Two pioneers of the Australian co-operative movement were Henry Parkes and Frank Pulsford. Henry Parkes, known as the Father of Australian Federation, arrived in Sydney as an immigrant in July 1839. He knew English co-operative promoter George Jacob Holyoake when both were active in radical politics in Birmingham, England, in the 1830s, and he continued to correspond with Holyoake until at least 1889.
Holyoake’s famous co-operative book, Self-Help by the People, was reviewed in Parkes’ The Empire Newspaper in August 1858. Parkes undertook a local well-publicised tour in 1863 of the Rochdale consumer co-operative in England, where he attended meetings. He later supported the establishment of two co-operatives, including a co-operative bakery, in Sydney during the 1860s.
Frank Pulsford, like Parkes, emigrated from England. He was a congregationalist minister and member of the Balmain Consumer Co-operative in Sydney. He saw co-operation as “applied Christianity” and an answer to the worst aspects of capitalism. His Co-operation and co-partnership: The way of social salvation, published in 1913, was the first Australian book to explore the development of co-operatives both in Great Britain and Australia.
Pulsford was overseas during the First World War as a military chaplain and was a speaker at the United Kingdom co-operative congress in 1917 before his return in 1919. He played an important role relaunching in July 1921 a national co-operative newspaper, the Co-operative News, with a circulation of 20,000 and surviving until 1959.
The Co-operative News published articles on Australian and overseas co-operatives and became a public voice for the co-operative movement on issues such as taxation. Pulsford, who had called for a national co-operative association as early as 1913, organized the first All-Australian Co-operative Congress in Sydney in April 1920, with representatives of 78 co-operatives and a second congress in Melbourne in October 1921. There were a series of resolutions at the second congress on the formation of state co-operative unions and a national co-operative wholesaler. Pulsford’s efforts to establish a national co-operative organisation died with him while giving a church sermon in Melbourne in 1923.
For further details, please download Greg Patmore, Nikola Balnave and Olivera Marjanovic, A History of Australian Co-operatives 1828-2023.
