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'A Terrible Monster': From 'Employers to Capitalists' in the 1885–86 Melbourne Wharf Labourers' Strike
Nick Dyrenfurth*
| During the 1880s the beginnings of an important shift occurred within the language of Australian labour. The relatively benign 'employer' of Australian colonial folklore began his metamorphosis into the exploitative and villainous 'capitalist'. The little analysed 1885–86 Melbourne Wharf Labourers' strike was an important example and practical catalyst for such discourses. This article primarily seeks to redress the neglect of this important strike and the related shift in terminology. A close reading of this strike also explores the gendered, populist nature of labour politics and its Victorian specificities. Above all, the article seeks to historically 'rescue' the 'villains' – in particular the leading employer Bruce Smith – of early labour discourse. As the strike in question reveals, the pre-1890s shift from 'employers to capitalists' was uneven, and at times contradictory, yet of unquestionable long-term significance. |
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Heroes and Villains in Early Australian Labour Discourse | |
In January 1886, Bruce Smith, President of the Victorian Shipowner's Association, complained to Melbourne's conservative Argus newspaper during the bitter Melbourne Wharf Labourers' strike:
Men who organised 'labour against capital' will have their names handed down with honour amongst the working classes ... [but] the unfortunate individual ... organising 'capital against labour', must be abused and threatened with financial ruin ... probably I may some day be represented in picture-books as a terrible monster ... endeavouring to injure a sweet and innocent child called 'labour'.1
With the sympathies of most Argus readers assured, Smith was engaging in some comical hyperbole. Equally, however, as one of the most prominent employers of the time, he was acutely aware that the increasingly assertive Australian labour movement was successfully demonising employers, and their newly formed associations. Labourites were beginning to construct a powerful, populist narrative of a conspiracy besetting New World Australia. Central to this story was the metamorphosis of the formerly benign 'employers' of colonial folklore into the exploitative and villainous 'capitalists' (such as Smith) already infamous in Old World struggles.2 |
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This article seeks to address three interrelated historiographical concerns. The first is the nature and effect of the 1885–86 Melbourne Wharf Labourers' strike. The events of this conflict have long been overwhelmed by the titanic struggle that was the 1890 Australasian maritime strike. This is despite, as discussed below, notable Old Left writers such as Brian Fitzpatrick pointing to the clear rhetorical shifts featured in the strike. And clearly the actors of 1890 (and perhaps the 1889 London Dockers' strike) must have used the dispute as a point of reference. Apart from neglecting this strike, historians have all too easily assumed or taken for granted changes in early labour movement discourse. Moreover the Wharf Labourers' strike is an important event in itself and deserving of a close analysis helping us to more fully understand the events of the 1890s. |
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Another issue involves questions of gender. Many writers, most notably Marilyn Lake, have addressed the gendered, racialist discourse of the 1890s radicals and labourites, noting the nature and dominance of a masculinist politics.3 According to Lake 'the socialist beliefs and commitment of many working men arose from an anxiety about their gender status as well as a consciousness of class'. Lake specifically points to efforts of propagandists such as William Lane, who, she suggests, argued that workers were not only exploited as a class, but were 'robbed of their manhood'.4 Lake's path-breaking work prompted a spirited debate between historians and included important contributions from Bruce Scates, Patricia Grimshaw, Michael Leach and others.5 (Lane's 'masculinism', as Scates importantly suggests, was not one and the same as the labour movement's 'masculinist discourse').6 Lake noted that Australian radicals borrowed the language of masculine and racial degradation from the earlier British Chartists and other international socialist writings.7 As she suggests, concepts of 'manliness' and 'manly independence' were essential to the 'construction' of a wider, hegemonic 'bourgeois ideolog[y] – part of the mid-Victorian package which included "respectability" and "self-help"'.8 Nevertheless the extent to which labourites, most notably Lane, were reacting to this ideological framework and established political practice, has been underplayed. I wish to argue, notwithstanding debates around his 'socialist-feminism', that Lane's gendered interventions had its antecedents in previous Australian events such as the strikes and wider labour 'successes' of the 1880s, which in fact set the paradigm for later actors.9 This article aims to augment Lake's analysis by documenting the ways in which Lane inherited a pre-existing labourist and wider masculinist political tradition. |
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Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I seek to redress the lack of attention given to the 'villains' of early labour discourse, and ipso facto, contribute to our understanding of the development of early labourism. John Rickard's Class and Politics is one exception. His important contribution sought, before 'the linguistic turn', to analyse labour and non-labour discourse in terms of a relationship. In particular he sees a shift away from the populist labour language of 'the classes versus the masses' towards a class language based upon appeals to 'the workers' in the period 1890 to 1910.10 Building on Rickard's work, I not only wish to explore how populist meanings were contingently reworked into, and interchanged with, class terminology, but will also emphasise that much of the important work in constructing labourism was discursive, interacting with materialist concerns. This article then suggests that a synthesis of the so-called 'linguistic turn' within a cultural materialist frame is both possible and productive, illuminating our understandings of Labor politics and of traditional historiographical concerns such as class.11 Specifically it argues that early labour discourse was directed against individual (male) employers within a populist discourse which did not, generally, treat capitalists as a 'class', nor capitalism as a discrete system of social relations. It does so by fleshing out the gendered, as well as class and populist, dimensions of early labour's portrayal of the 'capitalist'. During the 1880s, a populist and maculinist narrative of heroes and villains was developing, which would distinguish labourite thought and action in the immediate term and for decades to come. As the strike in question reveals, the shift from 'employers to capitalist' in Australian labour discourse was both problematic and uneven, yet of unquestionable long-term significance. |
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'Employers to Capitalists'? | |
| Scholars in Australia and internationally have lately concentrated on the 'bottom-up' and (to a lesser extent) 'top-down' formation of working people's social and political identities.12 Despite some historiographical attention to the construction of 'heroic' worker identity, their villainous 'capitalistic' counterparts have been generally neglected.13 Yet no social identity exists in a vacuum. As E.P. Thompson famously recommended identity develops as an 'experience' and 'relationship'. The working class, to use Thompson's terminology, clearly 'made' itself, and it typically did so, in Australia, by distinct reference to its enemies, real and imagined. Unfortunately the Australian historiography, despite infinite approbations towards Thompsonian social history, has neglected to properly explore his stress upon the relational aspect of class identities and their historical formation. During the last decades of the nineteenth century 'Fat Men', 'Capitalists', parliamentary 'Boodlers', 'Sweaters', 'Middlemen' and the conspiratorial 'Money Power' were regularly and increasingly cast as external enemies (in league with internal 'scabs' or racial 'Others', the Chinese and so-called 'Kanakas').14 These villains were set against positive collectivities of 'producers', 'the People', varying constructions of 'the masses' and, of course, but less frequently than assumed, 'workers' and the 'working class'. Even allowing for clear material changes to Australian society during the late nineteenth century, it was the developing 'language of class' that abstracted these relationships, most notably between that of employer and employee, to that of capitalist and worker. |
