not recognise that, when he once understands it..
..Anarchical Communism, that is, men working as
mates and sharing with one another of their own free
will is the highest conceivable form of Socialism in
industry.
In another place, also under his pseudonym 'John Miller', he wrote:
..Just how this co-operation of the workers is to come
about is a matter on which Socialists argue
considerably..For myself, I think that voluntary
co-operation will show the people at large how to do
it, that legislation will then bring about some form or
other of state control which will remove the pressure
that now makes us hustle one another for a job, and
that as we become accustomed to being mates, and our
children are born and bred into the same atmosphere,
all need for legislation or for state-force of any
kind will pass away, and we shall evolve a truly
socialistic method of co-operation which we shall
uphold without law because we shall all love being
mates and all hate the very notion of competing with
each other as we do now. Just what this final system
will be I do not know.
Naïve and overly optimistic about human frailties as this advocacy shows Lane to have been, the fact remains that at the very time 'mateship' was being idealised by Lawson in verse, it was being closely associated by some influential labour activists with a social and political utopia, and as its ancient heritage was being built all around.
In much more splendid surroundings than tradesman cottages energies were at this time also being mobilised for a federated nation-state. A wall plaque in the Canberra Federation Exhibition quotes Alfred Deakin, regarded today as 'the architect of Federation':
(Federation) must always appear to have been secured by
a series of miracles.
What could he have meant? Was he drawing on his hidden inner beliefs?
In 1891 the International President of the Theosophical Society, Colonel HS Olcott, visited Australia. Although cut short by his having to return to Europe suddenly following the death of the Order's founder, Mme Blavatsky in London, Olcott's sojourn was remarkable for the depth of his contacts with this country's political elite. A highly respected diplomat, he later wrote:
I was fortunate enough to meet some of the leading
statesmen of different colonies whose names have
figured largely in the recent Federation movement,
such as Sir Samuel Griffith, Hon Mr Barton, Sir George
R Dibbs, Alfred Deakin, Hon John Woods, and others.
Two or three of them occupied the chair at my
lectures, and my conversations with them, both upon
occult and political matters, were highly interesting:
they have enabled me to follow recent events with
intelligent understanding of the undercurrent of
colonial feeling.
Edmund Barton, the soon-to-be first Prime Minister, chaired Olcott's Sydney lecture. Deakin did likewise in Melbourne, when the visitor spoke on 'Buddhism.' A founder of the Ibis Lodge of Theosophy in the 1890's, Deakin, post-1901, maintained contact with Olcott and with Annie Besant, former labour and women's rights activist, who succeeded Blavatsky as 'commander' of Theosophy world-wide and helped establish Co-Masonry. From a young age Deakin had been interested in mysticism and spirituality, authoring in 1887 a book entitled Temple and Tomb in India. Describing him as 'a visionary whose 'practical' mysticism has left an enduring legacy in the institutions and the political processes of his beloved nation', Gabay's study of Deakin's inner life and politics concluded with the following:
Like Cardinal Newman, Arthur Balfour, Josiah Royce and
other Idealist intellectuals of his time, Deakin was
reacting against the current 'materialism'…in the
manner and with the presuppositions at hand, being
especially keen to defend immortality as the basis of
true morality…What marks Deakin out…were his own
remarkable private experiences, and the great
authority they were to assume towards the end of his
life…His faith was sustained by prophecy and 'signs'…
As theosophist Kynaston has pointed out, just as the work of Freemasons in creating the political structure of the USA was followed by a Masonic design of that nation's capital city, so the 'fathering' of the Australian nation state by a man heavily influenced by theosophy was followed by the designing of this nation's capital by a husband and wife team who, if not formally members, had very strong theosophical connections. There are other indicators. The founder in 1869 of the Victorian Association of Progressive Spiritualists for which Deakin was a conductor, ie, was involved in the ritual before entering politics, was WH Terry. The 'WH Terry Lodge' was one of two which formed the 'Practical Brotherhood of Spiritualistic Sociologists' when it was established by JR Davies in Melbourne around 1900. This organisation's Preamble is very closely modelled on that of the 'Australasian Knights of Labor' for which Davies was previously 'PMW' or 'Past Master Workman', serving on the executive with Federal MP Dr Maloney. JA Andrews and two anarchist comrades established a Theosophical Lodge in Sydney in 1894, the same year that Deakin met Annie Besant there and became a theosophist, suggesting quite a range of admirers at her lectures.
It was in that same year that a Corps of St John's Ambulance Brigade was 'initiated' in Lithgow. Revealing the fraternal heritage of what became in the 20th century a ubiquitous presence at working class sporting and community events, 'the Zambuks', the reporter wrote:
The St John's Ambulance Association was established in
England in 1877 by the chapter of the order of St John
of Jerusalem, an order which was incorporated by His RH
the Prince of Wales as Grand Prior.
Sydney's Cardinal Moran may have recognised the biblical allusions in the rites of the Knights of Labour and the Theosophists, if they had not been secret, while attmpting to emulate the mediating role played by (the Catholic) Bishop Manning in London's Dock Strike and later labour disputes. Appointed Archbishop of Sydney in 1884, Moran had shown his rigid hand while still a bishop in Ireland. In 1876, the Irish National Foresters indicated they were prepared to change their rules to 'meet objections against certain affectations of mystery' to obtain his approval but even this was insufficient 'flexibility'. In 1877 he refused to endorse the Leinster United Trades Association on the grounds that 'the rules offer scope for intrigue and subterfuge', and that the name 'United Trades' was
borne by many associations that have proved themselves
hotbeds of secret organisations and every social
disorder, and have brought ruin to thousands in
England.
According to Ford, Moran gave his approval when the Association changed its name to the Kilkenny Artisans Association, appointed an honorary chaplain, and arranged for quarterly reception of 'the sacraments' by members. Charles Dilke, English MP who made a fact-finding tour in the 1880's wrote later that Moran's prohibition on Australian Catholics receiving any of the sacraments while they were enrolled in any 'secret society' was a more rigorous ban than any that applied elsewhere.
Ford's study of the 'encounter between Moran and Socialism' in NSW between 1890 and 1907 is strongly partisan. He conflates communism and anarchism with state socialism, and NSW with Australia, and argues that Moran's was the key role in the 'deflection' of the State Labor Party into moderate 'trade union' policies, thereby supposedly making possible the 20th century mass entry of Catholics into the ALP. Ford argues that as a result of Moran's influence over Catholic voters in NSW, Australian democracy was defended and bigotry defeated:
This influence and (his insistence on a plurality of
political parties) were, both, a contribution to his
ideal of a free society - and the more significant for
coming at a time when Australia's new democracy was
emerging.
Ford added:
Of no less value, however, was his repeated assertion
of the necessity of promoting ancillary social
institutions ('the intermediate institutions' of Pope
John XXIII) such as benefit societies and housing
co-operatives, as basic to a free society.
