Len Fox the journalist, artist, social activist, and Mona Brand, his playwright-partner, lived 'up The Cross’ for some fifty years. Fox met Mona Brand through the Sydney Realist Writers’ Group and the couple married in 1955. Their small terrace in Little Surrey Street was a remarkable home where culture lived with socialist politics. Like many intellectuals and émigrés they were comfortable with The Cross’s mix of cosmopolitanism and working class realism. Mona Brand’s plays were performed at the New Theatre in St Peter’s Lane, Darlinghurst.
Len Fox’s paintings, sketches and posters reveal his commitment to the human face of socialism. The generation of Australians drawn to communism in the 1930s and 1940s, like Len Fox and Mona Brand, emerged from an Indigenous humanist radical tradition and, more often than not, was at odds with the cold, dogmatic men at the top.
As for many in his generation, the Great Depression had a profound impact on Len Fox. After teaching at Scotch College in Melbourne for four years, he went overseas where in Germany he saw the signs of Nazism rising and in London he witnessed the hunger marches. Fox returned to Melbourne in 1934 and joined the Movement against War and Fascism (active 1932–1939). He began writing for the Movement’s journal World Peace and inaugurated a prolific career as a journalist with a pamphlet co-written with friend Nettie Palmer, titled Spain! (1936).
To spread the word about the imminent catastrophe looming over Europe, the anti-fascist movement invited Egon Kisch, the Czech writer and participant in the European avant-garde, to lecture in late 1934. The five months of Kisch’s stay galvanised conservative forces. He was refused entry at each port as a ‘prohibited immigrant’ but managed to lecture to packed halls. During this confident time of the broad left period following the Dimitrov Report, Fox, now secretary of the anti-fascist movement, joined the Communist Party, remaining a member after Cold War paranoia took hold in the 1950s 'to fight Stalinism from within’.
Fox sketched over his lifetime, preferring to think through images. He took up oil painting in the mid-1940s after classes with the Studio of Realist Artists. His graphic work quotes others he admired, especially his newspaper colleagues, cartoonists Tom Challen and Herbert McClintock, while his modest paintings have a singularly utopian air. He saw himself as a commercial artist, only holding an exhibition for his 90th Birthday. The strength and honesty of political images and messages from this not too distant era, contrast with our age of spinmeistery and ‘outfoxing’.
The exhibition includes rare remnants of the popular but ephemeral ‘poster exhibitions’ held in union halls and workplaces in from the 1940s to 1960s. Often material was destroyed because of the consequence of membership of often banned (‘proscribed’) organisations. Homes were sometimes raided for ‘incriminating material’. These are artworks literally from under the bed.
Looking back, in his Australians on the Left (1996), Fox saw that these long struggles against racism and nuclear weapons, and for Aboriginal rights, workers’ rights and the environment, brought significant successes. Communism failed but fascism was beaten in Germany. Fox wrote 'We failed to give socialism a human face’ but the Party 'helped bring Australia out of its insular cultural cringe to the Tories’. Faith Bandler said at Fox’s funeral service in January this year, 'He helped renew our faith in people’.
- Writers:
- Jo Holder
- Date written:
- 2015
- Last updated:
- 2015
