Sydney Anarchy Trial of February, 1894

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1894 Sydney Anarchy Trial of February, 1894: William McNamara (shown at right of cartoon above) and Sam Rosa (colleagues of Sydney anarchist Arthur Desmond) were convicted on charges of selling an edition of the anarchist journal Hard Cash "that contained a libel of the trustees of the Savings Bank of New South Wales".


McNamara and Rosa managed bookshops that sold radical journals; their sole defence was ignorance of the law concerning the selling of libellous newspapers. Justice Foster sentenced McNamara to six months in Parramatta Gaol and Rosa to three months.

Two other men who worked on the anarchist journal, but were not charged, were writer Henry Lawson's brother-in-law Jack Lang (who became Premier of the State of New South Wales) and William Morris Hughes, who became Prime Minister of Australia.

Categories: australia, anarchy, anarchism, politics, progressive, history, australian-history, labor-history, radical-history, australian-labor-party