Fred Paterson.

Fred Paterson, born in 1897, was the only member of the Communist Party to be elected to the Australian Parliament. The sixth out of eleven children, his father came to Queensland in 1897, working as a jackeroo and pig farmer. Fred Paterson excelled at school, and won a scholarship to Brisbane Grammar in 1913. He went on to study at the University of Queensland, majoring in philosophy and Classics, a subject that his father also loved. Fred Paterson was a strong church-goer at this stage of his life, also teaching Sunday school.

When World War I erupted, Paterson was full of ideals, and at the age of 20, enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force (A.I.F.). He experienced his first taste of rebellion at the Australian soldiers' camp, where the soldiers were on strike due to lack of food supplies. When he returned to Australia, the 22 year old Paterson completed his University studies, and was selected as a Rhodes Scholar. Majoring in religious studies, he became disillusioned when he found that the Gospels were not necessarily true. After completing his studies, Paterson left Oxford to study Marx when he arrived back in Australia. The Russian revolution had swept the Australian Labor Party in 1920 after WWI, and he saw, along with others, that the only way to halt poverty and injustice in society was to install a socialist government.

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