In March 1959 I joined the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) at the age of twenty-eight. To those who may find it strange that I made this decision at a time when people were leaving the CPA in droves after the brutal suppression of the Hungarian uprising of 1956, especially those prominent in the fields of art and literature, some explanation is necessary. I was a child of the Great Depression, my father an ardent Labor supporter, and the Russian resistance to German invasion during the Second World War had endowed communism with a warm glow that belied its true…