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Improvising nomads
[6,456 words/11,584 including notes]
Opening The Australian Legend, Russel Ward reported that “[a]ccording to
the myth the ‘typical Australian’ is a practical man … a great
improviser, ever willing ‘to have a go’ at anything … He tends to
be a rolling stone, highly suspect if he should chance to gather much
moss.”
Although Ward drew this version of the “nomad tribe” of improvisers
from pastoral workers, he could have been writing about building and
construction labourers who, moreover, shared the characteristics of
drinking and gambling,
mateship, independence and Irishness.
Ward faced difficulties of time and place
in explaining the persistence of the type. He dealt with the temporal
disconnect by showing how several of the conditions of working up
country before 1850 had been repeated during the gold rushes, before
being made mythic around bushrangers. To overcome the spatial divide,
Ward had to demonstrate how an outback legend had conquered while a
growing proportion of the population was settling into urban centres
along the coast.
He pointed to the Bulletin as
one conduit for how bush yarns and a rural ethos attracted city
dwellers.
The rural-urban divide affected class
formation in
Australia
differently from in
Europe
where the peasantry had had deeper roots in localities than did
up-country proletarians or small settlers.
There, the forging of labour-power into a commodity had driven rural
workers into urban employments, or overseas.
Those migrations severed labourers from their sources of
self-sufficiency. Australians looking for work were as likely to move
from the cities to the bush, carrying town attitudes into the
countryside and bringing rural sentiments back to the coast. Many bush
workers were also city labourers, who shifted from construction sites to
shearing sheds, or between the building trades and fruit picking; they
left off navvying along the railway to take up mining; sailors came
ashore as riggers and dogmen; labourers sold their capacities as
pick-and-shovel men or as bush carpenters; they assisted tradesmen and
took their places, chased work through the suburbs and from the cities
to the country. They humped carcasses around abattoirs. Oft times, they
were on the grass. They spoke of this skein as “following the job”.
The mobility of workers contributed as much to the acceptance of the
type as did the balladists and writers. A Carcoar correspondent for the Town
and Country Journal criticised the coming generation of railway
navvies in 1885 for infecting the bush with larrikinism; his description
of their style of dress was close to that of the Kelly supporters known
as the Greta Mob.
This article unpicks four strands of
improvising nomads in relation to building and construction labourers.
First, their nomadism will be documented, showing also how their
switching between industries required relocation. Secondly, the
labourers’ movements gyrated around localities to which most attached
themselves, for if many were nomadic, few were rootless; as ever, memories threaded together the flows across space and
time. Thirdly, the pursuit of jobs spurred labourers “to have a go”,
an improvising which required mobility up and down the trades, giving a
twist to equality and independence. Finally, the analysis moves past the
folklorist and literary approaches by returning the nomadic improvisers
to their place within the dynamics of wage-labour versus capital.
I.
On the wallaby
In describing the origins of the Australian Workers’ Union (AWU), John
Merritt pointed up the cycles of employment:
Clearing, earth moving and building
usually ceased during the shearing season and contractors and their
employees would seek work as shearers or shedhands.
For most of the year, these city and town
dwellers worked intermittently on municipal work gangs, or building
sites, in flour mills, foundries or engineering shops and on the
wharves. The proceeds from a couple of sheds enabled them to cope with
the fluctuations in urban home building, the jobbing-shop environment of
Australian manufacturing and the seasonal variations in urban unskilled
work.
Contractors hired coal miners to excavate
the
Sydney
telephone tunnel and the Glebe tunnel in 1900.
Non-economic impulses drew some to the open-air of building sites when
factory-hands escaped the iron cage of process work, miners sought
relief from troglodyte confines and dirt farmers from loneliness.
Another reason for mobility was the blacklisting of activists. After the
1909 lockout at Port Pirie, several Wobblies agitated across the State,
one joining the United Labourers’
Union
to organise fruit-pickers before becoming prominent around
Adelaide
.
NSW Secretary Jack Millard described much of his Branch membership in
1913 as “wanderers”:
They are men who follow the occupation
for two weeks at a job. I have taken their names, and they have been on
a week till they get their pay, and I would catch again them two or
three months after, floating … In a lot of cases, as soon as they get
a pay, it is “off”.
In the winter of 1916, the majority of
ABLF members at Queenscliff “were at other work”.
As a young engineer, John Monash
supervised construction works throughout
Victoria
. In 1891, he described the habits of pick-and-shovel men:
Navvies are generally restless and when
work is plentiful go from one job to another out of pure caprice. In the
country he might when contracts were scarce turn farm hand (at smaller
pay), miner, perhaps shearer, wood-feller. But he generally travels with
his whole household long distances to get work on contracts with better
pay
… a horse and dray … is part of the
stock in trade of many of them, and in this they carry away their
household goods when they travel for fresh work.
These navvies were on the outer-suburban
line, but their kind drifted in and out of the metropolis and to the
reservoirs. At Mildura in 1890, the Chaffey Brothers complained that
their field labourers were working for “a short time” before they
got “a cheque and clear out,”
and denounced
strikers as “a mob of wandering swagmen”.
During the 1890s depression and drought, “caprice” became
less convincing as an explanation for mobility as “the hordes of
artisans, labourers, clerks, larrikins, and social camp followers”
swarmed “out of the cities into the poverty-cursed country
districts.”
At the same time, the three Hannah brothers shifted from
Melbourne
to
Perth
and
Adelaide
, and back again, to lead building unions in each city. Also in the West
for the 1897 building trades dispute were the Theosophist carpenter,
Montague Miller,
the Secretary of the colony’s Builders’ Labourers’ Society, Bill
Mellor, who had agitated in
Sydney
and
Melbourne
, and his comrade from
Newcastle
, Hugh de Largie.
The experiences of one nomad, A. J.
Sullivan, exemplified the transitions between bush worker and
builder’s labourer. Although a progenitor of the AWU, Sullivan chose
to publish his memoirs in the Builders’
Labourers’ News (BLN).
Across fifty years, he went from farmhand to shearer, while shifting
back and forth between navvy, builder’s labourer and miner. As a
stripling, he shouldered his swag in 1872 to seek experience and a
fortune. He turned to navvying in 1878 on the rail line between St
Arnaud and Dunolly. As a fully-fledged shearer, he travelled around
Australia
, gaining knowledge of “harvest hands, navvies and general workers.”
Between 1884 and 1886, Sullivan busied himself with the formation of
shearers’ unions across the Riverina, and then in
Tasmania
. By 1892, he had found work in
Melbourne
, first on the Tooronga gasometer and then on the Glen Iris rail line;
next year, he carried the hod on the quarantine station at Portsea.
Following this stint on the coast, he spent seventeen years in mines
around Rutherglen where he perceived that the seams into which he and
his workmates were burrowing had been streams before “mighty
convulsions” buried them. Change was the one constant in nature, a
lesson Sullivan carried across to political and industrial activism
while “following the job”.
Sullivan’s story was the kind of
evidence that the Australian Builders’ Labourers’ Federation (ABLF)
needed to gain a hearing before the Commonwealth Conciliation and
Arbitration Commission in 1913 by satisfying the constitutional
requirement under Section 51 (xxxv) of being involved in a dispute
“beyond the limits of any one State”. Union officials testified that
when firms accepted inter-State contracts they took labourers with them.
During 1912, the Victorian Branch had issued 200 cross-border
clearances.
The sprawl of nomadism is confirmed by the clearances that the Victorian
Branch granted to its members in the late 1920s when Bro. C. Watt went
shearing, as did Bros Allen and Riley who followed the clip every year;
Bro. Scott had accumulated overdue fees of £4 12s 6d while
banana-growing in
Queensland
; late in 1928, Bro. Wilson wanted to stay financial although he was
farming at Traralgon; and Bro. Wilkins moved to the Adelaide
Coachbuilders’
Union
in July 1929. The minutes recorded: “These men received our wages but
were in other unions – they were not permanently on our work but were
changing about in different jobs.”
West Australian Paddy Troy (b. 1908) took work as a shop assistant,
gardener, shearer’s roustabout, seaman and miner before becoming a
rigger on construction sites, shifting between Mt Magnet in the north
and
Albany
to the south, while retaining ties with his birthplace at Fremantle.
