This paper considers the origins, purpose and effect of labourist discourse surrounding the workplace 'scab' during the context of the 1890s. I argue that the labourist demonisation of scabbing was a masculinist trope which sought to appeal towards and shape Australian working-class identity. During this period the taken-for-granted figure of the 'scab' and wider labour discourse took on the appearance of anti-intellectualism. Yet scabbing was an important counterpart to labourist mateship; populist and accessible ideas of more abstract visions of solidarity, collectivism and mutuality. It should, given the labour's defeats in the major strikes and erratic parliamentary achievements, be understood as part of the broader cultural politics and intellectual traditions of Australian labourism.

Intellectual Anti-Intellectualism: 'Scabs' and the Cultural Milieu of 1890s Labourism

Writing in the Sydney Worker during the bitter Shearers' Strike of 1894, Henry Lawson declared:

It is a great pity that the word 'scab' ever dirtied the pages of a workman's newspaper. It is a filthy term in its present meaning – objectionable every way you look at it. It should never be used by one man in reference to another, no matter how bad the other may be … It does no good - you can't convert a man by using that word behind his back … It is a low, filthy, evil-working, ignorant, cowardly, and brutal term, and belongs to the slang of the brainless, apish larrikins and drunken prostitutes of the city press …. Let us talk straight in plain English, and not weaken our arguments with silly sounds that mean nothing.^[1]

Lawson's terse reproach of the peculiar antipodean deployment (given its rural relation to scabby, flyblown sheep) of the late nineteenth-century workplace 'scab' is interesting on a number of levels. As Graeme Davison has notably described, the Bulletin and writers such as Lawson were refracting an imagined set of national values or character onto an idyllic Australian bush setting, counterpoising this with the allegedly corrupting effects of modernist city life. Lawson self-consciously sought to distance labour discourse from the 'slang' of 'larrikins and drunken prostitutes of the city press'. Lawson's claim evinces the recurrent dovetailing of labourite critiques of capitalism and wider modernist anxieties. Such public men were also expressing a masculinist politics: Lawson, much like fellow propagandist, William Lane, was principally concerned with the (supra-class) relations between men.^[2]

     Most relevant to my present concerns is Lawson's denunciation of the appellation 'scab'. Here Lawson is joined in somewhat strange literary comradeship with the same Humphrey McQueen who labeled him a 'fascist': 'scab is such a filthy word that it should never be applied to another human being'. Lawson's criticism is odd on another more fundamental level. For Lawson was the poet of choice for bush unions such as the powerful Australian Worker's Union. He was widely regarded as a labourite very much 'in touch' with the bush-worker's concerns; he even worked as a sheerer (of apparently high quality) during the season of 1892-3.^[3] On this matter however Lawson appears to be out of touch with the direction of political language – what he derides as 'cant' – and the rationale for its deployment. For the insult 'scab', a seemingly anti-intellectual dialect, had taken on a cultural life of its own; overwhelmingly defensive, yet an established and significant – if now taken-for-granted – feature of the cultural politics of Australian labourism.

     The scab overwhelmingly arose in a period of intense social and political unrest, as early 1890s Australia was gripped by a succession of bitter strikes. The presence of large numbers of white strike-breakers in, for instance, the 1890 Maritime Strike and 1891 and 1894 Shearers' Strikes clearly threatened the ideals and practical aims of the labour movement, and impelled a response from both labourite rank-and-file and intellectuals. Not only were scabs practically targeted during disputations, but they came to form part of the wider cultural project of Australian labourites. Lawson's 'silly sound', like other masculine tropes such as 'mateship', had rapidly arisen ostensibly to express, but more importantly, formed part of a cultural politics which sought to shape the social and political identities of Australian workers.^[4] Utilising this methodology, in this article I want to contextualise and explore the politico-cultural meaning of the Australian 'scab' – treating it as an important counter-identity employed by both workers and labour intellectuals during the 1890s and beyond. As Verity Burgmann has argued, during the 1890s many, if not most labourites, ranged under the motto 'Socialism in Our Time'. Yet, while socialism in various forms became more popular amongst the labour intelligentsia of the late 1880s, its often abstract and complicated teachings meant less to ordinary Australians. It had to be re-crafted into an accessible language; hence the oft use of reductionist iconography and populist meanings, and explained within an Australian context. In this light Australia labour intellectuals eclectically relied upon populist socialism such as the utopian fiction of American writer Edward Bellamy's Looking Backwards, Laurence Gronlund's Co-operative Commonwealth and fellow-traveller but single-taxer Henry George. Moreover 'class' did not make some triumphal and entirely natural entrance onto the social or political stage during or after the so-called Great Strikes of the early 1890s. Herein the formation of worker identity (and collective trust) depended as much upon the persona of counter-identities like the scab as on positive characters such as mateship. ^[5]