The Cardinal's dogma that Catholics could not be socialists, which effectively narrowed the possible 'plurality', was matched by his further assertion that only Catholic societies were acceptable. He often used meetings of the HACBS, the INF's and the AHCG to speak his mind on social issues. Ford does allow that Moran's pronouncements and his candidature for the Federation Convention in 1897, resulted in his clashing violently 'with extreme Protestants':
The bitterness which resulted was severe and may
explain a tendency to sectarian hyper-sensitiveness in
Australia that does not seem to exist in England.
Local anxieties were again intensifying about the degree to which a growing personal independence fitted, on the one hand, with the asserted alignment of 'the Crown' and the Church of England, and with Catholic claims to be 'the one true faith', on the other. Anti-Catholics asserted 'papists' were voting for Protection candidates en masse because they were ordered to by the Church, a consideration much debated by historians since. The Catholic response included assertions that the Lord Mayor of Sydney in 1889 was expelled from the Orange Order because he attended a Ball held for St Vincent's Hospital. Two MPs were expelled at the same time, one of whom put this minor furore in the context of land reform, the Sudan Contingent and the likelihood of defeating the Stuart Government:
Mr Stuart was denounced and made to feel the constant
opposition of prominent members of the Orange
Institution because he had the talented and
liberal-minded Dalley as his Attorney-General; but they
do not denounce Sir H Parkes for having Mr D O'Connor as
a colleague. Oh, no, this is fiscal, not popery.
With Federation looming, the 'Brunswick Riots' of 1896 and '97 were a severe test of will. The first was a direct result of forces unwilling to allow Orange celebrations:
The intention was originally that the members of the
LOI and Protestant Alliance should hold a parade, and
then march to the Wesleyan church, where a service was
to be held..As the procession was abandoned, the
brethren to the number of over 200, including many
representatives from other suburbs, assembled in
regalia in the enclosure surrounding the church, and
marched into the church preceded by an officer bearing
a cushion, on which lay a copy of an open Bible.
The packed congregation, assembled around the Orange brethren sitting on a raised platform, continued to be assailed and 'boo-hooed' by crowds outside during the 'impressive' service and afterwards. Despite having the necessary permits, the LOI leaders were informed by the police that under the 'Unlawful Assemblies Act' they would be responsible for any disturbance of the peace brought on by the 'mob' of 'not fewer than 15,000' thronging the streets:
The contagion of riot soon spread, and scrimmages
developed in all directions. Boys perched on hoardings
took a devilish delight in pointing out where specks of
orange appeared in the crowd, and gloating over the
scenes that followed.
Discussions in parliament and elsewhere between that and the next July produced conflicting legal opinions about police powers when common wisdom said trouble was bound to re-occur. They also produced the Melbourne Post Office Inquiry and a book compiled by a Catholic priest, which quickly ran to eleven editions. During the Inquiry of 1896, where charges against a Catholic postal employee were heard and dismissed, the chaplain of the Queen's Own Lodge in Melbourne, composed entirely of Public Servants, claimed it to be the 'largest Orange lodge in the world.' Crowds in Brunswick streets in July, 1897 have been estimated at twice the previous year's total:
..A few wild spirits, led by a woman, broke into
incipient riot; but they were arrested, incontinently
bundled into cabs and taken to the lock-up...(But) for
the heavy restraining hand of the police the
demonstration must have ended in disaster..A dozen
arrests and a head slightly injured by a policeman's
baton represent the whole known results of the
lawlessness of the day.
Coolgardie, in the west was rocked by similar conflict in 1897, as was Southern Cross (WA) in 1901. These outbursts were exceptions to the rule of administrative conformity, centralisation and selective tolerance spreading across the continent, but were not the only exceptions. As anxiety battled optimism and the century drew to a close, Amy Castles, a shy Catholic girl from Bendigo thrust too quickly towards national and international stardom as 'the new Melba', became a tragic casualty of the faith-based wars. Nellie Melba, of course, was Protestant, and living the high life of a diva in the northern hemisphere. The showman-priest, Robinson, the girl's mentor and the person partly responsible for what became 'the Castles' boom', no doubt applauded when The Catholic Press wrote:
It is remarkable that all Australian singers of note
are Catholic.
There have been far too many Catholic sodalities, fraternities and like organisations to track in detail examples of their discrimination against non-Catholics, and it is probably unnecessary to point out the proscriptions the RC Church has effected against mixed-marriages and other forms of consorting with the alleged enemy. The Catholic Press in 1899 did manage to recount how a Catholic chemist in Sydney had been boycotted by members of the St Davids Lodge No 35 of the PAFS because, after five years of service, he had 'suddenly discovered' his religion. In Queensland, also at the end of the century, attacks on Catholic agendas and an 'unnatural Protestant ascendancy' led some of the faithful to argue that a growing Masonic movement had taken over the Orange agenda:
Freemasonry stood for a concerted aggression against
every claim of the Church as a supernatural polity - this, Pius IX's excommunication of all (Masons) made
clear on both sides.
There appears to be plenty of fire among the smoke which, in the new century, was to feed into the conscription and later the 'Catholic Action' debates, but it also has to be said, that, on both sides, to obtain a reaction it was only sufficient that members of one group believed that 'they' were out to get 'us'. Fear remained a potent weapon, whatever the realities, well into the 20th century. Fear of Jesuits, in particular, was a strong emotional trigger for the Australian Protestant Defence Association begun in Sydney in 1902 by the Reverend Dill-Mackey and designed "to draw the Orange Lodges and the wider membership of the Churches into 'union in political action.'" The APDA quickly spread numbered 'lodges' throughout NSW.
and other
Australian Secret Societies
as the 19thc became the 20th.
from 'Concrete and Symbolic Temples',
They Call Each Other Brother,(2011)
including Irish Brotherhoods, Anarchists,
Orange lodges and Trade Societies.
Near the end of the 19th century, one of the more forthright Australian protagonists in the on-going religious conflicts, the Church of England Association claimed that its church remained:They Call Each Other Brother,(2011)
including Irish Brotherhoods, Anarchists,
Orange lodges and Trade Societies.
honeycombed with secret societies, guilds and
brotherhoods, some under episcopal patronage, yet all
secretly instilling the false doctrine of
soul-destroying error that underlies Romish
ritualism. ..Ritualists were un-anglican, un-english,
anti-Reformationist and Anti-Christ.
This Association leafleted and campaigned for help from like-minded Protestants to oppose 'the present ritualistic wave..overflowing the Colony.' Clearly, the secret fraternal 'trappings' had not died. In addition to that which was being celebrated in churches, the gathering evidence insists that there was, in fact, a lot of Australian 'secret work' going on, in the bush and in the cities, quite apart from the Masons.