II. Nodes for
nomads
Observing navvies from outside and above, Monash had been puzzled by
their arriving “from no one knows where like crows around a carcase,
and when the work is over they vanish as mysteriously.” At the same
time, he acknowledged that “a popular ganger always knows where to
find 20 or 30 favourite men.”
Such combinations suggest more than “pure caprice” behind their
pathways. Just as swaggies left signs for each other, so itinerants
learnt the tracks to travel to locate their next job. The struggles of
railway navvies from 1860 to 1890 revealed the importance of local
linkages.
John Vans Agnew Bruce had charge of the
£3,357,000 contract to build a rail line from
Melbourne
to the
Murray
.
When he cut wages in July 1861,
the navvies struck, marching down the track to Kyneton and through
Castlemaine, before 600 “turn-outs” advanced towards Woodend.
At a meeting with Bruce in the Menzies hotel, a Mr Simpson spoke for his
fellow labourers, as he had on most of the delegations during the
previous three years.
Simpson said that he had not come to negotiate but to make it clear that
the navvies were determined to refuse 5s a day. Although they had not
formed an organisation, elected any officials, or adopted a set of
rules, the navvies did not confine their struggle to a few miles of
track but obtained help from their fellows far and wide; Simpson told
Bruce that the men were “trusting to contributions from without.”
Five labourers at Porcupine signed a letter to the Mt Alexander Mail asking the citizens of Castlemaine to support a
meeting to raise funds for the strikers.
That gathering set up a Railway Relief Committee to collect
subscriptions door-to-door and supplies from merchants and storekeepers
who resented the monopoly that the sub-contractors had over supplying
the workforce as much as the navvies did the prices charged at the
company shanties.
One small businessman called on his fellows to remember their own
experiences as labourers.
If the movements of the men disrupted any
on-going organisation, the contacts made during their travels spun a web
of friends who sent gifts, or made loans, some from striking it lucky on
a gold field, just as the strikers themselves did a spot of fossicking
and panning. Simpson had warned Bruce that the men would wait for
agricultural jobs in the spring. The economic climate changed before the
season. No sooner had the navvies struck, than the first gold escort
reached
Dunedin
from the Otago field.
Thousands of Victorians
headed for
New Zealand
, depriving Bruce of a reserve army of labourers.
On 19 August, he sent up a large body of men from
Melbourne
on 6s per day. The morning after, his agent was offering to restore the
7s rate. Before the month was out, contractors on the
Geelong
to Ballarat line had to pay 10s. The balance of class forces had shifted
and, hence, the socially necessary costs of reproducing labour power had
increased.
Meanwhile, the Kyneton navvies defended themselves against charges of
incitement to riot and assault by establishing their sobriety and
character with testimony that they had had their families with them,
squatting by the track in “snug” winter quarters.
A
Melbourne
magistrate accepted enough of their evidence to acquit one and to
sentence the rest to just fourteen days.
The importance of localities for
itinerants recurred as they engaged in disputes which led to the
formation of unions. When
railway navvies near Tenterfield resisted a wage cut early in 1884, they
had not formed an association, yet their kind had come a good way since
the “mobs” of the 1860s. The
New England
strikers elected a Central Committee to stop all work along the line, to
drive off strike-breakers, and distribute the donations that flowed from
their fellows elsewhere.
The iron rails that tethered the mighty Bush to the world were
connecting navvies to each other.
Victorian navvies went a step further in
August 1887 by forming the Australian Railway and Public Works Employees
Union (AR&PWEU). In each camp, the
Union
had its own collector, garnering £1,000 in less than a year, which one
navvy praised as “so much vitality as ours”. Conflicts erupted along
the track. In July 1888, the contractors locked out labourers at Bacchus
Marsh after 500 refused to return without 6d a day extra; in December,
500 labourers of the Outer Circle Line struck for that increase. One
difference between these strikes and those from twenty years before was
that more of the stoppages fed into organisations which outlasted the
dispute.
The labourers’ unions of the late 1880s
highlighted the expanse of their mobility but also exposed a failure to
sink roots in many localities. Late in 1889, the Australian Labour
Federation in
Brisbane
called a meeting to form a General Labourers’ Union (GLU), which
gathered together the pick-and-shovel men on all manner of construction
sites, from reservoirs to railways and roads, but also enrolled
mill-hands, carters, drivers, and storemen-and-packers. The GLU
contacted its counterparts in Maryborough,
Cairns
and near Rockhampton, offering to exchange membership cards, admitting
members of the Barcaldine Central Labour Union while setting up suburban
lodges. By the Maritime dispute on August 16, the metropolitan GLU had
320 members. Defeat of the Marine Officers did nothing to stem
enthusiasm. Lodges opened in Gympie with 309 railway labourers, at
Mungar and Mt Coomra. Growth cracked the foundations, bringing on a
financial crisis. The GLU had enrolled members with too little
organisation in their workplaces or communities.
Sustaining a strike, still less a union, among itinerants was nigh on
impossible.
Survival as an organisation depended on their coming together along rail
tracks, or at hiring points for shearers, such as Port Augusta or
Barcaldine
to rejoin their teams and to renew their union membership.
By the 1840s, Marx and Engels could see
that the working classes might remake the world because modern industry
brought wage-slaves together in factories and in cities, allowing them
to develop collective strength as “new-fangled men”.
Those structures could not instil consciousness, which required “human
sensuous activity, practice” at every level of life.
Illustrating why class consciousness had to be the outcome of social
practices, Marx characterised the French peasantry as being “formed by
simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack
form a sack of potatoes.”
Classes are divided by skill, trade and
industry. They are also fractured by mobility and locality; in turn,
localities are split along class lines, between landlords and tenants,
as well as employers and employees. Yet, those contrary forces
contributed to the labourers’ achieving a geographic expanse for their
unions. Identification with neighbourhoods deepened in the 1880s, for
instance, through football clubs,
while a continental awareness spread in forms of federation such as the
Inter-Colonial Trade Union Congresses between 1879 and 1891.
Williamstown workers rallied in 1873-74 to support
Sydney
iron-workers defending the 8-hour day,
and Victorian railway labourers sent funds to
Newcastle
miners in 1888.
Pockets of the cities were isolated, as
at Williamstown and
North Sydney
, Fremantle and Port Adelaide; at Balmain, in October 1889, 300
labourers formed their own union.
The parochialism of lodges was at times a barrier to wider association,
but could also become its seedbed. The activists had to learn how to
marshal transient labourers, a task which became easier if enough of
them settled in localities, close to a transport hub, such as
Richmond
in
Melbourne
. During 1898, the Melbourne Lodge of the Builders’ Labourers’
Union
fought the Richmond Lodge as much as the bosses; erstwhile Victorian
ABLF Secretary, Henry Hannah, recalled that “one lodge would carry a
resolution … and the other would do the direct opposite”; punch-ups
on sites were a “common occurrence”.
In 1900, the ULPS in NSW tried to prevent a Lodge in
Newtown
from affiliating with the Trades and Labor Council, and did the same
against the Builders’ Labourers’
Union
in 1902.
The Builders’ Labourers’ Unions from
the five Eastern States federated in 1910 through a three-tiered process
of merging lodges within the cities, combining navvies with
tradesmen’s assistants, and by joining hands across State borders.
The movement of labourers between capital cities had established the
personal contacts to facilitate this combination. The NSW Secretary had
been in
Victoria
until after the 1906-7 strike; the Queensland President arrived in
Brisbane
from
Sydney
in January 1910; the Queensland Secretary travelled to
Melbourne
to talk the Victorians around.
Employers displayed their class
consciousness by recognising how being “settled” had dimensions of
both place and social order. In 1884, and again in 1886, the NSW
government offered to fund public works in municipalities and shires if
they took in some of the metropolitan unemployed. Some local authorities
declined, fearful, as one Shire Clerk put it, “that in the event of
any Eight-hours men coming down here, they would spoil the regular farm
labourers who have been settled here for some years.” The Penrith
Magistrate agreed: “To import an unsettled section of the unemployed
into the District, would to a great extent, tend to upset the settled
portion of the working class of this place.” These agents of capital
placed the long-term benefits from keeping a workforce disorganised
above the gains from government spending on infrastructure, or any
advantage from a downward pressure on wages brought by the “pedestral
unemployed”, or “sundowners”.
