of the executive of the Australian Council of Trade Unions. He also ran the Labor Council's radio station, 2KY. In 1931, when the Labor Party split over the Scullin government's response to the Great Depression, Garden became a leading supporter of Lang's faction, which rejected Scullin's policies and favoured repudiating Australia's debt to British bondholders. Garden stood for the House of Representatives at the 1931 election as a Lang Labor candidate in the Division of Cook in inner Sydney. He was unsuccessful, but at the 1934 election he was elected – the first of a number of ex-Communists to become Labor parliamentarians. However, when the Labor Party was re-united under John Curtin's leadership in 1936, Garden was dropped as a candidate as part of the peace settlement, and at the 1937 elections he retired from Parliament. When Labor came to office federally in 1941, Garden was employed by Eddie Ward, a former Lang Labor man who was Minister for External Territories from 1943 to 1949. In this capacity he travelled to Papua New Guinea, then an Australian possession, and was involved in the corrupt sale of timber leases to various business friends. In 1946 a Royal Commission found that Garden had engaged in corrupt conduct, and he was subsequently convicted of fraud and sentenced to three years imprisonment. In 1949 M.H. Ellis intent upon showing the connections between the Communist movement and the ALP of the later 1940s, and ignoring Garden's 1920s leaving the party, wrote a book The Garden Path: The Story of the saturation of the Australian Labour Movement by Communism. Later life Jock Garden disappeared from public life and died in hospital on 31 December 1968. He was cremated with Church of Christ forms and was survived by his wife, one of his two sons and one of his two daughters. Notes References 1882 births 1968 deaths 20th-century Australian politicians 20th-century Australian Baptist ministers Australian Christian socialists Australian Labor Party members of the Parliament of Australia Australian trade unionists Baptist socialists Christian communists Lang Labor members of the Parliament of Australia Members of the Australian House of Representatives Members of the Australian House of Representatives for Cook (1906–1955) People from Lossiemouth Scottish emigrants to Australia Burials at Eastern Suburbs Memorial Park Communist Party of Australia members