Salvatore D’Urso
born 26/5/1927, died 16/6/2022. Most people would have known him as Ted D’Urso, but his given name was Salvatore D’Urso. For he was proudly Sicilian on both his father and his mother’s side. They were both immigrants from Sicily and part of the famous ‘Red North’ that was later to elect the only Communist ever, Fred Paterson, as a member of an Australian parliament. His father Alfio, to whose cane knife Ted gave pride of place on one of the bookshelves in his study, and his mother Luciana, both of whom Ted venerated all his life, conceived Ted out of wedlock on the Atherton Tableland in 1927, but Ted was to be born in their wedded state in Riposto in Sicily on the 26th of May in 1928, and his sister Concetta two years later. The small family returned to Innisfail, and to Depression-time Australia in 1931. Ted did his primary and secondary education in Innisfail, Charters Towers, and Cairns. In the background of these studies Ted D’Urso, 27 April 1993, c/o S909 image 7284, UQ Archives was a close and affectionate home life sustained by the cane-cutting work of his father, and the billiard saloon that his father ran after being obliged by sickness to retire from the cane fields in his thirties after fifteen years of hard work. In his political memoir Outlook Critical Ted conveys the extracurricular enjoyment he derived from the age of nine learning to play billiards, and eventually half-running the saloon when his father, despite having been a naturalised British subject for fifteen years, was interned for two years as an enemy alien and sent south to captivity in 1942. In 1940, after passing Junior with excellent results, Ted applied to enter teaching. The discrimination (because of the unjust internment of his father) that he suspected and that kept him from succeeding in this lifelong vocational ambition, not only then but also later, was not to be verified for fifty years when his file was examined by a historian friend in the Department of Education. Ted was obliged to spend time working in an uncongenial public service job in the Railways. Later the same was to happen in statistics. But it was Alfio’s insistence that, despite the setback to his teaching hopes, he should, with Alfio’s financial assistance, study for Senior in Cairns, that was to set Ted on his eventual path. A Commonwealth University Scholarship enabled Ted to start a Commerce degree at the University of Queensland in Brisbane in early 1947. Studying Economic History and Economics, and then Philosophy as part of his degree started Ted’s lifelong interest in political ideas that was to characterise his subsequent intellectual life. In his second year Ted could relax his dogged pursuit of good grades sufficiently to take an intense interest in student activities. It was a time when, under the post-war Rehabilitation Scheme, there were many ex-servicemen at the university, with more than the usual undergraduates’ experience of the world. In the wake of the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union, and the great role played in the defeat of Nazism by its counterpart in Russia, the Communist Party of Australia had expanded its industrial influence and its membership greatly. This was reflected in the student life of the university, and in due course, as well as feeling what he described as a magnetic pull to the Semper Floreat student newspaper office, Ted became a member of what was called the Radical Club, ‘the campus offshoot of the Communist Party’. The misreporting of a meeting of the Club addressed by Mick O’Brien of the Australian Railways Union by the anti-communist Courier Mail intensified Ted’s radicalism. It was in September 1948 that he joined the Communist Party. The membership was not to last long. In 1949 campus Communists fiercely supported the nation-wide strike of the Coal Miner’s Federation. In his memoir Ted called the strike, which was based on ‘the refusal of coal miners to use more advanced extraction machinery which threatened their safety’ to increase production outputs, ‘perhaps the fiercest industrial conflict of the 20th century and a grim confirmation of the Marxist-Leninist theory of the class character of the state under capitalism’. When the Chifley Labor government used troops to break the strike Ted thought that it ‘inflicted a historic defeat on the working-class movement and at the same time considerably weakened the power of the Communist Party within it’. But this opinion turned out to be most unwelcome to the Party Leadership, for both the Sydney Tribune and the Brisbane Guardian ran the line that it was a great victory for the Australian working class. Ted thought this was a transgression of the Leninist principle of total honesty towards the working class, and a loss of moral credibility. He wisely chose to resign from the party in the face of the imminent degrading choice