Memories
All communities are imagined, though not imaginary. Labourers made
“place” by constructing its buildings and utilities, in the process
reshaping the natural environs, and, through their labours, remaking
themselves, individually and collectively, physically and mentally.
Anecdote and lore, yarns and songs, supplied links between locality with
mobility, binding neighbourliness to nomadism.
Although urban labourers practised mateship as often as when they went
up country, their actions in the cities were passed on as anecdotes more
often than they were made literary. For instance, five men died from
poisoned air in the South Yarra section of a sewerage tunnel on 28
December 1897; two had sacrificed their lives by going back to rescue
the others, one calling out as he plunged into the gas: “Mick, mate,
we must get them out.”
Labourers projected the distant past or
remote events into current disputes. In 1861, Kyneton’s navvies called
one of their leaders “The Captain”. Whether this title resonated
with “Captain Swing” of the agricultural rioters is not known,
but that such nicknames could bear a political significance was shown by
Irish navvies in Queensland in 1866 who echoed the cry of “Bread or
Blood” from England in 1816, while recalling the overthrow of Governor
Bligh in 1808 and the attacks on Lord Elgin in Montreal in 1849.
Less surprising is the persistence across
decades of stories about local struggles. The need to raise track levels
on the Melbourne-Murray line in 1862 delivered a bonanza to Bruce but
gruel to his labourers, so that, seventeen years later, unionists
resented this injustice.
In 1922, a labourer recalled how builders, more than 30 years before,
had employed “runners” to set a faster pace “to get profit up and
finished as quickly as possible.”
Throughout the 1920s, the New South Wales ABLF Secretary painted a grim
account of
Melbourne
in the 1880s.
Victorian Norm Gallagher compared the 1973 -74 de-registration of the
Federation with that of the Queensland Branch after the 1927 strike,
four years before he had been born.
Patterns of movement and locality within
metropolises deserve their own studies before being integrated with this
account of movement between cities and the bush. A starting point is the
English immigrant millwright and pattern-maker, Thomas Dobeson, who
recorded how he chased work around
Sydney
in the 1880s:
I consider it harder to look for work
than the work itself. A man out here must be of tough material. He must
have a pair of strong legs. Let us go together kind Reader and look for
work. The day is early and we must not tarry. We will see what is in the
tenders. Here is one. Off we go. In half an hour we are there. We are
told to go to _____ Street. Away we go again, and in three-quarters of
an hour we are there. There are about 30 men here now and a lot more at
the end of the street. Some of the men would have to come long
distances, up to 8 miles. I myself would have to come 5 miles.
At another job, applicants had the toes
out of their boots. Dobeson learnt to pursue every possibility,
following a cart of timber to ask the owner for a place. Despite
believing that tariff protection created a demand for his skills in
Melbourne
, he could not afford to move south: “We would have to sell our home
at a great sacrifice. We could not let it. There are hundreds of houses
empty already.” Dobeson’s trade qualifications did not save him from
sharpening saws at sixpence a time, chasing a day’s pay as a poll
clerk, or seeking work as caretaker for the Town Hall. Labouring became a prize for this skilled worker.
III. Skills
Ward summarised the “myth” of the “typical Australian” as being
distinguished as much for his improvising as by his nomadism. Labourers
not only moved about the country, but shifted between industries while
scrambling up and tumbling down the skill ladders, with effects on the
significance for the Legend of “equality” and “independence”. An
unskilled labourer on a building site might have been a semi-skilled
operative in a different trade. The lines between unskilled, skilled and
multi-skilled were not decided by the possession of a scrap of paper,
whether a trade certificate or a union ticket, as is evidenced by the
clearance records of the ABLF. In Victoria in the mid-1920s, Brother
Hondrien transferred to the Boilermakers, Bro. Perry was cleared to the
Brick, Tile and Pottery union, Bro. Mitten had joined the Storemen and
Packers but hoped to come back to the ABLF, Bro. Ireland rejoined after
having been in business for himself for six months; Bro. Bray asked to
be cleared to the Carters and Drivers while Bro. Hammell returned to the
boot trade.
Because the AWU in Queensland claimed
coverage for almost every unskilled and semi-skilled occupation, less
diversity was apparent in Brisbane on 29 May 1928 when two-thirds of the
37 new members for the ABLF came from the AWU; the other 14 had been
with the Boilermakers, Seamen’s, Engineers, Iron workers, Furniture
Trades, Foodstuffs, Saddlers and Railways, while three had no union
attachments. The July meeting admitted one ironworker, one seaman and
two carters, two flour millers and a pair of storemen and packers, not
to mention one from the Asylum Employees.
Vocabularies contribute clues about
interchanges between industries. “Navvy” had its origins in
navigator. The goldfields warning “yo-ho” that the traps were coming
was later the call for knock-off time on building sites.
To indicate that a site had been cleared of scabs, an ABLF organiser in
1913 used “Zambucked”, from a patent ointment, Zambuck, popular
among cement workers and shearers.
Much of the jargon and most of the knots used by scaffolders and riggers
derived from seamen, known around the building game as “shellbacks”.
Craft barriers had fractured in an
economy where the demand for buildings outran the supply of tradesmen
who had served out their apprenticeship. Indeed, the new chum tradesman
found himself at a disadvantage because he lacked “colonial
experience”, a quality which involved a willingness to make-do, to
perform as an all-rounder and to get along with other workers without
expecting deference.
Eight-Hours activist Ben Douglass had been apprenticed to a plumber in
the
United Kingdom
, landed in
Melbourne
in 1855 as a bricklayer, a year later became the foundation President of
the Operative Plasterers’ Society and helped to organise labourers.
The latter picked up the rudiments of skill from the tradesmen they
assisted, while learning knacks from fellow labourers, to make
themselves into the “skilled unskilled”.
Settlers adapted building methods to
local materials in processes memorialised as “Stringing bark and green
hide is the mainstay of
Australia
”.
This improvising was as prevalent on city buildings as on bush huts,
helping the wattle from wattle-and-daub to become a national emblem.
After the spread of Veneer saws from 1867, a wood-carver lamented that
his skills were not wanted: “the business has degenerated to
third-rate found work.”
Sydney
carpenters complained in the winter of 1882 that they were being paid
less than hod-carriers although the construction business was brisk and
all the other building trades were doing well. The Bulletin
suggested that carpenters were suffering because their branch now
included lots of jumped-up men, with few capacities.
The apprenticeship system was failing.
Labourers with aptitude had absorbed the basics to compete against
accredited tradesmen. During the 1888 strike by
Melbourne
carpenters, they complained about being treated worse than labourers.
Fifteen years later, the Carpenters’ Society in
Sydney
objected because “so many men jumped the trade in this country, they
come along as carpenters’ labourers, and afterwards they come on as
carpenters.”
House-painting had turned into “a kind
of casual trade for all sorts to enter.”
The Trades Hall Gazette remarked
in 1889 that a man could be a dish-washer one day and a “painter”
the next.
Next year, one Master Painter reported that he had dismissed seven men
who had claimed to be tradesmen but, in truth, were failed “Tailors,
boot-makers, grocers and drapers all.” He feared that such untrained
brush-hands went from job to job picking up a knack here, or a trick
there, until, after a few months, they styled themselves as contractors.
Bricklaying became less skilled from 1880
with a simpler criss-crossing, known as the Colonial Bond,
and after the standardisation of cement during the1890s.
Builders’ labourer was once synonymous with the hod-carrier who
oversaw the whole job, from preparing the mortar (mud) to keeping up the
supply of bricks, thereby learning enough to tender for a labour-only
contract to erect a brick wall, though not to set an arch or weave a
chimney.
A navvy might assemble a gang to excavate, and, after the 1890s, to lay
the concrete foundations.