     Labour discourse then took on the appearance of anti-intellectualism and antipodean derivativeness – anti-intellectual in that it reduces more complex ideas about human actions and social relations to a simplistic, reductionist caricature of individual ill-behaviour - a trend which later writers would claim for the nation writ large. However, as Sean Scalmer notes, labour intellectuals spoke contextualised and consciously reflective languages to appeal towards and shape socio-political (often classed) identities. Such legitimating and reflexive discourses were also essential to the making of what Leach terms a 'positive' working class identity. Scabbing and the figure of the scab was an important counterpart to labourist mateship – a populist version of more abstract visions of solidarity, collectivism and mutuality – practically assisting those proselytising for socialism/labourism. Icons such as 'the scab' constituted an allegoric behavioural exemplar. In William Lane's famous summation of socialism as being 'mates' there was a clear converse: 'The scab, the blackleg, is not a Socialist'.^[6] In the pages of the Worker and Lane's Hummer the unionist 'mate' was repeatedly celebrated whilst the scab was reviled and ostracised: unionists were defined as much by their mateship, as against the non-mate, the scab.

     Despite their prominence in early labour literature scabs have generally escaped sustained academic attention. Scabs have been traditionally seen as faceless men in larger narratives^[7] – drawn upon to evoke the anti-intellectualism and exclusionary, sometimes violent tendencies of the early labour movement. This is not without some justification. In 1909 William Guthrie Spence's Australia's Awakening illustrated the way in which scabs were 'converted' by unionists (this of course dovetailed with the practice of 'scabby' sheep treated by being 'dipped'):

Some of the Unionists were great believers in immersion as a cure for 'scab.' One experienced organizer said he had only known one case which required more than one dip … He tried moral suasion without avail, and finally he dropped the 'scab' from the bridge into the cold water. The poor fellow came out still loyal to his desire to oblige the employer, so he was again pushed in. He came out the second time still a hardened sinner, and after some further parley was again dipped under the cold water. He repented this time, and came out a convert to Unionism and a monument to the efficacy of cold water in judicious quantities properly applied.^[8]

In the opinion of the editors of the 1973 collection, Strikes, 'it is a pity that the strike-breakers have remained so anonymous in our articles'. This historiographical note has not however been pursued, despite the existence of parallel works including Jacqueline Dickenson's comparative study of British and Australian radical languages of betrayal, 'Chasing the Rat'. In his chapter in the celebratory ALP history True Believers John Iremonger suggestively argued that the political 'Rat' was the 'first cousin' of the 'Scab'. Perhaps most specifically Bruce Scates, in his consideration of the 1890 Maritime Strike, has shown how the 'scab' was proclaimed through rituals of manhood which both subordinated and excluded. However we are generally bereft of a substantial study which places the scab in the context of the labour movement's wider discourses and contextual specificities. Given the context of labour's disastrous defeats during the 1890s strikes and erratic parliamentary achievements, the discourse of scabbing was an important part of the cultural politics of labourism. As should be clear, I am not interested in rescuing the faceless scab from what Thompson famously described as the 'enormous condescension of posterity'; it is precisely the anonymity and derogatory nature of this counter-identity which stirs my historiographical interest. For the scab must be placed and understood in the context of labour's counter-hegemonic practices: the struggle to 'build up' the industrial and political unity of the working class.^[9]

