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'The Active Chorus': The Great Strike of 1917 in Victoria
Robert Bollard*
Of the 97,000 workers who struck during the Great Strike of 1917 nearly 13 per cent were Victorian. The lack of attention that historians have paid to the Great Strike has been particularly alarming with regard to these Victorian strikers. The aim of this article is to begin to redress this balance, as part of the project of reshaping our understanding of what was, arguably, the greatest period of working-class radicalisation in Australian history. It does so from a perspective inspired by E.P. Thompson's concept of 'history from below'. This involves more than simply giving voice to those previously hidden from history; it demonstrates the role of the working class as an agent of history.
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| When E.P. Thompson declared his intention of rescuing the eighteenth-century English working class from 'the enormous condescension of posterity'1 he was making an argument for a radically different historiography. Previously, labour history in Britain had been dominated by the 'Oxford School', which had favoured an exclusively institutional methodology. With Thompson, this top-down orthodoxy was reversed. No longer was the working class to be considered as an object of history, but as one of its subjects. The British movement of 'history from below', which he helped to inspire, has since made its mark on Australian labour history. The growth of oral history, along with the various attempts to rescue from history's past neglect the story of marginalised individuals and groups, continues to gather pace. |
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This historiographical revolution is, nevertheless, far from complete. This is particularly the case with our understanding of the great upsurge in class conflict and the radicalisation that accompanied World War I. In 1966, for instance, making an historical aside in a book about the Labor Party, D.W. Rawson, the political scientist, argued that the key source of the leftward shift in the labour movement during World War I was a 'general discontent with capitalist society' arising from 'the particular discontents of many of the trade union officials with the actions of Labor Governments'.2 It is hard to imagine a clearer example of an 'institutional' approach to history. |
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At one level, Rawson's emphasis is understandable. He was, after all, writing about the Labor Party, a political party in which trade union officials wielded decisive power. Clearly the officials, their attitudes and their behaviour, were important in this period. Read in a Thompsonian light, however, there is an obvious hole in Rawson's analysis. What is missing is the attitude of the workers the officials represented. Were the workers discontented with capitalism and the behaviour of Labor governments? If so, how was this manifested, and how did it influence the behaviour of their officials? |
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Rawson's formulation, albeit in a stark manner, expressed the orthodoxy of labour history at the time. Writers such as Bedford, Turner and Farrell all demonstrate this institutional focus to varying degrees.3 Turner's Industrial Labour and Politics, arguably the most influential history of the period, records the various strikes and other occurrences of mass protest. He understands that there was a leftward shift amongst the rank and file as well as the officials and that the strike wave of 1916 and the first conscription referendum were central to this phenomenon. Yet little is done to integrate this insight with his analysis of the leftward shift in official labour. The main theme of Turner's book is the conflict between the industrial and political wings of the labour movement. As a result he devotes far more attention to the institutional manifestations of the wartime radicalisation than to its wellsprings in the turmoil of those years.4 |
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The Great Strike of 1917 is of obvious interest to anyone wishing to revisit this period informed by a 'history from below' methodology. The strike's most distinctive feature was the extent to which it was generated from below. Workers in workplace after workplace walked out with little if any reference to the hierarchy of their unions. They did so, often, despite official reluctance and, in some cases, in defiance of official opposition. Labour historians have not been indifferent to this element of rank-and-file revolt; they have in fact, more often than not, responded negatively to it. |
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The tone was set in 1924 by Vere Gordon Childe's assessment of the strike:
the uselessness of a strike, however widespread and popular, when the forces of labour lack organisation and unitary control — was cruelly demonstrated ... In the Great Strike of 1917 there was as much solidarity as in the Coal Strike. The craft unionists and the unskilled fought side by side. But there was no directing plan animating the whole, and the solidarity was misapplied.5
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Variants on this theme include Robin Gollan, writing in 1963:
The Big Strike was, from the union point of view, a catastrophic defeat. Without effective central leadership it had spread largely by rank-and-file decision. Strike funds were inadequate, and given the government's determination to win at whatever cost, it had no chance of success.6
As late as 1981 Frank Farrell wrote: 'The strike was spontaneous, badly organised, and mostly led by the rank-and-file ... It succeeded only in worsening the lot of its participants'.7 |
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More recently a challenge has been made by Lucy Taksa to the orthodox interpretation of the strike. In an article in Labour History, she challenged the traditional explanations of the strike's origins, which have tended to see it as purely a manifestation of wartime radicalisation. Turner, for instance, described the introduction of the card system into the railway workshops at Randwick as 'not particularly important'.8 Taksa argued instead that the strike involved an implicit protest at the perceived breaking by the state of a form of social contract — particularly the promise of the Railway Commissioners not to change working conditions during wartime. From this she concluded that Childe's argument that 'the solidarity was misapplied' has misinterpreted what was in fact an outburst of social protest on narrow tactical grounds as if it were no more than a straightforward strike over conditions.9 Her reassessment involved a focus on the attitudes (and, to the extent that it was aided by oral history, the memories) of the strikers and their families — a 'history from below'. Elsewhere, she has convincingly argued that the introduction of the card system should be understood by historians (as it certainly was within the labour movement at the time) as an attempt to introduce Taylorism into the largest workplace in Australia.10 |
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Much, however, remains to be done if the role of rank-and-file workers in the Great Strike is to be understood. The institutional bias of the strike's historiography is not only displayed in the assessment of the strike by labour historians, but in the limited attention it has received. This was a confrontation which Turner himself identified as the most significant in Australia's history — on a greater scale than the strikes of the 1890s. Yet the longest published narratives of the strike are only of chapter length — Turner's chapter in Industrial Labour and Politics, and a chapter published by Dan Coward in 1973.11 Neither of these narratives mentions the strike activity that occurred in Victoria, despite the fact that 13 per cent of the strike's 97,000 strikers were Victorian.12 The only published works even to touch on the Victorian strikes are Fitzpatrick and Cahill's history of the Seamen's Union and Rupert Lockwood's history of the Melbourne waterfront.13 Neither of these relates the strike in any depth, and both are limited to specific groups of workers: the seamen and the waterside workers. Moreover, both works are not scholarly, insomuch as they are devoid of footnotes or references. |