Just as the colour of cement drew its descriptor from Portland stone, so
did its application displace stonemasons, even for the facings of
Sydney
’s Trades Hall in 1891.
The determination among tradesmen to hold
the line between themselves and their offsiders grew in reaction to the
porousness of demarcations around the jobs. As a bricklayer remarked in
1890: “It was not a nice thing for a man to have to work for a master
who at one time had carried bricks to him.”
Tradesmen got their own back each winter when, according to a
Melbourne
labourer, they “rush into our ranks and take work out of their line,
at a wage they know they cannot live on … until their trade brightens
up.”
The ABLF’s Federal President reported in 1913 on
a large number of contractors working the
same as the men. These small contractors in villa work act as carpenters
and bricklayers and sometimes help the plasterers. They will be working
on the jobs just the same as a tradesman, taking their place with them.
During the 1916 lockout in
Tasmania
, the ABLF accepted that carpenters were not scabbing because
“carpenters’ labourers have never been in vogue in
Hobart
, it is a very fine line of demarcation,”
which was true for suburbs on the mainland, and throughout the country
districts. Hence, the distinctions between a building tradesman and his
assistant were not always as sharp as those between that assistant and
the navvy. A hierarchy, if not an aristocracy, existed among labourers.
Monash had discerned a gradation even between the navvies capable of
wielding a pick and those limited to the shovel.
The fraying of skill barriers contributed
to equality’s coming to mean not just that Mick thought that he was as
good as his master, but that Mick could become self-employed, even a
master, if only for a time. The Master Builders’ Association in NSW
declared itself “open to the ambitious mechanic who aspired to
establish a business of his own.” Its official history observed in
1923 that “the ranks of the Master Builders” were still “recruited
from those of the workmen.”
Nonetheless, freedom from a display of deference lasted longer for the
proletariat than independence from wage-slavery did for individual
labourers.
Their rising and falling added
intricacies to the making of the Australian working class. Commentators
once emphasised the differences between the tradesmen and the miners,
shearers, tailoresses and boot-makers who established “New Unionism”
from the 1870s.
The quest for benefits was not the dividing line between the Craft
Societies and the labourers whose need was greater because of their
higher rate of harms. The AR&PWEU provided £20 for burials, or for
any member who had to leave the trade.
The ABLF and the ULPS also maintained funds for injured brethren, and
buried their dead.
Previous discussions of the spatial
dimension in the self-making of the labour movement have traced the
creation of trust through local disputes. Students of skill demarcations
have exposed the fissiparous effects on solidarity. Such investigations
enrich our understanding and alert us to the variegated experiences
within class consciousness.
The next task will be neither to inscribe a stasis nor to track
mobilities, but to plot the dynamics of their intersections within the
needs of contending classes.
IV. Cycles of
capital
The significance of mobility in the formation of union solidarity, class
consciousness or a national ethos is conditioned by the multiple needs
of wage-earners, the self-employed and the employers. Their reproduction
as classes generates conflicts with orders of complexity which here can
only be indicated.
To the extent that labourers became
nomadic improvisers in order to put food on the table, that
characteristic is peculiar neither to bush workers and builders’
labourers, nor to the nineteenth century.
The expense of maintaining two tables was a disincentive to married
wage-earners’ going away for a job,
while single workers who moved out of home lost the subsidy that
households provided to the socially necessary costs of reproducing their
labour power.
When the ABLF
accepted a reduction in weekly earnings in 1913 to secure a shorter
week, one official explained that a “man could save a lot of
money by repairing his own and his children’s boots in the spare time
and could help to improve his house and do many things like that.”
Another official assured Higgins that his men “would often make up for
the loss of wages by giving more time to the cultivation of vegetables
for the table in their little plots of ground.”
Higgins choice of “bizarre” to describe this preference for time
over cash indicated the distance between the life of the judge and that
of the navvy, a gap which afflicts scholars who overlook the persistence
of the domestic economy.
The situation of small holders was more
time-bound, altering as the cash economy penetrated rural life, sending
selectors and their sons away shearing or onto the construction of
railways, silos and reservoirs. The
more of their needs, both personal and productive, that the farmers had
to buy in, the more of their produce they had to exchange for money.
Once they concentrated on commodities for sale, they had taken the first
step towards becoming commodities themselves, a challenge they met by
improvising co-operatives and Country Parties.
The expansion of money-capital is not the
same as its territorial extension,
but can occur within a domain already dominated by a body of capitals
through their nation-market-state.
Although the expanded reproduction of individual capitals and of
aggregate capital most often involves a spatial dimension in order to
secure materials and customers, the purpose of that physical extension
of production-capital and of commodity-capital is to contribute to the
growth of money-capital.
Its expansion depends, first, on the reach of the power of the state,
and secondly, on the disciplining of labour time, with agents of capital
extending the former to achieve the latter.
Capitalists are torn between the need for
mobility among their employees and the need to tie them down once they
start work. At issue is “not simple geographical mobility … but
mobility beyond the spatial boundaries of organisational coherence,”
as became apparent at Swan River in the late 1820s when Mr Thomas Peel
moved outside the labour discipline upheld by the state.
For as long as the outback was a terra
nullius as far as the capitalist mode of production was concerned,
employers replaced convict chains and the lash with Masters’ and
Servants’ Acts.
Those means of coercion had to be backed by the shadow, and sometimes,
the substance of the gun. The absence of armed force compounded the
problems that Bruce encountered around Kyneton in 1861 when the Imperial
contingent had been dispatched against the Maori,
limiting the state’s ability to uphold the law of supply and demand.
In later moments of crisis, the state sent
artillery to
Newcastle
in 1888, Gatling guns to Barcaldine in 1891, and troopers into the NSW
sheds in 1894.
In addition to armed force, capital needs
a reserve army of labourers to hold down labour costs, but also to be
ready to begin work as soon as opportunities arise for adding value.
Capitalists lose money if they incur interest charges while scrounging
for hands. Moreover, an oversupply of labour helps a contractor to get
one project finished in time to take on another before the business
cycle has turned down.
Capitalists also lose money when they pay
workers who are not adding value. A Bulletin
contributor claimed in 1894 that “labour’s own legs brought labour
without cost to capital’s door.”
It was more precise to say that the rural employers’ provisioning of
swagmen cost capital less than a rail ticket and on wages during
travelling time, while labourers were not adding value. The safety
bicycle reduced those times and costs, relieving pastoralists of feeding
their shearers’ horses and allowing the teams to reach more sheds
during a season.
On building sites, contractors stood
workers down for blocks of 15 minutes while waiting for materials to
arrive or the rain to stop. When Justice Higgins granted the ABLF a 20
percent loading for “lost time” in the 1913 Award, he contended that
this higher hourly rate was to “the advantage of employers” who
needed “to have a number of men holding themselves attached to the
building trade, ready to take a job in that trade when it is offered,
and waiting for the offer.”
Higgins further argued that if workers lost too much time, they would
quit the industry, depriving employers and the public of the benefits
from those who served by waiting. Experience provided little support for
Higgins’ argument. For as long as the level of unemployment ran
between five and ten percent, Messrs Construction Capital did not need
to pay a loading for lost time to attract labourers.
Marx recognised that, to minimise
circulation costs, capital pursues “the annihilation of space by
time”.
This rule rarely applies to the structures on which building and
construction labourers add value, since few can be moved from their
point of production,
despite the long experience with prefabrication. Money-capital
moves more easily, generating a demand for office space as exemplified
by the construction of Equitable Insurance offices for Melbourne and
Sydney in the early 1890s. Apart from speculators, buildings
usually have been sold before their foundations are dug. This
arrangement shifts the time-costs of capital back to the client who, in
turn, limits that charge through progress payments and penalties for
delay, risks that the contractors pass on to their labourers through
speed-ups, causing injuries to stay fifty percent higher in the sector
than throughout the economy.
Looking
backward, glancing forward
Ineluctable elements in the expansion of money-capital erase neither the
sectoral particularities of that process, nor the socio-cultural
inheritances within which it operates. Alertness to the specifics of
time and space is essential to locating the Legend within class conflict
and for pondering why Ward’s version focused on pastoral workers and
was innocent of Marxism.
