As we approach St Patrick’s Day, politically aware readers should know that in Brisbane on March 17 1948, Australia’s only Communist Party MP Fred Paterson was savagely smashed from behind by a Queensland policeman.
Some time after it occurred, this attack on Paterson became known as The Great St Patrick’s Day Bash.
Yet most Australians, including a great many Queenslanders, do not know about this horrific incident.
Indeed, many educated Australians remain unaware that north Queensland was once known as “The Red North”.
From 1944 to 1950, Frederick Woolnough (Fred) Paterson was the Communist Party member for Bowen in the Queensland Legislative Assembly, the upper house having been abolished in 1922 by Labor premier and later federal treasurer, EG “Red Ted” Theodore.
Shortly before his bashing, it was said of Paterson that only one politician was less likely ever to become premier of Queensland – the then unprepossessing Country Party MP for Nanango, Johannes (Joh) Bjelke-Petersen. This was confirmed by Sir Joh and Lady Florence (“Flo”) when David Isherwood and I visited their property, Bethany, outside of Kingaroy, in 1988.
Born in Gladstone in 1897, Paterson is the first and only Communist Party member to be elected to any state or federal parliament in Australia.
A former Rhodes Scholar and divinity student who became a prominent Communist activist and radical barrister for the poor and dispossessed, Paterson was widely known........