Red devils and white reaction : Jack Fegan and the Workers Defence Corps of the 1930s

For all their contemporary notoriety left-wing ‘basher gangs’ like the Workers Defence Corps (WDC) remain under-acknowledged in Australian historical writing about the Great Depression. This article seeks to redress this by following the career of one of the WDC's leaders, Irishman Jack Fegan. Apart from shedding fresh light on WDC activities, it assesses John Hirst's argument that left-wing historians have underestimated the real and pressing danger posed by groups like the WDC in order to trivialise the right-wing response. The article is also at pains to study the points of intersection between the evidence provided by oral testimony and family folklore on the one hand and archival evidence provided in a cache of police reports recently uncovered in the State Records of New South Wales on the other. Which is the more reliable in terms of assessing the potency of the communist peril in New South Wales during the troubled early 1930s? How may we assess the WDC? How did it relate to the New Guard? What was the relationship between right and left-wing extremism?