between recantation and expulsion. He thus acquired the uncommon pre-1956/1968 honour of opposing the Stalinist deviation well ahead of others whom he was later to meet in one of the world’s many Trotskyist factions, including the local party’s ideological hitman who had been sent to put the hard word on him. Recently, since Ted’s death, I have had the task of looking through his books and papers. Among the books was one that he mentions in his memoir as having been bought on the 30th of May 1950. It is The God That Failed: Six Studies in Communism. I’ll quote Ted directly: ‘The contributors were famous writers who had been dedicated fighters for communism but who had come to reject its Stalinisation. The writers were Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright, Andre Gide, Louis Fischer and Stephen Spender. Their collective recitals of disillusionment were unanswerable. It was this book, together with Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and The Yogi and the Commissar, which convinced me of the rightness of my own conceptions and feelings, and led to the decision to resign from the Party’. When Ted completed his Commerce degree he got a temporary job in the public service, and then made Ted at the University of Queensland, 1947 c/o Salvatore D’Urso another attempt to get a job teaching. He was successful in getting into the Teachers Training College, but was, again for what turned out to be political reasons, overlooked for secondary teaching training at the end of the year. An appeal to the Director General of Education succeeded. But when he got his first teaching appointment it turned out to have again the feel of discrimination about it. Instead of being sent to a secondary school it was to be to a sort of exile. He was to be the ‘headteacher’ of Lake Euramoo State School, ‘a one teacher operation, in a rather isolated pocket of rundown dairy farms on the Atherton Tableland’. Here he was at the age of 23, unable for financial reasons to resign, isolated, sleeping among surplus school furniture in a classroom adjoining the one he taught in, with a mere 22 pupils and needing to walk to a nearby farmhouse for breakfast and evening meals. But he decided to make of it a stoical effort of self-development. He completed a course of planned reading of such classics as Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, The Odyssey of Homer, Benvenuto Cellini’s Autobiography, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the Bible, and his favourite poet, T.S. Eliot, and books of Ancient History. The other day when I went through his books these volumes were still on the shelves. Ted had beautiful legible handwriting, and a very full exercise book of his notes on T.S. Eliot was one of the things I read out to him in his near-blindness on one of my latest monthly visits to him. Back in Brisbane early in 1952, Ted got an interview with the then Deputy Director General of Education, himself formerly unfairly passed over for a position, and he was able to confirm that his placement at Euramoo was politically motivated banishment. The place was ‘the second most isolated spot on the Atherton Tableland after Topaz on the western lee of Mt Bartle Frere’. Ted completed an Arts degree to add to his Commerce degree. The years from 1953 to 1955 were without political involvement, but began his entry into secondary school teaching, first in Malanda on the Tableland and then at Salisbury in Brisbane. Kruschev’s de-Stalinisation attempt ‘infected’ Hungary but led to the Soviet occupation in 1956. This had world-wide repercussions. In Australia, among other things it led to the publication by Helen Palmer, daughter of the novelists Vance and Nettie Palmer, of the magazine Outlook, a liberal-socialist bi-monthly. So soon there were a lot of other exParty members and other leftists belatedly joining Ted in his more independent form of what he continued to describe as ‘classic Marxism’. Palmer suggested that discussion groups form around the journal in the capital cities. Ted soon became the Brisbane go-to person. The Brisbane group survived till 1962, and the journal into the 70s. After the days of The Movement had sent a lot of ALP right-wingers into the DLP, and in Queensland, into the QLP, it seemed to Ted a good idea for a while to join the ALP, first in the Yeronga and then in the East Brisbane branch. He remained in it till 1967, when, living in Armidale he left it, disappointed by its ‘ideo- logical flaccidity and ineffectiveness against the destructive tendencies of capitalism’. Ted is only stating widely shared views on the left to the present day when he makes his valedictory remarks on leaving the ALP: ‘Although I supported the ALP at election time as the lesser of the two blights of Australian political life, my adherence to classical Marxism remains unshaken. It remained the lodestar of my political journey as I entered my forties.’ Ted’s next explicit political move was in the context of what he saw emerging in the 60s as the first New Left, the British movement around the merger of the two journals Universities and Left Review and New Reasoner to become the New Left Review. Ted associated this period with what he saw as a sort of rebirth of the relevance of Trotsky as a political guide in the aftermath of the Hungarian events. He found he was being sent material by a fictitious being called A. Mc Lean, PO Box 13, Balmain, New South Wales. This turned out to be Nick Origlass, who’d helped create a branch of the Fourth International way back in the 1930s, leaving the Party when Stalin exiled Trotsky from the USSR. When Ted got in touch with the Sydney people it turned out that up here there was already a Brisbane comrade, Ken Kemshead, who when met introduced Ted to others. When Ted married in August 1962, the meetings of the group were held at his home in Woolloongabba, when his wife Janet also became a participant. Their particular variant of the FI defined the Soviet Union as a ‘bureaucratically deformed workers state’. They practised ‘entrism’ in relation to the ALP. Ted’s retrospective view of the group was that it was effectively ‘a left-radical discussion circle’. Probably more consequential in that time was Ted’s involvement in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a Brisbane offshoot of the British CND, which his wife and a friend who taught Linguistics at UQ, Liz Tarnawski created in the last months of 1962. By that time Ted had left secondary teaching and was seconded to a lecturing appointment at Kelvin Grove Teachers College. Janet took the most prominent role in CND until Ted’s role in the College was made permanent. CND did local events inspired by the British Aldermaston Marches, and an annual event to commemorate the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on the 6th of August. The members of Brisbane CND were in- terrogated by Federal Police when a reprint of the British Spies for Peace pamphlet (an exposure of how Britain would be administered in the event of a nuclear attack) appeared in Brisbane. By early 1965 CND’s vitality declined when the attention of radicals was shifting to the Vietnam War. Ted, who’d been teaching at Kelvin Grove for three years, had been appointed to a lecturing position at the University of New England at Armidale. Ted’s courses at Kelvin Grove had included the history of Asia in the 20th century, so he was very much aware of the Vietnamese independence struggle since World War II. He was a welcome addition to the small group of leftists at the university. He wrote against the war and organised a series of Sunday afternoon seminars that tried to put the conflict into the wider framework of radical social theory. The next important phase of Ted’s political life began with his appointment at the end of 1970 to a Senior Lectureship in the Department of Education at the University of Queensland. He arrived back in Brisbane in the middle one of the most tumultuous periods of radi- Ted with his parents, Alfio and Luciana, after receiving his doctorate 11 April 1970 image c/o Salvatore D’Urso Radical protest in one of the two most radical campuses in Australia. As he wrote in his memoir: ‘The volatility of student radicalism was not only stirred by the war in Vietnam as on the other metropolitan campuses, but more immediately by the repressive stance of the BjelkePetersen government on the exercise of civil rights by protestors. The flashpoint in 1971 was the tour by the whites-only South African rugby team the Springboks’. Ted was not the only recent import from the University of New England. Another who’d already been there a couple of years, was the new ViceChancellor Zelman Cowen. His early hopes of charming the student-staff radical movement into more cooperative harmony with the status-quo had been savagely disappointed. Ted records in his memoir the Extraordinary Meeting of the Staff Association that was called to consider the motion, moved by Philosophy lecturer Wertheim, that ‘the Vice Chancellor resign his position as Vice Chancellor for the sake of the good health of this university’. Ted notes that it ‘was only narrowly defeated with a sizeable number of abstentions.’ It was soon after Ted’s arrival that I first made his acquaintance. He invited me to contribute a couple of essays on university education that I had written to a book that he edited called Counterpoints: Radical Writings in Australian Education. It was published in early 1971. I was able to observe some of his lecturing and thought it remarkable for its theoretical content. I have encountered some of his former students, and they have uniformly praised him as one of the really stimulating teachers they have had. I remember having later told him that I had in 1972 spent three months in Cuernavaca at Ivan Illich’s CIDOC, Centre for Intercultural Documentation, at the time that Illich was conducting seminars to feed into his thinking for the writing of his book Tools for Conviviality. Ted had been very enthusiastic about Illich’s influential and controversial book Deschooling Society. He invited me to be one of two speakers in a panel that would initiate discussion about Illich in one of his classes. The discussion that emerged was much more penetrating than would have followed a mere lecture or tutorial. It was fascinating to observe the innovative nature of Ted’s teaching techniques. In his memoir, when he gets to this point, having recorded that he got his doctorate on 11 April 1970, henotes that there is a gap in academic teaching between theory and practice, and that, under the influence of his Marxism, as a radical intellectual, he was less interested in the sort of so-called ‘research’ that might lead to promotion than in being a politically committed teacher who would give political activity priority. One of Ted’s heroes, along with Erich Fromm, and Lewis Mumford, was, as he frequently told me, the sociologist and activist-intellectual C Wright Mills. He would follow his example and be a ‘cultural workman’, connecting theory and practice. This was the kind of thinking that led to one of Ted’s remarkable ventures, the setting up of the Council for Democracy in Schools (CDS). It was triggered by his critique of the Radford Scheme of continuous school-based assessment, which was ostensibly about giving schools more freedom to participate in the continuous assessment of students’ work, but which was constrained by the state-enforced bureaucratic need to ensure comparability across schools. Without going into detail at this late stage, suffice it to say that Ted’s calling of a meeting to form this organisation in early March 1973 was in accord with the zeitgeist that was in favour, across a broad front, of democratisation of institutions, especially educational ones. Already in July 1970 at the University of Queensland, about a hundred students and staff had published a democratising critique of the totality and most of the individual parts of the university. This new focus by Ted on the secondary level of education was timely enough to gather to its founding conference on the weekend of 30 June-1 July something between 350 to 400 participants. By the later part of September 1974 Ted was being fully initiated into the mystic confraternity of ‘hateful freaks and monsters’ that powerful right-wing Bjelke-ites had begun to vilify from about the end of 1967 on. There was a full afternoon’s debate about CDS and Ted’s role in it in the Queensland Parliament on the 19th of September 1974, (freakish) with a sequel on the 24th of September, (monstrous). Ted saw the Whitlam dismissal and the Fraser government of December 1975 as the local variant of the inauguration of a neo-conservative period, a ‘tectonic movement of capitalist forces that brought Margaret Thatcher to power in 1978 and Ronald Reagan to the American presidency in the election of 1980.’ The 1983 Hawke government was just a false dawn, and the subsequent Ted D’Urso, 21 February 1973 c/o S909 image 1514, UQ archives thirteen years were just as capitulatory to deregulated neo-capitalism with ‘Friedmanite monetarism, and Hayekian ‘neoliberalism.’ The period from the late 70s to his retirement in 1993 was, I suspect, a constant temptation to pessimism. But his increasingly acute sense of its distinctiveness led to a great deepening of his thought. He went to Oregon on study leave in 1977, and it was there in the United States, in the belly of the beast as useful cliché has it, that he reports having felt that ‘a threshold into a portentous time of global disasters had been crossed’. One of Ted’s favourite writers was Robert Heilbroner. Here is the passage from his 1975 book An Inquiry into the Human Prospect that struck Ted as giving the framework for useful thought about the future from that time forward: ‘There is a question in the air, more sensed than seen, like the invisible approach of a distant storm, a question that I would hesitate to ask aloud did I not believe it existed unvoiced in the minds of many: ‘Is there hope for man?’