Australian Dictionary of Biography

Barbara Curthoys

Courtesy of Ann Curthoys

Barbara Lindsay Curthoys (1924–2000), communist, activist, psychologist, and historian, was born on 21 June 1924 at Grafton, New South Wales, second of four children to locally born parents John Archibald McCallum, politician and schoolteacher, and his wife Eda, née Lockwood, special needs teacher. As a child, Barbara’s father ‘encouraged her to think for herself’ (Allegritti 1983, 133). By the time she was six, her mother had developed Parkinson's disease, and a few years later her parents separated and subsequently divorced in 1938. Moving to Sydney in 1932, Eda raised her four children in the inner-west suburb of Ashbury.

McCallum struggled with the stigma of her parents’ divorce, her mother's disability, and their meagre financial circumstances, often ‘[escaping] into reading and schoolwork’ (Ryan 2001, 227). She was the dux of Canterbury Primary School (1936) and gained the Leaving certificate at Fort Street Girls' High School (1941). Although she achieved second-class honours in English, she was not awarded a scholarship, and so was unable to continue her education.

The McCallum family was political. Barbara had helped her father distribute leaflets for the Australian Labor Party when she was still in primary school, and her older brother Douglas was briefly a member of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) in 1941. Her own interest in left-wing politics earned her the nickname ‘red ragger’ in her senior high school years. In January 1942, concerned about the rise of fascism, she joined the Ashfield branch of the CPA. Soon after, her mother went into care, and she boarded with Samuel and Myrtle Aarons and their son Eric, all prominent in the CPA.

After a period working as a clerk, McCallum joined the Women's Auxiliary Australian Air Force in September 1942. Assessed as a ‘very bright and capable girl’ (NAA A9301), she was trained as a wireless telegraphist and in radio navigation. While in Melbourne for training, she met Geoffrey Curthoys, a Sydney-born industrial chemist who was also a member of the CPA. Geoff enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force in 1943 and they married at the District Registrar’s Office at Ashfield, Sydney, on 9 October 1944. After the challenges of her youth, marriage to Geoff became Barbara’s emotional mainstay. She was discharged from the WAAAF in March 1945 after falling pregnant. Ann was born in September 1945 and her sister Jean arrived two years later. Both girls would pursue academic careers, the elder as a historian and the younger as a philosopher.

The Curthoys family had relocated to Broken Hill in 1946 when Geoff took a position lecturing chemistry at the local technical college. While there, Barbara helped establish the Happy Day Kindergarten (1952). She also wrote letters to newspapers and began publishing short stories and reviews for the Communist newspaper The Tribune. The family moved again in 1953 after Geoff obtained a lectureship at Newcastle Technical College. The following year, Barbara was elected secretary of the Newcastle branch of the Union of Australian Women (UAW; 1954–61), becoming a delegate to its State committee and serving on the national committee. She lobbied the Newcastle Trades Hall Council (NTHC) to establish an equal pay committee (1956–58) and was an active member of the Newcastle International Women's Day (IWD) Committee.

With the trade union organiser Esther Aarons, Curthoys visited the Purfleet Aboriginal Settlement outside Taree in 1960. They met Horice Saunders, a Biripi and Worimi man, who was refusing to pay rent in protest of the reserve’s shocking housing conditions. That same year, she was integral in establishing the NTHC’s Aboriginal Advancement Committee. She helped Saunders build a campaign to improve conditions at Purfleet in what became a significant victory against racial segregation and the authority of the New South Wales Aborigines Welfare Board. By the mid-1960s segregation policies were being dismantled in favour of assimilation with children at Purfleet attending the Taree public school and participating in local sport and community activities. She was later a delegate (1963) to the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement’s annual conference in Canberra. Although her interest on Indigenous issues waned in subsequent years, she helped ensure Aboriginal participation at the Newcastle Palm Sunday peace march in 1988.

Admitting she was ‘slow in realising the importance’ (Curthoys 1994, 127) of the women’s movement, Curthoys believed that full equality between men and women would not be achieved until capitalism was overthrown. In 1980, as a representative of the Australian branch of the Women's International Democratic Federation, she reported on Australia at the World Conference of the United Nations Decade for Women in Copenhagen, which she described as ‘one of the most exhilarating and stimulating experiences’ of her life (Delprat 1980). Later, she came to believe that communist theory failed to recognise the depth of sexism in the community, and she would consider herself a feminist.

