Looking back from the present at the vibrant and powerful labour movement of the twentieth century, it is all too easy to succumb to nostalgia. The culture of unionism that prevailed in places like the waterfront or the coal mines seems so powerful and so ingrained. The traditions of collectivism, the hatred of scabs, the automatic assumption – extending out from the bastions of the movement into less organised sections of the class – that unionism was a good thing: all this appears in retrospect as a golden tradition from a golden age. It appears at once magical and unattainable – something that has slipped from our grasp never to return, like periwigs or top hats, suburban football teams or long-playing records. To recover it seems as impossible as the recovery of old forms of civility or deference must appear to commentators from the right.

    Culture and tradition can appear, like the weather or the economy, to be forces that are beyond the control of human agency. They can be seen as static reflections of more profound forces and relations, or as simple accumulations of prejudice inherited from the past, waiting for the blast of technological innovation and economic change to eradicate them, like a sandblaster on a sandstone edifice. But they are more than this. Traditions are not simply accumulated, they can also be invented, and they are invented, moreover, for a reason. That reason can involve the justification of oppression and exploitation; it can also involve the justification of resistance to oppression or exploitation. More than this, traditions like the culture of unionism are not simply a reflection of economic relations, they also reflect the actions of men and women that are embodied in those relations; they reflect the class struggle – and this reflection is not passive. Traditions in turn influence the struggle they reflect, strengthening a political attempt to alter the prevailing economic relations. The working class, as Thompson argued, makes itself, and it does not make itself in a passive way, simply voicing opinions that reflect everyday experience. Nor is the process gradual. The development of tradition is driven in a powerful way by the rhythms of class struggle.

    The Seamen's Union, before it was decimated by technological change and flags of convenience, was, for most of the twentieth century a bastion of left-wing politics and militancy. For much of the century it was under Communist leadership – it was one of the unions that were rebuilt by Communist militants in the 1930s and '40s. It was at the forefront of political intervention by the left of the trade union movement against the Vietnam War. In fact, the Seamen's Union is the one union in Australia to have come under Communist leadership before the watershed of the Great Depression. For seven tumultuous years, under the leadership of Tom Walsh, it served as a beacon of radicalism and militancy; its temporary eclipse, in the years after 1925, accompanied as it was by the arrest and attempted deportation of its leaders, demonstrated the horror with which it was viewed by the conservative governments of those years.

    This paper looks at the beginning of the Walsh years. It attempts to explain how the militancy and left wing traditions of the seamen were established in the final years of the Great War. It focuses, inevitably, on the wartime radicalisation of the labour movement and on the accompanying strike wave. It also includes a discussion of the great seamen's strike of 1919. It particularly focuses, however, on what was, arguably, the most cataclysmic event in the class struggle in the early twentieth century in Australia – the Great Strike of 1917. The seamen were caught up in this tumultuous event and transformed by it. Investigating how this occurred provides a fascinating insight into how sudden and profound transformations in the culture and traditions of groups of workers can take place – how militancy ingrained itself in a previously passive and conservative section of the class. Moreover, to understand how such a transformation occurred is to understand how it might happen once again. There was nothing automatic in the militancy of the big battalions that dominated the class battlefields of the last century; those militant traditions were a creation of human agency. Militancy had to be argued for, and an understanding of its contingency reminds us that there is nothing automatic or inevitable about the passivity and disorganisation of the new sections of the working class that have been created by the economic re-organisation of the last few decades.

    The performance of the union under Walsh was impressive. In 1919, the union won a dramatic strike outside the bounds of arbitration, winning a 35 shilling a week increase in pay. Cahill and Fitzpatrick, in their history of the Seamen's Union, made the observation that real wages for Australian seamen continued to rise up until 1925, while British seamen over the same period, under a notoriously right-wing union leadership, saw their wages halved.^[1]

    Yet the Australian Seamen's Union, before 1917, had no reputation for radicalism. The following table shows the growth in strike rates in the wharf and shipping sector in NSW:

Strike days lost in NSW – Waterfront and Shipping^[2]

Year	Days Lost
1914	7,060
1915	10,730
1916	8,645
1917	677,243
1919	1,182,933

Before 1917 there were no big strikes on the waterfront or in the shipping sector, which were lumped together by the Bureau of Statistics Labour Reports. The union reflected this passivity in the politics of its officials who were not only industrially conservative, but aligned with the right-wing of the movement.