[…]the question asks whether we can imagine that future other than a continuation of the darkness, cruelty, and disorder of the past; worse, whether we do not foresee in the human prospect a deterioration of things, even an impending catastrophe of fearful dimensions’. It was this darkly realistic perspective that directed Ted’s thought and activity from the late 70s into the last decade and more of his teaching life until his retirement in 1993, and beyond that into the very fruitful deepening of his ongoing philosophical quest up until the day of his death. Which last phrase is not mere rhetorical cadence, for I visited him in the Wesley hospital a few hours before his death, to observe him putting philosophical views about the nature of the cosmos to Pete, the obviously admiring male nurse who was attending to his nightly medication. This last period of Ted’s thinking and acting was begun on his return from study leave, with the introduction of a new advanced level course on the nature and ideology of industrial capitalism, exploring the ecological unsustainability of its inbuilt growth imperative, and looking at social alternatives and the educational ways to assist their realisation. In his political memoir he notes that in the circumstances where a globalising neo-capitalism had subjugated and silenced traditional voices of protest one faced a rather confusing set of options, ‘the tactics of reformism’ within the system, or ‘the strategy of stealthy revolution’ in a perspective that went beyond one’s own lifetime. ‘Was it possible to meld the alternatives to avoid the either-or bind of traditional logic?’ From the outside, as time wore on, the perceived emotional tone of this Sophie’s choice must have invited such short summaries as that of even the most sympathetic of Ted’s observers, for example that of Jeff Rickerrt, whose brilliant editing was responsible for the appearance of Ted’s privately written memoir in print: ‘He hated capitalism but was pessimistic about the possibilities of replacing it’. Although retaining ‘classic Marxism’, even as his deeper philosophical probings resituated it in the structure of his whole philosophy of life, his activism was reduced perforce to what he described as ‘passive membership of Green groups’ and ‘support [for] any struggle for social equity within the system while also assisting action that might safeguard the planet from capitalist despoliation’. Ted confessed that: ‘This ‘solution’ might be intellectually messy, but the imperatives of life rarely permit neat resolution of contradictions’. Taking a rather ironical view of himself Ted thought of this stance of his from the 1980s on as ‘meditative political inactivism’. But which of us present or erstwhile activists, living on the present bare and rocky ground, is going to throw the first stone? The last part of Ted’s memoir briefly covers the period after this retirement. In short summary he says: ‘When its strangeness quickly passed and I adjusted to its freedom, I put my metaphysical house in order through a closer acquaintance with Zen Buddhism and a working theory of creative cosmic evolution through a blend of my limited scientific understanding and philosophical speculation’. That is quoted from the second-last paragraph, but lest one think that he issues finally into any Schopenhauerian pessimism, the very last paragraph speaks of his unabated study of the developments of late capitalism and its ideology of postmodernism and the continuing capacity of Marxist theory to make sense of all this. In a way that is reminiscent of Terry Eagleton’s recent book Why Marx Was Right, Ted quotes the famous line: ‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned’, and concludes: ‘Thus the spiral of my political life has now ended at the point it began in my youth. Social truths then felt with passionate intensity are now confirmed through experience with equally passionate clarity’. If I may speak in conclusion about my own friendship with Ted, it intensified in the years of the new millennium, especially after I myself also retired. I fell into the practice of visiting Ted in his house at 33 Harts Road Indooroopilly every first Thursday morning of the month, and spending hours in conversation, often reading aloud and discussing various texts, whether sociological, historical or philosophical, that either he or I had re- cently come across. From the very first time I entered his study I was greatly impressed by the many folders of material that he had compiled over many years, all classified into subsets according to subject-matter, theme, genre. Much of it was accompanied by Ted’s marginal commentary in his beautiful totally legible handwriting. Many a memorable passage either excerpted or transcribed, from a huge variety of books, ancient and modern, many collections of epigrams, in poetry and prose, much of it pondered over years, much of it memorised accurately, and available for immediate quotation. What immediately came into my mind was that famous remark of Socrates in Plato’s Apology, that the unexamined life is not worth living. Here was someone who lived by submitting his ongoing experience to examination constantly. There is much I could go more deeply into about this, but for the moment I want to bring this retrospect to an end by suggesting that one main significance of the life of Ted D’Urso is that, beyond his importance for those of us who began to be politically conscious with