Mountjoy, Jane (Lindsay)

Jane (Lindsay) Mountjoy was a courageous fighter for the underprivileged. She stood as a Communist Party of Australia candidate in the 1930 elections for the New South Wales Legislative Assembly seat of Leichhardt.

• Eatock (maiden name)

Jane (Lindsay) Mountjoy married Wilfred Athelstane Mountjoy (known as Bill) in 1927 at Bankstown, a suburb of Sydney. He was also a Communist Party candidate at the 1930 election, for the seat of Parramatta.

Lindsay worked as an organiser in the textile industry in Sydney in the 1930s, and edited The Working Woman. (Sydney 1932-5)
Speaking to the Tenth Congress of the party, Lindsay Mountjoy noted that “the Communist Party is not a bohemian club”, and said that the sexual indiscretions of Communist women caused working class women to stop their husbands from joining the party.

She was arrested at a demonstration in support of the unemployed in November 1930, charged with riotous behaviour, assault and damage to a constable’s watch. She was sentenced to 8 days gaol. In her article describing the experience she said if necessary she would do it again.

She later moved to Western Australia with her husband when he became organiser there, and later State secretary of the CPA, until he was disgraced and removed from the Central Committee in 1940. He ran for the House of Representatives seat of East Sydney at a by-election in 1931 and for the Senate in Western Australia in 1934.