Ward had developed his ideas during the decades when
Australia
rode on the sheep’s back,
publishing The Australian Legend
as the economy sustained a building boom for the first time in sixty
years. Those circumstances did not prevent N. G. Butlin from
representing urban construction as the motor of the boom from 1860 to
1890, Eric Fry from researching the metropolitan working classes in the
1880s, or George Nadel from exploring urban culture in the
mid-Nineteenth century.
Yet, Ward’s “Apotheosis of the Nomad Tribe” was contemporary in
its defence of socialism-as-being-mates against the individualism of
Yankee imperialism, a contrast which Ward spotlighted in the concluding
chapter, “Two Noble Frontiersmen”.
The Australian Legend was part
of the folk revival as an alternative to Coca-colaisation, an academic
parallel to the Communist Party’s backing of the 1953 musical Reedy River and the launch in 1954 of
Overland
, with his masthead “Temper Democratic, Bias Australian”.
The failure of that manoeuvre by radical
nationalists confirms why our understanding of the “myth” about
“‘the typical Australian’” cannot be advanced by adopting either
inner
Sydney
or the bush as its matrix. For a start, the growth of the cities had
been possible because of gold and the fleece, with railways and
timber-getting as linkages.
The crux of the Legend is not a divide between the city and the bush,
but rather their interactions within the conflicts between wage-labour
and capital. Hence, the
materials presented above do not pose mutually exclusive determinants,
neither nomadism versus neighbourliness, cabinet-making against bush
carpentry, nor builders’ labourers in place of pastoral workers.
Analysing other segments of the workforce to enrich our apprehension of
the Legend invites researchers to emulate the improvising nomads.
Humphrey McQueen is researching
builders’ labourers and their unions.
Russel Ward, The Australian Legend,
Oxford
University
Press,
Melbourne
, 1958, pp. 1-2.
The bush labourer, A. J. Sullivan, recognised from his earliest
encounters with shearers and labourers in the 1870s “the
irreparable damage – mentally, physically and morally – that
John Barleycorn was doing, and had done. The saddest phase” of the
men’s drunkenness “was their cynical pessimism and their cramped
and distorted views on social subjects.” Builders’
Labourers News (BLN),
7 July 1916
, p. 5, and
4 August 1916
, p. 1. A Victorian
organiser with
the Australian Builders’ Labourers’ Federation (ABLF) in 1924
named “Mr Booze”, SP bookies and card games as the obstacles to
collecting dues, ABLF Victorian Branch Minutes, 1 September 1924,
Noel Butlin Archives Centre (NBAC), Australian National University (ANU),
Z398/20.
Ward returned to the urban question in “The Australian Legend
Re-Visited”, Historical
Studies, 18 (71), October 1978, pp. 183-90.
Beginning with words and ending with words, Graeme Davison, John
Hirst and John Rickard discovered that the makers of the legend had
had more in common with academics like themselves than with those
who were “sceptical about the value … of intellectual and
cultural pursuits generally.” (Ward,
Legend, op. cit., p. 2.) Graeme Davison, “Sydney and the Bush: an urban
context for the Australian Legend”, Historical
Studies, 18 (71), October 1978, pp. 191-209; J. B. Hirst,
“The Pioneer Legend”, Historical
Studies, 18 (71), October 1978, pp. 316-37; John Rickard,
“National Character and the Typical Australian’: An Alternative
to Russel Ward”, Journal of
Australian Studies, 4, June 1979, pp.12-21.
Similarly, a special issue of Australian
Cultural History on “The Cult of Practicality” in 1989
ventured no further into the world of work than ideas about
education and training.
Flemming Mikkelsen, “Working-Class Formation in
Europe
and Forms of Integration: History and Theory”, Labor
History (
USA
), 46 (3), August 2005, pp. 277-306.
The 1834 Poor Laws spurred the
mobility of rural labourers while the abolition of protection for
grains during the 1840s aimed to reduce the costs of reproducing
labour. Debates continue around Karl Polyani’s 1944 account of the
interplay of those commodities, The
Great Transformation, Beacon Press,
Boston
, 1957. The effect of “free trade” was not felt in full in the
United Kingdom
until the 1870s by which time railways were carrying crops to the
foreign ports from where the costs of trans-oceanic shipping also
declined. In addition, see the debate about the quest for a staple
export from Australia, J. W. McCarthy, “The Staple Approach in
Australian Economic History”, Business
Archives and History, IV (1), February 1964, pp. 1-22.
Linda Clarke, Building
Capitalism, Historical Change & the Labour Process in the
Production of the Built Environment, Routledge, London, 1992; M.
B. and C. B. Schedvin, “The nomadic tribes of urban Britain: a
prelude to Botany Bay”, Historical Studies, 18 (71), October 1978, pp. 254-76.
Fifty building tradesmen from Sydney arrived in San Francisco in
October 1906 to help with reconstruction after the earthquake,
Michael Kazin, Barons of
Labor, The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the
Progressive Era, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1987, p.
125; the foundation Secretary of the ABLF left for the USA in 1912,
National Archives of Australia (NAA), B1958 (B1958/1), 9/1912,
[hereafter 1913 Transcript],
p. 250.
Town and Country Journal,
25 July 1885, p. 171c-d, and 7 May 1892, p. 16d, mentioned by
Richard Waterhouse, “The Vision Splendid: Conceptualizing the
Bush, 1813-1913”, Journal of Popular Culture, 33 (1), Summer 1999, pp. 23-34. Morrissey
listed “labourer” as the occupation of a third of the Kelly
sympathisers, though the line between that category of work and the
selectors or shearers who made up the rest is likely to have been a
distinction with little difference, Doug Morrissey, “Ned Kelly’s
sympathisers”, Historical
Studies, 18 (71), October 1978, pp. 293 and 296.
John Merritt, History
of the AWU, OUP, Melbourne, 1986, pp. 43 & 23. The
tussles between the AWU and the ABLF for coverage of several types
of labouring grew out of the mosaic of jobs that their members had
to create to keep food on their tables. Transfers between the ABLF
and the AWU multiplied because so many ABLF members went shearing.
After the United Labourers’
Protective Society (ULPS) exchanged tickets with the AWU in
1903, two ULPS members who went to
Western Australia
had their cards accepted even after the formal agreement had expired
back East, ULPS Minutes,
Mitchell Library (ML) MSS 262/7 (1).
ULPS Minutes,
31 January 1900
, &
11 March 1901
, ML MSS 262/6 (9).
Jim Moss, Representatives
of discontent: history of the Communist Party in South Australia
1921-1981, Communist and Labour Movement History Group,
Melbourne, 1983, p. 8;
labourers from Broken Hill continued to move onto Adelaide, notably,
the last Federal President of the ABLF, Ron Owens, who started work
aged 13 in 1947 in a bakery, took station jobs and went shearing in
Queensland before returning to his birthplace to mine underground
and then left for Adelaide where he drove a truck for a soft-drink
company and started labouring on construction in 1964, interview, 7
July 2005.
1913 Transcript,
p. 489; Millard had earlier played down the drift to other
industries, p. 21.
BLN,
7 July 1916
, p. 3.
Printed in Labour History,
40, May 1981, pp. 93-94; Patsy Adam-Smith, The
Lore of the Railwaymen, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1969; Terry
Coleman, The Railway Navvies,
The Men Who Made the Railways, Hutchinson, London, 1965.
Argus,
30 May 1890
, p. 6d; the Chaffeys lamented a scarcity of labour in rural
districts, Mildura Cultivator (MC),
17 April 1890
, p. 6.
MC,
29 May 1890
, p. 7. The Mildura-based Land, Trade and Labour Union of Australia
wanted to combine station hands, roustabouts and swagmen with
labourers and tradesmen as a rival for the Shearers’
Union
, MC,
29 May 1890
, p. 7.
Bulletin,
23 September 1894
, p. 23b.
West Australian (WA), 5 March 1897, p. 4g,
20 March 1897
, p. 5b and
3 April 1897
, p. 5a; Jill Roe, Beyond
belief: theosophy in Australia 1879-1939, University of New
South Wales Press, Kensington, 1986, pp. 36 and 118.