It is well known that Irish nationalism achieved a potent symbolic and practical success when the Yankee whaler Catalpa, funded, apparently not through Fenian circles, but through Clan na Gael ('The Irish Race') and the Irish Republican Brotherhood [IRB], snatched six prisoners from Fremantle authorities and returned them to the northern hemisphere in 1875. Also known as 'the United Brotherhood' this Clan was organised in clubs or numbered branches, with public names, in the fraternal fashion. Originally the result of a secession from New York Fenian networks and known as the 'Knights of the Inner Circle', the Clan/United Brotherhood strictly enforced secrecy to guard against infiltration:
Both the IRB and the Fenian Brotherhood were organised
in small, well-disciplined circles..Each circle was
designed for up to eight hundred members and was
commanded by men identified not by title but by
letters. At the head of each circle was a centre,
referred to as...A; assisting the centre were nine
captains, or B's, who in turn had a staff of
sergeants, or C's.
Its elaborate initiation ceremonies involved blindfolds, tied hands and an oath:
..(We) are Irishmen, banded together for the purpose of
freeing Ireland, and elevating the position of the
Irish race. The lamp of the bitter past plainly points
out our path, and the first step on the road to
Freedom is Secrecy…
After the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, Irishmen happily acknowledged the thread of organisational connection from the Clan, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and the (US) Ancient Order of Hibernians back to the 'Circles' and 'Centres' of 18th century fraternities.
That the very old, shared fraternal heritage was being maintained is clear. In 1885, the Newcastle, NSW, branch of the Operative Stonemasons Society was still 'making', ie initiating, new members. When branches of the Progressive Society of Carpenters and Joiners were being established in regional NSW, a list of intending members and their initiation fees were being collected and forwarded to Sydney. Tylers, or Door Guardians, operated at meetings of the Sydney Coal Lumpers, which was not established until 1882, of the United General Laborers' Association of Newcastle and of the United Laborers Protective Society of NSW in 1892. This last body included in its assets for 1892: banner boxes, books, regalia and other lodge property to the value of £110 out of a total of £146/12/-.
Laffan has recently shown that the Orange affiliations of labour activists in the Hunter Valley from the 1860's on is 'quite remarkable in number and variety' and that it remained so well into the 20th century. As he rightly says, this finding runs 'contrary to a number of well-established assumptions about the Australian labour movement.'
For the period before the emergence of the Labour
Electoral Leagues in 1891, many labour activists were
Orangemen. Amongst the region's largest union, that of
the coal miners, many of the elected positions both at
a lodge and district level, were filled by Orangemen.
Newcastle's 1891 8-Hour Day 'Sports' were held under 'Wallsend Rules'. This strongly-fraternal, mining community was the home of 'Miners' Home Refuge', thought to be the largest GUOOF lodge in the colony, perhaps the world at the time. Not too many years before it had been insolvent but under hard-headed leadership its membership passed 500 in the early 1890's. It fostered a branch for juvenile members from 1876 and instituted a Ladies Temple, the 'Southern Cross', in 1891, before the Order officially admitted women.
Francis 'Frank' Craig was at the heart of all these developments. He had been involved with 'Miners' Home' since its founding in 1868, and its officers included his brother, Robert Fergus Craig. Wallsend Lodge appears to have had no banner or to have been very keen on spending money on processions, making exceptions for funerals, but just after 'Frank' Craig died in 1893, two banners were procured.
In 1895, 'Miners' Home Refuge' refused to adhere to directions issued by Hunter River District officers, and with a neighbouring miner-based branch, Lambton's the 'Rose of Australia', was expelled from GUOOF altogether. The following year, after thirty years of experience in GUOOF, and specifically over a detail of benefit conditions seen as 'not being in accordance with their requirements nor the spirit of Odd Fellowship', these two branches established a totally-new Order, the 'Australian Odd Fellows' Union' [AOU]. It followed the usual fraternal form, in structure and in its Rules, until its lodges re-joined Grand United in 1905.
While Archibald was absent in the UK in 1884, 'the editor' of The Bulletin (Traill?) was made a founding member of the 'Fraternity of Mutual Imps'. This secret society was founded in the early 1880's, under the motto, 'Friendship and Hospitality' by HT Towle, conductor of the orchestra at the Theatre Royal in Sydney using the nom-de-plume, 'HW Harrison.' It was formed for the purpose of:
promoting intercourse and cementing the bonds of
friendship between members of the Dramatic, Lyric,
Musical and Literary Professions.
Lodges of Imps were established throughout New Zealand - in Christchurch, Wellington, Dunedin and Aukland, in 1881-2, and shortly after in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Hobart, Broken Hill and Adelaide. Some boasted their own neatly furnished rooms where members could meet to chat, reminisce, read the papers, or use the writing materials and other conveniences, as in many another 'City Club.' Paying members numbered between 350 and 400, making them financially sound. Melbourne Lodge, No 3 on the Grand Lodge Roll, opened in September, 1882, and still claimed 350 members in 1927.
The Installation and Investiture of the 'Arch Fiend' [Lodge Master] was 'a most imposing spectacle, never to be erased from one's memory.' Officers, members of the Council 'with all their war paint on', were installed to specially-composed music rendered by the conductors and players from professional theatres with vocals contributed by 'artists associated with the Opera Companies in town.' Some of the earliest concert programmes were reviewed in detail in The Bulletin, and as for ritual, it commented:
(Unless) you have nerves of steel and a head harder
than a billy-goat don't you seek for admission, for
the initiation ceremony isn't a bit funny, and the
candidate is bound to imagine that he is in hades or
the next door to it before he's halfway through the
ordeal.
The General Rules of the Imps show other executive positions as 'Past Arch Fiend, Steward, Tyler, Hon Treasurer and Secretary.' They also show four classes of membership and that 'the emblems, regalia, paraphernalia, etc,' were to be returned 'into safe keeping at the rising of the lodge.'
It is not accidental nor a sign of a personal quirk that labour leader and preacher at the time of the great Maritime Strike, WG Spence, saw trade unionism as 'a new religion', that he saw organisation as 'the first step essential to Society's salvation', or that he sent out 'missionaries' to 'convert' non-believers. Neither was it accidental that he used coercion and violence to back up his disciplined, hierarchical attitudes.
Spence and many other labour notables were initiated into the Knights of Labor at the height of the 1890's confrontation with capital. Imported from the USA in 1889 this fraternal society caught the imagination of dreamers, pragmatists and revolutionaries alike. Hand-written records show that during the most disturbed and turbulent months of 1892-3, the Knight's 'Inner Guardian' had led William Lane, Henry Lawson, George Black, Ernie Lane, Spence, and many others, past the Tyler, through Outer and Inner Veils to the 'Master Workman' seated inside 'Adelphon Kryptos' or the 'Assembly of the Secret Brotherhood.' There they were given passwords, one each for the Inner Veil and the Outer Veil, Travelling Cards, with another password, and were lectured on relations the Divine Creator and certain geometrical shapes had with justice, wisdom, truth, industry and economy. The Knight's motto, 'That is the most perfect government in which an injury to one is an injury to all' was increasingly popular on trade union banners. A brief guide for initiates, 'Secret Work and Instructions', describes the use of passwords, hand signs and response signals and insists that:
If there is any sign or portion of a sign, words or
symbols, in use in your local different from what you
find laid down here, discard the same at once.
