David Andrade

Biography

His parents were Abraham Da Costa Andrade y Maria Giles, both from Middlesex, England. His brother William Charles Andrade was an anarchist too. They were active in Joseph Symes's Australasian Secular Association.

In May 1886, David Andrade, his brother Will and half a dozen others formed the Melbourne Anarchist Club (MAC), the first anarchist organisation in Australia. Andrade became the MAC secretary and one of its main propagandists.

The MAC produced the journal Honesty, an Australian organ of anarchism which had substantially the same principles as those championed by Benjamin Tucker's Liberty. In a news agency at Brunswick, now an inner suburb of Melbourne, and later in Liberty Hall, Russell St. Melbourne the brothers operated the first anarchist book shops in Australia.

Andrade's main works include Money: a study of the currency question (1887), Our Social System (n.d.), An Anarchist Plan of Campaign (1888), and The Melbourne Riots and how Harry Holdfast and his Friends Emancipated the Workers (1892).

In the early 1890s, Andrade was the secretary of the Unemployed Workers Association.

Andrade explains, "We are ruled by a lot of robbers. Our legislators are more degraded than a person who abuses a woman or a child and I have no confidence in them."

Andrade was burnt out in the disastrous Red Tuesday bushfires in 1898. He appears to have been financially ruined by this. In 1903, he was committed to the Yarra Bend Asylum and died in 1928 at the Ballarat Mental Asylum.

Andrade adds, "Socialism is a matter of justice. It acknowledges the rights of the poor to dignity and self determination, promulgating co-operation as the cure for the wrongs of capitalism."