WA,
13 March 1897
, p. 12c,
10 June 1897
, p. 4g; Verity Burgmann, In
our time: socialism and the rise of Labor, 1885-1905, George
Allen & Unwin, North Sydney, 1985, p. 163.
BLN, in six parts from 7 July
to
13 October 1916
. His brother Charlie took out the first ticket in the Wagga
Wagga Amalgamated Shearers’
Union
, ML MSS A2886;
segments of Charlie’s memoirs ran in the Australian Worker from 5 February to
4 March 1936
, usually on page 7.
Henry Hannah, Affidavit, p. 5, NAA, A1007 (A10071/1) 1914/1.
ABLF, Victorian Branch
Minutes, 25 August and
3 November 1926
,
28 May 1928
, NBAC, Z398/20.
Stuart Macintyre,
Militant, the Life and Times
of Paddy
Troy
, George Allen & Unwin,
North Sydney
, 1984, pp. 12-14 and 54-55.
Labour History,
1981, op. cit., p. 94.
Argus,
14 August 1861
, p. 5a,
15 August 1861
, p. 5b & e.
Argus,
5 August 1861
, p. 5c-d. Bruce had been summoned over the non-payment of wages, Argus,
24 May 1861
, p. 5a.
Argus, 6
August 1861, p. 5b; 150 followed a green flag emblazoned with
the Harp of Erin;
the Argus correspondent
thought that rumour had run riot more than the navvies.
Argus, 7
August 1861, p. 4g; the navvies wanted 30s a week but not 5s a day
because broken time during the winter rains meant that they could
not earn 30s a week, Argus,
5 August 1861, p. 5d.
Argus,
7 August 1861
, p. 4g.
Mt Alexander Mail,
14 August 1861
, p. 3d.
Argus, 4 July 1860, p. 3g,
and 3 October 1860, p. 6c; cf. letter from “A Navvy”, Age,
9 December 1870, p. 3g. For the Truck system as a method of labour
discipline see Samuel Cohn, “Keeping the Navvies in Line:
Variations in Work Discipline Among British Railways Construction
Crews”, Louise T. Lilly and Charles Lilly (eds), Class
Conflict and Collective Action, Sage,
Beverley
Hills
, 1981, pp. 143-66.
Mt Alexander Mail,
19 August 1861
, p. 2 c-d; the chairman complained that some leading
citizens had absented themselves.
Age, 6 August 1861, p. 5b;
Mt Alexander Mail, 8 August 1861, p. 6d, 21 August 1861, p. 2b,
and 23 August 1861, p. 3d-f; Herald, 7 August 1861, p. 4d.
Mt Alexander Mail,
8 August 1861
, p. 6d, 21 August 1861, p. 2b, and
23 August 1861
, p. 3d-f.
The Argus fumed that, by
taking advantage of the labour shortage, the navvies were laying the
foundation for a future loss to themselves since high wages would
discourage investors from new projects when conditions returned to
whatever was normal in the colonies. Argus,
16 August 1861
, p. 4e; Herald,
8 August 1861
, p. 4d.
Letter from “A
Navvy” (Gisborne), Argus,
11 May 1860
, p. 7b.
The
presence of families here unsettles the notion of a gender imbalance
of up-country life as a source of mateship’s compensating for the
absence of white women, Ward, op.
cit., pp. 88-90. The skerricks of information I encountered
about how itinerants related to the household economy neither
confirm nor deny the masculinist bias of the type. [see note 96
below] Similar questions arise about the relationship of the legend
to intellectual pursuits and religion if bush workers spent periods
of their lives in urban districts, and more so once schools followed
itinerants, see Graham Wilson, “Public Schools Along the Great
Western Railway Line from Tamworth to the Queensland Border”, Journal
and Proceedings, Armidale and District Historical Society, 50,
2007, pp. 71-83.
Argus,
28 August 1861
, p. 6b. On the same day, a
Melbourne
man got one month’s hard labour for stealing a coat.
Denis Rowe, “The Robust Navvy: the Railway Construction Worker in
Northern New South Wales
, 1854-1894”, Labour History,
39, November 1980, pp. 28-48; Peter Chambers, “The Big Family:
Railway Workers in Armidale”, Journal
and Proceedings, Armidale and District Historical Society, 50,
2007, pp. 51-70.
Trades Hall Gazette (THG),
28 July 1888
, p. 7,
29 December 1888
, p. 4
General Labourers’ Union Records, NBAC,
Z491/8.
To
what extent did the survival of the ASU and the success of the AWA
depend on the interweaving of the small selectors who went shearing
with the mining settlements, so that the Shearers’ Unions
piggy-backed on the more settled membership of the Miners’
Association? Mining was
ignored by Bede Nairn, Civilising
Capitalism, The Labor Movement in
New South Wales
1870-1900, ANU Press,
Canberra
, 1973.
In explaining why miners made
their stand around Ballarat late in 1854, and not earlier, or
elsewhere, Geoffrey Blainey stressed the more settled life around
the pits than on alluvial finds, The Rush That Never Ended, MUP,
Parkville
, 1964, chapter 4.
Merritt, op. cit., p. 102;
Australasian Pastoralists’
Review,
15 September 1894
, p. 321.
Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, Selected
Works, Volume I, Foreign Language Publishing House,
Moscow
, 1958, p. 360.
Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach”, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,
Collected Works, Volume 5,
Lawrence
and Wishart,
London
, 1976, p. 6. The analysis of space in the formation of class
consciousness starts from the processes of hominisation discussed in
Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels, The German
Ideology, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1938, Part I;
Karl Marx, “Introduction”, Contribution
to the Critique of Political Economy, Progress Publishers,
Moscow, 1970, pp. 188-217; and Karl Marx, Pre-Capitalist
Economic Formations, New World Paperbacks, New York, 1964, pp.
88-99.
“In so far as millions of families live under economic conditions
of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests and
their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in
hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. In so far as
there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding
peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no community,
no national bond and no political organisation among them, they do
not form a class.” Marx-Engels,
Collected Works, volume
11, Lawrence & Wishart,
London
, 1979, pp. 187-88.
The Wren machine in Collingwood, like the Loughnans’ in Richmond
and Keegan’s in the Glebe, connected sport, religion and municipal
politics; Chris McConville, “John Wren, Machine Boss, Irish
Chieftain, or Meddling Millionaire?”, Labour
History, 40, May 1981, pp. 49-76; Janet McCalman, Struggletown:
portrait of an Australian working-class community, Penguin,
Richmond, 1988; Michael Hogan,
Local labor: a history of the
Labor Party in Glebe, 1891-2003, Federation Press, Annandale,
2004.
Lynne Strahan, At the edge of
the centre: a history of Williamstown, Hargreen Publishing Co.,
Williamstown, 1994, chapter 6.
THG,
29 September 1888
, p. 6.
Australian Trades and Labour Journal,
19 October 1889
, p. 5.
BLN,
12 May 1916
, p. 3; in March 1912, a reform ticket routed an executive
which had appointed an outsider as coach, the incoming officials
campaigning on “Richmond for the Richmondites”, Brian Hansen, Tigerland: the history of the Richmond Football Club from 1885,
Richmond Former Players’ and Officials’ Association, Melbourne,
1989, p. 34.
ML MSS 262/6 (9); NSW
Industrial Arbitration Reports, 2, 1903, pp. 32-49 &
226-230; Peter Sheldon, “In Division is Strength: Unionism Among
Sydney Labourers, 1890-1910”, Journal
of Industrial Relations, 35 (3), November 1992, pp. 43-59.
Although a Western Australian attended a Sydney Conference in 1912
to form a national union of general labourers, the State’s
Builders’ Labourers’ Union did not join the ABLF until the
1960s; Argus, 26 June
1912: 13c, and 24 July 1912: 15d; Mark Hearn
and Harry Knowles, One Big
Union, A History of the Australian Workers Union 1886-1994,
Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1996, p. 126.
quoted in Anne P. O’Brien, “The Poor in
New South Wales
, 1880-1918”, Ph. D. Thesis,
University
of
Sydney
, 1982, pp. 22-23.