A published 'Preamble' declared:
TO THE PUBLIC: The alarming development and
aggressiveness of great capitalists and corporations,
unless checked, will inevitably lead to pauperisation
and hopeless degradation of the toiling masses.
It is imperative, if we desire to enjoy the full
blessings of life, that a check be placed upon unjust
accumulation, and the power for evil of aggregated
wealth.. Therefore we have formed the Order of the
Knights of Labor..
Mary Gilmour was not a member but her coolness under pressure may have been among the reasons Lawson was attracted to her. She, apparently, kept watch on one occasion while Arthur Rae and other 'Knights' worked feverishly to remove a bomb allegedly planted by their enemies at Circular Quay in Sydney.
The US 'Grand Master Workman' of this brotherhood, Terence Powderley, was a Freemason and an initiate of other societies. Larry Petrie, arrested in July, 1893 for attempting to bomb the SS Aramac in Brisbane Harbour, is shown in the Sydney Assembly's records as Member No 59. A hand-written memo dated 25 October, 1893, to 'the Master Workman of Freedom Assembly' and signed by Frank Cotton, Thomas Bavister and Arthur Rae, among others, received the following as response to its request for a meeting:
This requisition was only handed to me practically on
Oct 30th the day named therein so of course the
meeting could not be called for that day..
[Peter]McNaught is away and the others either resigned
or left the country some for 'New Australia'..(For) a
special meeting for the purpose named no doubt you
will kindly do the needful.
Without naming him, 'Billy' Lane had spoken glowingly, of McNaught in April, 1892, in the Brisbane Worker, the paper he, Lane, edited before leading the New Australia movement to Paraguay:
The ex-editor of a North Queensland paper, the Master
Workman of a southern Knights of Labour Assembly, one
of the most popular of Australian lecturers and other
prominent persons in and out of the Australian Labour
movement are known to their friends as enthusiastic
Anarchists.
Anarchism, theoretical or practical, is another of the many aspects of real-time labour history which have been left severely alone by Labor's spokespeople. Globally blighted by the controversy around an 1886 explosion in Chicago and its aftermath known as 'the Haymarket Affair', anarchism in all its variations nevertheless achieved substantial credibility. The Knights in the USA received a substantial influx of self-described anarchists in the late 1880's and early 1890's. Lane, himself, equated anarchism with 'mateship' and put it at the centre of the vigorous debates then occurring over labour members of parliament and revolutionary action in his 1892 novel, Working Man's Paradise:
The Anarchist ideal is the highest and noblest of all
human ideals. I cannot conceive of a good man who does
not recognise that, when he once understands it..
..Anarchical Communism, that is, men working as
mates and sharing with one another of their own free
will is the highest conceivable form of Socialism in
industry.
In another place, also under his pseudonym 'John Miller', he wrote:
..Just how this co-operation of the workers is to come
about is a matter on which Socialists argue
considerably..For myself, I think that voluntary
co-operation will show the people at large how to do
it, that legislation will then bring about some form or
other of state control which will remove the pressure
that now makes us hustle one another for a job, and
that as we become accustomed to being mates, and our
children are born and bred into the same atmosphere,
all need for legislation or for state-force of any
kind will pass away, and we shall evolve a truly
socialistic method of co-operation which we shall
uphold without law because we shall all love being
mates and all hate the very notion of competing with
each other as we do now. Just what this final system
will be I do not know.
Naïve and overly optimistic about human frailties as this advocacy shows Lane to have been, the fact remains that at the very time 'mateship' was being idealised by Lawson in verse, it was being closely associated by some influential labour activists with a social and political utopia, and as its ancient heritage was being built all around.
In much more splendid surroundings than tradesman cottages energies were at this time also being mobilised for a federated nation-state. A wall plaque in the Canberra Federation Exhibition quotes Alfred Deakin, regarded today as 'the architect of Federation':
(Federation) must always appear to have been secured by
a series of miracles.
What could he have meant? Was he drawing on his hidden inner beliefs?
In 1891 the International President of the Theosophical Society, Colonel HS Olcott, visited Australia. Although cut short by his having to return to Europe suddenly following the death of the Order's founder, Mme Blavatsky in London, Olcott's sojourn was remarkable for the depth of his contacts with this country's political elite. A highly respected diplomat, he later wrote:
I was fortunate enough to meet some of the leading
statesmen of different colonies whose names have
figured largely in the recent Federation movement,
such as Sir Samuel Griffith, Hon Mr Barton, Sir George
R Dibbs, Alfred Deakin, Hon John Woods, and others.
Two or three of them occupied the chair at my
lectures, and my conversations with them, both upon
occult and political matters, were highly interesting:
they have enabled me to follow recent events with
intelligent understanding of the undercurrent of
colonial feeling.
Edmund Barton, the soon-to-be first Prime Minister, chaired Olcott's Sydney lecture. Deakin did likewise in Melbourne, when the visitor spoke on 'Buddhism.' A founder of the Ibis Lodge of Theosophy in the 1890's, Deakin, post-1901, maintained contact with Olcott and with Annie Besant, former labour and women's rights activist, who succeeded Blavatsky as 'commander' of Theosophy world-wide and helped establish Co-Masonry. From a young age Deakin had been interested in mysticism and spirituality, authoring in 1887 a book entitled Temple and Tomb in India. Describing him as 'a visionary whose 'practical' mysticism has left an enduring legacy in the institutions and the political processes of his beloved nation', Gabay's study of Deakin's inner life and politics concluded with the following:
Like Cardinal Newman, Arthur Balfour, Josiah Royce and
other Idealist intellectuals of his time, Deakin was
reacting against the current 'materialism'…in the
manner and with the presuppositions at hand, being
especially keen to defend immortality as the basis of
true morality…What marks Deakin out…were his own
remarkable private experiences, and the great
authority they were to assume towards the end of his
life…His faith was sustained by prophecy and 'signs'…
As theosophist Kynaston has pointed out, just as the work of Freemasons in creating the political structure of the USA was followed by a Masonic design of that nation's capital city, so the 'fathering' of the Australian nation state by a man heavily influenced by theosophy was followed by the designing of this nation's capital by a husband and wife team who, if not formally members, had very strong theosophical connections. There are other indicators. The founder in 1869 of the Victorian Association of Progressive Spiritualists for which Deakin was a conductor, ie, was involved in the ritual before entering politics, was WH Terry. The 'WH Terry Lodge' was one of two which formed the 'Practical Brotherhood of Spiritualistic Sociologists' when it was established by JR Davies in Melbourne around 1900. This organisation's Preamble is very closely modelled on that of the 'Australasian Knights of Labor' for which Davies was previously 'PMW' or 'Past Master Workman', serving on the executive with Federal MP Dr Maloney. JA Andrews and two anarchist comrades established a Theosophical Lodge in Sydney in 1894, the same year that Deakin met Annie Besant there and became a theosophist, suggesting quite a range of admirers at her lectures.
