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Book Review
| Tom Sheridan, Australia's Own Cold War: The Waterfront Under Menzies, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2006. pp. xiv + 391. $49.95 print-on-demand, $39.95 e-book.
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| Think 1998 and the waterfront dispute. Recall government duplicity, employer perfidy, leaks, and dark hints of conspiracy. Retrieve from dimming memories how the union won the public relations war. Now read Tom Sheridan's account of the waterfront during the 1950s and note the remarkable parallels. The actors and the industry may have changed but not the capacity for government intervention on behalf of the employers or union methods and traditions of resistance. |
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Australia's Own Cold War is destined to become the seminal reference point for future scholars of the fractious history of industrial relations on the waterfront. It is a significant if long-awaited sequel to Sheridan's masterful analysis, published in 1989, of industrial relations during the Chifley years. The focus here is narrower but its chronological range and complexities are greater. Like its predecessor, Australia's Own Cold War is an exemplar of archival-based research used to strip the layers of propaganda from public pronouncements and thereby reveal hidden connections and inner workings. |
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After a compelling opening, which neatly encapsulates the book's main concerns, Sheridan provides a historical trajectory of the work practices and conditions, dockworkers' subculture and psychology, and class relations within the stevedoring industry. It is easy to see why, from 1890 to 1998, this industry was riven with suspicion, bitterness and confrontation. But the 1950s, which dominate this book, were haunted by one recurring feature: the spectre of 'red plots'. Menzies, Harold Holt (Minister of the Department of Labour and National Service) and his formidable secretary, Sir Henry Bland, among others, all persistently alleged that troubles in this antique, complex industry were the product of a Cold War conspiracy fomented by the Kremlin to disrupt the Australian economy. Obedient communist union bosses were the instruments; deluded wharfies were the puppets. A major string-puller was the charismatic general secretary of the Waterside Workers Federation (WWF), 'Big Jim' Healy. Sheridan has a different view: 'In studying Australian industrial history for 40 years I have come across no more capable and attractive figure than Healy'. And if there were a conspiracy, it took the form of repeated efforts by the State to control, constrain or discipline the WWF. |
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Having effectively demolished the notion of external communist control of the industry, Sheridan identifies the actual, internal sources of industrial unrest. These were 'ancient' and multi-faceted: job insecurity and casualisation, inefficiency and callous negligence by the shipowners, dangerous working conditions, primitive amenities, long traditions of union militancy and, from the 1960s, the increasing pace of automation. Consequently, high levels of stoppages occurred in ports where communist leadership was minimal or where the ALP Industrial Groups were ascendant. |
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Much of the book is devoted to detailed analyses of a series of disputes within the stevedoring industry. Whilst finely textured and impressively documented, these will have greater appeal to students of industrial relations than to historians of the Cold War. While Sheridan seeks to either integrate or locate the minutiae of such disputes – over margins, pensions, sling loads, labour turnover, quotas, casualisation and a host of other contentious, recurring issues – within the broader historical context, this aim is unevenly realised. To that extent, the expectations invoked by the title, Australia's Own Cold War, are not always matched by the book's principal preoccupations. On the other hand, virulent anti-communism aimed at eradicating Moscow's alleged 'alien grip on the waterfront' is certainly evidenced by the legislative assault initiated by the Menzies government for over a decade. The penal powers of the Stevedoring Industry Bill in 1956 or the astonishingly wide provisions of proposed amendments to the Crimes Act in 1960 (which bore a strong resemblance to current anti-terror laws), for example, were aimed at both short-term political gain ('banging the communist drum') and longer-term circumvention of union bargaining power. The ultimate goal, and this is a central theme of Sheridan's study, was the regulation and centralisation of the industry. In this the shipowners – those 'pirates of civilisation', according to Les Haylen – played only a walk-on role. |
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The most crucial actor remained Henry Bland. This powerful mandarin cultivated close relationships not only with the director-general of ASIO, Charles Spry, who gave Bland a 'stream' of information about communist WWF officials, but also the 'moderate' secretary of the ACTU, Albert Monk. Of William McMahon, Holt's ministerial successor, he was always contemptuous; of the employers he was often critical. In evaluating Bland, Sheridan's skills in sifting through voluminous departmental records, in matching contradictory evidence from different sources and different periods, are pronounced. His discussion, for instance, of Bland's role in the Bowen dispute of 1953 and the activation of 'Operation Alien', is superb. |
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Equally admirable is MUP's production of this book: I found only three typographical errors. A rare factual slip was Sheridan's contention that Judge Foster 'relished' imprisoning union officials during the coal strike in 1949. In fact, Foster wept with anguish in an ante-room after sentencing Jim Healy to gaol. Overall, then, Australia's Own Cold War is a distinguished contribution to the historiography of post-war industrial relations, studies of the waterfront and the Cold War. Sheridan's analysis reminds us that events on the Melbourne waterfront in 1998 were not unique. Let us hope that historians of that event will have similar access in the future to the rich set of sources that underpin and animate this study. |
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| Victoria University |
PHILLIP DEERY | |
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