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.

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.

Politically involved by his early twenties, Ross was self-taught in the political dimension as a voracious reader of socialist and rationalist texts. An early influence on Ross' orientation in this respect was the writing of Australian labour movement pioneer William Lane, whose 1890s work concerning a co-operative society gave emphasis to the role of trade unionism. Ross responded to left-wing appeals of this kind enthusiastically. He became a founding member of the Queensland Socialist League in 1894 and helped to found the Socialist Democratic Vanguard in 1900. He married Ethel Slaughter, who would become an ally in his political efforts, on 14 March 1900.

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