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In 1906, Rosa Luxemburg published The Mass Strike, in an attempt to distil for the benefit of German Social Democracy the lessons of the Russian Revolution of 1905.14 The pamphlet was more than a broadside against the 'Revisionists' within the German Social Democratic Party. In the pamphlet she described the wave of strikes that gripped the largely unorganised Russian working class in the years before the revolution. She contrasted this with the bureaucracy and passivity of the German labour movement, so well organised and yet so inactive. In the way it spread, its spontaneity and energy, as well as in its lack of 'organisation and unitary control', the Great Strike of 1917 bears some resemblance to the mass strikes described by Luxemburg. There are crucial differences, and yet the appellation 'mass strike' is probably more appropriate than 'general strike' — the term that has most commonly been used to describe the Great Strike. In any case, Luxemburg's call to German Social Democracy, drawing upon the inspiration of the Russian strike movements, is apposite:
it is high time that the mass of Social Democratic workers learn to express their capacity for judgement and action, and therefore to demonstrate their ripeness for that time of great struggles and tasks in which they, the masses, will be the active chorus, and the leaders only the 'speaking parts', the interpreters of the will of the masses.15
The chorus was in full voice in 1917, in Victoria as well as in NSW. It should not remain silent in history. |
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'The shrieks of women and the hoots of senseless young men': The Strike in Victoria | |
| The Great Strike in Victoria began on the waterfront. For most of 1917, the Melbourne wharfies had been in dispute over the export of wheat, to which they objected at a time of rising food prices.16 They had banned, in particular, the export of food to neutral countries such as Holland, from whence they believed much of it was sold again to Germany.17 By August, they had gained sufficient confidence to launch a dispute over wages and conditions. They objected to the fact that, after having been assigned to a ship, they then had to make their own way to various pick-up points around the port and be paid only from the time of arrival. Instead, they wanted to establish a single central pick-up point at the Flinders Street extension, and to be remunerated for the time it took to travel to and from their assigned ship. |
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On the morning of 13 August, the wharfies assembled at the Flinders Street extension. No one picked them up and the port was idle for the day. That evening a meeting of 1,000 workers voted - in view of the imminent arrival of ships loaded by strikebreakers in Sydney - to abandon the dispute concerning a central pick-up. The strike was to continue, not as an offensive strike over conditions, but as a defensive strike in solidarity with the men in Sydney.18 The Waterside Workers Federation19 also covered a number of the labourers who were employed at this time unloading the wheat harvest at railway depots in Brooklyn, Newport, Williamstown and Geelong, and these ceased work along with the rest of the union.20 |
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The next day (14 August) a meeting of representatives from the Railway Unions of Queensland, NSW and Victoria met at Unity Hall in Collins Street. The NSW delegates reassured the Victorian officials that they had no desire for solidarity action from the Victorian union. In any case, one Melbourne delegate was reported by the Age as declaring, 'there are too many scabs in Victoria for any successful industrial effort'.21 The line from the local officials of the Seamen's Union, at a meeting of their members that same night, was that they had had no word from Sydney and that, in the absence of an instruction from the Federal Executive of the union, any action that was taking place interstate would be unconstitutional. This line prevailed, but not without resistance, as the Age relates:
It transpired, however, that the 'constitutionalists' had fought a keen battle with a section that was anxious to join issue with the Sydney and Brisbane seamen.22
By 16 August, it was becoming clear that the union leadership might have trouble keeping the seamen from striking once strikebreakers started unloading their ships:
In certain quarters yesterday it was hinted that if volunteer workers, other than wharf and shipping clerks, appear on the wharves all the seamen on Melbourne vessels would 'individually' decide to leave their ships as a protest against the use of 'black' labo[u]r. This attitude, however, is not supported by officials of the Seamen's Union.23
By Friday, 17 August, the crews of at least three ships had walked off the job; the seamen were beginning to ignore their officials and vote with their feet.24 |
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On 19 August, the workers at the Colonial Sugar Refinery's (CSR) Yarraville factory voted not to unload sugar from the Kadina (which had been stranded at the factory's wharf on the Yarra by the wharfies' strike).25 By 24 August the manager of the Yarraville factory was writing to his head office in Sydney complaining of the '150 men outside the gates waiting for those who have been at work today'.26 On 20 August, the miners at the State Coal Mine in Wonthaggi joined the strike in retaliation for the gaoling of their union's President, Willis, in Sydney.27 The Jumbunna mine near Korumburra joined later in the week.28 On 21 August, as strikebreakers began unloading ships, the remaining seamen began walking off ship by ship rather than work with them.29 Simultaneously, painters and dockers began refusing to work on ships being unloaded by strikebreakers,30 and 200 members of the Artificial Manure Trades Union walked out at the Mount Lyell Co. in Yarraville rather than handle a 'black' cargo of superphosphate.31 By the next day, 500 members of the union were out.32 That evening, independently of their officials, a meeting of shunters at Spencer Street voted to ban the handling of any goods sent from Sydney or otherwise handled by 'scabs'.33 As an Age reporter had already commented:
There is a turbulent section of the railway service which is badly disappointed over the result of the recent strike ballot and which is now advocating sympathetic action in respect of the New South Wales railway men. These men are in the minority, and not the least militant among them are to be found among the shunters. The engine drivers are not keen on striking.34
The shunters had already organised their own ballot as early as Monday 20 August, but as the Age remarked:
It is significant that although the Council [of the Victorian Railways Union] met on [the following] Thursday night it did not decide one way or the other.35
There is no evidence of whether these shunters were able to enforce their ban. The likelihood is that they never did, since the Bureau of Statistics was later to record that, for the whole of 1917, Victoria lost only 270 days to strike action in the entire rail and tram sector.36 |
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A pattern was emerging in Victoria. As in New South Wales, the strikes largely began upon the initiative of the rank-and-file. Yet, unlike in Sydney, there were few cases of workers walking off in a pure display of solidarity, and the union officials were often (as in the shunters' case) more successful in restraining the rank-and-file. The coal miners went out because their national leader had been gaoled. The wharfies, and most of the seamen, were motivated by a desire not to handle 'black' goods or to work with 'scabs'. The CSR workers had been faced with a choice of 'scabbing' on the wharfies or being stood down; they chose instead to strike. |
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The same principle was to inspire the next batch of strikers. At a mass meeting of carters and drivers, on 26 August, militants won a vote to overturn their officials' previous policy and ban handling 'black' goods.37 On the morning of 25 August, 1,000 timber workers at Melbourne's three largest timber yards walked out rather than accept deliveries of 'black' timber. By Monday 27 August, 15 of Melbourne's timber yards were shut, and Melbourne's building trade was in danger of closing down as a result.38 That Sunday saw a 'well attended' mass meeting of wharfies at Guild Hall reject the call of their national leader, Morris, for a ballot to return to work.39 |
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The Argus on 28 August gave the following breakdown of the numbers of workers 'affected by the trouble in this state' (ie on strike or laid off).
