[14] Among the party's founders were a prominent Sydney trade unionists, Jock Garden, Tom Walsh, and William Paisley Earsman,[15] and suffragettes and anti-conscriptionists including Adela Pankhurst (daughter of the British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst), Christian Jollie Smith and Katharine Susannah Prichard.

In its early years, mainly through Garden's efforts, the party achieved some influence in the trade union movement in New South Wales, but by the mid-1920s it had dwindled to an insignificant group.

A visits to the 1924 New Zealand conference by CPA executive members Hetty and Hector Ross got the (also small) Communist Party of New Zealand (CPNZ) agreeing to temporary affiliation with the CPA, and were followed by visits in 1925 by Harry Quaife, and by Norman Jeffery a bow-tie wearing former "Wobbly" (IWW member).

The CPA ran candidates including Garden (for Sydney)[18][19] at the 1925 New South Wales state election in working-class seats against the ALP but was decisively defeated.

The movement instigated the events which led to the attempted exclusion of Egon Kisch from Australia in late 1934 and early 1935.

This result in the creation of the Unemployed Workers Movement which at its height had 30,000 members and was infamous nationally for its anti-eviction campaign in Sydney.

[21][22][23] The CPA was the first Australian political party to make a commitment to Aboriginal rights, which were included in its manifesto from 1931 onwards.

Menzies banned the CPA after the fall of France in 1940, but by 1941 Stalin was forced to join the allied cause when Hitler reneged on the Pact and invaded the USSR.

[26] Following the invasion of the Soviet Union, the CPA shifted towards a collaborative United front approach to the Labor Party to fully support the Australian war effort against fascism.

Party members held discussions with senior Labor ministers following Curtin government entering office in 1941, pledging to provide full support to mobilise resources for the war effort.

[3] The CPA supported calls for conscription, increased working hours, condemned strike action in war industries, and minimised criticism of John Curtin and his government.

[3] During the united front period, the CPA's membership rose to 20,000, it won control of a number of important trade unions, and a Communist candidate, Fred Paterson, was elected to the Queensland parliament.

The Chifley Labor government saw this as a communist challenge to its position in the labour movement, and used the army and strikebreakers to break the strike.

The issue of communist influence in the unions remained potent and led to the Australian Labor Party split of 1955 and the formation of the Democratic Labor Party comprising disaffected ALP members who were concerned over communist influence in Australian unions.

This period also saw the establishment of the National Training Centre in Minto, NSW, ostensibly for the purpose of educating in the ideology of Marxism-Leninism.

The CPA conducted campaigns against nuclear weapons and the extraction of uranium, and supported the demands of indigenous peoples in Australia and abroad, especially in Papua New Guinea.

It thus militated for the abolition of legislation judged repressive regarding indigenous people, for equal pay and for land rights.

Internationally, the Communist Party of Australia was close to the Revolutionary Front for the Independence of East Timor (Fretilin) who resisted the Indonesian occupation in the 1970s and 1980s.

"[35] The archives of the party are now held at the State Library of NSW[36] and can be accessed with the written permission of the SEARCH Foundation.

[41] The SEARCH Foundation is a left-wing Australian not-for-profit company that was established in 1990 as a successor organisation of the Communist Party of Australia to preserve and draw on its resources and archives.

At a meeting in Melbourne in 1937 attended by 1,500 people, the YCL changed its name to the League of Young Democrats (LYD).

[52] The Eureka Youth League also had an important role in the early promotion of jazz music in Australia in the 1940s under the leadership of Harry Stein.

It protested the Vietnam War actively, but by 1968 membership had declined, and a change of name to the Young Socialist League did not last long.