It was in that same year that a Corps of St John's Ambulance Brigade was 'initiated' in Lithgow. Revealing the fraternal heritage of what became in the 20th century a ubiquitous presence at working class sporting and community events, 'the Zambuks', the reporter wrote:
The St John's Ambulance Association was established in
England in 1877 by the chapter of the order of St John
of Jerusalem, an order which was incorporated by His RH
the Prince of Wales as Grand Prior.
Sydney's Cardinal Moran may have recognised the biblical allusions in the rites of the Knights of Labour and the Theosophists, if they had not been secret, while attmpting to emulate the mediating role played by (the Catholic) Bishop Manning in London's Dock Strike and later labour disputes. Appointed Archbishop of Sydney in 1884, Moran had shown his rigid hand while still a bishop in Ireland. In 1876, the Irish National Foresters indicated they were prepared to change their rules to 'meet objections against certain affectations of mystery' to obtain his approval but even this was insufficient 'flexibility'. In 1877 he refused to endorse the Leinster United Trades Association on the grounds that 'the rules offer scope for intrigue and subterfuge', and that the name 'United Trades' was
borne by many associations that have proved themselves
hotbeds of secret organisations and every social
disorder, and have brought ruin to thousands in
England.
According to Ford, Moran gave his approval when the Association changed its name to the Kilkenny Artisans Association, appointed an honorary chaplain, and arranged for quarterly reception of 'the sacraments' by members. Charles Dilke, English MP who made a fact-finding tour in the 1880's wrote later that Moran's prohibition on Australian Catholics receiving any of the sacraments while they were enrolled in any 'secret society' was a more rigorous ban than any that applied elsewhere.
Ford's study of the 'encounter between Moran and Socialism' in NSW between 1890 and 1907 is strongly partisan. He conflates communism and anarchism with state socialism, and NSW with Australia, and argues that Moran's was the key role in the 'deflection' of the State Labor Party into moderate 'trade union' policies, thereby supposedly making possible the 20th century mass entry of Catholics into the ALP. Ford argues that as a result of Moran's influence over Catholic voters in NSW, Australian democracy was defended and bigotry defeated:
This influence and (his insistence on a plurality of
political parties) were, both, a contribution to his
ideal of a free society - and the more significant for
coming at a time when Australia's new democracy was
emerging.
Ford added:
Of no less value, however, was his repeated assertion
of the necessity of promoting ancillary social
institutions ('the intermediate institutions' of Pope
John XXIII) such as benefit societies and housing
co-operatives, as basic to a free society.
The Cardinal's dogma that Catholics could not be socialists, which effectively narrowed the possible 'plurality', was matched by his further assertion that only Catholic societies were acceptable. He often used meetings of the HACBS, the INF's and the AHCG to speak his mind on social issues. Ford does allow that Moran's pronouncements and his candidature for the Federation Convention in 1897, resulted in his clashing violently 'with extreme Protestants':
The bitterness which resulted was severe and may
explain a tendency to sectarian hyper-sensitiveness in
Australia that does not seem to exist in England.
Local anxieties were again intensifying about the degree to which a growing personal independence fitted, on the one hand, with the asserted alignment of 'the Crown' and the Church of England, and with Catholic claims to be 'the one true faith', on the other. Anti-Catholics asserted 'papists' were voting for Protection candidates en masse because they were ordered to by the Church, a consideration much debated by historians since. The Catholic response included assertions that the Lord Mayor of Sydney in 1889 was expelled from the Orange Order because he attended a Ball held for St Vincent's Hospital. Two MPs were expelled at the same time, one of whom put this minor furore in the context of land reform, the Sudan Contingent and the likelihood of defeating the Stuart Government:
Mr Stuart was denounced and made to feel the constant
opposition of prominent members of the Orange
Institution because he had the talented and
liberal-minded Dalley as his Attorney-General; but they
do not denounce Sir H Parkes for having Mr D O'Connor as
a colleague. Oh, no, this is fiscal, not popery.
With Federation looming, the 'Brunswick Riots' of 1896 and '97 were a severe test of will. The first was a direct result of forces unwilling to allow Orange celebrations:
The intention was originally that the members of the
LOI and Protestant Alliance should hold a parade, and
then march to the Wesleyan church, where a service was
to be held..As the procession was abandoned, the
brethren to the number of over 200, including many
representatives from other suburbs, assembled in
regalia in the enclosure surrounding the church, and
marched into the church preceded by an officer bearing
a cushion, on which lay a copy of an open Bible.
The packed congregation, assembled around the Orange brethren sitting on a raised platform, continued to be assailed and 'boo-hooed' by crowds outside during the 'impressive' service and afterwards. Despite having the necessary permits, the LOI leaders were informed by the police that under the 'Unlawful Assemblies Act' they would be responsible for any disturbance of the peace brought on by the 'mob' of 'not fewer than 15,000' thronging the streets:
The contagion of riot soon spread, and scrimmages
developed in all directions. Boys perched on hoardings
took a devilish delight in pointing out where specks of
orange appeared in the crowd, and gloating over the
scenes that followed.
Discussions in parliament and elsewhere between that and the next July produced conflicting legal opinions about police powers when common wisdom said trouble was bound to re-occur. They also produced the Melbourne Post Office Inquiry and a book compiled by a Catholic priest, which quickly ran to eleven editions. During the Inquiry of 1896, where charges against a Catholic postal employee were heard and dismissed, the chaplain of the Queen's Own Lodge in Melbourne, composed entirely of Public Servants, claimed it to be the 'largest Orange lodge in the world.' Crowds in Brunswick streets in July, 1897 have been estimated at twice the previous year's total:
..A few wild spirits, led by a woman, broke into
incipient riot; but they were arrested, incontinently
bundled into cabs and taken to the lock-up...(But) for
the heavy restraining hand of the police the
demonstration must have ended in disaster..A dozen
arrests and a head slightly injured by a policeman's
baton represent the whole known results of the
lawlessness of the day.
Coolgardie, in the west was rocked by similar conflict in 1897, as was Southern Cross (WA) in 1901. These outbursts were exceptions to the rule of administrative conformity, centralisation and selective tolerance spreading across the continent, but were not the only exceptions. As anxiety battled optimism and the century drew to a close, Amy Castles, a shy Catholic girl from Bendigo thrust too quickly towards national and international stardom as 'the new Melba', became a tragic casualty of the faith-based wars. Nellie Melba, of course, was Protestant, and living the high life of a diva in the northern hemisphere. The showman-priest, Robinson, the girl's mentor and the person partly responsible for what became 'the Castles' boom', no doubt applauded when The Catholic Press wrote:
It is remarkable that all Australian singers of note
are Catholic.