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The particularised movement from 'employer to capitalist' is more than just a rhetorical or 'natural' tendency. This shift should be understood in the context of labour's core struggle: the building up of the industrial and political unity of a more homogenous Australian working class.15 This collectivity should not be understood in determinist Marxist terms: the late nineteenth-century 'making' of an Australian working class was an overwhelmingly populist construction. Rather than narrating a 'foreign' 'working-class', the antipodean labour movement mostly spoke of the struggles of its own, native-class collectivity of 'the People'. Within this discourse, early labour intellectuals created various heroes and villains, friends and enemies, and other dichotomous relationships. I argue that the construction of villains, often racialised, was the most prominent element of this discourse. And perhaps the most famous villain of all was the capitalist 'Fat Man' – often linked to the shadowy 'Money Power'. From the 1890s onwards the image and rhetoric of 'Fat' capitalists was regularly evoked, and increasingly naturalised as the workers' or 'People's' enemy.16 In this article however I want to look to Fat Man's important capitalistic antecedents. |
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During the 1880s and beyond – for there is no neat beginning or end point – the identity of the employer was increasingly subsumed by, or juxtaposed with, that of the 'capitalist'. The emergence of such asocial individuals, argued labourites, marked a new and dangerous development in colonial society. Prominent unionist and labour historian W.E. Murphy suggested as much in his chapter in John Norton's 1888 tome The History of Capital and Labour:
Employers, for the most part, had sprung from the working classes themselves, and the utmost familiarity prevailed between them and their employees ... It was not until the employers became capitalists, and the small tenement used as a workshop was replaced by a massive brick or stone factory ... that the patient and hitherto contented workman could be at all unimpressed with the disparity which they helped to create between their employers and themselves.17
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Murphy's role here must be treated sensitively, for he was both an actor and contemporary historian narrating his own role in the struggles of the 1880s. Nonetheless, as Murphy intimated, the powerful mythology of colonial upwards social mobility, or the so-called 'Working Man's Paradise', seemed to have eroded by the late 1880s. Workers' grievances could no longer be explained away by claims of intemperance, ill-thrift or laziness. But this was very much a new claim. As the dominant societal narrative went, prior to the 1890s workers generally adhered to the ideal of 'becoming' middle class as being virtuous and desirable, even nation-building: 'individual self-improvement' constituted 'national progress'.18 Liberals and conservatives championed classlessness as the promise of upwards social mobility. Such discourses were used to demonstrate the 'rule' of labour over capital and invoked by workers, politicians, and even conservative social commentators. 'Nowhere could a man rise in life so surely or so speedily as in these colonies', intoned H.M. Franklyn, editor of the conservative Victorian Review in 1881:
No working man, who is prudent, temperate and industrious, need occupy a house which is not his own ... No farm labourer need continue to be a wage earner for more than a few years, for it is quite within his power to acquire a small farm for himself by the practice of anything but severe economy.19
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Just two years later such Utopian claims were becoming more defensive and shrill. Visiting English journalist R.N. Twopeny insisted that upwards mobility was merely the individual choice of prosperity: 'Every man has it in his power to earn a comfortable living; and if ... the working man does not become one of the capitalists his organs inveigh against, he has only himself to blame'. Twopeny was clearly reacting to the intensified and expanded labour organisation of the time, posthumously known as 'New Unionism'. Nevertheless, according to Twopeny, 'class relations are, on the whole, excellent'. Indeed Twopeny sought to flatter Australian workers. Such cordial dealings were 'more to the credit of the lower classes, because the plutocracy is utterly selfish in character'.20 While a self-made free-immigrant such as Henry Parkes (then NSW Premier) was the likely model, no doubt the experience of reformed convicts and rapidly prosperous gold-diggers also helped. This narrative needs to be seen for what it was; an intoxicating and resilient form of cultural hegemony, which Davison sees as developing into the 'mobility myth'.21 However as Ray Markey notes, the ideal of social mobility was not merely myth, being 'deeply implanted in the experience of late-nineteenth century Australians ... enough people [enjoyed social mobility] ... for the phenomenon to be considered socially significant'.22 Radicals of the time, such as those writing in the then labour-sympathiser the Bulletin, had helped spread this myth, in this instance tying upwards social mobility to the developing national identity: 'Australians are practical people. The very essence of their careers is the spirit of material development and progress. They are bent, almost without exception, on industrial development. Every individual is devoted to money-making'.23 |
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Moreover rather than simply rejecting such ideals out of hand, Australian radicals sought to rework the dominant discourses of the time. It was the emergence of the 'new' anti-social capitalist that threatened the status quo. In 1885, a piece in the Bulletin likened the failure to 'unlock the lands' to the transformation that occurred in post-Tudor England where once
in the main, the mass of the people lived on their own land, were happy, contented, well-fed and well-clothed, producing and working up enough food and raw material for their own use and thinking little of exchange [but now the] people were gradually being driven off the soil, their ancient rights destroyed ... a propertyless folk – forced to compete with one another in the cities for wages to keep body and soul together – replacing to a large extent the sturdy yeoman, craftsmen and labourers of old days.24
Thus, at least during the early to mid-1880s, labourite language was less informed by pre-existing socialisms as by a decidedly pre-modern, populist imagining of small landholders now dispossessed.25 Here gender or, more specifically, discourses of antipodean masculinity, provided a bridge to the new class society in which the 'new' capitalistic predators primarily exploited and degraded white working men. In an opinion expressed in the Bulletin:
The director drinks his champagne, while the mine-serf toils at the risk of his life in the bowels of the earth to pay for it. The wife of the speculative monopolist – that parasite of labour – glides through the mazes of a waltz, prankt in sheeny silks and glittering with gems, while the white wage slave drudges in dirt with all his intellectual and moral faculties blunted and destroyed.26
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Lake argues that William Lane was one of the first Australians to specifically suggest that the system of capitalism itself emasculated men's manhood.27 As noted earlier, there is a significant body of primary evidence to suggest that Lane was in fact drawing on an established (nativist) rhetorical toolkit. In response to the growth of manufacturing and 'sweating', Victorian labourites persistently spoke the language of manhood denied. In the early 1880s the pages of the Carlton Advertiser and Trades Advocate, for instance, contain frequent references to 'white slaves' and the hope of legislation providing their masculine 'emancipation'.28 My analysis of the strike provides further examples. And labourite denunciations were often qualified and focussed on the moral depravity of the 'individual' male capitalist. According to Thomas Caddy of the 3rd Intercolonial Trades Union Congress of 1885, the exploiter of working men was: 'The capitalist ... [who] holds the sweat of the toiler, as it were, in the hollow of his hand, and the wealth of generations between the covers of his chequebook'.29 Caddy was not suggesting that a wholesale 'class' of such 'capitalists' existed. On the contrary, as the Bulletin suggested above, it was anti-social, atypical and particular 'parasites' who were exploiting the toilers. |
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When demonising individual capitalists, the labour movement began to utilise what Michael Leach terms an 'affective' and at times exclusionary masculinism. Labourites appealed to working men's sense of independent manhood as their defining sense of cross-class socio-political identity.30 As we shall see later, the claims of the propertied or employer class would mirror labourite discourse. The capitalistic emasculation of manhood began to be conflated specifically with worker exploitation. Shortly after the Wharf Labourers' strike, the unionist C. Jones thus described the industrial ills of Australian seamen: 'Forty years ago they were treated like dogs, and now they were not treated like men'. Conversely, employers – or here middlemen – were frequently depicted as immoral 'sweaters'; 'men who took work out of the shops were, as a rule, immoral characters, bad husbands and bad fathers'. It is in this context that one of the earliest and most influential labour cartoonists, Montagu 'Monty' Scott, later contributed to Lane's Brisbane-based Boomerang by picturing 'the Queensland Samson', a pre-industrial male worker, emasculated by a greedy (Assyrian) monopolist in league with a sadistic Chinese hireling [Figure 1].31 |
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Figure 1
Montague Scott, 'Wealth and Want: The Queensland Samson',
Boomerang, 22 December 1888.