    What caused the sudden transformation in 1917? In discussing the 1919 strike, Ian Turner made the point that there was an accumulation of wartime grievances that the Seamen's Union officials, wedded to the creaky mechanism of arbitration, were unable to address.^[3] This was clearly a key element in the transformation of the seamen. The following chart shows the dramatic effect of the wartime, and immediate post-war, surge in the cost of living, and the wage rises of three different groups of workers: the coal miners, the wharfies and the seamen. It illustrates the failure of arbitration to cope with the explosion in the cost of living generated by the war, and explains why the seamen eventually abandoned arbitration for direct action.^[4]

The three groups of workers achieved widely varying wage outcomes over this period charted here. The miners received a small increase in pay from Justice Higgins in January 1916. The dramatic spikes in their pay, shown on this chart in 1917 and 1919, were due to direct action – the famous successful strike of November 1916 (reflected in the 1917 rise) and a threatened strike when coal stocks were low in April 1919. The wharfies, who remained wedded to the idea of arbitration throughout this period, received only a modest increase from Justice Higgins in 1919 – which, as this chart shows, amounted to a real wage cut of some significance. The seamen were also granted a modest – dare one say 'piddling' – pay rise by Higgins in December 1918. This was a powerful demonstration of the ineffectiveness of arbitration and clearly played a role in their adoption of direct action in 1919. The change in their fortunes once they did so is dramatically demonstrated.

    The problem is however, that, as the first table indicating strike days lost shows, the initial spike in strike figures in the shipping sector precedes the wages strike of 1919. It was the seamen's participation in the Great Strike of 1917 that was the decisive break in their industrial behaviour – an event that also preceded Walsh's takeover of the union. Why then did the seamen join in the strike of 1917? The accumulation of grievances – particularly wage grievances – might explain why they were discontented, but they did not strike over wages in 1917. What happened was that, as part of a movement of a hundred thousand, which included the coal miners and wharfies among others, they struck in solidarity with the workers in the railway workshops in Sydney. More specifically, they followed the lead of the wharfies who had struck a few days before them. In Melbourne the seamen's strike was most clearly connected with the wharfies' strike. The seamen walked off ship-by-ship rather than work alongside the scabs who filled the waterfront.^[5] In Sydney, however, there was more to the strike than this. A Newcastle paper described the scene in Sydney on 10 August 1917:

There was a complete stoppage of work along the waterfront to-day owing to the wharf labourers' strike. The seamen are restive, and any attempt on the part of steamship owners to introduce free labour would bring them out immediately. It is not likely that the owners will try to utilise any other labour.^[6]

Yet, though the possibility of working with strike-breakers may have been part of the seamen's motivation in striking, it was not all. As the quote above implies, the owners in Sydney were in many cases willing not to load or unload their ships in order to keep the seamen at work, but their crews struck anyway. This was the case, for instance, with the steamer, the Bombala. The Sydney afternoon paper, the Sun, described in detail the story of this particular steamship going on strike:

A conference had been held during the morning between representatives of the wharf labourers, seamen, and trolleymen and draymen, at which it was agreed that…goods, providing they had been loaded before the wharf labourers' strike, could be unloaded. The seamen [on the Bombala], however, apparently took the matter into their own hands, and said that they would not allow anyone but members of the Wharf Laborers' Union to touch anything aboard the ship. The shipping companies accepted the seamen's ruling, and made no attempt to discharge the goods. They were prepared to leave these on board and run the risk of their going to waste, rather than precipitate trouble with another union.