| Boot makers |
500 |
| Carter & Drivers |
500 |
| Miners |
1,500 |
| Confectionery Employees |
2,000 |
| Fuel Employees |
300 |
| Match Makers |
600 |
| Superphosphate Workers |
500 |
| Stevedores |
500 |
| Seamen |
200 |
| Sugar Workers |
400 |
| Timberyard Employees |
2,100 |
| Timber Stackers |
200 |
| Wharf Labourers |
3,000 |
| Others: including boilermakers, engineers, engine-drivers, ironworkers, manufacturing grocers, furniture makers Etc |
30040 |
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On 29 August, 6,000 strikers rallied on the Yarra bank. After the usual speeches, Adela Pankhurst persuaded the crowd to 'roll up' to Federal Parliament. The demonstration was blocked from reaching Parliament by a solid barrier of police. It nevertheless swelled (according to the Argus) to 20,000 as it proceeded along Collins and Bourke Streets where, according to the Age:
The crowd had worked itself into a frenzy and shouts of 'Mob Rule' could be heard above the shrieks of women and the hoots of senseless young men.41
Behind the police lines that protected them from Adela Pankhurst and her rampaging throng, the members of Federal Parliament discussed the apparently fearful rumour that another dangerous agitator, the great Irish syndicalist and leader of the 1913 Dublin lockout, James Larkin, was en route to NSW. Hughes reassured the anxious members that Larkin would not be allowed to land.42 The following day Pankhurst led another crowd of 10,000 from the Yarra Bank in a similar attempt to reach the Federal Parliament.43 |
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On Friday 31 August, a handful of carters and (for the first time) storemen join the strike.44 Rather than process a delivery of New Zealand hemp handled from the port to the factory gate by 'scabs', 400 rope and cordage workers at James Millar Pty. Ltd. in Yarraville joined the strike.45 On Sunday 2 September, the Storemen and Packers voted to ban the handling of 'black' goods.46 They were perhaps encouraged by the rally of 30,000 that filled the Yarra Bank that day — a bigger demonstration than during the Conscription Referendum of 1916.47 |
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By 4 September the Age was reporting 15,858 'idle' (either on strike or laid off); 200 storemen and packers had now joined the strike. On 5 September, 1,250 workers at Dunlop's Montague factory (1,000 men and 250 women) went on strike rather than deal with a shipment of raw rubber unloaded and shipped by 'scabs' from the waterfront.48 That week also saw the dismissal of '80 men and boys and 40 girls ... at the soap works of Kitchen & Sons in Port Melbourne' for refusing to load carts driven by non-union drivers'.49 The rest of the 300 employees at Kitchen & Sons went out the next day in protest, along with another 300 members of their union, the Manufacturing Grocers, at two similar companies, Parsons Bros. and Lewis and Whitty.50 In addition to these, another factory in the trade, McKenzies, was out while another, Prowlings, was only kept at work by the intervention of the Secretary of the Union, no doubt shocked to see the overwhelming majority of his union's 972 Victorian members out on strike.51 It was to be the last substantial addition to the strike in Victoria, which by now was responsible for 20,000 Victorian workers either on strike or laid off.52 |
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On 8 September both Melbourne dailies announced an imminent settlement in Sydney,53 and two days later came the news that the Defence Committee in Sydney had capitulated.54 Suddenly, the strike in Victoria had lost its raison d'être— solidarity with the railway workshops in Sydney. The problem, however, was how to return. What, in other words, was to be done with the 'scabs'? |
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From almost the beginning, the government had responded by recruiting 'volunteers'. An advertisement appeared in the Age on 20 August calling on 'volunteers' to register for 'National Service'.55 The next day the Age announced a flood of recruits, and called for more to register the next day at the Bureau's new headquarters at the Atheneum in Collins Street. It reassured potential strikebreakers that they had nothing to fear from the strikers, as 'the wharf labourers as a body, acting on the advice of their leaders, will shun the locality'.56 Over the following weeks, the daily tallies of recruits at the Bureau were highlighted every day. On 20 August (the first day), for instance, 462 had registered. The next day another 400 registered, but only 600 were working, implying some disorganisation, turnover, or a combination of both.57 |
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Who were these 'volunteers'? The Age gave breakdowns of the first two days' registrations based on categories such as 'professionals', 'employers', 'students', 'clerks', etc. Around one-half of the volunteers were blue-collar workers ('labourers' and 'artisans').58 A number of these had signaled their intention to remain permanently on the waterfront by forming a 'union' and registering with the Arbitration Court. All of this made it impossible for the wharfies to return. As the Age summed it up: 'The free labourers, having formed and registered a union, are legally unionists. For the present, however, the wharf lumpers on strike refuse to work alongside them'.59 |
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A number of employers were determined to seize the opportunity to turn the screw on their employees and their unions. The manager of the privately owned coal mine at Jumbunna refused to allow his workforce to return, observing somewhat quaintly that they were 'now strangers to him'.60 When a mass meeting of storemen and packers voted to declare food supplies 'white', their employers rejected the idea, arguing that those dismissed would be allowed back only if they agreed to handle all goods.61 |
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The management at Dunlop was particularly intransigent. They were well provisioned with 'volunteers'.62 They may also have welcomed some of their original workforce (numbered at 1,250), back by 27 September when 1,104 strikers offered to return.63 Geoffrey Blainey's history of the company refers to a 'Share Purchase Association' set up to encourage employees to buy shares; it was to develop, during 1918, into a sort of de facto company union, with a membership of 638.64 In any case, for the moment, Dunlop was only willing to accept 50 of the 1,104. Dunlop had been a patriotic employer, encouraging its workers to enlist and promising them jobs upon their return. A number of these returned servicemen were amongst those victimised. Most had been loyal employees of Dunlop (with up to 14 years of pre-war service) who, having enlisted with their employers' encouragement, had returned wounded to their old jobs.65 By striking, they had provided Dunlop with the excuse to renege on its promise. |
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A small measure of the bitterness engendered by Dunlop's attitude can be seen in the case of William Thomas Cullen, a Dunlop striker, related in the Age of 21 September.66 He had been tried the day before for assaulting Edward Millekin, a strikebreaker, on 11 September, as Millekin made his way after work from the factory to Montague railway station. Apparently, Millekin had replied to Cullen's relatively mild abuse by shouting, 'oh, go to the war'. Cullen had then flashed his returned services badge and punched Milliken, for which he was convicted of assault. |
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The night of Cullen's trial, 20 September 1917, saw revenge of a sort on Dunlop. It was the night of broken glass, when Adela Pankhurst and Jenny Baines led an army of thousands of women from the working-class suburbs of Richmond, Port Melbourne and South Melbourne in a rampage through streets blackened by the continuing shortage of coal. Along with the windows of butcher shops in Swan Street and the posh emporiums of Collins Street, the Dunlop factory in Montague had all its windows smashed.67 |
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Another group of workers who faced a strike-turned-lockout were the timber workers. Almost every day throughout September they met in the Socialist Hall in Exhibition Street to discuss the question of how to return to work. The Age of 18 September records a representative of the Defence Committee being 'refused a hearing' at a timber workers' meeting the day before. The Argus blamed the disruption on 'militants' (though it later retracted the report at the request of the Defence Committee).68 The Defence Committee was now following a strategy of restricting the strike to the waterfront, the seamen and the coal miners.69 The idea appears to have been that everyone else should return to work so that they might finance these key, strategically placed unions. It is likely that an argument along these lines was the cause of the militants' anger. On 24 September, another meeting of the timber workers rejected a deal their officials (with the Defence Committee's encouragement) had negotiated with their employers.70 The problem was that the deal conceded to the employers the right to pick and choose whom they would accept back — a recipe for victimisation. |
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The employees at CSR were punished in another way by their management. The company maintained a Provident Fund towards which 21/2 per cent of their workers' wages was directed.71 When the employees returned to work on 15 September, they were informed that:
Every employee concerned with the strike has to either withdraw his money paid into the Provident Fund without interest and be re-employed or else retire and take a reduced pension.72
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Not all groups of workers were faced with such intransigence on the part of their employers. The Wonthaggi miners were free from 'scabs', and their management was happy to let them return on pre-strike conditions as early as 9 September.73 The rope and cordage workers in Yarraville also returned on 20 September without any changes in conditions.74 The carters and drivers, though faced with a range of individual victimisations, resumed on 28 September.75 The strike, slowly but surely, was being reduced to a core of wharfies, seamen, Dunlop employees and timber workers. |
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On 21 September, the Age supplied its readers with a breakdown of 'engagements' of 'volunteers' by the Bureau since the beginning of its operations.