Courtesy of the Newspaper Collection, State Library of Victoria
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As the later and more prominent writings of Lane show, the alleged degradation of women and womanhood was an equally evocative tool in garnering popular support. Lane's discourse, however, took root within the existing framework of masculinist politicking. And when working men articulated their gendered class identities (or often anxieties), this was itself expressed by the alleged sufferings and dependence of the female sex. Moral critiques of the increasing extent of female factory work highlighted the imagined helplessness and protective moral requirements of working women. One consequent emotion was the shame of men not being manly enough to help, partly because of the immoral actions of the exploitative male factory owner:
Factories in Victoria were nothing else than hotbeds of vice and immorality ... women [were] herded together in miserable circumstances, who took in work and lived partly upon it and partly by prostitution. Workmen who attempted to speak out upon this subject were either ordered to hold their tongues or to go somewhere else where they might find a worse place ... Many of these places belonged to some of the richest men in the colony – bank directors and others – otherwise they would have been pulled down long ago.32
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On the other hand, as the above example illustrates, labourites argued that the manhood of certain employers was debased by their selfish actions. The leader of tailoresses during the 1882–83 Melbourne Tailoresses' strike, Eileen Creswell, told of how 'They had been fighting with men, but she did not call them men, for no man would fight with women, and grind them down as these men were doing'.33 During that strike male support was harnessed and expressed in similar terms. According to the 'sweated' women's male union organiser, W.E. Murphy, 'there was not a man ... who had the heart of a man in his bosom who would allow it here'.34
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Racial threats joined gender anxieties in shaping labour's targeting of the 'capitalist'. Speaking at the same congress as Caddy, leading Victorian unionist H.A. Harwood launched this diatribe against those advocating Chinese immigration:
They live in fine houses, pleasantly situated, and are surrounded by refined associations. Their daughters are not tempted, and drugged, and degraded. Their callings and incomes are not interfered with hence they see no harm in thousands of Chinese being allowed to come here.35
Harwood was talking about the emergence of class divisions within Australian society, with a personalised emphasis on Melbourne and his own furniture trade.36 However, his invocation of racial and gender fears in laying the blame for the Chinese 'problem' accurately reflects the historical development of a wider Australian language of class during the late nineteenth century. According to unionists such as Harwood, it was powerful male villains, often a 'new' breed of asocial capitalists, who were attempting to create a foreign 'class' society in the antipodes. And they did so by threatening not only the material interests, but racial and gender certainties of Australian working men and their families. |
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On the other hand, the employers that Harwood and others damned, increasingly felt as though they had less responsibility for their employees. One such employer, V. Stooke told the 1884 Royal Commission into the Factory Act:
the feeling between the employer and the employee is much worse than it used to be; the good old feeling – the old spirit – has gone out ... My feeling now is that the law has taken over the responsibility of their well-being, and told me how many hours they should work, and what they shall get paid, and I am relieved of any responsibility.37
So as employers themselves claimed a less paternalistic and logically sympathetic role, labourites began to paint a more lurid picture of large employers' masculine (lack of) respectability and societal utility. My overarching point here is to demonstrate that their narrations of a 'new' class society relied upon an engagement with and reworking of pre-existing, more familiar discourses of racially and gender-constructed populism and indeed radical liberalism. Unsurprisingly then, it was the more bitter and publicised strikes which were the strongest facilitators of such discursive shifts. The 1885–86 Melbourne Wharf Labourers' strike is an important example and it is to this which I now turn in detail. |
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'a new phase, viz, Capital versus Labour' | |
| During the New Year period of 1886, the docklands of 'Marvellous Melbourne', then one of fastest growing in the world, were brought to a standstill. Brian Fitzpatrick has described the conflict, which drew in seven unions and affected every port in Australasia, as a 'sort of dress rehearsal' for 1890. Insofar as the strike featured analogous language and soon-to-be familiar combinations of employers and workers this is true, but the actors were, of course, not following the later script. Surprisingly the literature dealing with this strike is scanty. Murphy certainly thought it worthy of more attention. Writing two years afterwards he thought it 'the greatest struggle between capital and labour in Australia'. The story of 'a few hundred cargo and coal lumpers [who] defied the power of capital', mused Murphy, 'would smack too much of an Arabian tale' to the later historian. Ship to Shore, Rupert Lockwood's history of the variously-titled maritime unions, includes the strike as a foundational event and largely concurs with Fitzpatrick's narrative.38 I am not claiming any exceptional historiographical significance for the strike – as some sort of neat or talismanic 'turning point' – nor contradicting Fitzpatrick's account, but wish to illustrate how its events were symbolic of larger processes at play. |
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The strike was preceded in April 1885 by the formation (led by Bruce Smith) of the Victorian Employers Federation (VEF) from the remnants of the Victorian Boot Manufacturers Association, which had itself mobilised during the previous years' bitter Bootmakers' strike.39 During the 1870s, unionism had expanded to include many unskilled workers – notably coalminers, seamen and wharf labourers. In the 1880s there was a further dramatic mobilisation, particularly in the maritime industry.40 Between 1880 and 1885, Melbourne had seen a large rise in the unionisation of the unskilled across all industries.41 In 1883 the Trades Hall Council was established, widening the functions of the old Trades Hall Committee.42 Employers were directly reacting to this heightened labour organisation. Memories of the Tailoresses' strike and bitter Sydney-based Seamen's strike of 1878–79 were also quite recent. Smith claimed that 'Trades Hall [had] assumed a position of confidence and power – backed up by the working classes of Victoria – which showed the immense power they wielded in the land'. Whilst Smith was clearly exaggerating, labour's prima facie organisation was evident. In 1880 no more than a dozen unions were affiliated with Trades Hall, by 1885 that number was more than fifty. Employer D. Munro thought 'manufacturers would henceforth act on the defensive, but not with the object of affecting employes [sic] save for their good. The employees had set their employers a worthy example in the matter of co-operation, which the latter were not ashamed to follow'.43 |
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Early in 1885 the Federated Seamen's Union organised a 'vigilance' committee, to compel companies not to use non-union, 'coloured' labour in the inter-colonial trade.44 Trans-Tasman ructions during 1885 were also influential. The Northern Steamship Company of New Zealand had slashed wages, and its crews promptly went on strike, affecting every port in Australasia.45 Shamelessly borrowing from the existing labour unions, the VEF declared that its motto was 'defence not defiance'. Shipowner, VEF President, and soon-to-be villain Smith avowed 'that the Employees Union had [not] been formed in order to have a crushing effect upon the working man ... They had no wish to do an injustice to any one, but were anxious to maintain simple equity between man and man'. Smith's emphasis on the relations between 'man and man' was as disingenuous as the employers' claim to 'defence'. The very formation of the VEF implied that face-to-face relationships had been superseded by a more abstract, antagonistic and collective framework. The loudly anti-labour Argus reiterated Smith's thesis of individuality, bemoaning the trend:
In all trades it would appear as if we were drifting to the union as the dominant power, and the large millowner with machinery, capital and credit behind him as the other, the working man becomes a caste and the employers a specialised class, while individuality is crushed out in the conflict.46
Historians have traditionally pointed to the Victorian protectionist alliance as being based around the manufacturing industry. Yet on the docks this phenomenon was of less importance. In the mid-1880s the effects of the 1870s depression were still being felt, and together with the continued stagnation of 'old' industries, employers had increasingly sought to bend or break the terms of union agreements. In the shipping industry companies were facing increased competition alongside falling profits.47 It was within this broad context that the strike erupted. |
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Despite Smith's claim to 'defence', on 21 April 1885 eight Melbourne shipowners revoked a 20-year-old informal agreement that waterside workers could enjoy a holiday on the occasion of the Eight Hours Day without loss of pay.48 The annual celebration was hardly a radical celebration or act of defiance, attended as it was by the Governor Sir Henry Loch and the Chief Secretary Graham Berry, and addressed by several leading businessmen (who defended themselves against allegations of antagonism to labour). As the Age argued, 'every eight hours demonstration is a happy augury for the colony, for each exceeds the preceding one in splendour and impressiveness ... it is a tribute to the organising power of the class who participate'.49 To add insult to injury the owners cancelled penalty rates for those remaining at work. In response the Melbourne Wharf Labourers Union was born on 23 May 1885 with J.B. Tucker as its inaugural secretary, and it affiliated with Trades Hall (though this had already been flagged the previous year). However, owing to its weak organisation, the newly formed union decided against immediate strike action. Instead during September it served a three-month notice on the employers, requesting recognition of the Eight Hours Day holiday, as well as improved pay and conditions.50 |
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As the deadline approached the action and rhetoric of the unions was restrained. When Murphy spoke to a mass meeting at Trades Hall on 22 December he declared: 'No sensible man ... can deny that capital has rights as well as labour'. The same meeting narrowly resolved for the executive of Trades Hall to mediate. Having received no concessions by New Years Day 1886 and despite several conferences with the employers (who declared that 'surplus labour ... [could] be found elsewhere'), some 900 men struck. 'The strikers who have a grip on the throat of the Melbourne people at present, care as little for public opinion as the gallant robber baron of the Rhine' cried an outraged Argus; 'It is extremely satisfying therefore to find that the shipowners (with one exception) are thoroughly united ... their action receives the support and approval of business people in Melbourne generally'. Unsurprisingly the Age attacked its rival newspaper, arguing that the strikers had 'asked for very little more than their employers admit to be reasonable, and that one employer will grant ... It is impossible not to wish them success'.51 |