'The Scab': Context, Purpose, Effect

The term 'scab', while ostensibly Australian slang, was actually borrowed from popular English and American sources. In pre-industrial sixteenth-century England, a scab was a populist term of abuse for a despicable or filthy person, derived from medical terminology, but reworked into an expression of moral or spiritual malady. The radical and class connotations of the scab seem to have appeared in the late eighteenth-century, arising as we might expect with processes of early industrialisation. The modern scab functioned as the immoral (and individuated) cause of the increasing disputation between capital and labour. As the editorial of Bonner & Middleton's Bristol Journal proclaimed after the settling of a dispute in 1777: 'To the Public … We have the Pleasure to inform them, that Matters have been amicably settled … The Conflict would not have been so sharp had there not been so many dirty scabs: no Doubt but timely Notice will be taken of them …' An explicitly working-class usage drew upon its popular and moral meanings. By 1806 the scab had taken on its conventional meaning of strikebreaker, which dovetailed with hostility to those persons who refused to join a trade union. Its most simple industrial meaning and purpose was to ostracise the (male) worker who would perform, or employ another to perform, the job of a striking worker: inclusion by the threat of exclusion. Across the Anglo world, the scab was taken to mean the same thing as the perhaps more sanitised 'blackleg'. The public ostracising of the 'dirty' scab conflated both physical and mental states of unfitness, with an underlying sense of unmanliness. The industrial and class disloyalty of the scab overtook, but never fully replaced such (moral and masculinist) meanings. An unidentified trade unionist asked in 1792: 'What is a scab? He is to his trade what a traitor is to his country... He first sells the journeymen, and is himself afterwards sold in his turn by the masters, till at last he is despised by both and deserted by all'. The scab played a somewhat ironic 'positive' role within intellectual and worker affirmations of masculine pride, self worth and fraternal solidarity. American workers declared during the 1888 Burlington strike that they would never have 'scabbed a day in their lives'. Others publicly declared 'I won't scab any man's job'.^[10] Such discourses were increasingly loaded with an explicitly classed language of masculinity. The American author, Jack London, evoked several, particularly biblical meanings in his famous 1903 essay 'The scab':

After God had finished a rattlesnake, the toad, and the vampire, He had some awful substance left with which He made a scab … The scab sells his birthright, his country, his wife, his children, and his fellow man for an unfulfilled promise from his employer … a scab is a traitor to his God, to his country, to his family, and to his class.^[11]

Not unsurprisingly an Australian usage emerged during the first flushes of intense industrial unrest: scab idiom first appeared during the late 1880s, but was most fully developed during the 1890s. The Queensland shearers drew on its sense as a disease found in sheep, to disparage strike-breakers employed by the pastoralists during the Shearers' strikes. According to one Hummer scribe in 1891, a scab was 'the strongest and worst-smelling breed of skunks I ever scented'. The location of scab in the language of the essentially industrial British and American unions sits interestingly alongside the very rural connotations of scabby Australian sheep. It is a reminder that New Unionism in Australia had a much larger rural component (and a more significant bush iconography) than elsewhere. Of course there quickly emerged multiple meanings – those who left the early Australian Labor Party were somewhat later also termed scabs (or more commonly 'rats'). Scabs, it was argued, came from established line of traitors and villains. The Shearers' Record thought 'What the working men have to contend against are the Judases in their own ranks, those scabs and blacklegs whose contemptible spirits can allow them to step in undersell their fellow labourers'.^[12]