There have been far too many Catholic sodalities, fraternities and like organisations to track in detail examples of their discrimination against non-Catholics, and it is probably unnecessary to point out the proscriptions the RC Church has effected against mixed-marriages and other forms of consorting with the alleged enemy. The Catholic Press in 1899 did manage to recount how a Catholic chemist in Sydney had been boycotted by members of the St Davids Lodge No 35 of the PAFS because, after five years of service, he had 'suddenly discovered' his religion. In Queensland, also at the end of the century, attacks on Catholic agendas and an 'unnatural Protestant ascendancy' led some of the faithful to argue that a growing Masonic movement had taken over the Orange agenda:
Freemasonry stood for a concerted aggression against
every claim of the Church as a supernatural polity - this, Pius IX's excommunication of all (Masons) made
clear on both sides.
There appears to be plenty of fire among the smoke which, in the new century, was to feed into the conscription and later the 'Catholic Action' debates, but it also has to be said, that, on both sides, to obtain a reaction it was only sufficient that members of one group believed that 'they' were out to get 'us'. Fear remained a potent weapon, whatever the realities, well into the 20th century. Fear of Jesuits, in particular, was a strong emotional trigger for the Australian Protestant Defence Association begun in Sydney in 1902 by the Reverend Dill-Mackey and designed "to draw the Orange Lodges and the wider membership of the Churches into 'union in political action.'" The APDA quickly spread numbered 'lodges' throughout NSW.
Secret societies have not had 'the press' they deserve. They have usually been presented in black-and-white terms. JM Roberts' The Mythology of the Secret Societies, 1974, is a case in point. He apparently believed he could isolate perceptions, and largely ignore reality. Consequently, he treated the subject narrowly and without imagination. A definition would have been helpful, too.
Carr's review of his book, AQC, Vol 85, for a Masonic audience, misses or perhaps avoids the point, while a 2011 reprint of a collection of earlier articles, Tabbert + eds, Secret Societies in America: Foundational Studies of Fraternalism, implies that little of value on the subject has been written in the USA recently.
The secrecy had a function and a complexity which need to be appreciated in context, as parts of, and connected to the rest of the fraternal furniture.
What follows here are my contributions.
'Chinese Fraternalism' and 'Codes and Ciphers' follow below.
Carr's review of his book, AQC, Vol 85, for a Masonic audience, misses or perhaps avoids the point, while a 2011 reprint of a collection of earlier articles, Tabbert + eds, Secret Societies in America: Foundational Studies of Fraternalism, implies that little of value on the subject has been written in the USA recently.
The secrecy had a function and a complexity which need to be appreciated in context, as parts of, and connected to the rest of the fraternal furniture.
What follows here are my contributions.
'Chinese Fraternalism' and 'Codes and Ciphers' follow below.
Chinese Fraternalism
Chinese 'Freemasonry', as it has come to be known, stems from very old benefit societies probably introduced here when immigrants from China came to the gold rush settlements of Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland in the 1850's. In ritual details and in format completely unlike Freemasonry of either the British or the mainland European varieties, these brethren, nevertheless, swore an oath of secrecy and allegiance to 'the brotherhood' and lived by rules which exhorted them to observe a similar philosophy of mutual aid and 'mateship'. Lepper has provided a valuable, concise summary of the 36 rules of the Heaven and Earth Brotherhood, for example:
If a brother be poor, you must help him; otherwise may
you die on the road;
A brother must nourish another brother; if you have food you must share it with him; if you do not may a tiger devour you;
He who commits adultery with a brother's wife, let him be run through with a sword;
He who mentions the thirty-six oaths of the brotherhood must have two hundred and sixteen strokes of the red wood.
In one version, the movement's adherents fled from mainland China as political refugees known as Hung Mun to offshore havens including to Australia from where reports of 'a new gold mountain' were circulating. More recent scholarship disputes this claim, asserting that the bulk of migrants were deliberately brought by agents established in Australia and that this was a major function of the 'lodges'.
It has been estimated that about 20 million Chinese migrated overseas during and since the 19th century. Most worked as labourers in mining, on road construction and as farm hands. In contrast to extensive material published on these societies in South East Asia and North America, very little has been made available with regard to their history in this country, partly because of few known primary resources.
In 1992, the Bendigo Chinese Association found a 'Hongmen cabalistic tract'. This has now been translated. With work on gravestones, other records and surviving temple artifacts, comparisons have been able to begin. Any Hongmen member possessing such a manuscript could propogate the association, so whether a tract was a transcribed copy or had been purchased or inherited, whoever possessed it 'could disseminate the society and become a headman.'
Not that Bendigo was a naturally receptive environment. Holdsworth, curator and researcher at the Goldfields Research Centre, Bendigo in 2006, believed that Bendigo was unusual amongst Victorian towns with Chinese 'lodges.' Being an extremely 'unionised' town, for example, the original source of the Amalgamated Miners' Association, Bendigo was the last amongst Victorian towns to accept Chinese involvement in cultural life. It was also the home base of the architect of legislation disenfranchising Chinese residents, the man who later became Sir John Quick.
John Fitzgerald, now at La Trobe University, disputes much of this, also pointing to recent research. He argues that this shows that in Bendigo the white community leadership worked closely with the Chinese community to ensure continuous participation in local affairs, though not always without tension. Holdsworth argues that members of friendly societies withdrew their support in the late 1880's when local authorities gave money to the Chinese 'lodge' to participate in community events but none to them.
Fitzgerald believes there is no evidence that Chinese 'lodges' subsequently started calling themselves 'Masonic' to ward off racist attacks. The newly-opened archives of NSW's United Grand Lodge are providing insights into connections between Freemasonry and the Yee Hing networks in late 19th and early 20th century Sydney. However, the label 'Masonic' remains problematic. Fitzgerald suggests it was more likely a case of 'uneducated country folk' attempting to attain a cloak of greater respectability by adopting the name, with no attempt made to formalize a connection with official Freemasonry.
This is possibly the case with Quong Tart who died a respected Sydney businessman widely regarded as the first Australian Chinese member of a regular Masonic lodge. He had earlier been a member of 'the Foresters' and the IOOFMU, his wife later claiming him to have been the first Chinese man elected to an Odd Fellows lodge in NSW. Naturalised in 1871, he joined MU's Unity Lodge No 46 at Araluen, a small mining camp near Braidwood, NSW. When that closed he must have transferred to Miners' Refuge, No 73, at Major's Creek, his 'brothers' presenting him with an Illuminated Address in March, 1881. At his death in 1903, the Professional Musicians Association Brass Band played, the Presbyterian Archdeacon spoke and the Very Worthy Brother FR Bretnall, Past Grand Registrar and Secretary of the Lodge of Tranquility read the Masonic burial service attended by forty other brethren.