Martin Heidegger,
“Building Dwelling Thinking”, Poetry,
Language, Thought, Perennial,
New York
, 2001, pp. 143-59.
See my “The
embarrassment of nationalism: a love that does not have a name”, Manning Clark House Newsletter, 31, September 2007, pp. 17-20.
Age,
12 January 1898
, p. 5g.
Argus, 21
August 1861, p. 6b, 28 August 1861, 4f and p. 6b-c; see E. J.
Hobsbawm and George Rude, Captain
Swing, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1969, chapter 14.
John Kellett, “Bread
or Blood, 1865”, Raymond Evans and Carole Ferrier (eds), Radical Brisbane, an unruly history, Vulgar Press, Melbourne, 2004,
pp. 42-44.
Anxious for news, immigrants were
often closer to “home” in their thoughts than if they had moved
only to a different county in
Britain
. When commenting on local strikes for “the boon”, Melbourne
editors in 1860 referred to the lockout of British building workers
over their claim for a nine-hour day, Argus,
5 November 1860, p. 5f, and 23 November 1860, p. 4f; Raymond
Postgate, Builders’ history,
National Federation of Building Trade Operatives, London, 1923, pp.
174-6.
THG,
2 February 1889
, p. 10.
J. H. Disney, Victorian
Parliamentary Debates, volume 161,
4 November 1922
, pp. 1666-7.
Victorian ABLF Minutes,
18 August 1924
,
29 March 1926
and
14 May 1928
, NBAC Z398/20.
Australian Building & Construction Employees and Builders’
Labourers’ Federation, Federal Council,
30 October 1973
, NBAC, N130/18; see my “Lessons from Defeat: The 1927 Claim for a
40-hour Week by Queensland Building Industry Unions”, Queensland
Journal of Labour History, 3, September 2006, pp. 16-46.
In the words of biologist Steven
Rose: “Memories are living processes, which become transformed,
imbued with new meanings, each time we recall them”, The
Making of Memory, From Molecules to Mind, Anchor, New York,
1992, p. 2.
ML MSS 2980, CY
731.
Henry
Hannah rode a bike to
work, leaving his Northcote home at 7.10 am and getting back at 5.50
pm., though when he had worked at Rippon Lea, he set out an hour
earlier and returned over an hour later, to be away for nearly 13
hours a day, 1913 Transcript, p. 142; Victorian official Dick Loughnan told Justice Higgins that he
had had to travel to the outlying areas to find a job once he became
known as a union activist, 1913
Transcript, pp. 379 and 398.
ABLF, Victorian
Branch Minutes,
25 August and
3 November 1926
, NBAC, Z398/20.
Fryer Library,
University
of
Queensland
, ABLF,
Queensland
Branch Minutes, QUFL 166.
In
2002, a quarter of the members of the Construction Division of the
CFMEU had joined in the past year, and 45% in the previous three
years. Workplace Health and
Safety, Discussion Paper 6, Royal Commission on Building and
Construction Industry,
Canberra
, 2002, p. 27.
Ward, op. cit., p. 110; 1913 Transcript, p. 156.
BLN,
28 April 1916
, p. 1.
1913 Transcript, pp. 516-7; Architecture,
November 1924, p. 7.
For a first-hand
reaction see Australasian
Engineering and Machinery (B&EJ),
January 1912, p. 13.
S. Merrifield,
“Benjamin Douglass (1830-1904)”, Australian
Dictionary of Biography, volume 4, MUP,
Carlton
, 1972, p. 93.
Higgins distinguished “skills” that required special training
from “knacks” to be picked up on the job, 1913 Transcript,
p. 320; in NSW, Judge Heydon had drawn similar lines, see Ben
Maddison, “‘The skillful unskilled labourer’: The Decline of
Artisanal Discourse of Skill in the NSW Arbitration Court,
1905-15”, Labour History, 93, November 2007, pp. 73-86; Charles Fahey,
“Unskilled Male Labour and the Beginnings of Labour Market
Regulation, Victoria, 1901-1914”, Australian
Historical Studies, 33 (118), April 2002, pp. 143-60. Labourers
knew that the skill they needed most was how to survive by
“following the job”, 1913
Transcript, p. 610.
Ward, op. cit., pp. 81-82.
Libby Robin, How
a Continent Created a Nation, UNSW Press, Kensington, 2007, p.
189; Henry J. Cowan, From
Wattle and Daub to Concrete and Steel, MUP,
Carlton
, 1998.
Robin Boyd, Australia’s Home,
Penguin, Ringwood, 1968, p. 47; B&EJ,
11 February 1893, p. 58; the editor offered a Ruskinite critique of
an architecture in which art had declined because it did not pay, 22
April 1893, pp. 147-8.
Bulletin,
24 June 1882
, p. 1.
John Shields,
“Deskilling Revisited: Continuity and Change in craft work and
apprenticeship in late Nineteenth-century
New South Wales
”, Labour History, 68,
March 1995, pp. 1-29.
THG,
22 December 1888
, p. 9.
George Waite, Carpenters’ Transcript, Court of Arbitration, NSW,
No 2 of 1903, p. 379, ML MSS 208.
Jeff Rich, “Victorian Building Workers and their Unions,
1860-1890”, Ph. D., ANU, 1993,
p. 60.
THG,
13 April 1889
, p. 8.
B&EJ,
1 March 1890, p. 77; in the 1920s, ready-mixed paints encouraged
householders to do their own jobs, Decorator
& Painter, May 1929, p. 218; June 1929, p. 258, July 1929,
p. 277, August 1929, pp. 309-10; 311-13; competition was less acute
for decorators, August 1929, pp. 311-13. One Master Painter welcomed
the ready-mixed paints for their reduction of labour time,
characterising the resisters as being stuck with the view that
“there is only one paint – that is, one made from English white
lead, linseed oil and patent driers. They must dig the lead from the
can, knock it up with a stick and strain it through a piece of
Hessian or stocking.” September 1929, p. 355; for the impact of
pressed-metal ceilings on plasterers see Susan Bures, The
House of Wunderlich, Kangaroo Press, Kenthurst, 1987.
David Denholm, The
Colonial Australians, Penguin, Ringwood, 1979, chapter 5; Rich, op.
cit., p. 88; Nathaniel Lloyd, History
of English brickwork, H. Grenville Montgomery, London, 1925.
B&EJ, 6
February 1892, pp. 56-7; 5 March 1892, pp. 99-100; 5 May 1894, pp.
139-40; Miles Lewis, (ed.), Two
hundred years of concrete in Australia, Concrete Institute of
Australia, Sydney, 1988.
1913 Transcript, pp. 419 and 468.
1913 Transcript, pp. 20 and 269.
Ray Markey,
“New Unionism in
Australia
, 1880-1900”, Labour history,
48, May 1985, p. 19, n. 35.
Australasian Builder and
Contractors’ News,
20 September 1890
, p. 216.
Age,
18 July 1890
, p. 6c; Ray Markey, The
Making of the Labor Party in New South Wales 1880-1900,
University of NSW Press, Kensington, 1988, pp. 34-5 and 45.
1913 Transcript, p. 520.
Letter in BLN,
21 July 1916
, p. 5.
Labour History,
1981, op. cit., p. 93.
J. M. Pringle, A Jubilee
Record, MBA, Sydney, 1923, pp. 13-14, see also Pringle’s Australian
industrial legislation and the building trade 1902-1906; review of
Australian industrial Legislation and the Building Trade, 1926,
MBA, Sydney, 1928, p. 6.
When brickies’ labourers and scaffolders in
Melbourne
set up the United Labourers’ Protection Society in May 1882, W. G.
Spence wrote from Creswick offering the assistance of the Miners’
Association, Trades Advocate
and Friendly Society Journal,
26 May 1883
, p. 7.
THG,
9 February 1889
, p. 10.
From 1912 to
1914, the Victorian Branch of the ABLF distributed £200 each year
from its Mortuary Fund, 1913
Transcript, p. 211. In
Sydney
, the ULPS, between 1919 and 1924, paid out ₤4,500 for
accidents and £1,000 on funerals, ML MSS 208/2 (5).