BOMBALA FIREMEN REFUSE DUTY

It was confidently expected then that there would be no further trouble. However, the Bombala, which was the first of the Inter-state boats to leave, only got clear of the wharf when the firemen took action. ^[7]

The reason why the firemen on the Bombala suddenly decided to refuse duty, after their steamer had already left the wharf, is revealed in the trial of two seamen for conspiracy later in August. Thomas Robinson, who was described simply as a seaman who 'has been in the country for only two years' and William Daly who described himself as 'a native of Wales and a free thinker' and who was both a working seaman and the Vice President of the union's NSW branch, were very active on the day the Bombala struck. In the words of the police report, quoted at their trial:

It appears that Mr. Cooper, general secretary of the Seamen's Union, was engaged at Trades Hall, and a number of members headed by William Daly, insisted on having a meeting to deal with the strike question. Mr. Cooper gave way to them, and they, including Cooper, adjourned to the rooms in Clarence-street. Daly then took the chair, and passed a resolution calling all the members out. Most of the members present at this meeting were men who were not employed on any ships in Sydney Harbor. It had been explained to me that no strike could be passed by the union, except by the executive. It is pointed out that members of such executive reside in Brisbane, Melbourne, and Adelaide, as well as Sydney. Therefore the declaring of this strike is a gross violating of the union's regulations.^[8]

Robinson was delegated by the meeting to inform the ships in port that a strike was on, as the report of the trial in the Sun continues:

William Stone, gatekeeper at Howard Smith's wharf, testified to having refused to allow Robinson to go on the wharf on August 11. Witness afterward saw Robinson addressing a number of the Canberra men outside the gate…Captain Harry Tryer stated that he heard Robinson call out: 'On strike; come out!' The men he called out to then came on shore.^[9]

Another of the ships in port that Robinson called out was the Indarra. Its crew had decided to strike but were still on board when the outward-bound Bombala passed by. As the Sun's original report of the Bombala firemen's action described it:

The vessel [Bombala] was just about to pass the stern of the Indarra when the seamen on the outward-bound vessel were hailed from the Indarra. They notified the firemen of the message they had received from the Indarra, and the firemen came up on deck and notified the chief engineer that they could not keep up steam. The vessel went as far as Neutral Bay and there dropped anchor.^[10]

So unexpected was this sudden walkout by the seamen in Sydney that a number of delegates from the Labor Council's Defence Committee were reportedly stranded on board the Indarra and the Canberra. They had been en route to inform interstate unionists of the strike.^[11] The attitude of Secretary Cooper towards his rebellious members after being press-ganged into the 'unconstitutional' mass meeting of 11 August is not entirely clear, but there are some clues. With regards to the meeting itself, Cooper quickly let the press know that he wasn't responsible for the strike decision. Hence an article in the Sun on 13 August headed: 'HOW THE SEAMEN LEFT; UNION SECRETARY'S STATEMENT: Executive Advice Turned Down', in which Cooper is quoted as saying:

The executive advised the men to take no action until called upon by the Strike Committee; but the meeting unanimously voted that work should cease immediately, and appointed delegates to convey the resolution to the men on the ships in port.^[12]

The police report, cited above, makes great play of the allegation that none of the members at the meeting of 11 August were currently working on a ship. It also alleges that the meeting was packed with Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) sympathisers. This is extremely unlikely given the state of that organisation at the time – the IWW had been banned and most of its leading members arrested. The prevailing hysteria around the IWW explains why a policeman might see the organisation's hand in any left-wing agitation. Significantly, the policeman giving the report made it clear that he was relying heavily on an interview with Cooper. His comments regarding the meeting's unrepresentative nature and unconstitutional status are likely to come from this source. We can only speculate whether Cooper shared, or indeed was the source of, the paranoia regarding the IWW. In any case, a Sun article of 13 August makes the allegation regarding the unrepresentative nature of the meeting somewhat redundant when it mentions a follow up meeting on 13 August:

Mr. Cooper added that practically the whole of the members of the union in Sydney attended a meeting at the Trades Hall to-day and unanimously endorsed the decision to come out on Saturday.^[13]

There are a number of elements here that point to a more complex explanation of the motivation for striking. There is the principle of solidarity – the idea that to work would involve, at some level, collaborating with the waterfront scabs. This clearly is not sufficient though – as the example of the Bombala shows. There is also a question of political intervention. Who were these seamen who marched on Trades Hall to confront Cooper and force a mass meeting? The police allegation that they were IWW members may be dubious, but it is likely that they were a militant and left-wing minority. Daly's proud description of himself as a 'free-thinker' is suggestive. We are, moreover, dealing with a period of significant radicalisation, in the wake of the Easter Uprising and the conscription referendum and in the midst of the political crisis engendered by the war. It is not hard to understand why there would be a significant left-wing developing within the union and that this would be influenced by the prevailing syndicalist enthusiasm. More importantly, that minority was able to sway the majority – to convince them to strike. This is shown by the swift reaction of the seamen on the ships in Sydney Harbour to the strike call and the subsequent, more representative, meeting which voted to make the strike official. This can be explained by a combination of resentment at accumulated industrial grievances and the enthusiasm engendered by the mass strike that was sweeping the State. This latter factor is particularly important and will be dealt with in more detail later in this paper.

