Lance Sharkey

Lawrence (Lance) Louis Sharkey (18 August 1898–13 May 1967) was the secretary of Communist Party of Australia (CPA) from 1948 to 1965. From a humble rural background he was to become a member of the executive of the Communist International or Comintern. He was an orthodox communist in his support for the Soviet Union but following the Twentieth Congress of the Communist party of the Soviet Union he became a supporter of Nikita Khruschev's revisionist policy of peaceful co-existence.

Lance Sharkey was born at Warry Creek, near Cargo, New South Wales, Australia. His farming parents, Michael and Mary, were Irish and raised him as a Roman Catholic. He left school at fourteen and commenced an apprenticeship as a coachmaker in Orange. He later claimed that itinerant bushworkers drew him into the anti conscription struggle during World War I and into support of the Industrial Workers of the World.

After World War I he moved to Sydney and obtained a job as a lift attendant. In 1922 he joined the CPA. Sharkey became a member of the Federated Miscellaneous Workers Union of Australia and was elected to its executive. He lost the post in 1925 after organising the Trades Hall cleaners, who had been sacked but later reinstated, but was to be made a union delegate to the Labor Council of New South Wales in 1928.

Sharkey was elected to the executive of the CPA in 1926 but was dumped in 1927 when he resisted the turn from a 'united front' with the Australian Labor Party (ALP). In 1928, he re-emerged as a strong advocate of the Comintern's new line of opposstion to all forms of reform. He rose to prominence with the rise of fellow CPA leaders Bert Moxon and J.B. Miles. After they won control of the party in 1929 he became editor of its newspaper "Workers' Weekly". In 1930 he visited the Soviet Union, for the first time, as the Australian delegate to the Comintern. At the congress Sharkey was elected to the executive of the Comintern.

When the Australian government declared the CPA illegal in June 1940, Sharkey and other party leaders went underground. A year later in June 1941 Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union entered the Second World War as an ally of Britain. The ban on members of the CPA was relaxed and Sharkey resumed open political activity. By 1942 the ban was removed.

With the onset of the Cold War Sharkey displaced Miles as party secretary. CPA became openly hostile to the ALP and withdrew conditional support for its program of post-war reconstruction.

In March 1949 Sharkey told a Sydney journalist that' "if Soviet Forces in pursuit of aggressors entered Australia, Australian workers would welcome them" '. He was tried and consequently found guilty of uttering seditious words. The High Court upheld his conviction and in October was sentenced to three years imprisonment. The term was later reduced and he served thirteen months. On his release he embarked on national speaking tour. He then spent six months at a sanatorium in the Soviet Union for treatment of a heart condition.

Under his strong leadership he was able to ensure that the party minimised the impact of Nikita Khrushchev's repudiation of Joseph Stalin in 1956. Later in 1961 he rejected the Chinese position of the Sino-Soviet split. He ceded the post of party secretary to Laurie Aarons in 1965.

Sharkey was lauded in his heyday as a heroic communist leader but his reputation sank with the fortunes of the Party.

He died of a heart attack in 1967 in Sydney and was cremated.