Rawling was the eighth of nine children of James Rawling, coalminer, and his wife, Annie Elizabeth, nee Normington from Yorkshire, England. He grew up in a deeply religious Mormon home and was educated at Newcastle High School, Newcastle, New South Wales, before enlisting in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) on 7 August 1916. He served on the Western Front from October 1917 with the 36th and then the 35th battalions. His loathing of war became a central motivation in his life. After the Armistice, Rawling gave lectures for the AIF Education Service and returned to Australia in June 1919. In 1920 he enrolled at the University of Sydney, gaining a B.A. in 1929 and an M.A. in 1946. He trained as a teacher in 1921-22 and in 1923 began teaching at Crown Street Public School in Sydney and tutoring for the Trade Union Educational League. In 1922 he married Mary Stewart; they were to have three children. From 1924-27 Rawling worked as an ironworker's assistant in Newcastle, desirous of becoming a rank and file agitator, and then returned to Sydney and taught at private schools and colleges.
Rawling had lost his religious faith and embraced the Leninist theory on imperialism while studying at the University of Sydney. He joined the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) in 1925 and became an active campaigner and publicist for the party on current issues. From 1934 onwards he provided the Communist Review and Workers' Weekly with articles on Australia's democratic traditions. Pomeroy comments: 'In 1932-34 he edited World Survey, the magazine of the League Against Imperialism, and in 1934-39 War! What For? (later World Peace), the organ of the Australian Movement Against War and Fascism (later Australian League for Peace and Democracy) of which he was secretary. His pamphlet, Who Owns Australia? (1937), enjoyed four editions. The CPA commissioned him to write The Story of the Australian People (1938-39), an unfinished series of booklets which sold for one shilling each. Suddenly expelled from the party in December 1939 for expressing unorthodox views, he justified his stance in an article in the Sydney Morning Herald on 6 March 1940: 'The Hitler-Stalin pact of last August pulled me up with a jerk . . . the ''spear-head of peace'' and the spear-head of aggression had coalesced . . . the brutal invasion of Finland was the final determining blow'.' (63).
Rawling spent the war years as a temporary clerk for the Metropolitan Water Sewerage and Drainage Board while studying Australian literary history. He then continued teaching in private schools and gained second class honours for his thesis on Daniel Deniehy (q.v.). In 1947 he was awarded a Commonwealth Literary Fund fellowship to write the biography of Charles Harpur (q.v.) which aroused Opposition politicians to attack the Government over supporting a former communist. He was a principal witness at the Victorian Royal Commission on communism, arguing that international communism was a bigger threat than nazism to democracy. Rawling also wrote for B. A. Santamaria's journal, Freedom, in his desire to recant the mistakes of his past, and he set about writing a history of the Communist Party of Australia that was never published.
Rawling's Charles Harpur was published in 1962 and in 1962-63 he was a visiting fellow at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. He left the bulk of his collection of material on radical politics to the Noel Butlin Archives Centre at A.N.U.; some papers are also at the State Library of New South Wales. Rawling was frustrated by his failure to find permanent employment after 1940 but remained a committed teacher who believed art, literature and politics should have greater prominence in the curriculum. Pomeroy concludes: 'A loner, pacifist and an ideologue, Rawling had been attracted to communism by intellectual persuasion and by moral outrage at capitalist and imperialist exploitation. His contemporaries saw him as opinionated, stubborn and impractical, and as one who was better at writing propaganda than at public speaking or organization.' (64).
(Source: Adapted from Stephen Holt, 'James Normington Rawling' Quadrant (September 1998): 34-35; John Pomeroy, 'Rawling, James Normington (1898 - 1966)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 16, MUP, 2002, pp 63-64.)
