Lance Sharkey

Lawrence Louis "Lance" Sharkey (18 August 1898 – 13 May 1967) was an Australian trade union activist, a radical journalist, and a Communist politician. From 1948 to 1965 Sharkey served as the Secretary-General of Communist Party of Australia (CPA). Sharkey was an orthodox Communist throughout his political career, closely following the prevailing Soviet line in each major turn of policy.

Lawrence Sharkey was born on 18 August 1898 at Warry Creek, near Cargo, via Orange, New South Wales. His farming parents, Michael and Mary, were Irish and raised him as a Roman Catholic: a religious background he would share with numerous other Australian communist officials. He left school when only 14 years old, and commenced an apprenticeship as a coachmaker in Orange. Later he worked as a farmhand, claiming that itinerant bushworkers drew him into the anti-conscription struggle during World War I and into support of the Industrial Workers of the World.

After World War I Sharkey moved to Sydney and obtained a job as a lift attendant, also becoming a militant activist in the Sydney Federated Miscellaneous Workers Union. In 1922 Sharkey became a member of the Sydney labor union council. Sharkey was elected to the executive of the Miscellaneous Workers' Union, but lost that post in another election in 1925. In 1928 he became a union delegate to the Labor Council of New South Wales.

By this stage Sharkey had already been a member of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) for four years. Elected to the executive of the CPA in 1926, he was dismissed from it the following year, when he resisted the turn from a 'united front' with the Australian Labor Party (ALP).

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