     The emergence of the scab, I suggest, had other racially derived and perhaps socio-psychological bases. Worker identity could not exist autonomously of a defined Other; ostensibly lacking in respectability and manly honour. Previous to the 1890s a race based consciousness of workers subordinated the Chinese or Asiatic (mainly Kanaka) Other. Such workers were accused of undermining the racial and sexual solidarity of white women as well as undercutting white men's wages. Yet, owing to the cross-class movement against Chinese immigration, which resulted in their practical exclusion, the Chinese, while still referred to and feared, were not practically engaged in the struggles of the 1890s. During the 1891 strike the Queensland pastoralists association specifically issued a statement calling on its members not to employ them.^[13] Chinese immigration was virtually eliminated by the State before the White Australia policy of 1901. Between 1888 and 1901, Australia's Chinese population fell from about 50 000 to about 32 000.^[14] The treacherous white scab surfaced, in many respects, to fill this race void: as many labourites came to realise that industrial disputation would continue beyond the racial-industrial threat of the Chinese. I am not suggesting that worker's racism somehow disappeared or was neatly replaced by an antagonism to the scab. As Banjo Paterson's 1892 poem 'A Bushman's Song' describes:

I asked a cove for shearin' once along the Marthaguy:
"We shear non-union here," says he. "I call it scab," says I.
I looked along the shearin' floor before I turned to go -
There were eight or ten dashed Chinamen a-shearin' in a row.^[15]

Nevertheless, constructions of white mateship and wider worker identity were just that: defined not as much by the mateship of the unionists as by the invocation of the Other, or constitutive (and logically pejorative) counter-identity or enemy. Congruent with this logic the vehemence directed at scabs itself may be understood as projecting or perhaps mediating male worker's own fears of being industrially marginalised and degraded by capitalism. Racialist worker consciousness intersected with gender anxieties.

     The scab had an unmistakably gendered meaning and women were rarely termed scabs. The blackleg remained - the Australian Workman forcefully titled its 25 September 1890 editorial 'Blacklegs – Beware!' – but he possessed none of the scab's rhetorical cruelty. Using the scab was an attempt to use dominant and emotive symbols of masculine consciousness. If working men did not typically understand their identity as class based (solidarity) then such supra-class meanings could, it was hoped, be drawn upon for the labour cause. The label of unmanliness it seems was itself utilised to induce 'manly' union and class loyalty. Spence, in his celebratory history of New Unionism thought the scab (for a man), 'the lowest term of reproach'. Beyond such rhetoric, being a 'scab' had practical effects and penalties. Scabs were named in some union journals. And as Spence suggested in his allusions to the sanctity of bush life, 'Experience has taught that the man who sells himself to the employer at a time of strike is a man of weak character if not worse. At many a country ball the girls have refused to dance with them, the barmaids have refused them a drink, and the waitresses a meal'. In a similar vein unionist George Hadlow scorned the manhood of scabs imported from Adelaide during the 1891 Shearers' strike: 'they will be taught that although they have tried to do their fellows harm, they will have possibly to produce some sign of manhood, or go without tucker …'.^[16]

     The scab also served to define collective decency. As the early 1890s strikes gripped Australia, both employers and unionists appealed to conceptions of the collective good, most often grounded in the expression of individual masculine respectability. Whilst employers and conservative social commentators were (re)developing a theory of moral virtue based on individual deference to the law (and more often than not Protestantism), labourites were enunciating a similar version, though based squarely on the individual's relations to the collectivity. To be collectively minded was, in the minds of leading labourites, itself an act of good individual moral character. Looking back on this period, Spence juxtaposed the union and non-union man:

In my thirty years' experience and association with many thousands of men I have never known an anti-unionist who was any good. If I was an employer I would not have him near my workshop. The non-unionist—the "scab"—is only a trifle better ... Unionism has a markedly beneficial effect on character. It inculcates brotherhood. It gives the right to one member of the union to speak to another if he thinks that he is doing or contemplating a wrong act. The effect of discipline is seen at its best, and its effect is to make men better citizens, better husbands, and better fathers.^[17]