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The Melbourne wharf labourers were quickly followed by sympathetic yardmen and draymen, and wharf unionists from Geelong (who formed a union of their own). Newcastle wharfies refused to load coal for Melbourne-bound ships. The union received funds from as far afield as the Townsville Wharf Laborers. Pickets of strikers turned away or persuaded other workers to black-ban associated goods. The Stevedore Laborers Eight Hours Association announced that the wharf labourers' 'interests were identical with their own'.52 Smith's 'simple equity between man and man' rapidly transformed:
the intention of the Shipowners' Association, [is] not merely to break down the Wharf Laborers' Union, but to substitute from the other colonies a completely new set of men ... when the present strike ceases the employers will, if they win, exclude union men from their service.53
Led by Smith the employers declared a seemingly natural language of collective sentiment; a meeting of the VEF on the 7 January 1886 passed a motion declaring 'the bounden duty of every employer of labor at this juncture to support in every way which lies in his power in resisting the claim which has been made by the wharf-laborers'.54 Smith's firm Howard Smith and Co. promptly offered the eight-hour day and 45 shillings a week to 'scab' labour. Union circulars and posters were issued in depressed areas in and outside of Melbourne, wherever potential scabs might be found, as the shipowners had advertised for some 500 men from Sydney, Adelaide and New Zealand.55 'Wharf Laborers' strike – Laborers of all classes are requested not to engage for wharf labor in Melbourne during strikes of lumpers for what is only just to themselves', announced one such notice to unemployed miners in Sandhurst and Ballarat.56 |
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The employers were, however, successful in bringing potential scabs from Adelaide, under police escort.57 In response, on 8 January, the 500 unionists who gathered at Trades Hall were told: 'not to speak or molest them in any way, but to rely upon moral suasion ... there was little doubt that they would have more sympathy with their fellow working men than with the capitalists'. The next day Murphy denounced the actions of the shipowners 'as a direct attack upon labor by capital to avenge the defeats it had met at the hands of the bootmakers and other guilds'. On hearing that they had been brought to break a strike, the 94 potential scabs – the 'scum of the colonies' according to Murphy – refused to work.58 The Age reported that the union provided 'the checkmate to this adverse move by providing for the newcomers as they arrived, the sympathy of the latter being naturally with their fellow workers'. The men from Adelaide, according to the naturalising language of the Age, expressed
the desire to be untrammelled in their actions, to be free men, indeed, to co-operate heart and soul with their union brothers on shore ... and they determined upon a course of action – to throw in their lot with the union.59
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As Murphy's warning and the Age's intimation suggests, the dispute was now being painted as a generic one between capital and labour. We should be careful, however, in considering the actions of Trades Hall, and the way in which its leadership spoke to different audiences. On one hand we see the now familiar language of class and union loyalty. Murphy told a later meeting of the wharfies (though note the invocation of authority) that 'he would stand by them to the bitter end ... This strike was a system of social warfare, and that every man was to act unquestionably as a soldier whose discipline required him to obey his superiors'.60 In fact Trades Hall was keen to see a speedy conclusion to the matter and a return to cordial relations between labour and capital, on the way pressing its claim as the exclusive moderator of workers' grievances. Trades Hall vice-president and future leader of the Victorian Parliamentary Labor Party Fred Bromley told Age readers that 'disputes ... might with confidence be left in the hands of the Employers Union and the Trades Hall Council, who have hitherto acted together with that amity which should exist between capital and labor'.61 Strikes were to be avoided, according to Bromley, by 'boards of conciliation [which] will cause both employers and unions to pause before resorting to strikes and lock-outs, the evils of which are so painfully apparent to all sections of the community'.62 |
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Nevertheless many unionists sought to paint the conflict as natural. Just a day after Bromley's call for moderation, Trades Halls' Mr Croker summoned the seemingly conventional conflict of class: 'the union was not only fighting its own battle, it was only the first engagement of the great army of capital against labor'.63 Though it seems familiar to later historians, labourite language did not suddenly switch to that of class war, and given the peculiarity of Victorian labour-capital relations,64 it was contested ground. Labour's response would mirror the later travails of political Labor, as it oscillated between a conception of itself as distinctively 'Labor' or as an advanced wing of liberalism. 'The question', according to J.M. Mansfield of the Seamen's Union, was
whether the wharf laborer's battle was between sections of the employers and the employed or between the whole forces of capital and labor, and on determining this action would have to be taken to show sympathy or otherwise with the men on strike.65
In reply Henry Anderson contended that it was indeed 'an organised attempt on the part of capital to crush labor, and if the wharf laborers were first beaten, the seamen would be the next attacked'. Most suggestively of all, future Labor Member of the Legislative Assembly George Sangster concurred, but added 'and it had been made so by the influence of Mr Bruce Smith'.66
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Shortly afterwards the dispute escalated. The Federated Stewards and Cooks Union of Australasia walked off their ships, much to the chagrin of middle-class Melbournians on board the S.S. Pateena:
All the passengers, a large crowd of holiday makers were ... allowed to assemble on board ... when the men suddenly shouldered their personal property, and forsook the vessel amidst cheers from an assemblage of wharf labourers, who had collected on the quay to watch and enjoy.67
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More importantly the federated seamen also withdrew their labour. 'We are compelled to take this course' declared Mansfield in a circular to shipowners, 'owing to the struggle having assumed a new phase, viz, Capital versus Labour'. Labourites were now seemingly locked into a more serious course of action. Smith, in a public letter to Murphy, objected to the 'the intrusion of a second and distinct issue of "Capital and Labour" which has been raised by the sailors'. Notwithstanding the disappointment of the passengers on board the Pateena and the exaggeration of conservative commentators, public opinion rallied behind the strikers. The Melbourne Lead Works broke ranks and acceded to the unions' circular of demands. Its chairman John McIlwraith dismissed the protests of the shipowners: 'Gentleman, I prefer to manage my own business in my own way'.68 |
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The Age earlier supported the strikers unconditionally, but seemed to switch course as the conflict took on a distinctive 'class' character. 'The impending actions of the Seamen's Union', argued an alarmed Age, in a rehearsal of public discourse of the great strikes:
will affect not merely a particular class in Victoria alone, but every citizen in the Australian colonies ... some will say that there is a danger of a reaction in the public mind against the cause of labor by the adoption of such an extreme and far-reaching measure ... neither shipowners nor laborers can afford to alienate their fellow citizens.69
The Metropolitan Gas Company was also worried as coal supplies dwindled, threatening to throw the city into darkness.70 Such absolute alliances of capital and labour scared more moderate, liberally-minded Melbournians, and the Age now advocated arbitration and, in a veiled warning of the state's coercive, non-neutral power, several wharfies were found guilty of abusing scabs.71 The key difference with the 1890 strike, however, was that most commentators persisted in seeing the strike, though newsworthy, as inherently apolitical, with no conception that the state might break its neutrality. The Age announced:
A fortnight ago no one dreamt that the whole colony would be affected by a strike of wharf laborers but today speculation on political changes, the reconstruction of ministries, and the results of the elections are entirely overshadowed by the social questions involved in the war between the shipowners and the hands who hitherto headed their vessels.72
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Despite its caution The Age was an important advocate and conduit for workers. Patrick Murray, a seaman from Geelong, spoke of 'the grievances under which we have suffered'. 'Bent but not broken', an out-of-work tailor, widened claims of injustice: 'Is it to be wondered that bread winners of the present day are fortifying themselves against having their existence crushed out by employers such as these?' A 'labourer' (perhaps someone at Trades Hall) wrote to warn:
one of the most serious dangers since the days of free immigration now confronts the working men of this city through the greedy conduct of the shipowners ... this is a nice new year's gift for the men of Melbourne, who, with their families, will suffer as well as the wharf laborers now on strike from this deluge of interlopers. And as the employers are forming a ring to crush labor and the unions, it is only right that every labourer in Melbourne and suburbs should enrol themselves in a laborers union without delay, or it will be too late for themselves and for those men who are fighting the battle against those wealthy men who are trying to ruin them.73
This plea and warning is interesting not only in terms of its call upon a tradition of populist protest, but in its intimation of working men's needs being bound up within a wider class circle of family and community. Overwhelmingly, however, despite the appearance of class war rhetoric, the union's success was based in its appeal to cross-class, gendered respectability (or its enemies' lack thereof). A public meeting at Brunswick Town Hall denounced the shipowners as having acted 'against the best interests of the community generally and ... therefore deserving of the censure of every honest man in Victoria'.74 Labourites were drawing upon what many liberals thought of as the 'social contract' – arguing that the actions of shipowners threatened its continuation. |
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'If you don't stop this strike' | |
Smith was the most popular target of scorn and abuse. Murphy thought, despite his 'large natural talent' and 'high educational attainments', that Smith was 'a man imbued with all the prejudices of his class'. Complaining to the Argus again, in his own words, Smith was the 'best abused man of the day'. As he himself said, as quoted earlier, he was likely to be remembered as a 'terrible monster'. Smith was specifically referring to a threatening letter which had been sent to his private address. It was later reprinted in the Age:
Bruce Smith
If you don't stop this strike and give the men what they want I will shoot you next Thursday without fale [sic]. You bringing a lot of loafers ... to take away our livin and the livin of all the men of Melbourne so I have no friends ... if you don't give the men wot [sic] they want and stop bringin [sic] over all the loafers you can take notice without fale I will shoot you this day week and then shoot myself as I have no friends. So take warning.