| Wharf Laborers |
2,831 |
| Wheat Stackers |
303 |
| Drivers |
511 |
| Laborers |
1,112 |
| Seamen |
25376 |
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| The Age report, however, qualified these figures by pointing out that many 'volunteers' were 'engaged' many times and that there were 'never more than 1,200' working on the waterfront at any one time. Nevertheless, these figures emphasise that it was on the waterfront that the problem of 'scabbing' was most acute. |
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By early October, the seamen had been abandoned by their officials:
Many seamen, it will be recalled, took individualistic action, in opposition to the advice of their officials. Others were 'paid off'. The position, the officials claim now, is that the seamen are not officially on strike, and that they have no alternative but to return to work when berths are offered. To emphasise this point of view the relief money paid out to many seamen has, it is reported, been stopped. The position thus created had [sic] provoked a pronounced split in the union ranks, since a considerable proportion of the seamen is anxious to continue to stand out in support of the wharf labourers.77
On 8 October the seamen in Sydney returned to work, leaving the Melbourne seamen even more isolated, and they too voted to return. That day the timber workers and the Dunlop strikers voted to end their strike on the employers' conditions, which meant a range of victimisations for the timber workers and unemployment for the vast bulk of the rubber workers.78 |
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When the seamen reported for work on the morning of 9 October, given that the preference clause in their Award had not been cancelled, they all expected to be employed. But when the former crew of the steamer, Oonah, reported for duty, they found 17 'scab' firemen already on board and 17 of the former union crew were told they would not be re-hired. Despite all they had suffered, including betrayal by their officials and desertion by the Sydney branch, this was too bitter a pill for the seamen to swallow. Their strike resumed.79 |
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It is clear that they considered themselves to be betrayed, from their behaviour at a mass meeting in the Socialist Hall in Exhibition Street on 15 October. The federal secretary and president had travelled together from Sydney in attempt to get them to return to work. At the meeting they informed the Melbourne branch that if they would not man the ships currently held up in Port Phillip, members of the Sydney branch of the union would. The reaction of the meeting was understandably stormy.
When Mr. Cooper [the federal secretary] left the meeting the hostility towards him became very pronounced. He was followed from the building by over 200 men along Exhibition-street, to continuous hooting and yelling from the mob. As he turned into Bourke-street one of the wildest spirits dashed from the vanguard and dealt him a severe blow behind the ear. Mr. Cooper declined to retaliate, and proceeded into Bourke-street, but as his passage was blocked he eventually escaped in the direction of Parliament.80
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Why had the Sydney Branch, which had initiated the strike, moved so dramatically to the right, while the Melbourne Branch, derided as one of the least-organised branches of the union, stayed steadfast? One explanation was provided by an anonymous official in Sydney:
One prominent official [of the Seamen's Union] said that the actions of the Victorians was [sic] rather humorous, as they were never looked upon as staunch unionists. Now they objected to work alongside loyalists, and no doubt the trouble was being prolonged by many of the malcontents in the Sydney branch who had gone over to Victoria. It had been stated on good authority that the Victorian strikers were being supplied daily with hot meals, and their boots repaired free of charge. The official added if this were true he did not know where the funds were coming from. No doubt, as long as these things were provided free of charge, many of the men who did not like work at any time would be only too pleased to see the trouble prolonged.81
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This quotation reveals the confusion and exasperation of the unnamed official, as he witnessed the rapid radicalisation of the workers he was used to representing — their transformation from annoyingly docile object, to even more annoyingly rambunctious subject. Even if he had been radical in his youth (unlikely in the case of the Seamen's Union82), such an official would have been habituated over the years to the routine of arbitration, and insulated by its practices and prejudices from the political and industrial wave that was now animating the rank-and-file. That rank-and-file, once passive, apathetic and inarticulate, had suddenly burst into militancy and shifted dramatically to the left, outflanking the officials in the process. Little wonder that one at least of those officials was left to propose absurd conspiracy theories about the sinister provision of boots to explain what was happening. |
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The return of the Port Phillip Stevedores (the more conservative of the two sections of the Waterside Workers Federation in Melbourne), which the Age had trumpeted as imminent back in September, was finally accomplished in late October. They voted to return on 19 October,83 though it took more than a week for them to actually resume.84 During that week, however, an incident occurred that allowed, for the first time, the anger of the wharfies towards the 'scabs' who had taken their jobs, to boil over. On 24 October, the Wharf Labourers Union decided to test the suggestion of Justice Higgins that they should simply report on mass for work. Unfortunately, the union failed to notify any of the companies in advance of their intention, and the 'scab' foremen, without any instructions to do otherwise, refused to hire any of the unionists. The result was an explosion of anger in which any unfortunate 'scabs' who were within reach of the unionists were beaten 'with, fists, boots and lumps of coal'.85 |
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The day before this riot, the wharfies' last significant ally, the seamen, had finally capitulated. Having expressed their anger at Cooper, they were now willing to accept the fact of defeat. They had offered for work, and most had been accepted. They were, however, working with 'scabs': the Oonah was crewed with unionists working alongside the 17 'scab' firemen.86 |
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After the riot, the wharfies began to gather on a vacant lot opposite the Yarra Stevedoring Company's bureau in a last ditch attempt to intimidate the 'volunteers'.87 It was of course too late to do anything about the 'scabs'. On 30 October, in far away Korumburra, the Jumbunna miners voted to resume. They had been kept on strike by the management's determination to victimise militants. Now the mine was to be opened by a face-saving deal that saw the victimised men's case shuffled off to a 'judicial enquiry'.88 The wharf labourers, staring down the 'scabs' from their vacant lot, were now completely alone; the Sydney wharfies had returned on 21 October.89 It was clear to everyone that they could not hold out for much longer. In the end, they held out longer than anyone might have predicted. It was not until 4 December that a mass meeting of the wharf labourers 'narrowly' voted to return to work.90 The 'Great Strike' was over. |
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'The men are to blame and not the Federation' | |
Many doctors hold the view that there is an emotional wave unconsciously produced by the fact that we are at war that has disturbed the mental equilibrium of a great many of us...that causes us not to see clearly, thoroughly and exhaustively, but rather to take notice of petty worries and troubles as if they are inflicted deliberately.91
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| Chief Commissioner Fraser, NSW Railways, 1916 |
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| Why did these Victorian workers join the strike movement? Traditional explanations of the causes of the Great Strike, focussing invariably on NSW, have tended to explain it as simply a form of wartime radicalisation. It is not hard to find powerful undercurrents of wartime discontent influencing the strike in Victoria. The figure of Melbourne's Catholic Archbishop, Mannix, had been prominent in the anti-conscription campaign and in the process by which the discontent of Irish Australians with the suppression of the Easter Uprising fed into opposition to the war. He figured again during the strike, making at least two speeches in defence of the strikers.92 |