    There is another element which is peculiar to the experience of the seamen in 1917. A comparison with the wharfies is instructive. The wharfies also faced a group of federal officials who were hostile to their participation in the strike. The Waterside Workers' Federation Committee of Management (its federal executive body) tried in vain to engineer a return to work by the wharfies in 1917.^[14] Their efforts, however, were above board and consisted mostly of arguments made, unsuccessfully, in mass meetings. Cooper, the General Secretary of the Seamen's Union played a much more unpleasant role. The minutes of the Steamship Owners' Federation record that as early as 16 August he was active in trying to undermine the strike:

It was reported that Mr. Cooper had visited the various Companies at Sydney and had intimated that the railway strike would probably collapse shortly and the seamen would be prepared to go back if payment were made for the time they have been on strike.^[15]

There is no evidence that this underhand approach to the employers was known to the rank and file of the union. More significant was a dispute with the Melbourne Branch about the ending of the strike in October. The seamen returned to work nationally on 9 October, but when the crew of the Oonah in Melbourne found that they would have to work with 17 scabs (with 17 of the former crew thus victimised) the Melbourne Branch walked out again. The shipowners retaliated by locking seamen out nationally.^[16] Cooper, who was now firmly in control again in NSW, engineered a motion at a meeting in Sydney that NSW seamen would man vessels if the Victorian members refused.^[17] In other words, the NSW members were willing to scab on their Victorian comrades. Cooper then travelled to Melbourne where he delivered the message to a furious mass meeting and was chased down Exhibition Street by an angry mob for his pains.^[18]

    Cooper soon abandoned the union, and the attendant dangers of facing angry seamen, when he vacated his official position for a Government job in 1918. His departure provided an opening for Tom Walsh to join the ranks of officials. Walsh had been active in radical circles during the war and was a delegate on the National Committee of the union. When Cooper departed, he was temporarily replaced by one of his supporters, the NSW secretary, Edwards, and Walsh replaced Edwards as secretary of the NSW branch. From this toehold in Sydney, Walsh then challenged Edwards and narrowly won an election as General Secretary in early 1919. This was in the immediate aftermath of the tiny pay rise awarded by Justice Higgins in 1918. Walsh had the support of only a minority on the National Committee, but a rank and file rebellion soon changed that. In January 1919, seamen in the Eastern states had joined a strike initiated by New Zealand seamen. This had not been supported by the National Committee and all but the Queensland branch members returned to work. Walsh supported the strike and, in May, won a second ballot for General Secretary by a substantial margin.^[19] Almost immediately the Victorian and then the NSW branches struck again. The seamen's strike was on, and Walsh's position was made more secure by a decision of some of the old officials in NSW to resign their positions in disgust.^[20]

    The militancy of the seamen's union in 1919 was not, then, simply a reflection of the politics and character of Walsh and his close supporters like Le Cornu, the new union President. Walsh and Le Cornu's radicalism, particularly their open denunciation of arbitration, was as much a reflection of a new found militancy in the rank and file. This had its roots in economic discontent, in the disappointment of Higgins's miserly eleven percent pay rise in 1918, in the political radicalisation associated with war and with the experience of the mass strike in 1917. The leadership betrayal in Victoria in 1917 was clearly important. Gibson, the Victorian secretary throughout this period, had been indistinguishable politically from the federal officials before 1917. He had opposed striking at the beginning of the 1917 strike.^[21] Yet, by the end of the strike, he had clearly sided with his newly militant members as they roasted Cooper.^[22] In 1919 he was a Walsh loyalist and, when the strike began, despite the fact that Walsh had first obtained official status in NSW, it began in Victoria.^[23] During the dispute between Cooper and the Victorian branch in October 1917, an unnamed Sydney official of the union was cited in the press complaining that the Victorian branch had previously 'not been staunch unionists' and that its new militancy came as a shock.^[24] It is significant then that this once-backward branch should initiate the 1919 strike.