reference to the issues raised for us by the world, the Australia, the Queensland of the sixties, by giving us a bridge back to the activism of the years of the Cold War and World War II, there is a more universal importance. He is a contemporary exemplar of the sort of life that has been made possible in the West by the rise of philosophical thinking in Ancient Greece. This gave rise to a way of asking rather speculative questions about the constitution of the universe, and about human life within it. These questions made it possible not to simply take for granted that the current mythology told you the main things you needed to know beyond where to get food, shelter, and warmth. Philosophy itself could be, not just oral lucubrations or written tracts, but a way of life, a way of living more fully. In the most recent years of our friendship, under the more and more stringent necessities of coping with growing old—Trotsky called it the most surprising thing that happens to a man—Ted became at first more strictly housebound, and increasingly, within that, even bedridden, and finally just about blind for the purposes of that unrelenting avocation of reading that had been his very lifeline. He was more and more dependent on being read to, as a stimulus to discussion. This is what led to my coming upon, among his typewritten papers, a paper written between October 1997 and February 1998. It was headed ‘WHAT I BELIEVE: AN OUTLINE’. It was a whole series of ordered propositions numbered in strict sequence within subsections, a la Spinoza, going from THE UNIVERSE to PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY to HUMAN SOCIETY to EPISTEMOLOGY to SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY to (Ted’s former professional discipline, I suppose) EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY. Reading this out really blew me away, as they say. I realised that Ted wasn’t ever just starting with ‘classic Marxism’. You had to get to it, bit by bit, from first principles, the way Marx got to it, but perhaps starting from where you were, not from where Marx was. That way you could say, like Marx himself, that you weren’t (just) ‘a Marxist’. This was a new way of looking at whether Ted had wound up in the grip of ‘pessimism’ or not. Ted’s first proposition couldn’t possibly have been Marx’s, for it was pretty much non-nineteenth century: ‘1(i) The universe “popped” into being through the “singularity” of the “big bang”. It came out of a vacuum, i.e. out of nothingness, an eruption of “creative energy” from the void, as a “vacuum fluctuation”. Talk about starting from first principles! I won’t go into any of the later propositions, except to say that the phrase ‘classical Marxism’ doesn’t get a guernsey till, many many pages later, logically-arrived-at subordinate proposition number III (D) (iv) turns up in its appointed place. When I finished reading this out, and realised I’d have to read it again at leisure to really get a grip on it, I asked Ted, who was usually pretty paranoid about any of his stuff going astray, if, on a strict condition of bringing it back within minutes, I could take it to the university and photocopy it. He said yes, and so copies of it now exist. Which is good for two reasons, because (1) if any of you who read this appreciation of our deceased comrade want to read it you need only get in touch, and (2) I have only to re-read it to be challenged in the appropriate way to confront, as one of Ted’s favourite poets, Matthew Arnold, put it, ‘this iron time/Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears’. Not necessarily in Ted’s way, but in a way that takes the problem as seriously as he did and goes down as deep for the answers. Which reminds me finally of something that he asked countless times, doubtless under the inspiration of Catch 22, ‘How does a sane man live in an insane world?’ Is that pessimism? I wish he was here to answer. In his absence I can only recall another much-repeated expression of his: ‘All real living is meeting and sharing’. Is that optimism? Or just hope? Vale Salvatore D’Urso. Dan O’Neill taught English at the University of Queensland from 1965 to 2003. He was involved in street protests throughout the period from the sixties to the SEQEB dispute. He currently convenes the 17 Group, a politico-cultural discussion group, as well as a number of reading groups that slowly discuss literary works.We post this tribute by Dan O’Neill, a friend of Ted D’Urso who died in the Wesley Hospital in the very early hours of Thursday the 16th of June 2022. People are welcome to add anything else in the comments section down below. Dan’s tribute appears at page 79 of the Queensland Labour History Journal which we include Barlow with many other interesting articles. – Ian Curr, Ed., 11 Nov 2022.
The-Queensland-Journal-of-Labour-History-No.35-Summer-202216Download