A WORKING MAN75
Crude as it is, this letter encapsulated something of the populist disgust cultivated by Trades Hall. Villainous men such as Smith, who was, in a real and abstract sense, 'known' to his 'victims', provided an easy way of explaining the ills of a developing social system.76 Where employers had formerly bargained in a conciliatory spirit, this new breed was presented as acting in an aggressive and decidedly anti-social manner. Having provoked a dispute which was now drawing in the seemingly innocent 'citizenry' of the Age's discourse, Smith was hailed as the strikes' agent provocateur. Smith had the 'intention of flooding the labor market', announced a 'South Melbourne Taxpayer' in the Age: 'It is only the flotsam and jetsam we are likely to get here, and I should like to ask the taxpayers if they are desirable citizens'.77 |
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Not all were supportive of the wharfies' claims. A mocking correspondent to the now conservative Melbourne Punch reacted to J.B. Tucker's claims that their work was 'dirty' and 'laborious':
Oh horror! Perhaps it would suit the lumpers if the shipowners provided a boy to each man, with water and towel, to keep his face clean. At the same time they might pick out some of the larger pieces of coal, if the load were a trifle hefty, and thus relieve the laborious labor of some of these much-to-be-pitied and over-taxed men.78
Like Smith, the Punch correspondent was correct in identifying the wharfies' noisy calls for sympathy. Both were equally wrong in assessing the outcome of such claims. Popular ill-will towards Smith, and the diplomatic efforts of liberals such as the 'prince of negotiators' Andrew Lyell, forced both sides to arbitration. 'The feeling of consciousness of impending evil which has been experienced by many classes of the community during the past week will be considerably relieved', sighed the Age.79 |
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'smarting under a sense of wrong' | |
| Smith, the self-described 'terrible monster', was not some naïve or passive actor in these processes. Born in England, the 34-year-old Smith was a businessman, barrister and later member of the NSW and Federal Parliaments. He was, perhaps, the foremost intellectual of the employers during the late nineteenth century. After Smith resigned his NSW Legislative Assembly seat in April 1884 he returned to Melbourne to become joint managing director of Howard Smith & Sons. He served as president of the VEF until 1887. Unlike most Australians, Smith publicly opposed the eventual White Australia policy, confirming his status as early Federal Labor's bete noire. During the 1897 Federal Convention debates he openly boasted that Federation would impede the growth of political Labor.80 As a committed classical liberal – in contrast to many of his fellow Victorian (social) liberals – he seemed to welcome and indeed sought to hasten the arrival of a dichotomous class politics. However Smith was swimming against the tide of public and intellectual opinion, the emergence of the 'freedom of contract' argument notwithstanding. According to Stuart Macintyre, in this period 'New Liberalism' was challenging classical liberalism's conception of individual freedom and the role of the state in facilitating this.81 |
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An essay Smith wrote for the conservative Victorian Review just prior to the strike entitled 'Trades Unionism in Victoria; or Who Shall be Master? A note of warning to Employers' demonstrates his position. Murphy thought his essay the tinderbox which lit the flames of the strike.82 Smith, like his counterpart male unionists, spoke the language of affective masculinity. The title is particularly revealing – the choice of 'master' was a conscious appeal to the imagined class identity of his readership. Smith deliberately exaggerated the threat and homogeneity of the working class, whom he called the 'conflicting classes'. Hoping to 'awaken' employers from their alleged 'apathy', Smith described the worker's 'almost perfect organisation'. Smith could have been reading from a socialist pamphlet when he mused:
the population of Victoria, like that of all working communities, is for the most part made up of two classes, the employers and the employed. The interests of these two classes are, as their relationship at present exists, antagonistic to each other – the one seeking to obtain the largest amount of labour for the smallest amount of wages; the other, endeavoring to obtain the largest amount of wages for the smallest amount of work.83
The key difference was that he claimed that the organised and annoyingly boisterous workers constituted a threat to independent manhood:
It is already well-established in this country, (and we are, goodness knows, often enough reminded of it, by processions, drums, brass bands, banners, and other paraphernalia) that the day's work of a working man omitting, of course, the inferior classes of working-men, who use their heads, such as lawyers, doctors, merchants, newspaper editors, and others consists of eight hours; but it is scarcely well-known that these gentleman claim the right to prevent a man, however willing or anxious he may be to do so, from working more than eight hours a day.84
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We should be careful in reading the discourse here as with interpreting the words of the union leaders. Smith described the same militants as 'on the whole cool-headed, exceedingly amenable to reason', and 'not the same "tone of men" as what might be called the ruck of the working classes'.85 Nonetheless Smith's claim is indicative of the way in which a 'class' of employers (in the making) were coming to deal with the advent of the new class politics and labour's ostensible 'victories'. The new breed of employers portrayed 'class' demands not only as illegitimate, but as an affront to the masculine socio-political identity of potential sympathisers. Smith later claimed this as the grounds for his very founding of VEF: 'he was smarting under a sense of wrong caused by the demands of some of the working men'.86 Such demands, Smith recounted, meant that one 'second engineer of a steamship had threatened to report his firm to the Trades Hall if the sweets served upon the board were not more varied'.87 As Smith's outrage intimates, such men themselves spoke the language of class privilege and interest. In fact Smith was somewhat of a rarity in his candidness; he described the function of an employer body: 'to watch parliament, and see that it did not interfere with the propertied class'.88 |
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'there will be trouble' | |
The arbitration tribunal, chaired by Professor W.C. Kernot, found for the wharf labourers, acceding to most of the log of claims which had been rejected in September.89 Smith's prominent role had helped sway public opinion against the employers. As the Age presciently claimed, even though it was increasingly wary of labour's independent politicised voice:
employers have not been fighting to save the pockets of the public or their own, but because they disliked to be bossed by their own men. They have been beaten because the public has no sympathy with that sentiment.90
Commenting from Sydney, the Bulletin celebrated this turn of events. 'Congratulating' the men, it thought 'the strike of wharf-labourers and seamen in Melbourne marks a transition stage in the relation of Capital to Labour'.91 In the same edition its cartoonist Phil May used the occasion to denigrate the claims to respectability and manly dignity of the capitalists imagined, in the case of Smith erroneously, as a paunchy, top hatted old man [see Figure 2].92 Significantly, imagery of the capitalist had not generally taken on the appearance of the infamous, generic 'Fat Man'.93 |
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Figure 2
Phil May, 'The Wharf-Labourers' Strike',
Bulletin, 23 January 1886.