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One of the ways in which the war fed into radicalisation was through a dramatic assault on working-class living standards. The war had initially been accompanied by a surge of unemployment, and, when that abated, by rampant inflation; the rise in the price of basic food was particularly steep.93 The industrial unrest that began in Broken Hill in 1915 and surged through the coal strike of 1916 is most easily explained as a reaction to a particularly potent combination of economic distress with a political crisis generated by the war and conscription. |
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Whatever its causes, a curious quotation from the Age of 21 August 1917 illustrates the shift leftward, caught, as it were, in midstream. One J. Cadden, the Vigilance Officer for the Melbourne Wharf Labourers Union, was quoted at length defending the strikers against charges of disloyalty. His chief defence was to recall the stance taken by waterfront workers in 1914 when they demanded that 'enemy aliens' (wharfies born in Germany) be removed from the port so that they would not be a 'danger to shipping'. He then continued that four of these aliens had recently been offered lucrative employment supervising 'scabs' but had refused, stating that they had 'never been a scab'.94 When confronted by a journalist questioning his loyalty he recited the first anecdote to prove the wharfies' xenophobic credentials. Then, in stark contrast to the argument he was trying to make, he slid into the second point about the class-consciousness of the once-despised 'aliens'. The shift from an emphasis on loyalty to nation to loyalty to class is exposed — partial and contradictory, as all such shifts must be. |
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The growth of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), overwhelmingly concentrated in NSW, is generally understood to be one of the clearest manifestations of this wartime radicalisation. By early 1917 they claimed nearly 2,000 members,95 all of them, by the IWW's own rules, wage earners,96 and most of them in New South Wales. Childe went further and saw the influence of the IWW, the advocates of One Big Union and the scientific general strike, as providing part of the inspiration for the strike, even though the organisation had largely been crushed by the state before it began.97 |
45
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The IWW was weak in Victoria. The Victorian Socialist Party (VSP), however, had also grown during the war. It is possible to discern a difference between the culture of the left in Melbourne and Sydney, which appears to have been reflected in the different behaviour of the workers in the two cities. In Sydney, the main far-left current was syndicalist; in Melbourne, it was a political current, based primarily around the VSP, with a tradition of propaganda and street agitation (as well as work within the ALP) rather than of work within the unions.98 Individual VSP members were active in the unions. John Curtin, for instance, was Secretary of the Timberworkers Union from 1911 to 1915, and though he was already resident in Western Australia at the time of the strike, his old union still held their meetings at the VSP's Socialist Hall in Exhibition Street.99 But there is nothing in the party's collective intervention to match the agitational activity of the IWW in Sydney, holding, for instance, lunchtime meetings at the Randwick workshops.100 In any case, the VSP's approach to the ALP was mirrored in their approach to the union leadership — as a loyal but radical ginger group rather than as a defiant opposition.101 This may well partly explain why the strike movement began and was always strongest in NSW. It may be part of the reason why rank-and-file workers in Sydney exhibited defiance and opposition and were willing to act independently of their officials in greater numbers then in Victoria. In Melbourne, radical defiance was more likely to be found amongst the working-class women who followed Adela Pankhurst, storming parliament and smashing shop windows. |
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But there were some advantages to the traditions of the Melbourne left. In January 1917, Adela Pankhurst had left Vida Goldstein's Women's Political Association (WPA) to join the VSP.102 She did so because she felt that class rather than gender was now the most important division in society. Given the trajectory of the WPA later that year, she perhaps need not have resigned. It was in the WPA's headquarters at the Guild Hall in Swanston Street (now Storey Hall in RMIT) that the decisive meeting of the wharfies was held on 19 August. Later, the basement of the same building was turned into a food cooperative to aid the strikers. By February 1918, the WPA had supplied 60,000 food parcels, prepared 30,000 meals, provided 6,500 haircuts, distributed 30,000 items of clothing and repaired 2,000 boots.103 The funds were largely solicited from suburban Political Labor Councils.104 |
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Such a level of organised strike support prefigures the Wonthaggi strike of 1934 under communist leadership.105 It may help explain why the Melbourne wharfies, in particular, were able to hold out longer than anyone else. The Melbourne Wharf Labourers made a point, during the Eight Hour parade in March 1918, of leaving the procession as a body, marching to the Guild Hall and saluting the WPA.106 Apart from being a poignant gesture, this gives some indication of the extent to which they maintained their cohesion — their sense as a collective. It was not the behaviour of men who had been utterly defeated. |
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One conclusion that can be drawn from the Victorian evidence is a qualification of Taksa's arguments regarding the importance of the ideological battle around Taylorism and resentment at the Railway Commissioner's betrayal of trust. There is little doubt that she was correct to focus upon this as a key aspect in the strike's genesis. Yet it becomes clearly less relevant the further the strike moves from the Randwick and Eveleigh workshops. The coal miners and wharfies of Victoria had nothing in particular to fear from the example of the card system. They were no doubt aware of it. Articles abound in the labour press about the iniquities of Taylorism.107 Archbishop Mannix railed against what he described as `the American system'.108 Yet the group of workers with the most to lose from the example of the card system, the engineers (and in particular the skilled tradesmen of the Newport Railway workshops), did not strike. The Wonthaggi miners, employed under a piece rate system that made any sort of 'speed up' meaningless, did. |
49
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Two elements appear to have been decisive in Victoria. One was the principle of refusing to work with 'black' goods or with 'scabs' — an active principle in every Victorian strike, except that of the miners. The other was the extent of recent traditions of militancy. The miners, for instance, had shared in the great victory of late 1916, while the wharfies were already engaged in an offensive strike over conditions and had been involved in a campaign against the exportation of wheat. By contrast, the railway workers, still suffering from the defeat of 1903, were not ready to join the strike movement. |
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The two elements are clearly connected. The idea of solidarity is a key element in the consciousness of workers as a distinct class. Implicit in it is a rejection of sectional and regional divisions. This is particularly emphasised in strikes of this scale, which both depend on and underline an identity as 'workers', which overrides narrow occupational categories. As Thompson argued so forcefully, this is not a consciousness that arises as a simple reflection of class relations. It is a consciousness that is forged in struggle; consciousness and agency are inextricably linked. |
51
