Salvador Torrents was involved in anarchist activities in Spain and took part in the July 1909 uprising in Barcelona in protest against the call-up of the military reserve to fight in Morocco. Torrents escaped to France for some years and then returned to Spain in 1914 but because of his political associations he was unable to find work. He left Spain for Australia in 1915, arriving in Melbourne at the end of December. Torrents eventually went to Innisfail in far north Queensland to work cutting cane. There he was able to save enough for a deposit on a block of land and arrange for his wife and child to travel from Spain and join him in Queensland.
Torrents had some difficulties with the Australian Security Service who identified his 'anarchist tendencies' when in 1916 a French anarchist periodical addressed to him was seized by Australian Customs. In the 1940s Torrents was again investigated with regards to his involvement in a Spanish anarchist newspaper, published in New York, Cultura Proletaria, for which Torrents wrote a regular column. Cultura Proletaria was a banned import for a period of time in the 1940s and again in the 1950s. His column in Cultura Proletaria commented on anarchist philosophy, family life and Australian and world politics. He also wrote novellas and translated anarchist essays from French into Spanish. In the 1940s, Torrents began a correspondence with the Australian writer Nettie PalmerYi).
Salvador Torrents's books and papers are held in the Special Collections of the Library of James Cook University of North Queensland. Among these papers are numerous press clippings of his columns published in Cultura Proletaria. His correspondence with Nettie Palmer are held among the Palmer Papers at the National Library of Australia. [Source: Judith Keene, 'In Search of Acracia. A Catalan Anarchist in Australia' in Memories of Migration (1999)]