Courtesy of Monash University Rare Books
The caption reads 'Labour (to Capital): 'Orderly? Of course.
Since these shackles were knocked off, we can move as steadily as yourselves'.
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With the aid of hindsight, labour's victory instilled overconfidence. 'Henceforth it would be a bold co-operation that would cross swords with this powerful lever of the working-classes of Victoria', argued Murphy.94 Whilst the union was ostensibly successful, the growing mobilisation of employers should have acted as a more worrying portent. In this instance, the employers' defeat was largely due to their lack of solidarity. As Murphy suggested 'union operatives radiating from a solid centre can achieve [much] when brought face to face with a phalanx of capitalists, many of whom ... cordially hate one anther on account of the constant jars which competition begets'.95 This, of course, would not last. At a conference of ship-owners and delegates of the maritime unions held at Sydney Town Hall in 1886 a leading representative of Australian shipping interests demanded a 'stop to the undue interference by union officials with their officers and men', going onto ominously warn:
We know perfectly well that you can dictate to us, and we came to you as you would go with your prayer-book, and beg you – pray you to help us. But you must consider that when you shove a body of men in a corner and jam them there, and have not the sense to know when you ought to let them out, that there will be trouble.96
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Despite the clear self-interest of such employers, others were also growing uneasy about the perceived accentuation of workers' organisation, their apparent militancy and challenge to the judgment and control of employers. Employers such as Smith were reworking a discourse of masculine respectability coded as independent judgment (as distinct from merely material prosperity) in which unions were themselves demonised as dictatorial villains. According to Smith, 'every man is bound by the union, and works only as he is directed'.97 Likewise in 1886 the prominent Australian Magazine bitterly denounced 'the insolent demands continually made by the Australian working-man upon his employer, whom he insists upon regarding as his subordinate, if not his slave'. It went onto warn that 'the much tried capitalist will have his revenge'.98 Such claims are evidence of what writers such as R.W. Connell and Martin Crotty see as the construction of a hegemonic masculinity – of what it meant to be 'manly' within Australian society.99 But for actors such as Smith this was not merely an attempt to oppress or exclude working-class men. The allegedly illegitimate class demands of working-class men could seemingly be solved by their incorporation into an imagined community of independent manhood.100 Consciously or not, it was within this established context that the masculinist writers of William Lane's ilk negotiated the battles of the 1890s and beyond. |
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'As it should be' | |
What, apart from helping to establish the dominance of a masculinist politics, were the major effects of the strike? Did the language of 'capital viz labour' become ingrained in the discourse? There was a short-lived trend in that direction, at least at a surface level. The President of the 1886 Intercolonial Congress F.J. Morris contended 'there are signs of a mighty struggle in the near future between capital and labour'.101 A little later the Bulletin confidently proclaimed:
The coming revolution is already here ... There is no common brotherhood between Capital and Labour, any more than there is common interest between the vampire and the sleeping Indian ... Abolish ... distinction between Capital and Labour, make them one, and humanity's future is straight away rosy ... We must abolish not a class but a system.102
On the whole, at least in Victoria, labour shied way from the deployment of such rhetoric before the 1890s. Many labourites continued to assert that labour-capital relations were not inherently conflictual (as indeed the Bulletin still seemed to imply) – the underlying assumption being that labour's industrial strength could hold off any attempt by capital to shift the status quo. Here is the Trades Hall Gazette on the eve of 1890:
We regret to say that recent circumstances point to the fruition, at no distant date, of one of the most extensive strikes ... seen in the southern hemisphere ... Grave consequences, and some hardship, may ensue, but firmness, moderation, and combination, on the part of the unions will certainly ensure victory.103
Harwood, too, played down labour's radicalism, telling a meeting of the VEF:
The employer need not fear the working man, who only desired fair play. Frequently working men were carried away by sympathy because they knew where the shoe pinched. Employers did not always see it as a workman saw it. The employer did not feel the same pressure that working men felt. He felt it necessary to always guard the interests and rights of the labouring class, not merely against employers, but as against a system which had sprung up.104
More importantly defeat impelled further employer organisation. It was no coincidence that Smith, on his return to NSW, formed that state's employers' union in 1888. The next time conflict erupted, employers Australia-wide would be prepared and out for revenge. In contrast, and unlike the later Maritime strike, this strike's success did not spur labourites to further political mobilisation.105 Defeat not victory would do so. |
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Why then did the discourse of 'capital viz labour' not spread more quickly in Victoria? The reasons are two-fold. The discourse had not, as I have argued, been the major reason behind the strike's success: the rhetoric was in effect transitory and specific. In the flush of victory Victorian labourites and the wider public held firm to a socially harmonious vision of capital and labour relations – one in which labour held sway. Perhaps more importantly, the non-emergence of sustainable and independent labour press restrained the dissemination of any new paradigm. Whilst the Bulletin was generally pro-labour, there were few other such publications – the Queensland-based, Boomerang edited by Lane, appeared in late 1887, as did W.R. Winspear's The Radical, and the Shearer's Record in 1888. Versions of the Worker and Workman would not however appear until in the 1890s. In Victoria, a dedicated weekly –Tocsin (later Labor Call) – only emerged in 1897. The Melbourne Typographical Journal had existed since the 1870s – but as the name suggests it possessed a narrow readership. |
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Various attempts were made to establish a labour press. During 1888–89 the Victorian Trades Hall published the Trades Hall Gazette.106 In 1889 the journal was reincarnated as the Australasian Trades and Labour Journal before ceasing production altogether. Yet the content of such publications was contradictory and mirrored the ambiguities of Victorian labourites. In 1889 the Australian Trades and Labour Journal presented labour relations 'as they should be' with equally trim figures of Capital and Labour in an idyllic industrial embrace.107Trades Hall Gazette described itself as a 'strictly class publication ... a channel of collective rather than individual opinion'. In the same edition its editorial did indeed conflate the employer with capitalist:
Did the capitalist or the employer – for they are essentially the same – ever consider what the country would be without the working man? Who builds our railways, our bridges; unloads our ships, tills the soil, and mines the earth. Who fills the ranks of our armies, and if trouble arose and an enemy invaded our country, who would be called upon to defend our homes? Who has developed our country, and made it one of brightest spots on the Globe? Who are the sinews and the backbone of the country? THE WORKING MAN!108
Yet, in another edition, the Gazette advocated 'the best means of unifying Labor and Capital' pointing to their 'indissoluble bonds of mutual interest'.109 Overall labourites would continue to intermittently and spontaneously target asocial individuals, most often 'sweaters', who it was argued, threatened the social compact.110 |
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Conclusion | |
| As the 1880s unfolded particular capitalists were increasingly, and in the case of Bruce Smith, successfully constructed as the worker's or People's villainous enemy. Like the later Maritime strike, the Melbourne Wharf Labourers' strike should be seen not as some neat turning point, but as an example of how labourite language waxed and waned, contingent upon the context and audience. The developing language of class should be seen as complex and non-determinant and the 'fidelity' of Victorian labour to colonial liberalism would bedevil Labor politics in Victoria until the early twentieth century.111 At the same time such events were providing labourites with the cultural material to make traditions of their own. The makings of a distinctively populist and racialist culture of masculinist labourism are evident. But whilst the demonising language directed at figures such as Smith constituted an important part of the contingent success of such strikes, the binary caste of the new class politics would contain dangers and monsters that labourites could not have predicted. |
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Nick Dyrenfurth lectures in International Studies at the School of Historical Studies, Monash University. He recently completed his PhD thesis entitled Heroes and Villains: the Cultural Politics of Australian Labour, 1878–1918. With Marian Quartly he is contributing a chapter about the world of Australian radical and labour cartoonists for Drawing the Line, an edited collection on international political cartooning to be published by Monash e-press later this year. He is also co-editing with Paul Strangio a centenary history of the 'fusion' of the non-Labor parties in 1909.