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To fully understand why each group of workers joined the strike, it is necessary to be aware of the specifics of their experience, their history and traditions, their work conditions and their relations with their employers. That is the virtue of the type of micro analysis carried out by Taksa at Eveleigh. However, the fact that so many workers went out — the fact that made this to contemporaries 'The Great Strike' — indicates that there were general factors at work which have to be understood as well. There was a war. There was a crisis in the cost of living.109 There had been a rising level of strikes which, while it had not managed to recover completely the losses in real wages, was sufficient to enrage the employers and their political representatives.110 The scale of the state's repression of the strike was clearly a factor in turning up the heat of class conflict, helping to generalise the resistance.111 It also explains why so many of the leaders of the movement, for whom arbitration was the be-all and end-all of unionism, were found wanting.112 |
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One Melbourne example is both a demonstration of this problem of leadership and an illustration of the pitfalls of a top-down approach to labour history. In 1917 the national leadership of the Waterside Workers Federation, the Committee of Management (COM), was based in Melbourne. Joe Morris had replaced Billy Hughes as President in 1916. This, along with the fact that he was the only original member of the COM to have been a wharfie rather than a Labor politician, made him somewhat of a hero of Rupert Lockwood's history of the Melbourne waterfront. Lockwood wrote of the Melbourne wharfies in 1917:
Joe Morris had been telling them for weeks. There wasn't a hope of winning the strike with volunteers to spare ... Through the bleak month of October the rank-and-file rejected his advice: their judgement had become as blinkered as their fighting spirit was redoubtable.113
This, perhaps, is of what Thompson was speaking when he wrote about the 'enormous condescension of posterity'. |
53
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In reality, Joe Morris's performance during the strike was far from heroic. His attitude to the strike at its outset is not easy to establish. For instance, although Morris was almost certainly present, there are no records of the Melbourne mass meeting that voted to strike apart from a report in the Age. This report implies that the officials seized upon the need for solidarity with the strike in Sydney as a useful excuse to end the offensive strike over conditions begun that very day by the Melbourne members.114 The COM did not meet until 24 September, nearly three weeks after their members struck in Sydney and 11 days after the Melbourne Branch voted to join the strike. Nor is there any correspondence on file for this early period. Beginning, however, with the meeting on 24 September, the records tell a different story — one of frantic activity by Morris and the federal officials to end the strike at all costs.115 The catalyst of this change is revealed in a transcript of an arbitration court hearing on 23 September in which Morris was interrogated by Justice Higgins regarding the Melbourne strike:
| Higgins: |
How do you explain their conduct in leaving work? |
| Morris: |
I cannot explain it at all. |
| Lewis (Company Rep.): |
Why don't you be frank and say that they are standing by their Sydney colleagues? |
| Morris: |
They are doing nothing of the kind. The executive of the union has given them no instruction to do so. It is the men who are to blame, and not the Federation.116 |
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Higgins proceeded to demand Morris engineer a return to work or risk the loss of preference. The very next day the COM met and, from that point on, it met regularly and Morris was in constant communication with branches around the country, often by telegram. The apathy that had characterised the federal officials' initial response to the strike was replaced by an energetic determination to end it at all costs. They were largely unsuccessful in their efforts, although, at Justice Higgins' behest, Morris did manage to push through a constitutional amendment banning the various state branches from initiating strike action without the federal committee's consent.117 |
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The transformation of Justice Higgins from the friend of labour to a bullying representative of his class, indicates the dilemma in which an official like Morris found himself. Arbitration had taught a generation of trade union officials to rely upon the state to intervene in their favour. When the state turned on them, they were left with nowhere to go, except, after a period of confusion and inertia, into full-scale retreat. |
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The fighting spirit of the Melbourne wharfies in 1917 was, indeed, 'redoubtable'. Whether their 'judgement' was wrong in lending their industrial weight to the defence of the labour movement from one of the most vicious and sustained ruling-class offensives in Australian history is a more complex question. However that question is resolved, one thing is certain. To simply argue that 'the solidarity was misapplied' or that 'the men' were 'to blame' is to view the labour movement from a perspective that denies the reality of working class agency. It is an agency which, as Thompson argued, is both tumultuous and contradictory. It is not an agency that proceeds under 'unitary control' from Point A to Point B. Instead, the transition from acquiescence to resistance and from resistance to revolt involves defeats as well as victories, cul de sacs and strange detours as well as triumphant processions. The process, moreover, is overwhelmingly driven from below. The men and women who struck in 1917 were, in a sense different from any imagined by Joe Morris, 'to blame'. For that they should be both remembered and celebrated. |
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Robert Bollard is a PhD candidate at Victoria University. He is currently researching the Great Strike, having produced an honours thesis on the Victorian aspect of the strike. He spent over 20 years as an activist in the far left and the trade union movement, and has worked as a delegate in the Commonwealth Employment service and a journalist on The Socialist. <Robert.Bollard@research.vu.edu.au>
Endnotes
*.I would like to thank Professor Phillip Deery and the anonymous Labour History reviewers for their assistance and guidance in producing this article.
1. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Vintage Books, New York, 1963, p. 12.
2. D.W. Rawson, Labor in Vain, Longmans, Melbourne, 1966, p. 15.
3. Ian Bedford, 'The One Big Union, 1918–1923', in I. Bedford and R. Curnow (eds), Sydney Studies in Politics: 3, F.W. Cheshire, Sydney, 1963; Ian Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics: the dynamics of the labour movement in Eastern Australia, 1900–1921, ANU, Canberra, 1965; Frank Farrell, International Socialism & Australian Labour: The Left in Australia 1919–1939, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1981.
4. For example, in a chapter devoted to 1919, Turner (Industrial labour and politics, pp. 182–202) devotes 13 pages to the various conferences and the political manoeuvrings that characterised the One Big Union movement in that year. He devotes only five pages to the strike movement of 1919 — a year that saw the largest number of strike days lost in Australian history.
5. Vere Gordon Childe, How Labour Governs: A Study of Workers' Representation in Australia, Melbourne University Press, Parkville, 1964, p. 153.
6. Robin Gollan, The Coalminers of New South Wales, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1963, p. 156.
7. Farrell, International Socialism & Australian Labour, p. 24.
8. Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, p. 141.
9. Lucy Taksa, '"Defence Not Defiance": Social Protest and the NSW General Strike of 1917', Labour History, no. 60, May 1991; see also, Lucy Taksa, Social Capital, Community and Citizenship at the Eveleigh Railway Workshops in Sydney, 1880–1932, School of Industrial Relations and Organisational Behaviour, UNSW, Working Paper Series, Sydney, 1996, p. 7, for an expanded discussion of the concept of social capital and the importance of trust to its development and sustenance.
10. Lucy Taksa, 'All a Matter of Timing': Workplace Restructuring and Cultural Change in the NSW Railways and Tramways Prior to 1921, School of Industrial Relations and Organisational Behaviour, UNSW, Working Paper Series, Sydney, 1996.
11. Dan Coward, 'Crime and Punishment: The Great Strike in New South Wales, August to October 1917', in John Iremonger, John Merritt and Graeme Osborne (eds), Strikes: Studies in Twentieth Century Australian Social History, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1973.
12. 'Strike Crisis', App. 1, Commonwealth Labour and Industrial Branch Report, no. 8, Bureau of Census and Statistics, Canberra, July 1918, p. 122.
