Freda Brown

Freda Yetta Brown (9 June 1919 – 2009), born Freda Yetta Lewis in Sydney, was an Australian political activist who was a member of the Communist Party of Australia and later the Socialist Party. She married Bill Brown, a leading Australian Communist, in 1943. She is the only Australian woman to have been awarded a Lenin Peace Prize, which she received in 1977-78. Her daughter, Lee Rhiannon, is an Australian Greens member of the Australian Senate and previously a member of the New South Wales Legislative Council.

Freda Brown joined the Communist Party of Australia in 1936, at a time when the CPA was firmly loyal to the Soviet regime of Joseph Stalin. She worked in her father’s signwriting business, before becoming a journalist working for the Radio Times, and then later for various Communist-affiliated trade union papers.

After the Second World War, Freda Brown joined the New Housewives Association, later known as Union of Australian Women, a Communist front, and ultimately became its president. She was instrumental in the United Nations' celebration of International Women’s Year in 1975. She worked with the Women's International Democratic Federation, and was elected President at its Congress in East Berlin in 1975, a position she held until 1989, when the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe left her position of traditional old-school communism untenable.

Freda Brown was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Australia from 1968-72.^[1]

In 1971, Freda's husband Bill was expelled from the CPA as a member of a faction which remained loyal to the USSR after the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia which the party had condemned. Bill and Freda then joined the Soviet-loyal Socialist Party.^[2]

Freda Brown was the subject of SBS Television's "Australian Biography" programme^[3] which screened on Friday, 15 November 1996.

On 8 March 2004, International Women’s Day Brown, then 85, was honoured for her work against apartheid by the South African government in a ceremony in Johannesburg to mark the 10th anniversary of the end of apartheid. She had worked closely with the African National Congress women’s section throughout the 1970s and 1980s when she worked with the Women's International Democratic Federation.^[4]

See also

• Politics of Australia

References

1. ↑ Australian Women
2. ↑ Mark Aarons, The Family File, Black Inc, Melbourne, 2010, pp 224-225, 242.
3. ↑ Green Left Weekly
4. ↑ Senate adjournment speech, 9 March 2004 by Senator Kerry Nettle

External links

• Obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald, 27 May 2009.