Alongside Lenin, Trotsky was one of the foremost Bolsheviks known to Australian socialists after 1917, writing a well-read history of the Russian Revolution, and featuring in John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World.

However, over the course of the 1920s he would come to be vilified in Communist circles as a traitor and even a "fascist." Despite the calumny leveled against him, in the 1930s in Australia the first socialist groups who agreed with Trotsky's opposition to the Stalinist counter-revolution in Russia were founded. They would go on to form a significant basis for the future of socialism in Australia from the 1960s onwards during the international student radicalisation centred on the Vietnam War.

This session will look at how Trotsky's fight against Stalinism was understood and interpreted in Australia in these significant periods.