Robert Samuel Ross

Robert Samuel Ross (5 January 1873 – 24 September 1931) was an Australian socialist journalist, trade unionist, and agitator best known as the editor of a series of political magazines associated with the Australian labour movement in the 1890s and early 1900s.

Ross' militant journalism and agitation against Australia's involvement in World War I led to repression by the authorities. Ross' works during the war were censored and confiscated by the police and Ross faced multiple arrests for opposing conscription, waving the socialists' red flag, and circulating anti-war literature. His publication of the article "Bolshevism Has Broken Out in Heaven" led to a 1919 trial for blasphemy.

Ross' political views were drastically moderated during the 1920s. His contributions to Australian political life ended with his death as a respected member of the Australian Labor Party in 1931.

Biography The eldest of three sons born to Robert Mitchell Ross, a Scottish-born compositor, and Anne Matilda (née Bonham), Robert Mitchell's English-born wife, Robert Samuel Ross was born on 5 January 1873 in Sydney. The Ross family relocated to Queensland in 1885, where Robert Mitchell Ross found work as an editor. The younger Robert was educated at state schools, attended a Brisbane Baptist sunday school, and contributed to the family's finances by working as a messenger boy before became an apprentice compositor at seventeen. An precocious youth, he began working as a magazine editor at twenty, at first editing the sports magazine Queensland Cricketer & Footballer, later becoming editor of the Queensland Sportsman. At times and attracted to and at times repelled by the Australian Labor Party throughout his life, he supported permeation tactics following the failure of Socialists against the Labor Party candidates. A strong supporter of secular society and rationalist ideas, Ross joined the Victorian Rationalist Association during the Melbourne period.

Though he considered Bolshevik methods of struggle inapplicable to Australia – and would continue to support the distinctly moderate line of reformism for the remainder of his career – Ross greeted the 1917 Revolution in Russia warmly and produced the supportive pamphlet Revolution in Russia and Australia in 1920. Undaunted, Ross protested the looming gaoling by joining the poet R. H. Long and other socialists in Brisbane for an illegal public display of a red flag – one more activity officially forbidden at the time. The flag-wavers were violently suppressed and Ross was once more arrested. The draconian sentence for blasphemy was, however, eventually reduced to a mere fine of £50 on appeal.

No longer so much on the political fringe during the 1920s, Ross cemented his association with the Australian Labor Party in the post-war decade. He became council-member of the University of Melbourne in 1925, and trustee of the Melbourne's public library and museums as well as the National Gallery in 1928; he was appointed a commissioner of the State Savings Bank in November 1930. The Victoria branch of the Labor Party elected him to its vice-presidential post in 1930–1931.

Ross died of uraemia in Richmond, Victoria on 24 September 1931 and was cremated after a modest and secular ceremony. Among those paying the last respects were Tom Tunnecliffe, J. P. Jones, Don Cameron, and Harry Scott Bennett.

Ross' two sons, Lloyd (1901–87) and Edgar (1904–2001), both became prominent as Australian activists and trade unionists.