‘Jean Devanny’, wrote novelist Miles Franklin, ‘is a red revolutionist and ranter, but I like her very much.’

Devanny, a New Zealander, became a writer and married a union militant. Her first novel The Butcher Shop, full of political and erotic themes, was banned – being considered ‘disgusting, indecent, communistic’. She joined the Labor Party, but was skeptical about parliamentary strategies, believing socialists needed to smash the state.

Moving to Australia in 1929, Jean found Sydney in a ferment as unionists defended their organisations against an employer onslaught. Arrested at an unemployed demonstration, she announced in court: ‘I am here on a trumped up charge. When I come out of jail I shall join the Communist Party.’

According to fellow writer Kay Brown: ‘She always reminded me of a knight at arms galloping to a crusade, and her crusade was her passionate love of Communism.’ She was also a rebel inside the party.

In earlier years the party had been open-minded about sexuality, but with the rise of Stalin’s dictatorship in Russia, Communist ideology became more repressive. Devanny refused to be stifled. Left activist Edna Ryan later remarked that ‘Jean Devanny advocated sexual liberation, particularly for women, as a political issue. She was far in advance of the Party at that time.’

A noted platform agitator in Sydney’s Domain, Devanny ‘prowled the platform like a hunting lioness.’ Here she confronted Adela Pankhurst Walsh, former Communist who had moved to the right and founded the anti-union Women’s Guild of Empire. Journalilst Miriam Soljak reported that Devanny ‘completely floored’ Pankhurst ‘in a debate on the rights of the workers.’

She was arrested in 1933 for selling seditious material. ‘I can see her now’, said an eyewitness, ‘kicking a couple of detectives in the face when they tried to drag her off the stump’. When a free speech rally in 1934 attracted a big crowd, police charged the platform and again Jean was in the thick of the fight.

Jean’s 1934-35 anti-fascist speaking tour of Queensland brought her into contact with industrial ferment in the sugar industry. She was active in supporting the 1935 strike over Weil’s disease, ‘not a struggle for wages but for life’, which provided the material for her novel Sugar Heaven. The book combined classic Devanny features: militancy, class consciousness, anti-racism and an open treatment of sexuality. The Communist Party found it disconcerting.

He relationship with the Party was always difficult, but became traumatic after an incident at Emuford, near Cairns. Accounts vary, but it’s clear she was assaulted, perhaps raped by male party members, who then spread slanders about her sexual behaviour to cover their crime. The party expelled her for ‘moral indiscretion’, and that injustice took two years to reverse.

Jean returned to the party, left it, then joined again. She concentrated more on her literary work, which included 14 novels, a play, stories and sketches, and autobiography. In addition to the personal issues, she considered the Communists narrow and dogmatic in the cultural sphere, yet her basic left wing convictions were unshaken. The party, for its part, was always lukewarm about her novels, preferring the safe party-line work of other writers such as Katherine Prichard.

Devanny died on International Women’s Day 1962, having lived to express her skepticism after the party endorsed a parliamentary road to socialism, and having written to the papers from her deathbed protesting about nuclear weapons.

Railway workers observed a minute’s silence, as did the IWD rally in Sydney. It was a fitting tribute for a red revolutionist.

• For the full story see Carole Ferrier’s biography, Jean Devanny, Romantic Revolutionary.