Scabbing, then, was a practical counter-hegemonic discourse of masculinity positioned against employer and press terminology of 'free' and 'independent' labourers. (Such references of course were terms used to describe earlier convict servants.) Shipowners during the 1890 Maritime Strike placed a ban on references to blacklegs and scabs in all communications with unions. This formed part of a wider conservative reaction to the new-found and allegedly illegitimate claims of labour. Conservative newspapers were increasingly speaking of an upturned false consciousness, whereby in the 'happy Australian colonies our working classes – the most fortunate, the best paid, and the most prosperous body of workers in the world [are being] summoned by their leaders to take part in a ruinous war against society …' But this modernist colonial collectivity was, by the 1890s, a far more abstract, uncertain and thus malleable subject. In this context the shadowy and faceless figure of the scab might be seen as symbolic of the up-rooting of ordinary people's lives and the removal of many of the certainties of face-to-face community. Anxieties of modernity were often played out or mediated in accusations of the scab's immoral or degraded behaviour. Above all the scab's actions were immoral, particularly when the State began to act 'legally' (or illegally) on behalf of the employers during strikes. The Australian Workman considered, "For a blackleg to take a striker's billet is moral robbery even though it may be legally honest … And as moral laws should override all laws that are not moral strikers are quite justified in using physical as well as moral strength in preventing men from stealing their billets."^[18]

     Contrarily male, often racialised honour lay at the heart of labourite counter-discourse, as Spence infamously boasted: 'Unionists have starved rather than accept work under other conditions … [they] have gone without for a year – remaining penniless, but independent, and proud that they had not degraded themselves … Rough and unpolished many of them may be; but manly, true and white'. Following such logic if capitalism did, indeed, degrade the white male wage-earner, in the idiom of writers such as Spence, a residual 'manly' honour could be salvaged. In 1891 the Manifesto of the Queensland Shearers' Union summed up this defensive, consolatory masculinist logic as the employers' industrial strength threatened to practically shatter the solidarity of the unionists:

Let us fight this fight in Queensland so that we shall never look back to it with regret. Let us so act that whatever is said afterwards it will at least be said that Queensland unionists were men … If you blackleg, the very companies that engage you will in their hearts despise you; they will treat you like dogs and kick you out, in spite of all their promises, when they have used you. No man respects a blackleg, not even himself.^[19]

Workers responded boisterously to such imagery in acts both material and rhetorical. When the steamer Rodney attempted to bring scabs ashore during the 1891 Shearer's Strike, unionists commandeered the boat and marched the scabs to a nearby camp. Three years later, when the Rodney attempted the same, it was infamously burnt to the ground. In 1900, the unionist J. Byrne wrote to the Worker describing how 'Last week two of the famous Barratta scabs came over to start but the men refused to be classed with such creatures …' In almost all of its representations the scab appears dichotomously to the positive identity given to union workers or 'mates', as William Lane's earlier summation of socialism evinced. When 'Old Hank' penned 'An Essay on Scabs' for the Hummer in 1892, he set the degraded scab against the 'all-round man':

Scabs are also known as "rats", "blacklegs", "white-wings" and other names …. They are all the same breed though … descend[ed] from Meanness, by Ignorance out of Funk, Money-Grubb[ing], by Selfishness out of Hypocrite. Their employers don't think much of them, but they have lately renamed them "free" labourers, just to amuse them and insult the Unionists … Any decent Unionist who calls a scab a "free" labourer ought to get six months for perjury … if you want an all-round man, he is no more fit for use than a wax-work image would be for a gas-stoker.^[20]

In contrast to such acts of manly degradation was placed the language of classed (and racially) derived masculine independence. This individuated subjectivity was however constructed within a collective identity and purpose. As the Silver Age posited in regards to the 1892 Broken Hill Strikers, '… the unionists would be less than men, they would be unworthy of the race from which the majority of our workers have sprung, if they tamely submitted to allow the work of years to be destroyed, if they remained supine while at one fell swoop all the advantages so dearly won were to be confiscated'.^[21] Thus the typical bush worker was being constructed in new contingent terms, to counter the popular stereotypes of capitalist press and employers.