The Hongmen Tiandihui was more accurately a fraternal mutual benefit society utilizing the distinguishing features of oaths, secret ritual and regalia, all directed at obligating members to help one another especially at times of hardship and calamity. I am tempted to refer to it as a Friendly Society of the ANA kind, because it had explicitly political objectives. As Cai Shaoqing has it:
The numerous Chinese labourers were away from home,
helpless and isolated. They joined the Hongmen as
sworn brothers for mutual support to protect their
livelihood and mutual interests, and to counter racist
discrimination and mistreatment by the colonial
government and the white colonialists.
This author describes three stages in the society's development. The first, from 1851 to 1875, was, roughly, the period of arrival, establishment and expansion. Cai Shaoqing deduces around half the Chinese population in the country were members. From 1875 to 1900, all Chinese were harshly treated by non-Chinese and the Society was inactive or very circumspect. Many Chinese moved to the cities and took up other occupations. The third stage, 1901 to 1921 was marked by rising Chinese nationalism and transformation of the Society into a social and political force. Its organisation actively opposed the 'White Australia' policy, set up a newspaper and agitated for the establishment of a Chinese Consulate in Sydney. It was in this period that Clubs were established and the title 'Masonic' adopted.
Price quotes Oddie's MA thesis to the effect that an Anti-Chinese League, revived by the United Furniture Trade Society in Victoria in 1887-89:
received considerable support from the [ANA], a
combined benevolent and political association for
professional men, business men and small farmers
(with) branches in many suburbs and country towns,
most of whom wished to keep the Australian continent
free for a predominantly Anglo-Saxon race and society,
and for other Europeans willing and able to conform to
British-Australian ways.
The Anti-Chinese League, in Price's paraphrase of Oddie, sought to convince:
every voter and member that Chinese were socially
undesirable and economically dangerous, that all
future immigration should be prohibited, that Chinese
residents should pay an annual residence tax of 20
(Pounds), that no further Chinese should be
naturalized, and that any naturalized Chinese leaving
the colony, even for a short trip, should at once lose
his citizenship.
The League apparently won 'support from many other Unions', organized numerous meetings in suburbs and country towns, and sent deputations to Parliament in July and August, 1887. Similar activities occurred in NSW and Queensland, where, as in Victoria, emotions had been roused by an economic recession which lasted well into the 1890's.
Another disputed assertion is that unlike their countrymen in other countries, the Chinese in Australia were culturally homogeneous and that inter-racial battles between 'lodges' were rare. One widely acknowledged exception was a fierce armed conflict in Melbourne in 1904 between Hongmen and the Bao Liang Society over opium and gambling interests, after which the Bao Liang lost credibility and dissolved around 1912. There was also a period of 'faction fights' in Sydney's George Street in 1892. Quong Tart, with others, convened a conciliating committee and though abused by some Chinese for opportunism succeeded in apparently easing tensions between a Loon-Ye-Tong group and a Dwoon Goon group.
In his recent book, Chinese Lodges in Australia, the Bendigo tract's translator, Kok Hu Jin has concluded:
firstly, that the overseas pursuit of gold had to be a
group enterprise, involving mutual dependency and
support; second, that lodges generally reflected
pre-migration bonds and associations, and thirdly, that
each lodge maintained its own temple for the local
membership, and was directly involved in sponsorship of
more immigrants. The temple was therefore, 'office,
headquarters, meeting place and ceremonial centre.'
His research approach exposes clear similarities to fraternals drawn from Europe, and thus suggests paths not yet pursued by scholars of 'our' lodges. For example:
Many artefacts…identify the lodges with which the
temple followers who donated them were affiliated. In
turn, one may then trace links, whether of common
geographic origin, ancestry, clan or language, between
groups of immigrants scattered far and wide around the
Australian continent.
Dr Kok Hu Jin sets out the various names under which the Hung League family of brotherhood associations have been known - 'the Heaven and Earth Society', 'the Heaven-Earth-League', 'the Three United Society (Heaven, Earth, Man)' and the 'Triad Society of Heaven and Earth Society.' After the British Government ordered the breaking up of the Society on the Malay Peninsular in the late 19th century, some surviving factions went underground and degenerated into gangsterism, the now dreaded 'triads'.
He believes that it was Sun Yat Sen, 20th century nationalist and republican, who undertook from mainland China the reorganization of the Hungmen which resulted in the adoption of the label 'Masonic' in Australia, and presumably elsewhere. Fitzgerald finds this connection unlikely, especially for Australia. Interestingly, Dr Sun's emblem, adopted by the Nationalists in China, was a 12-rayed rising sun. In the North American case, researchers have claimed that:
At the turn of the century Sun Yat-Sen obtained
considerable financial support from chapters of the
Chih-kung T'ang in North America. In San Francisco
over 2,000,000 dollars in revolutionary currency was
printed. In British Columbia the chapters mortgaged
their buildings to raise money for the republican
cause.
All of which suggests there is much more to be learnt about the Australian variants of these organisations.
Chinese 'Freemasonry', as it has come to be known, stems from very old benefit societies probably introduced here when immigrants from China came to the gold rush settlements of Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland in the 1850's. In ritual details and in format completely unlike Freemasonry of either the British or the mainland European varieties, these brethren, nevertheless, swore an oath of secrecy and allegiance to 'the brotherhood' and lived by rules which exhorted them to observe a similar philosophy of mutual aid and 'mateship'. Lepper has provided a valuable, concise summary of the 36 rules of the Heaven and Earth Brotherhood, for example:
If a brother be poor, you must help him; otherwise may
you die on the road;
A brother must nourish another brother; if you have food you must share it with him; if you do not may a tiger devour you;
He who commits adultery with a brother's wife, let him be run through with a sword;
He who mentions the thirty-six oaths of the brotherhood must have two hundred and sixteen strokes of the red wood.
In one version, the movement's adherents fled from mainland China as political refugees known as Hung Mun to offshore havens including to Australia from where reports of 'a new gold mountain' were circulating. More recent scholarship disputes this claim, asserting that the bulk of migrants were deliberately brought by agents established in Australia and that this was a major function of the 'lodges'.
It has been estimated that about 20 million Chinese migrated overseas during and since the 19th century. Most worked as labourers in mining, on road construction and as farm hands. In contrast to extensive material published on these societies in South East Asia and North America, very little has been made available with regard to their history in this country, partly because of few known primary resources.
In 1992, the Bendigo Chinese Association found a 'Hongmen cabalistic tract'. This has now been translated. With work on gravestones, other records and surviving temple artifacts, comparisons have been able to begin. Any Hongmen member possessing such a manuscript could propogate the association, so whether a tract was a transcribed copy or had been purchased or inherited, whoever possessed it 'could disseminate the society and become a headman.'
Not that Bendigo was a naturally receptive environment. Holdsworth, curator and researcher at the Goldfields Research Centre, Bendigo in 2006, believed that Bendigo was unusual amongst Victorian towns with Chinese 'lodges.' Being an extremely 'unionised' town, for example, the original source of the Amalgamated Miners' Association, Bendigo was the last amongst Victorian towns to accept Chinese involvement in cultural life. It was also the home base of the architect of legislation disenfranchising Chinese residents, the man who later became Sir John Quick.
