Lynette ‘Inga’ Smith

Our long-time supporter and friend, Inga Smith, died on 1 September last year. Inga was a member of the Spartacist League (SL) for ten years and remained a staunch supporter of our International throughout the rest of her life. We extend our condolences to her partner, Doug, her family and her many close friends.

Inga grew up in New Zealand. Drawn to the anti-Vietnam War protests in the 1960s, she had a brief introduction to the radical left in NZ. After spending a year in Europe with her boyfriend, living in the radical hotbed of West Berlin and later travelling around Eastern Europe in a Kombi van, they settled in Sydney in 1972.

We first met Inga in 1974 at one of the monthly general meetings of Sydney Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) where we had intervened to argue for a communist women’s movement against the feminist notion that only women can liberate women. She disdained the personalism and subjectivism rife in the women’s movement. At one “consciousness-raising” meeting, when women complained that their menfolk were all cheating with “the other woman,” she exclaimed: “I was the other woman!”

Inga was attracted to the SL by our insistence that the road to women’s liberation lay through socialist revolution. She was quickly won to Trotskyism and never wavered in her convictions. After joining the SL, Inga was plunged into the political struggles of our work within the WLM. Always an articulate and powerful speaker, she was in the forefront of our battle in 1977 to successfully beat back an attempt by the CP-backed Scarlet Woman collective to ban us from Sydney Women’s Liberation.

Inga moved to Melbourne for about a year in mid-1975. Soon after arriving there, she drew a late-night assignment to bail out student comrades arrested on the picket line of striking Herald-Sun and Age printing workers. This was the start of Inga’s valuable defence work. She took a leading role in party campaigns to aid class-struggle militants and others imprisoned or targeted by the state. A determined and effective spokesperson, Inga was key to securing signatures or statements of support from senior trade-union or ALP officials. Inga was closely involved in the successful international campaign to get exiled Chilean miner and militant union leader, Mario Muñoz, out of Argentina following the 1976 military coup.

Inga cut a striking figure, a tall Nordic blonde with piercing blue eyes and a dazzling smile. Getting around on a motor bike, she was often decked out in her leathers, looking like a Viking shield-maiden, as a friend quipped. She was frequently on the defence team at demonstrations. A great photographer, she was also the party photographer at many events. In the late 1970s, Inga was production manager for Australasian Spartacist, then a monthly paper. Her flair for design as well as her administrative skills came to the fore. In those pre-digital days, getting out the paper was a painstaking and highly manual process. It required long hours and hard work, which Inga took in her stride. Inga was also the party treasurer for a period. Her conscientiousness and meticulousness were qualities well suited to the role, which she carried out with the same distinction as she did in all the positions that she held in the party.

After resigning in the mid-1980s, Inga continued to support and work with the SL. For example, in late 1991, Inga travelled to Moscow to join comrades stationed there fighting for proletarian political revolution against the tidal wave of capitalist counterrevolution that was engulfing the Soviet Union. While marching with our contingent on Revolution Day, she was interviewed by Pravda. Its next issue reported on the front page that an Australian woman representing the International Communist League (ICL) had responded when asked why she had come: “The October Revolution was directed to the whole world. What is happening with you these days is a blow to communists in all countries.”

Nursing was Inga’s main vocation, later qualifying as a nurse educator and gaining a Masters in Women’s Health. When friends had health problems she was on the case, researching the literature, finding doctors, and assisting in every way possible. She was a member of the NSW nurses union, a lifelong trade unionist. One of her last public political acts was standing on the nurses’ picket line at Canterbury Hospital in September 2022.

She worked for several years at the Children’s Hospital in Sydney. In 1986, presumably at the urging of workmates, she stood for election as the branch delegate to the union’s annual conference. An excellent writer, she penned a powerful statement setting out her political views. This included the need for the union “to fight against the [Hawke/Keating government’s] Prices and Incomes Accord which the union council accepted.” Later, Inga worked for abortion providers, including at one Sydney clinic where clients and staff faced ongoing harassment from anti-abortion bigots. After she brought this to the attention of the party, the SL joined with other left groups to defend the clinic.

Her curiosity and independent spirit led Inga to travel the world widely on her own. She rode a motorcycle around the Golden Triangle, travelled all over Vietnam, went trekking in Nepal, visited Laos and toured Egypt, Jordan and other places. On holiday in Vietnam in 1991, she visited the district hospital in Xuan Loc, near Ho Chi Minh City. Noting it was very poor and lacking in basic equipment, Inga spent the next three years scouring Australia for unused or obsolete but still functional equipment and supplies. Overcoming many obstacles, in 1994 she was able to deliver 486 kgs of donated medical supplies and equipment to the hospital. In 1992, while working in Fiji as a volunteer theatre sister, Inga delivered funds that had been collected in Australia to the striking miners at the Vatukoula gold mine. The funddrive to aid their long-running struggle against the Emperor Gold Mining Company was initiated at her urging.

A devoted reader of the ICL’s English-language publications, Inga was always happy to socialise with comrades. She was a highly cultured woman who loved talking politics, history, music, art and theatre, often with a glass of wine in hand. A voracious reader, her interests were broad-ranging—from medical journals, to books on the Jacobins, to the plays of Euripides, to the novels of Hilary Mantel, Naguib Mahfouz and many others. Her love of music was just as broad, being particularly fond of classical piano, jazz, and blues (she was a big fan of the Sydney blues band, the Foreday Riders). She loved the fact that, while working in Toronto in the early 1990s, by chance she stumbled upon a live performance by jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela in a bar. Reflecting her intense interest in the history of the workers movement, Inga also joined in a study group with other former SL members to pursue research into the early Australian Trotskyist movement. As a result, two historical studies of this important movement were published in the journal Labour History.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Inga was among many supporters dismayed by the silence and evident collapse of the ICL. However, she did not lose confidence in our ability to work things out, knowing that an intense internal re-examination must be underway. When our April 2021 Spartacist supplement “Down with the Lockdowns! The Working Class Must Defend Itself” was published, she embraced it wholeheartedly, joining our team at that year’s May Day rally in Parramatta to get it around. She was also thrilled that our British comrades led a protest against the monarchy in London on the very day of the Queen’s funeral. She worked with our Sydney comrades to help distribute the Workers Hammer leaflet “Queen croaks! Labourites crawl” at demonstrations.

In May last year she was pleased to learn about the political refounding of our Mexican section and the launch of their new paper, El Antiimperialista. In August she cheered on our SL/A and B-L joint campaign to throw the AUKUS supporters out of the ALP. Inga was re-energised by the rearming of the ICL and we have no doubt that she would have embraced the new edition of Spartacist, “The Breakdown of U.S. Hegemony & the Struggle for Workers Power.” She will be missed by her many friends and comrades around the world.