Judith Keene

Review Article: Turning Memories into History in the Spanish Year of Historical Memory

Chris Ealham, Class, Culture and Conflict in Barcelona 1898–1937, London, Routledge, 2005; pp. xvi + 264; ISBN-10: 0 415 29961 6 Chris Ealham and Michael Richards (eds), The Splintering of Spain: Cultural History and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005; pp. xxiii + 282; ISBN-13: 078 0 521 82178 0 Imágenes contra el olvido: Lo que nunca se contó del franquismo; 10 documentales en 5 dvd’s sobre la recuperación de la memoria histórico de la Guerra civil española y el franquismo, Tenerife, Prensa Impulso Records and Films, 2006 Steven Marsh, Popular Spanish Film under Franco: Comedy and the Weakening of the State, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006; pp. ix + 222; ISBN-13: 978 1 4039 4117 6, ISBN-10: 1 4039 41173 3 Francisco J. Romero Salvadó, The Spanish Civil War: Origins, Course and Outcomes, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005; pp. xxv + 268; ISBN-13: 978 0333 754351 1, ISBN-10: 0 333 75435 2

“The word makes the man”: A Catalan Anarchist Autodidact in the Australian Bush

This paper examines the interplay between the life and ideas of a Catalan anarchist and autodidact, Salvador Torrents, who migrated to Australia in 1915. Until his death in 1951, Torrents, from his isolated farm in North Queensland, contributed regular commentaries and articles in libertarian newspapers in Spain, France and the United States. With the exception of the years of the Spanish civil war, Torrents remained outside mainstream Australian labour politics. Like many non-English speaking immigrants, a lack of the language was an obstacle to participation. As well, as an anarchist, Torrents considered political parties and electoral politics a waste of time in achieving social and political change. Instead he propounded, and practised, the transformative powers of self-education and the revolutionary role of the autodidact in fomenting radical change. His ideas had been forged in the turbulent politics of Catalonia in the first decades of the century. In Australia he continued to apply the same analysis in what he perceived as the similar context which Southern European immigrants confronted in North Queensland. Although invisible on the Australian Left, Torrents functioned as a left wing intellectual, contributing to a particular public discourse, which took place in a space that was separated from the mainstream Australian Left by language and different radical traditions.