John Fitzgerald, now at La Trobe University, disputes much of this, also pointing to recent research. He argues that this shows that in Bendigo the white community leadership worked closely with the Chinese community to ensure continuous participation in local affairs, though not always without tension. Holdsworth argues that members of friendly societies withdrew their support in the late 1880's when local authorities gave money to the Chinese 'lodge' to participate in community events but none to them.
Fitzgerald believes there is no evidence that Chinese 'lodges' subsequently started calling themselves 'Masonic' to ward off racist attacks. The newly-opened archives of NSW's United Grand Lodge are providing insights into connections between Freemasonry and the Yee Hing networks in late 19th and early 20th century Sydney. However, the label 'Masonic' remains problematic. Fitzgerald suggests it was more likely a case of 'uneducated country folk' attempting to attain a cloak of greater respectability by adopting the name, with no attempt made to formalize a connection with official Freemasonry.
This is possibly the case with Quong Tart who died a respected Sydney businessman widely regarded as the first Australian Chinese member of a regular Masonic lodge. He had earlier been a member of 'the Foresters' and the IOOFMU, his wife later claiming him to have been the first Chinese man elected to an Odd Fellows lodge in NSW. Naturalised in 1871, he joined MU's Unity Lodge No 46 at Araluen, a small mining camp near Braidwood, NSW. When that closed he must have transferred to Miners' Refuge, No 73, at Major's Creek, his 'brothers' presenting him with an Illuminated Address in March, 1881. At his death in 1903, the Professional Musicians Association Brass Band played, the Presbyterian Archdeacon spoke and the Very Worthy Brother FR Bretnall, Past Grand Registrar and Secretary of the Lodge of Tranquility read the Masonic burial service attended by forty other brethren.
The Hongmen Tiandihui was more accurately a fraternal mutual benefit society utilizing the distinguishing features of oaths, secret ritual and regalia, all directed at obligating members to help one another especially at times of hardship and calamity. I am tempted to refer to it as a Friendly Society of the ANA kind, because it had explicitly political objectives. As Cai Shaoqing has it:
The numerous Chinese labourers were away from home,
helpless and isolated. They joined the Hongmen as
sworn brothers for mutual support to protect their
livelihood and mutual interests, and to counter racist
discrimination and mistreatment by the colonial
government and the white colonialists.
This author describes three stages in the society's development. The first, from 1851 to 1875, was, roughly, the period of arrival, establishment and expansion. Cai Shaoqing deduces around half the Chinese population in the country were members. From 1875 to 1900, all Chinese were harshly treated by non-Chinese and the Society was inactive or very circumspect. Many Chinese moved to the cities and took up other occupations. The third stage, 1901 to 1921 was marked by rising Chinese nationalism and transformation of the Society into a social and political force. Its organisation actively opposed the 'White Australia' policy, set up a newspaper and agitated for the establishment of a Chinese Consulate in Sydney. It was in this period that Clubs were established and the title 'Masonic' adopted.
Price quotes Oddie's MA thesis to the effect that an Anti-Chinese League, revived by the United Furniture Trade Society in Victoria in 1887-89:
received considerable support from the [ANA], a
combined benevolent and political association for
professional men, business men and small farmers
(with) branches in many suburbs and country towns,
most of whom wished to keep the Australian continent
free for a predominantly Anglo-Saxon race and society,
and for other Europeans willing and able to conform to
British-Australian ways.
The Anti-Chinese League, in Price's paraphrase of Oddie, sought to convince:
every voter and member that Chinese were socially
undesirable and economically dangerous, that all
future immigration should be prohibited, that Chinese
residents should pay an annual residence tax of 20
(Pounds), that no further Chinese should be
naturalized, and that any naturalized Chinese leaving
the colony, even for a short trip, should at once lose
his citizenship.
The League apparently won 'support from many other Unions', organized numerous meetings in suburbs and country towns, and sent deputations to Parliament in July and August, 1887. Similar activities occurred in NSW and Queensland, where, as in Victoria, emotions had been roused by an economic recession which lasted well into the 1890's.
Another disputed assertion is that unlike their countrymen in other countries, the Chinese in Australia were culturally homogeneous and that inter-racial battles between 'lodges' were rare. One widely acknowledged exception was a fierce armed conflict in Melbourne in 1904 between Hongmen and the Bao Liang Society over opium and gambling interests, after which the Bao Liang lost credibility and dissolved around 1912. There was also a period of 'faction fights' in Sydney's George Street in 1892. Quong Tart, with others, convened a conciliating committee and though abused by some Chinese for opportunism succeeded in apparently easing tensions between a Loon-Ye-Tong group and a Dwoon Goon group.
In his recent book, Chinese Lodges in Australia, the Bendigo tract's translator, Kok Hu Jin has concluded:
firstly, that the overseas pursuit of gold had to be a
group enterprise, involving mutual dependency and
support; second, that lodges generally reflected
pre-migration bonds and associations, and thirdly, that
each lodge maintained its own temple for the local
membership, and was directly involved in sponsorship of
more immigrants. The temple was therefore, 'office,
headquarters, meeting place and ceremonial centre.'
His research approach exposes clear similarities to fraternals drawn from Europe, and thus suggests paths not yet pursued by scholars of 'our' lodges. For example:
Many artefacts…identify the lodges with which the
temple followers who donated them were affiliated. In
turn, one may then trace links, whether of common
geographic origin, ancestry, clan or language, between
groups of immigrants scattered far and wide around the
Australian continent.
Dr Kok Hu Jin sets out the various names under which the Hung League family of brotherhood associations have been known - 'the Heaven and Earth Society', 'the Heaven-Earth-League', 'the Three United Society (Heaven, Earth, Man)' and the 'Triad Society of Heaven and Earth Society.' After the British Government ordered the breaking up of the Society on the Malay Peninsular in the late 19th century, some surviving factions went underground and degenerated into gangsterism, the now dreaded 'triads'.
He believes that it was Sun Yat Sen, 20th century nationalist and republican, who undertook from mainland China the reorganization of the Hungmen which resulted in the adoption of the label 'Masonic' in Australia, and presumably elsewhere. Fitzgerald finds this connection unlikely, especially for Australia. Interestingly, Dr Sun's emblem, adopted by the Nationalists in China, was a 12-rayed rising sun. In the North American case, researchers have claimed that:
At the turn of the century Sun Yat-Sen obtained
considerable financial support from chapters of the
Chih-kung T'ang in North America. In San Francisco
over 2,000,000 dollars in revolutionary currency was
printed. In British Columbia the chapters mortgaged
their buildings to raise money for the republican
cause.
All of which suggests there is much more to be learnt about the Australian variants of these organisations.