     In labourite propaganda it was the scabs and non-unionists who were intemperate boozers, larrikins and unfit ruffians. As Bongiorno comments: 'In the culture of colonial unionism, [often] the ideal man was not the nomadic bushman of the Australian Legend, but the respectable breadwinner who showed self-restraint in the interests of his family and his own future prospects'. Scabs and scabbing then were a part of a resurgent trope of 'moral economy', which was at once critiquing and being replaced by the discourse and reality of political economy during the late nineteenth-century. If workers were not being portrayed as 'mates', then 'staunch' 'men' or 'unionists' were equally effective. According to Spence 'the great majority of the 'scabs' were notorious criminals, well known to the police. Many of them were bullies and larrikins who in dark city lanes "dealt it out," as they termed it, to weak old men'. On the other hand, claimed Spence, 'good staunch men had no chance whatever of work, and were therefore penniless. They saw the work taken from them by the scum of society from the cities'. In part these rhetorical movements also represented the growing strength of temperance advocates such as William Lane within the labour movement. In the Worker Lane 'urged[d] unionists to debar all who in any way drink to excess from positions of trust and responsibility.'^[22] A regular correspondent to the Hummer, 'Sewing Girl' illustrated the debilitating and degrading class effects of drink upon individual workers and the labour cause in general. Intemperance, it seems, lead to scabbing:

I suppose a Capitalist or squatter consumes as much drink in a month as a working man would in the whole twelve. But then the monied man has the means of counteracting the effects of the drink poison … There is no excuse for a worker drinking … the drink curse is an evil and an obstruction to the Cause … an habitual drunkard, becomes degraded … sink[ing] to a cursing, crawling hound. This is the opportunity for the greedy employer, who lowers that man's wages, and from a free and independent worker the unfortunate drunkard falls to a detestable blackleg and crawling cur.^[23]

As 'Sewing Girl's' claim examples, the scab was widely constructed and accepted as the opposite of the manly, proud and independent worker imagined as the prototype unionist. The exclusionary and implicitly violent language of scabbing was not however universally accepted, as Lawson's earlier counsel suggests. Indeed his intervention prompted a series of debates in the Worker which reflected critically upon the counter-intuitive nature of abusing scabs. More than alienating non-unionists it was likely, in the words of 'Coyal' 'to lead people who were friendly inclined to think the toilers and moilers a very bad lot … We want neither cant, rant, nor snivel, both in speech and action'. Despite such debates neither workers nor leaders challenged the dominant labourite discursive tactic of inclusion by threat of exclusion; identity constructed by an antagonism to the pejorative other. Even the socialist publication the People and the Collectivist devoted its pages to essays such as 'The Making of Scabs' that, though focusing on 'economic causes', focused primarily on the scab's unmanliness and subsequent degradation.^[24] Appealing to men's more familiar social identity, the language of scabbing had rapidly acquired its own legitimacy within the discourse of labourism. The internalised scab enemy came to constitute a powerful counter identity, but also represented the increasing defensiveness of labour rhetoric in the light of the heavy defeats it experienced in the major strikes.    

     It is not so much that the scab was the 'wrong' enemy per se, but that greater villains abounded. Most obviously the scab was a reductionist idea that obscured a more rigorous analysis of capitalist society and worker exploitation. For instance an 1896 shearing dispute in NSW was explained to Tasmanian readers as 'Blacklegs versus Shearers: Success to the Union'. Herein lies the great (though not entirely unexpected) contradiction at the heart of labour's demonic iconising of the scab - though the boundaries of scabbing were never entirely clear. The scab is at once all-powerful in undermining the solidarity of the union, though he is simultaneously tainted by weakness of self, unmanliness and utter corruption by the capitalist. An 1890 Worker editorial is a classic example:

Unorganised labour broke the strike, and not only unorganised labour but unskilled labour. Men who in ordinary times would have been considered unfit by shipowners, unions and shipping office, have manned the companies' fleets and been winked at by the law; raw lads have worked on the wharves and drunken boozers have been at a premium; there has been nobody whom Capitalism would not have used in its determination to break the Organisation of Labour.^[25]

Though the Worker identified the attacks of 'capitalism' upon 'labour', such analysis was arguably drowned out by the allusions to scab (and more significantly 'unskilled') labour. Likewise scabs regularly appeared as enemies in a wider populist conspiracy which labourites were narrating. The poem 'How We Beat the PU' (Pastoralists Union), written by 'the Tug', neatly expresses this theory in regards the conspiratorial 'Money Power' of the banks:

So shoulder to shoulder, and firmer and bolder,

As each day made bolder our fight with the banks.

We gained our sheds surely – the 'scabs' shaped out poorly,

And 'White Wings' were daily won into our ranks.

This pre-occupation with the individual depravity of the scab had unfortunate effects. It was the scab, in conjunction with enemies such as the greedy capitalist Fat Man, rather than an economic system which cut down the workers' wages and solidarity. It was rare, but probably more accurate for writers such as 'Spartacus' in his 'Beware Fat Man' to describe how 'The fat man sits on the rail rejoicing when he sees scabs and unionists in the field fighting for existence. He laughs loudly when they maltreat each other. But take care, my stout gentleman, least a gleam of intelligence reveals your hateful form in its true shape …'.^[26]

     Despite these caveats the scab emerged in a very real historical context; often enough as the counterpart to discourses of mateship. Such masculinist tropes must be understood as part of the cultural politics of unions and workers, which sought, in Mark Hearn's words, to 'construct an agreed social order in the context of hard economic times, and governments and employers who refused to recognise their legitimate grievances'. As the counterweight to mateship the scab compelled uniformity – a defensive subjectivity which fostered an inward looking culture of unionism. When Spence announced that 'Unionism came to the Australian bushman as a religion … bringing salvation from years of tyranny. It had in it that feeling of mateship which he understood already, and which always characterised the action of one "white man" to another', he likewise suggested 'Unionism extended the idea, so a man's character was gauged by whether he stood true to Union rules or "scabbed" it on his fellows. The man who never went back on the Union is honoured to-day as no other is honoured or respected. The man who fell once may be forgiven, but he is not fully trusted'.^[27] If mateship was a vision of collective inclusion, trust and brotherhood, scabbing was a salutary lesson and dystopic warning of manly degradation and exclusion.

     Importantly, Labor was conscious of transporting such rhetoric and industrial emotion into the political arena. The political act of 'ratting' and the cultural importation of the caucus pledge of solidarity is perhaps the most striking example, bound up within the political labour movement's invention of a tradition of electoral trust and solidarity. For instance in 1890, when the Labour Electoral League appealed to the electors of West Sydney it conflated social and political identity in speaking of 'us and them': 'We … ask you to choose between us and the other candidates, who are, to a man, either directly or directly representatives of the Employers' Union … Our cause is yours. Be true to us and you must be true to yourselves.'^[28]          That Labor survived the industrial and political crises of the 1890s is in many ways a testament to the broad culture of labourism – of which the discourse of scabbing was an important, if problematic element. The scab formed part of a broader cultural project which sought to appeals towards, mobilize and ultimately politicise the Australian working class. In the context of the 1890s strikes the unity of the nascent working class, or more accurately, 'the People' was held together through various discourses; some positive, like mateship, others like its counterpart the scab, a negativist construction or warning of social exclusion. Indeed the scab is far more prominent in the writings of 1890s labourites than ideals such as mateship – overwhelmingly reflecting the defensive nature of the movement during this decade. Whilst the scab possessed various obfuscatory and reductionist tendencies, its very prominence in labourite language illustrates the complex tools by which labour intellectuals sought to explain and critique the turbulent Australian society of the 1890s.