OBITUARY

A Legend Among True Believers: Clyde Cameron (1913–2008)

Bill Guy

Clyde Cameron was born not long after the birth of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and, in a fundamental sense, he outlived it by some years. The ALP today is a mere ghost of the party Cameron joined 81 years ago. Then, it was proud to identify itself as a socialist party and that identity was maintained, with modifications, until the end of the Whitlam era. Since then, its leaders have seemed increasingly to regard 'socialism' as a dirty word. The party that was largely created by the trade union movement to achieve social justice for the working class is now uncomfortable with its union connection and seems mostly concerned with wooing the middle class. Throughout this evolving shift in philosophy and practice, Cameron clung to the old ideals. He remained a true believer long after others had jettisoned their faith.	1
Clyde Robert Cameron (11.02.1913 – 14.03.2008) Photo courtesy of John Rau
Cameron not only died a socialist, he was virtually born a socialist. He was the eldest of four sons of a remarkable woman who taught her boys from their earliest days that the working class deserved a better deal from society. Not the least remarkable thing about Adelaide Cameron was that she crossed the social boundaries to champion the working-class cause. She had lived her first two decades as a privileged daughter of a grazier near Quorn in South Australia. When she married Robert Cameron, a shearer who worked from time to time at her family's property, her father saw this as a betrayal of her class and for many years dismissed her from his life.	2
After a brief honeymoon, Robert and Adelaide moved to a smallholding at Murray Bridge, and it was there that Clyde was born on 11 February, 1913. By 1920, the Cameron family was settled on a small dairy farm bordering the Gawler River, 50km north of Adelaide. Adelaide Cameron was a woman of redoubtable energy and high intelligence. (Reputedly she was descended from the scientist Isaac Newton.) She did most of the work around the farm as well as in the house and in the evenings she would read to her children; not fairytales or adventure stories but extracts from her favourite authors: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill or Bertrand Russell. Meal times were for nourishing the mind as well as the body. The table talk was usually about politics or economics. Of the four brothers, Clyde was the most ardent debater. His path in life was already being marked out.	3
Clyde left school at 14 on the eve of the Great Depression, a social disaster that was to reinforce all his mother had taught him about the deficiencies of capitalism. Clyde followed his father into the shearing industry – and the Australian Workers Union (AWU) – starting as a rouseabout at the Ashmore Station, near Kingston on South Australia's southeast coast where his paternal grandparents had settled after migrating from Scotland in the mid-nineteenth century.	4
Throughout the Depression years spanning the 1930s Cameron was able to gain reasonably regular work in shearing sheds across south-eastern Australia – and even in New Zealand. It was there in 1938 that he received a telegram from his mother to say he had won election as a full-time organiser for the Adelaide branch of the AWU. From 1939 to 1941, he travelled throughout South Australia and south-western New South Wales, ensuring that pastoralists fully observed the awards covering shearers and, in particular, cracking down on unhygienic working conditions.	. . .