<Nick.Dyrenfurth@arts.monash.edu.au>
Endnotes
* My thanks to Marian Quartly, Paul Strangio, and Marc Brodie who read various drafts, as well as Labour History's anonymous referees for their useful suggestions.
1. Argus, 19 January 1886. When referring to the movement I use the spelling 'labour' and use 'labor' for the political wing/party. However many of the contemporary usages cited in this article interchange between the two.
2. For analyses of early Australian labour populism see Peter Love, Labour and the Money Power: Australian Labour Populism 1890–1950, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1984; Raymond Markey, The Making of the Labor Party in New South Wales, 1880–1900, New South Wales University Press, Kensington, 1988; Frank Bongiorno, The People's Party: Victorian Labor and the Radical Tradition, 1875–1914, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1996); Neville Kirk, Comrades and Cousins: Globalization, Workers and Labour Movements in Britain, the USA and Australia from the 1880s to 1914, Merlin, London, 2003, esp. ch. 2; and Nick Dyrenfurth and Marian Quartly, 'Fat Man v 'the People': Labour Intellectuals and the Making of Oppositional Identities, 1890–1900', Labour History, no. 92, May 2007, pp. 31–56.
3. Marilyn Lake, 'The Politics of Respectability: Identifying the Masculinist Context', Historical Studies, no. 22, 1986, pp. 116–31, and 'Socialism and Manhood: the Case of William Lane', Labour History, no. 50, May 1986, pp. 54–66.
4. Lake, 'Socialism and Manhood', p. 54.
5. As Scates suggests one must be aware of the context and purpose of Lane's writing which Scates sees as 'the very real crisis of masculinity'. Scates (and Leach) both make a compelling argument for classifying Lane as a 'socialist-feminist'. See Bruce Scates, 'Socialism and Feminism, the Case of William Lane: A Reply to Marilyn Lake', Labour History, no. 59, November 1990, pp. 72–94 and Bruce Scates, 'Socialism and Manhood: a Rejoinder', Labour History, no. 60, May 1991, pp. 121–4, and 'Mobilising Manhood: Gender and The Great Strike of 1890 in Australia and New Zealand', Gender and History, vol. 9, no. 2, 1997, pp. 285–309, Patricia Grimshaw, 'The "Equals and Comrades of Men"?: Tocsin and "the Woman Question"', in Susan Magarey, Sue Rowley & Susan Sheridan (eds), Debutante Nation: Feminism Contests the 1890s, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1993, and Michael Leach, '"Manly, True, and White": Masculine Identity and Australian Socialism', in Geoff Stokes (ed.), The Politics of Identity in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1997.
6. Scates, 'Socialism and Feminism', p. 121.
7. Lake, 'Socialism and Manhood', p. 56. For the wider British context see Keith McClelland, 'Masculinity and the "Representative Artisan" in Britain' in Michael Roper and John Tosh (eds), Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain Since 1800, Routledge, London, New York, 1991, pp. 74–91, and Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1995.
8. Lake, 'Socialism and Manhood', p. 56, and Lake, 'The Politics of Respectability', p. 118. See also Martin Crotty, Making the Australian Male: Middle-Class Masculinity 1870–1920, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2001.
9. Consult also Leach, 'Masculine Identity and Australian Socialism', pp. 71–6.
10. John Rickard, Class and Politics: New South Wales, Victoria and the Early Commonwealth, 1890–1910, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1976, pp. 297–310.
11. Nick Dyrenfurth, 'Rethinking Labor Tradition: Synthesising Discourse and Experience', Labour History, no. 90, May 2006, pp. 177–99.
12. Bongiorno, The People's Party, 'Introduction'. Internationally the most well-known contributor to the debates about the 'constitutive' importance of institutions and political discourse is Patrick Joyce. See his Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–1914, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1991.
13. Exceptions include Marian Quartly, 'Making Working Class Heroes', Labour History, no. 89, November 2005, pp. 159–178.
14. On the historical foundations of labour's antipathy towards the Money Power see Love, The Money Power, Introduction and ch. 1.
15. Sean Scalmer, 'Being Practical in Early and Contemporary Labor Politics: A Labourist Critique', Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 43, no. 3, 1997, p. 302.
16. Dyrenfurth and Quartly, 'Fat Man v "the People"', pp. 31–36.
17. W.E. Murphy, 'Victoria', in J. Norton (ed.), The History of Capital and Labour in all Lands and Ages, Oceanic Publishing, Sydney, 1888, pp. 153–4 (emphasis added).
18. Graeme Davison, 'The Dimensions of Mobility in Nineteenth Century Australia', Historical Studies, no. 2, August 1979, p. 7. See Kirk, Comrades and Cousins, ch. 3, and Charles Fahey and Jenny Lee, 'A boom for whom? Some developments in the Australian labour market, 1870–1891', Labour History, no. 50, May 1986, pp. 1–27.
19. H.M. Franklyn, A Glance at Australia in 1880, Melbourne, 1881, cited in Davison, 'The Dimensions of Mobility', p. 9. See Kirk's extensive discussion 'The Australian "Workingman's Paradise" in Comparative Perspective', in Kirk, Comrades and Cousins; Davison, 'The Dimensions of Mobility', p. 7; Markey, The Making of the Labor Party, p. 20, and John Rickard, Australia: A Cultural History (2nd ed.), Longman, Essex, 1996, p. 102.
20. R.N. Twopeny, Town Life in Australia, Elliot Stock, London, 1883, p. 103.and p. 109. That said, owing to the spread of factory life, Twopeny thought 'In Melbourne the masses seem worst off, and the display of riches, if not the actuality thereof, is most noticeable'. (Twopeny, Town Life in Australia, p. 111).
21. Davison, 'The Dimensions of Mobility', p. 7. See also Shirley Fitzgerald, Rising Damp: Sydney, 1870–90, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1987, ch. 4.
22. Markey, The Making of the Labor Party, p. 20. See also Rickard, A Cultural History, p. 102.
23. Bulletin, 20 March 1886.
24. Bulletin, 15 August 1885.
25. Whilst socialist literature and agitation begins to make its mark during the 1880s, its fuller effects are not really felt until the 1890s. See Verity Burgmann, In Our Time: Socialism and the Rise of Labor 1885–1905, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1985.
26. Bulletin, 11 August 1888. Love, The Money Power, ch.1, and Markey, The Making of the Labor Party, ch. 10. On the naturalising function of gendered discourse see Joan Scott, 'Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis', American Historical Review, no. 91, vol. 5, December 1986, pp. 1053–75, Gender and the Politics of History, Columbia University Press, New York, 1988, and Leach, 'Manly, True, and White', pp. 66–8.
27. Lake, 'Socialism and Manhood', p. 115.
28. See for instance Carlton Advertiser and Trades Advocate, 24 March 1882.
29. Official Report of the Third Intercolonial Trades' Union Congress, Sydney, October 1885, p. 17.
30. Leach, 'Masculine Identity and Australian Socialism', pp. 63–5.
31. Official Report of the Fourth Intercolonial Trades Union Congress, Adelaide, September 1886, p. 19; Third Intercolonial Congress, p. 64, Montagu Scott, 'Wealth and Want: The Queensland Samson', Boomerang, 22 December 1888.
32. R. Hayes, Fourth Intercolonial Congress, p. 87.
33. Trades Advocate and Friendly Societies Journal, 12 February 1883.
34. Carlton Advertiser and Trades Advocate, 19 December 1882. On the strike see Raymond Brooks, 'The Melbourne Tailoresses' Strike 1882–1883: An Assessment', Labour History, no. 44, 1983, pp. 27–38.
35. Third Intercolonial Congress, p. 70.
36. See Andrew Markus, 'Divided we fall: The Chinese and the Melbourne Furniture Trade Union, 1870–1911', Labour History, vol. 26, May 1974, pp. 1–10.