13. Brian Fitzpatrick and Rowan J. Cahill, The Seamen's Union of Australia, Seamen's Union of Australia, Sydney, 1981; Rupert Lockwood, Ship to Shore: A History of Melbourne's Waterfront and its Union Struggles, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1990.
14. Rosa Luxemburg, 'The Mass Strike', in Selected Political Writings (edited and translated by Dick Howard), Monthly Review Press, New York & London , 1971.
15. Luxemburg, 'The Mass Strike', p. 270.
16. Margo Beasley, Wharfies: A History of the Waterside Workers' Federation of Australia, Australian National Maritime Museum, Sydney, 1996, p. 48.
17. Lockwood, Ship to Shore, pp. 138–9: 'a discharged soldier approached the lumpers to tell them that in captured German trenches flour bags bearing a WA mill marking were found by Australian soldiers'.
18.Age, 14 August 1917, pp. 5–6.
19. Lockwood, Ship to Shore, pp. 101–8. The Federation included two formally separate unions (which still, at this stage, maintained their own separate officials) within its ambit, the Melbourne Wharf Labourers and the Port Phillip Stevedores.
20. None of the newspaper sources mentions which union was involved. However, University of Melbourne Archives (hereafter UMA) Trades Hall Council (Microfilm record), Executive Committee Minutes (hereafter VTHC, EC Minutes), 14 January 1918, relate a dispute re 'working with the wheat' and how to deal with a 'scab union' set up after the strike. The dispute regarded a complaint by the Waterside Workers that the AWU were attempting to muscle in by allowing their members to join the 'scab union', thereby trespassing on traditional WWF ground.
21.Age, 15 August 1917, p. 9.
22.Ibid.
23.Age, 17 August 1917, p. 8.
24.Age, 18 August 1917, p. 11.
25. UMA, Sugar Works Employees' Union of Australia papers, 1 / 2, Minutes, 21 August 1917. The meeting was held at the Masonic Hall in Newport. See also Argus 20 August 1917, p. 7 and Age, 20 August 1917, p. 7.
26. Noel Butlin Archives (hereafter NBA), ANU, Canberra, CSR papers, 142/204, Letter from CSR Yarraville to Head Office (Sydney), 24 August 1917.
27.Age, 21 August 1917, p. 5; Argus, 21 August 1917 p. 5.
28.Age, 27 August 1917, p. 7.
29.Age, 22 August 1917, p. 8; Argus, 22 August 1917, p. 7.
30.Age, 23 August 1917, p. 8; Argus, 23 August 1917, p. 5.
31.Argus, 23 August 1917, p. 5.
32.Argus, 24 August 1917, p. 7.
33.Age, 24 August 1917, p. 5.
34.Age, 23 August 1917, p. 8.
35.Age, 25 August 1917, p. 11.
36. Bureau of Census and Statistics, Commonwealth Labour and Industrial Branch Report, No. 8, July 1918, p. 128.
37.Age, 25 August 1917, p. 11, and 27 August 1917, p. 7; Argus, 27 August 1917, p. 5.
38.Age, 27 August 1917, p. 7; Argus, 27 August 1917, p. 5.
39.Age, 28 August 1917, p. 5.
40.Argus, 28 August 1917, p. 5.
41.Age, 30 August 1917, p. 7; Argus 30 August 1917, p. 8. The description of the demonstration here is constructed from both reports, though the quotation, of course, is from the Age.
42.Age, 30 August, p. 7.
43.Argus, 31 August 1917, p. 5.
44.Argus, 31 August 1917, p. 5.
45.Age, 1 September 1917, p. 13; Argus, 1 September 1917, p. 19.
46.Age, 3 September 1917, p. 5; Argus, 3 September 1917, p. 5.
47. J.M. Bomford, That Dangerous and Persuasive Woman: Vida Goldstein, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1993, p. 181, provides the comparison with the first conscription referendum. The Socialist, 7 September 1917, p. 4, argued that the figure of 30,000 should be doubled.
48.Age, 6 September 1917, p. 8; Argus, 6 September 1917, p. 5.
49.Age, 6 September 1917, p. 8; Argus, 6 September 1917, p. 5.
50.Age, 7 September 1917, p. 5.
51. UMA, Manufacturing Grocers' Employees Federation of Australia, Vic. Branch, papers, 1/1/4, Minutes, 11 September 1917: 'The Secretary also reported that the members at Prowlings desired to cease work owing to being asked to handle black goods but he had attended the factory and had informed them that in accordance with the policy of the Defence Committee that no more unionists should cease work'.
52.Age, 10 September 1917, p. 5; Bureau of Census & Statistics, Strike Crisis, July 1918, estimated that 3,000–8,000 were laid off in Victoria and as many as 22,000 were on short time during the length of the strike.
53.Age, 8 September 1917, p. 13; Argus, 8 September 1917, p. 19.
54.Age, 10 September 1917, p. 5; Argus, 10 September 1917, p. 7.
55.Age, 20 August 1917, p. 10.
56.Age, 21 August 1917, p. 5.
57.Age, 21 August 1917, p. 5 and 22 August 1917, p. 7.
58.Age 21 August 1917, p. 5 and 22 August 1917, p. 7.
59.Age, 11 September 1917, p. 5.
60.Age, 12 September 1917, p. 8.
61.Age, 13 September 1917, p. 7.
62.Age, 8 October 1917, p. 7, states that, by early October, there were 700 'volunteers' at Dunlop.
63.Age, 27 September 1917, p. 8.
64. Geoffrey Blainey, Jumping Over the Wheel, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, 1993, p. 97: 'Essentially a co-operative designed to encourage workers to invest in Dunlop shares and thus receive some of the profit in good years, the [Share Purchase Association] began to take on an industrial role. With 638 members at the start of 1918 it probably was entitled as the union to speak for the work-force, but was seen by the union as a gate-crasher, a mealy-mouthed upstart'.
65. UMA, VTHC, EC Minutes, 29 October 1917, a deputation of returned soldiers, all of them victimised by Dunlop, related their stories to the Trades Hall Executive.
66.Age, 21 September 1917, p. 5; Argus, 20 September 1917, p. 7.
67. Judith Smart, 'Feminists, Food and the Fair Price: The cost of living demonstrations in Melbourne, August — September 1917', Labour History, no. 50, May 1986, p. 122; Lockwood, Ship to Shore, p. 178. Neither Lockwood nor Smart mentions that Dunlop was on strike, let alone the hard line its management was taking. This means that their accounts lack a crucial motivation for the targeting of Dunlop.
68.Age, 18 September 1917, p. 5. Argus, 19 September 1917, retracts a previous report (after a request by the Defence Committee to do so) that 'militants' had counted out E.J. Holloway at that meeting.
69.Argus, 20 August 1917, p. 7, provides the first reference to such a strategy. Both the Age and the Argus allude to it more frequently, however, after 14 September.
70.Age, 24 September 1917, p. 7; Argus, 10 September 1917, p. 8.