The Australian Intelligence Security Organization had begun a file on Curthoys in 1954. Over the next three decades operatives would fill eighteen volumes with reports of her activities. Soon after her and Geoff’s move to Newcastle, she joined the executive of the Hunter Valley district committee (1959–70) of the CPA, attending State and national CPA conferences. Believing women needed to be active in political parties, she stood as a CPA candidate for the Newcastle City Council (1959, 1962), Federal seat of Shortland (1967), and the Senate (1964, 1967). She was also prominent in campaigns for nuclear disarmament, including Hiroshima Day marches, and she supported both the Vietnam moratoriums and Save Our Sons anti-conscription movement.

In 1961 Curthoys went on an extended CPA study group visit to China, where she observed the ‘developing fanaticism around Mao Zedong’ (Curthoys, in Henry 1993). The CPA strongly criticised the Soviet Union-led Warsaw Pact invasion that crushed the Czechoslovak reform movement in 1968. She also opposed the intervention but sided with other members who had issues with the shifting focus of the party’s leadership, reflected in their unprecedented criticism of the Soviet Union. Those who defended the Soviet Union were often labelled ‘Stalinists,’ which she found hurtful as she had been horrified by Stalin’s atrocities. In December 1970 she was expelled for organising against CPA policies. She later described this period as the ‘worst year of my life’ (Curthoys, in Henry 1993).

Early the following year, Curthoys led the formation of the Newcastle Socialist Unity Committee, which operated until the Socialist Party of Australia (SPA) was established in December. She was the only woman on the SPA executive and was instrumental in forming its women’s committee. In the 1970s she served as national vice-president and president of the Newcastle branch and attended the Congress of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany in Berlin (1976) as a delegate. She also went to the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party Congress in 1981.

Between 1962 and 1990 Curthoys visited the Soviet Union at least six times, including during her husband’s sabbaticals at Moscow State University. In 1981 the Curthoys were pushed out of the SPA after being critical of its voting procedures and lack of support for a broad peace movement. Barbara joined other ex-SPA members in the Association for Communist Unity (ACU) in 1984. Although she later felt that she and Geoff had been too closely tied to the Soviet Union, she was sad to see the ‘socialist dream so completely shattered’ (Curthoys 1991) with the break-up of the USSR in 1991. Recommitting to the peace movement, she won the Newcastle Peggy Hill Peace award in 1991 for service to world peace.

Alongside her activism, Curthoys was one of the first mature age students at the University of Newcastle (BA Hons, 1974), where she graduated with honours in psychology. In 1977, while working as a psychologist at Stockton Mental Hospital, she was pivotal in establishing a hostel that supported independent living for the intellectually disabled. She was interviewed for the 1983 Richmond inquiry into mental health care in New South Wales, which promoted a decentralised model of support. Her resignation in December 1982 coincided with her husband’s retirement.

Since the 1950s Curthoys had written historical articles on left-wing women and trade unions for the UAW’s journal Our Women and other left-wing newspapers. She had returned to study history as part of her arts degree and began giving the occasional paper about her experiences in the Newcastle branch of the UAW, including at the first Women and Labour Conference at Macquarie University in 1978. In 1990, when the CPA and ACU were invited to view the Communist International (Comintern) archives in Moscow, she is believed to be the first Australian to study the collection, which she used to write two essays on the role of the Comintern in the CPA in the late 1920s. She went on to write an important article about Newcastle IWD celebrations (1994) and to co-author a history of the UAW (1996).

An optimist, fearless campaigner, and sought-after spokesperson, Curthoys also had her ‘lighter sides’ (Curthoys 2020, 193). She sewed and knitted, played Mahjong, and loved reading, theatre, and listening to old records by singers such as Paul Robeson. Family and friends were also important, and she and Geoff were unendingly hospitable. In later life a favourite activity was her extensive genealogical research into her family trees. In 1994, soon after the Curthoys moved to Manly, Barbara was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She arranged her funeral service and deposited her papers with the University of Newcastle Archives before she died at home on 28 September 2000. Survived by her husband and daughters, she was cremated at the Northern Suburbs Memorial Gardens Crematorium, North Ryde.