Obituaries Australia

Joyce Slater showed great courage and her warmth and humor helped her through many difficult times. There was the long ill health her husband Jim suffered, the cold war hysteria of Australia's McCarthy era and the shock and disappointment with the dark side of Soviet history — the Stalinist crimes committed in the name of socialism.

Joyce was a battler who questioned everything in the light of experience and a changing world — even her most cherished beliefs. She was encouraged by developments in Eastern Europe and Gorbachev's reforms which she believed create an opportunity to make a real start on developing a truly humanist and democratic socialism.

A member of the Communist Party of Australia since 1938, she was enthusiastic at the emergence of green environmentalist alternatives and looked forward to the development of the New Left Party. At 74 Joyce was concerned with the issues that face humanity into the 21st century — the need to end the plunder of resources and the destruction of the environment.

Joyce Slater was one of the best of her generation — an ordinary working class woman always active in the cause of social change.

We are celebrating her life, a life devoted to the cause of freedom, the liberation of humanity from all forms of oppression, exploitation and war.

Joyce was born 74 years ago in Norfolk, England. Her mother Irene, who had such an influence on her life, moved with her four daughters from the English countryside to Birmingham, the heart of the industrial Midlands, when she was 12.

She left school to work in the 'massive' Dunlop rubber plant in 1929, the year of the great stock-market crash. Dunlop was a factory where the workers faced the sack for being active in a trade union. Joyce's experience in the struggle to build trade unionism in that factory led her to join the British Labour Party at the age of 15.

Her idea of human liberation was a socialism with a human face. The brutal face of fascism and the gathering clouds of war led Joyce to join the British Communist Party in 1936 — because it was leading the anti-fascist struggle in the cause of Republican Spain. Her mother, a devout Baptist, joined the CP a year later.

Joyce left England and her family for Australia in 1938 where she met Jim Slater, who was to be her lifelong partner and in 1944 they had their only child, Victor, who was named in celebration of the victory over fascism.

Joyce loved people and her warmth and humor evoked many friendships. She loved animals and music — Mozart, Handel and Beethoven.

Joyce and Jim had a lifelong commitment to socialism and were active in many community causes. Joyce worked in Parents and Citizens associations, the local Progress Association, the struggle for a childcare centre and the cause of equal pay for women.

Although she left school at an early age, she worked as a journalist for the Queensland Communist weekly, Guardian, and later for many years as a regular writer and seller of Tribune. Her work for the socialist press, from selling the Daily Worker in England to her work for Guardian and Tribune, spanned 50 years.

- from the oration by John Gandini, President, WA Trades and Labor Council
Vic Slater has donated $150 to Tribune's Press Fund in memory of Joyce Slater, and calls on Tribune readers throughout Australia who appreciated Joyce's contribution to Tribune to donate to the fund in her memory.