71. NBA, CSR papers, P10/75, Half Yearly report of the Colonial Sugar Refining Company, 'Note for the Information of Shareholders', 30 September 1917. 'Although ... all the members of the Provident Fund were given the opportunity to return to duty for a week after they struck, only a trifling percentage of these members availed themselves of the offer made'.
72. NBA, CSR papers, 142/204, Letter from Frank Tudor MP to W.M. Hughes, 19 September 1917. Emphasis in original.
73.Age, 10 September 1917, p. 6.
74.Age, 20 September 1917 p. 7.
75.Age, 28 September 1917, p. 7; Argus, 28 September 1917, p. 7.
76.Age, 21 September 1917, p. 5.
77.Age, 3 October 1917, p. 7.
78.Age, 8 October 1917, p. 7; Argus, 8 October 1917, p. 7; The Timber Worker (Official organ of the Amalgamated Timber Workers Union, Victorian Branch), 12 October 1917, p. 2, claims, however, that only a minority of yards actually victimised anyone.
79. Fitzpatrick and Cahill, The Seamen's Union of Australia, p. 46.
80.Sydney Morning Herald, 16 October 1917, p. 7.
81.Sydney Morning Herald, 18 October 1917, p. 7.
82. Fitzpatrick & Cahill, Seamen's Union of Australia, pp. 20–50.
83.Age, 20 October 1917, p. 11.
84.Age, 29 October 1917, p. 8.
85.Age, 25 October 1917, p. 5. Argus, 25 October 1917, p. 5, described the incident as 'union terrorism'.
86.Age, 24 October 1917, p. 10; Argus, 24 October 1917, p. 9.
87.Age, 26 October 1917, p. 7.
88.Age, 30 October 1917, p. 7; Argus, 20 October 1917, p. 6.
89.Age, 22 October 1917, p. 8 — after submitting to a secret ballot.
90.Age, 5 December 1917, p. 6.
91. 'Address by Mr Fraser to employees at Eveleigh, 23/11/16', Rail Department Pamphlet, Rail Printing Office, Mitchell Library, pp. 2–3.
92.Age, 3 September 1917, p. 6, describes a speech at Clifton Hill while Labor Call, 23 August 1917, p. 4, reports a speech by Mannix 'at Newport' in which he defended the strikers against the inequities of 'the American system'.
93.The Victorian Yearbook, 1917–18, pp. 1158–9, cited in Smart, 'Feminists, Food and the Fair Price', pp. 115, states that prices in Melbourne had increased from 1914 to June 1917 by 28.2 per cent but wages only by 15.4 per cent; Coward, 'Crime and Punishment', pp. 62–3, cites the Commonwealth statistician as estimating a 32.8 per cent rise in prices and a 1.75 per cent drop in real wages in NSW from 1914–17. The Piddington Royal Commission in 1920 established a much higher figure that implied something in the order of a 30 per cent drop in real wages between 1911 and 1919 — see, Morris Graham, A.B. Piddington: The Last Radical Liberal, UNSW Press, Sydney, 1995, pp. 80–9. See also note 110 below for a discussion of figures provided by Turner.
94.Age, 21 August 1917, p. 5.
95. Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, p. 126. Around 1,500 of these lived in Sydney. Burgmann also points out in 'The iron heel: The suppression of the IWW during World War One', Sydney Labour History Group, What Rough Beast? The State & Social Order in Australia, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1982, p. 187, that the actual size of the IWW has been a matter of great controversy, with estimates ranging from 2,000 to 30,000. The circulation of its paper, Direct Action, was, at its height, around 15,000.
96. Turner, Sydney's Burning, p. 29.
97. Childe, How Labour Governs, p. 150.
98. See, Verity Burgmann, In Our Time: Socialism and the Rise of Labor, 1885–1905, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1985, and Geoffrey Charles Hewitt, A history of the Victorian Socialist Party, 1906–1932, Unpublished MA Thesis, La Trobe University.
99. Lloyd Ross, John Curtin: A Biography, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1996, pp. 30–7.
100. Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, p. 174.
101. This is not to suggest that VSP members were immune to the syndicalist bug, despite the organisation's orthodox socialism and willingness to work inside the ALP. A VSP member, writing for an interstate newspaper, wrote in praise of the 1917 strike (just after its defeat): 'The truth is that the only thing the plutocracy really fear is the well-organised army of Labor. Political campaigns come and go'. It would seem that John Curtin learned a somewhat different lesson from the strike than that famously learned by the victimised engineer Ben Chifley. See, Lloyd Ross, John Curtin, p. 60.
102. Bomford, That Dangerous and Persuasive Woman, p. 170.
103.Woman Voter, 20 September 1917, p. 1, anticipated the fashionable terminology of the 1960s: 'The Guild Hall — twelve months since, the home of true democracy — now a commune'.
104.Woman Voter, 25 October 1917, p. 2, describes how a van supplied by a sympathetic driver from Carlton & United Breweries delivered six tons of food donated by the workers at Newport Railway Yard to the Guild Hall. A 'moving picture' was made of the whole event and screened to an audience of strikers the following weekend.
105. See Peter Cochrane, 'Wonthaggi coal strike of 1934', in Judy Mackinolty (ed.), The Wasted Years?, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1981, pp. 42–57.
106. Bomford, That Dangerous and Persuasive Woman, p. 170.
107. See, for instance, Labor Call, 23 August 1917, p. 2.
108.Labor Call, 23 August 1917, p. 4.
109. W. Jurkiewicz, Conspiracy Aspects of the 1917 Strike, unpublished honours thesis, University of Wollongong, 1977, in an otherwise inconclusive discussion of the motivations of the Railway Commissioner in introducing the Card System and the extent to which a ruling-class 'conspiracy' may have been behind this provocative act, contains figures that demonstrate the extent of the financial crisis on the NSW Railways, most of which can be explained by a wartime surge in interest rates, without which the railways would have remained in profit (see Appendix D, p. 70).
110. Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, p. 252, provides figures (1,000 representing real wages in 1913) outlining a decline to 854 by 1915, then a rise to 864 in 1916 and 930 in 1917. On p. 254, he provides strike figures for these three years: 583,200 days lost in 1915, 1,678,900 in 1916 and 4,599,700 in 1917. The correlation between the two sets of figures is striking.
111. See again Jurkiewicz, Conspiracy Aspects of the 1917 Strike.
112. Mark Hearn, A History of the Australian Railways Union (NSW Branch), Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1990, p. 31, quotes Kavanagh as arguing that unionism had reached its 'highest pinnacle' after 27 years of hard work, largely through arbitration, but it had been 'knocked down in 27 days by direct action in 1917'.
113. Lockwood, Ship to Shore, p. 167.
114.Age, 14 August 1917, pp. 5–6.
115. NBA, Waterside Workers' Federation (hereafter WWF) papers, T62/1/1, Federal Committee of Management (hereafter COM) Minutes, 24 August 1917.
116.Age, 24 August 1917, p. 6.
117. ANU, NBA, WWF COM, T62/1/1, Minutes, 24 August — 11 October 1917.
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