Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. (Aus.) a left-winger, a socialist.

1911		Barrier Miner (Broken Hill, NSW) 21 Jan. 5/3: One would have thought they would have been careful to select their team with [...] such a rank ‘red-ragger’ as Mr T. Hogan.
1913		Advertiser (Adelaide) 18 Nov. 13/7: To the genuine revolutionary and red-ragger who has the courage of his convictions [...] I take off my hate.
1914		Bulletin (Sydney) 9 July 10/1: [R]ecently the Mayor set his face against the holding of open-air meetings by Socialists. After the first batch of red-raggers had gone to gaol, he started on other speakers who had taken up the running. [Ibid.] 10 Sept. 30/2: The red-raggers and impossibles and irreconcilables and peace-at-any-price crowd at Broken Hill had bad luck last Friday. It gathered at the railway station to boo-hoo a few men who had volunteered for the defence of Australia.
1929		Sun. Times (Perth) 7 July 63/5: He was an out-and-out Red Ragger. He damned the capitalistic system and urged the proletariat to seize the banks.
1933		Sun. Times (Perth) 29 Jan. 45/9: I’m not a red-ragger as everyone knows; / No riots you’ll catch me incite.
1940		Advocate (Burnie, Tas.) 25 July 3/6: I am not a red ragger, or a Communist either.
1950		(con. 1936–46) K.S. Prichard Winged Seeds (1984) 184: Detective-Sergeant Smattery informed him we were going about with one of the worst red raggers in town.
1959		D. Hewett Bobbin Up (1961) 73: Al’s like Dad, always was a bit of a red ragger.
1974		D. Ireland Burn 114: You don’t have to be a bit of a red-ragger to know that first our people have to be given some things.

2. (also red-rag) attrib. use of sense 1.

1914		Bulletin (Sydney) 16 July 10/2: Another ‘free-speech campaign’ is in full blast, and the blood of the red-rag martyrs can be observed trickling in the Sydney courts each week.
1920		Barrier Miner (Broken Hill, NSW) 6 Feb. 2/7: A few learned shrewd nuts have accused us numbskulls and thick-heads of being misled by the officials of that big ‘red-ragger’ association.
1946		Sydney Morn. Herald 11 May 2/7: It was an organised demonstration [...] by the ‘red ragger’ mob.
1951		D. Stivens Jimmy Brockett 223: He’d spouted a lot of red-ragger stuff in the old days.
1959		D. Hewett Bobbin Up (1961) 245: She’d say what the Jumbuck workers wanted, not some blow-in Commo with a lotta jumped-up, red-ragger ideas.