37. Cited in Davison, Marvellous Melbourne, p. 62.
38. Brian Fitzpatrick, A Short History of the Australian Labor Movement, Rawson's Bookshop, Melbourne, 1944, p. 105; Murphy, 'Victoria', p. 179; Rupert Lockwood, Ship to Shore: A History of Melbourne's Waterfront and Its Union Struggles, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1990, pp. 80–92. See also Brian Fitzpatrick and Rowan Cahill, The Seamen's Union of Australia, 1872–1972: a History, Seamen's Union of Australia, Sydney, 1981, and Geoffrey Serle, The Rush to be Rich: A History of the Colony of Victoria 1883–1889, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1974.
39. Murphy probably gave the group a wider employer base than in reality: the VEU was allegedly 'a combination of capitalists from all braches of commerce, manufacturers, and general industries' (Murphy, 'Victoria', p. 179).
40. Ray Markey, 'Explaining Union Mobilisation in the 1880s and Early 1900s', Labour History, no. 83, November 2002, pp. 24–5.
41. Gollan, Radical and Working Class Politics, ch. 4.
42. Serle, The Rush to be Rich, p. 94.
43. The Age, 14 March 1885, 11 April 1885 (emphasis in original).
44. Fitzpatrick and Cahill, The Seamen's Union of Australia, p. 15
45. Fitzpatrick, Short History of the Australian Labor Movement, p. 105.
46. The Age, 11 April 1885; Argus, 27 May 1885, cited in Davison, Marvelous Melbourne, p. 43
47. And even within industries such as bootmaking that alliance was showing signs of strain in mid 1880s. Davison, Marvellous Melbourne, p. 41, 43 and pp. 53–4 and 63, and ch. 2. See also Bongiorno, The People's Party, ch. 4, and Serle, Rush to be Rich, p. 108.
48. Murphy, 'Victoria', p. 181.
49. The Age, 21 April 1885.
50. Lockwood, Ship to Shore, pp. 80–1. The union asked for 10 shillings a day for eight hours instead of the prevailing ten (Serle, Rush to be Rich, p. 108.)
51. Cited in Murphy, 'Victoria', p. 183; cited in Serle, Rush to be Rich, p. 108; Argus, 6 January 1886; The Age, 7 January 1886.
52. The Age, 13 January 1886.
53. The Age, 13 January 1886.
54. The Age, 7 January 1886.
55. The Age, 8 January 1886.
56. The Age, 6 January 1886.
57. Lockwood, Ship to Shore, p. 83.
58. Murphy cited in Serle, Rush to be Rich, p. 109.
59. The Age, 11 January 1886.
60. The Age, 13 January 1886.
61. The Age, 7 January 1886.
62. The Age, 8 January 1886.
63. The Age, 8 January 1886.
64. Bongiorno, The People's Party, ch. 1, and Stuart Macintyre, A Colonial Liberalism: The Lost World of Three Victorian Visionaries, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1991.
65. The Age, 8 January 1886.
66. The Age, 8 January 1886.
67. The Age, 15 January 1886.
68. The Age, 14 January 1886; Cited in Murphy, 'Victoria', p. 186. The Adelaide Steamship company did likewise (Serle, Rush to be Rich, p. 110).
69. The Age, 13 February 1886.
70. Murphy, 'Victoria', p. 187.
71. The Age, 7 January 1886.
72. The Age, 9 January 1886.
73. The Age, 9 January 1886; The Age, 15 January 1886; The Age, January 11 1886.
74. The Age, 16 January 1886.
75. Murphy, 'Victoria', p. 180; Argus, 18 January 1886; The Age, 16 January 1886. On account of the multiple spellings of 'bringin(g)', The Age intimated that it was not a 'workman' but someone from Trades Hall. Murphy believed it to be an acquaintance of Smith.
76. Love, The Money Power, p. 6.
77. The Age, 15 January 1886.
78. Melbourne Punch, 14 January 1886.
79. Suzanne G. Mellor, 'Lyell, Andrew (1836–1897)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 5, Melbourne University Press, 1974, pp 115–116, cited at http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A050135b.htm, July 2006; The Age, 18 January 1886.
80. Martha Rutledge, 'Smith, Arthur Bruce (1851–1937)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 11, Melbourne University Press, 1988, pp. 637–639, cited at http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A110657b.htm, July 2006; Stuart Macintyre, 'Federation and the Labour Movement', in Mark Hearn and Greg Patmore (eds), Working the Nation: Working Life and Federation, 1890–1914, Pluto Press, Annandale, 2001, p. 18. For Smith's criticism of White Australia's 'hypocrisy' see Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates (House of Representatives) 25 September 1901, 1: 5157–61, 5165–7. Smith's criticism of White Australia meant he was repeatedly singled out by Labor parliamentarians. See Senator James (Jim) Page commenting on the Pacific Islanders Bill, (Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates (House of Represntaives) 10 October 1901, 5: 5906–5910).
81. Macintyre, A Colonial Liberalism, ch. 5.
82. Murphy, 'Victoria', p. 180.
83. Bruce Smith, 'Trades Unionism in Victoria; or Who Shall be Master? A note of warning to Employers', Victorian Review, no. 65, March 1885, pp. 571–2
84. Ibid, p. 572 (emphasis in original).
85. The Age, 31 May 1887.
86. Ibid.
87. Ibid.
88. Ibid. The seemingly impudent challenge to the individual male judgement and power of such employers was reiterated by J.M. Bruce to the founding meeting of the VEF on 13 March 1885: '... employers should take some steps towards protecting their rights ... It was most unfair and unjust that because certain men were employed by a manufacturer the union should say, "We will make every man in that shop join the union or put the shop on strike"' (The Age, 14 March 1885).
89. This was the first board of arbitration as distinct from conciliation in Australia. Consisting of two union representatives and two representatives of the owners and an independent chairman, it sat for eight days. (Fitzpatrick, Short History of the Australian Labor Movement, pp. 106–7).Though this was an important precursor to the institutionalised arbitration of the twentieth-century, it differed on account of its lack of permanent judges and incapacity to sanction unions through fines and jailings.
90. The Age, 10 February 1886.
91. Bulletin, 23 January 1886.
92. Phil May, 'The Wharf-Labourers' Strike', Bulletin, 23 January 1886. The caption reads 'Labour (to Capital): 'Orderly? Of course. Since these shackles were knocked off, we can move as steadily as yourselves'.
93. For a brief discussion of imagery of employers before the 1890s see Dyrenfurth and Quartly, 'Fat Man vs. the People', pp. 26–40.
94. Murphy, 'Victoria', p. 195.
95. Murphy, 'Victoria', p. 179.
96. Cited in Arthur Duckworth, 'The Australian Strike, 1890', The Economic Journal, vol. 2, no. 7, September 1892, p. 425, cited at http//www.jstor.org, June 2007
97. Argus, 8 January 1886.
98. Cited in Kirk, Comrades and Cousins, p. 63.
99. R.W. Connell, Masculinities, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1995, and Crotty, Making the Australian Male.
100. Crotty, Making the Australian Male, pp. 4–5. This is not to argue that a unitary masculinity emerged but that actors such as Smith were attempting to construct just that.
101. Fourth Intercolonial Congress, p. 19.
102. Bulletin, 11 August 1888.
103. Trades Hall Gazette, July 1889.
104. The Age, 31 May 1887.
105. We do, however, see a further expansion of unionism. In 1888 union membership numbered between 25,000 to 30,000. In 1890 it had risen to 70,000 in about 100 unions (Markey, 'Explaining Union Mobilisation', p. 27).
106. See, for further discussion, Frank Bongiorno, 'Constituting Labour: the Radical Press in Victoria, 1885–1914', in Ann Curthoys and Julianne Schultz (eds), Journalism: Print, Politics and Popular Culture, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1999, pp. 70–82.
107. Dyrenfurth and Quartly, 'Fat Man vs. the People', p. 37.
108. Trades Hall Gazette, 13 July 1889.
109. Cited in Bongiorno, 'Constituting Labour', p. 72.
110. Davison, Marvellous Melbourne, p. 52
111. Bongiorno, The People's Party, p. 29.
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