People Australia

John Royston (Jack) Wishart (1909-1965) solicitor, gaoled Trotskyist

Birth: 1909 at Martinborough, Wellington, New Zealand, son of John Henderson Wishart (1876-1926), cordial manufacturer, later miner, born in Melbourne, Victoria, and Rose Ellen, née Dunne (1883-1913), born at Inverell, New South Wales. Marriage: 1941 at Paddington, Sydney, NSW, to Ruth Ellen (Ruby) Barlow (1905-1983). They had no children. Death: 3 August 1965 at Balfour Hotel, Sydney, usual residence, Craigend Street, Kings Cross. Religion: buried with Anglican rites: celebrant Rev Alf Clint. 

• In 1913 he travelled with his parents from New Zealand to Australia where his mother died on 21 November. Six weeks later he and his younger brother, David, were buried when a wall fell on them near their home at Paddington, Sydney, seriously injuring him and killing his three-year old brother.
• On 31 October 1914 his father enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force, giving his surviving son as his next of kin, address c/o Superior Boys Orphanage, Baulkham Hills. After serving with the 3rd Battalion Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force in New Guinea, Wishart senior was discharged in Adelaide on 15 March 1917.
• Jack was educated at Fort Street Boys High, and Sydney University Law School, having moved to live with relatives in Annandale.
• In 1937 he became a major rival of Nick Origlass for leadership of the Trotskyist faction, forming a separate Revolutionary Workers League, claiming that the Workers Party was a “clique” run by Origlass and Laurie Short reliant on overseas “dogma”. In 1938 the dispute was resolved when the two groups merged to form the Communist League of Australia.
• Jack was sentenced to gaol in 1940 for twelve months for issuing radical propaganda to soldiers; the sentence was reduced on appeal to eight months.
• In November 1941 he bitterly opposed ALP entrist “French turn” favoured by Origlass, forming a separate faction, with Alan Thistlewayte, styled the Revolutionary Workers Party. The 'Wishartites' were especially active at Bunnerong Power Station during World War II. Both groups vied for recognition by the Fourth International until 1947 when the Wishart group disbanded.
• In 1948 he was jailed for fraud, having pocketed a client's cheque. Disbarred after two years in Long Bay he became a law clerk in firm of Harold Munro, specialising in workers' compensation cases.
• Adviser to Builders’ Labourers’ Federation in 1950s and joined the Harbord branch of the Australian Labor Party.
• Buried on same day as Jack Sylvester, founder of Australian Trotskyism.
• A “character straight from Dostoevsky or Conrad . . . a prodigious whisky drinker . . . a criminal defence lawyer who was very friendly with some of  his clients . . . egotistical, domineering, argumentative . . . conventionally ugly”, “a short, fat, cherubic-looking man of high intelligence and chaotic habits”.
• Cause of death: myocardial degeneration (Coronial report).

Sources
Hall Greenland, Red Hot: The Life & Times of Nick Origlass 1908–1996 (Sydney, 1998), James McClelland, Stirring the possum: a political biography (Ringwood, 1988).