P14-15 - Interview with Tom Payne, Sydney, 28 October 1985

Component identifier:

File P14-15

Content Summary:

Tom Payne, born in the 1890s, grew up in Clunes in Victoria and worked there as a cobbler. He was influenced politically by Mark Anthony, a Broken Hill miner from Clunes who frequently returned to visit. Payne became an early member of the Communist Party of Australia. In 1922, he was one of its two delegates to the Comintern Conference in Moscow. He relates how he travelled to there as a stowaway, aided by sympathetic maritime workers, and heard Lenin speak and met Trotsky, who had confused Payne's fellow delegate W.P. Earsman with the much more important American delegate Max Eastmann. Payne joined the breakaway Socialist Party of Australia in 1970-71 and remained a loyal defender of the Soviet Union until his death late last century, still revered in CPA and SPA circles as 'the man who met Lenin', when in fact he had only met the hated Trotsky.

2 x 90 min. cassette, c. 100 mins.

Subjects:

Politics and government
Academic
History

Names:

Burgmann, Verity, FASS, Adjunct Professor of Politics

Contents

Access and use