    The extent to which the rank and file had moved to the left was shown towards the end of the 1919 strike when they proved to be more militant even than Walsh and his supporters. After Walsh was arrested, a deal was cobbled together which would eventually result in the seamen obtaining all their demands – though this was not immediately clear. All the officials, including Walsh loyalists, recommended a return to work. Walsh wrote a letter from prison pleading with the members to go back, but the Victorian and NSW branches refused.^[25] This time it was the turn of the NSW branch to be the most intransigent. They held out the longest and even briefly replaced the fiery Le Cornu with a more militant delegate on the National Committee.^[26] The radical mood is summed up by the revelation, in a secret report on the strike prepared for the Prime Minister, that before one of the strike processions in Sydney 'some of the strikers' asked President Joyce of the Trades Hall 'if he would advise them to carry firearms'.^[27]

    From this brief narrative it is possible to list the elements that led to a transformation in the political and industrial traditions of the seamen. First there was a general discontent with wages in particular which was exacerbated by the wartime economic conditions and the inability of arbitration to remedy grievances in a sufficient or timely manner. Next there was a general political radicalisation associated with the war and the agitation around conscription, the Easter Uprising in Ireland and so on. Associated with and flowing out of this generalised left-wing shift was the crystallisation of a layer of politicised militants influenced by syndicalist ideas, most importantly, a belief in the superiority of direct action over arbitration. Finally, as we have already noted, there was, in 1917, a mass strike movement which, by the time the seamen began to consider strike action, had involved the coal miners and the wharfies and had begun to fill the Domain and the streets of Sydney with thousands, even tens of thousands of strikers and their supporters.

    The atmosphere in Sydney during the early days of the 1917 strike was one of almost millennial enthusiasm, tinged with more than a touch of larrikin energy. The daily strike processions were orderly but far from solemn. One thing, for instance, that stands out from descriptions of both the demonstrations and the mass meetings is the ubiquity of the song Solidarity For Ever.^[28] The song had only been written two years earlier by a member of the IWW in the United States.^[29] It has since become accepted as an anthem of the union movement, but in 1917 it was new and had a radical aura. It summed up, however, the nature of the great strike. The introduction of the card system into the workshops at Randwick and Eveleigh did not directly affect the vast majority of strikers. They were striking in solidarity with the railway workers – and so the song was particularly apt.

    What the enthusiasm and energy of the strike movement and its associated protests demonstrates is the way in which a mass strike can electrify the labour movement, particularly if it is built from below – how the momentum of struggle can build in such a way that new groups of workers are inspired to act. This phenomenon was famously described by Rosa Luxemburg. Her description of the way in which political and economic struggles can feed off of and into one another, seems particularly apt for the 1917 strike, sandwiched, as it was, in between the anti-conscription campaigns engendered by the two referenda of 1916 and 1917.

The worker, suddenly aroused by the electric shock of a political action, grasps immediately and above all that which is most distinctly present to him: the resistance to his economic slavery. The stormy gesture of the political struggle causes him suddenly to feel the weight and the pressure of his economic chains with unexpected intensity.^[30]

It helps explain the readiness of the seamen to strike – obeying a single shouted call from the dockside in Sydney, or walking off ship-by-ship in Melbourne. The experience of that strike enabled the militant left-wing minority to win over the mass of ordinary members to the idea of direct action. The Melbourne Branch, in particular, was transformed from one of the most backward branches of the union to one of its most militant. The experience of defeat momentarily restored the influence of the conservative officials within the Sydney Branch, though only at the cost of further alienating the Victorians who would become a key section of Walsh's support base. Even in Sydney the restoration of Cooper's influence was short-lived, as Walsh's election as Branch Secretary in 1918 showed. Disgust over Justice Higgins' pitiful wage increase of late 1918 then helped tip the balance in Walsh's favour and, under a leadership which concurred with their new-found distaste for arbitration, a pattern of militancy and political radicalism was set that would last, despite setbacks, for most of the twentieth century. When Thomas Robinson called out to the seamen on the Canberra on 11 August 1917, he was helping to create a new tradition. He deserves to be remembered for that.