Despite its peripheral role in Australian politics and its ultimate dissolution, the Communist Party had an influence far beyond its numbers. From the 1930s to the 1960s it occupied leadership positions in a number of important trade unions, and was at centre of many major industrial conflicts. Many of its members played leading roles in Australian cultural life, such as the novelists Katharine Susannah Prichard, Judah Waten, Frank Hardy, Eric Lambert and Alan Marshall, the painter Noel Counihan, and the poet David Martin.