Ken Gott: the fashioning of an activist

Contains a paper on Ken Gott, a prominent contributor to Australian politics, a leading activist of the left in Melbourne, and a journalist. During the 1940s Melbourne University Labor Club and the university branch of the Communist Party provided a training ground for many of the intellectuals who remained active on the left for the next forty years. Ken Gott, who became one of the leadership group in both, was one of the few who actually came from a working class background. After graduating, he worked at various unskilled jobs, as well as doing casual work for the Melbourne Herald and some research for trade unions, before going in 1950 to Prague, where he became head of the weekly news service of the International Union of Students. After his return to Melbourne, he followed a career as a journalist, working first for West Australian Newspapers and assisting the Communist Party press, and eventually becoming Asian Editor of Business Week and then Managing Director of Business Asia. He finished his career back in Australia working for CRA as personal assistant to Sir Maurice Mawby. He had left the Communist Party following the suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, was active in subverting Communist efforts to manipulate the Peace Congress in 1959, and continued throughout his career to undertake research on behalf of the Labor Party. One of his most effective publications, and still germane, is Voices of Hate, a precisely documented study of the League of Rights and its methods