Examples range from Alan Walker, Coaltown, A Social Study of Cessnock, N.S.W., Melbourne University
Press,
Carlton
, 1945 to Barry Hill, Sitting
In, William Heinemann
Australia
, Port Melbourne, 1991.
August D. Webb, “The Building Trade”, Sidney Webb (ed.), Seasonal
trades, Constable, London, 1912, pp. 312-93, mentioned by
Higgins, 7 Commonwealth
Arbitration Reports
(CAR)
(1913) 210 at 218; William Stanley Parker, “The Problems of
Seasonal Unemployment in the Building Industry”, International
Labour Review, 9 (3), March 1924, pp. 361-71; Gareth Stedman
Jones, Outcast London, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1971, especially Chapter 2;
Jan Kok, Kees Mandemakers and Henk Wals, “City Nomads: Changing
Residence as a Coping Strategy, Amsterdam, 1890-1940”. Social
Science History, 29 (1), Spring 2005, pp. 15-44.
1913 Transcript, pp. 133 and 522.
Seamus O’Hanlon, Together
apart: boarding house, hotel and flat life in pre-war Melbourne,
Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2003, pp. 32-34 and 47. Men and women contributed within the household and for barter, (see note
34 above). For instance, Dobeson helped his wife to make him
an overcoat, which they later sold, as
Mrs Dobeson did her dress-making in 1889, ML MSS 2980, CY
731. These earnings suggest that married women did more paid work
than appeared in Coghlan’s statistics; see also Ben Maddison, “
‘De-Skilling’ the 1891 Censuses in New South Wales and
Tasmania”, Australian
Journal of Politics and History, 53 (4), December 2007, pp.
505-18.
Access to a garden plot varied with
the suburb, but one employer complained that “all classes of
gardeners round Melbourne have a miniature general nursery at the
back of their cottage ready to supply those who will buy at a
cheaper rate than the legitimate nursery-men.” Journal
of Horticulture,
7 June 1907
, p. 218.
For the significance of rent see
Frederick Engels, The Housing
Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1970, pp. 11-12 and 45,
and for the significance of labour which does not itself produce
surplus value, see Claude Meillassoux, Maidens, Meal and Money, Capitalism and the Domestic Community,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981.
1913 Transcript, p. 458.
7 CAR
(1913) 210 at 229.
Humphrey McQueen,
A New Britannia, revised
edition, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2004, pp. 262-3.
Ellen Meiskins Wood, Empire of
Capital, Verso, London, 2003; canals and railways offer
intermediate cases, see Marc Linder, Projecting
Capitalism, A History of the Internationalisation of the
Construction Industry, Greenwood Press, Westport, 1994.
“Distance” subjected thinking about settler Australia to a
tyranny of cliché after Blainey reworked insights proposed by the
Tasmanian Marxist Ken Dallas, who argued back in “The Fallacy of
Remoteness”, Tasmanian
Historical Research Association, Papers and Proceedings, 16 (2),
September 1968, pp. 55-60.
For the three circuits of capital, Karl Marx, Capital,
II, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1957; see my “What
happened in Globalisation?”, Journal
of Australian Political Economy, 51, June 2003, esp. pp. 115-26.
Doreen Massey, Spatial
divisions of labour: social structures and the geography of
production, Macmillan, Houndsmill, 1995 edition, p. 56; see also
Edward W. Soja, “The Socio-Spatial Dialectic”, Annals
of the Association of American Geographers, 70 (2), June 1980,
pp. 207-25; Jamie Peck, Work
Place, The Social Regulation of Labour Markets, Guilford, New
York, 1996; Ellen Meiskins
Wood, “Global capital, national states”, Mark Rupert and Hazel
Smith (eds) Historical
Materialism and Globalisation, Routledge, London, 2002, pp.
17-39; and Andrew Herod, “Workers, Space and Labor Geography”, International
Labor and Working-Class History, 64, 2003, pp. 112-138.
Social, cultural and political
dimensions of the move from convictism were surveyed by George
Nadel, Australia’s Colonial
Culture, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge
,
Mass.
, 1957, and Michael Roe, The
Quest for Authority in Eastern Australia, 1835-51, MUP,
Parkville, 1965.
“Unhappy Mr Peel who provided for everything except the export of
English modes of production”, Karl
Marx, Capital, I, Foreign
Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1958, p. 766; one solution was
to import convicts, Mathew Trinca, “The Control and Coercion of
Convicts”, Studies in Western Australian History (SWAH), 24, 2006, pp. 30-32.
Robert J. Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001; Douglas Hay and Paul
Craven (eds), Masters,
servants, and magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562-1955,
University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2004; Rob McQueen,
“Master and Servant Legislation as ‘Social Control’: The Role
of Law in Labour Relations on the Darling Downs 1860-1870”, Law
in Context, 10 (1), 1992, pp. 123-39. Capitalists supplemented
both convict labour and the Masters’ and Servants’ Acts with the
import of indentured workers, Hugh Tinker, A
New System of Slavery, the Export of Indian Labour Overseas,
1830-1920, OUP, London, 1974; K. Dallas, “Slavery in Australia
– Convicts, Emigrants, Aborigines”, THRA, P&P, 16 (2), September 1968, pp. 61-94; Jack Hutson, Penal
Colony to Penal Powers, AEU, Sydney, 1966.
By the twentieth century, the
stop-watch was “suggesting the whip of owners or taskmasters.”
“Editorial”, Australasian
Engineering and Machinery, 1 April 1913; Frank B. Gilbreth, Bricklaying
system, M.C. Clark, New York, 1909; Frederick Winslow Taylor and
Sanford E, Thompson, Concrete
costs: tables and recommendations for estimating the time and cost
of labor operations in concrete construction and for introducing
economical methods of management, Wiley, New York, 1912.
In the opinion of the Herald,
7 August 1861
, p. 4d, they had been ferried from
Melbourne
to shoot “down the New Zealanders as savages because they won’t
sell their land to the Government for an old song.” The biggest
movements of Australian workers in the service of aggregate capital
have been to and from imperialist wars.
Karl Marx, Capital, II,
Foreign Language Publishing House,
Moscow
, 1957, Part II; see
my “Making Capital Tick”,
Overland
, 170, Autumn 2003, pp. 92-101. Sometimes, employers accept
the expense of hoarding the workers who add the most value, or those
whose skills are in short supply. If a building project runs late,
all the surplus value can end up in the hands of bankers and
lawyers, or with the client through penalties.
Bulletin,
1 September 1894
, p. 23b-c; Western Australian settlers resisted keeping
ticket-of-leave men for a year, when they had hardly more than a
month, Trinca, SWAH, 2006, p. 32; “The
homeless man’s preference for migratory work makes him in this
phase quite a valuable member of the work force,” according to
Alan K. Jordan, in charge of Hanover Centre Fitzroy, who prepared a
paper on homeless men for 1964 Royal Commission on Supply and
Consumption of Liquor in Victoria, quoted in John Stubbs, The
Hidden People, Poverty in Australia, Cheshire-Lansdowne,
Melbourne, 1966, p. 85.
Jim Fitzpatrick, Bicycle
and the bush: man and machine in rural Australia, OUP,
Melbourne, 1980, p. 210; Merritt, op.
cit., pp. 59, 73, 147 and 200; unionists breached the eight-hour
day to perform their 44 hours within five days in order to head home
over weekends when working on the SEC in the La Trobe Valley, ABLF
Minutes, 21 November 1936, NBAC, Z398/21, and on the construction of
the national capital, with the foreman carpenter at Parliament House
pedaling to Braidwood, Ann Gugler, Canberra
Construction Camps, early houses and selected documents,
privately published, Canberra, 2001, p. 94.
7 CAR
(1913) 210 at 218. Higgins made aggregate capital pay
builders’ labourers when they were not adding value so that their
weekly incomes approached the basic wage set in the 1907 Harvester
judgement. Elsewhere in the ABLF Award, Higgins ruled that “the
working time of the labourer is time purchased by the employer, who
has the exclusive right to it.” (7 CAR
(1913) 210 at 232)
Only in an extremity did the demand for labourers upset the relative
strengths of the buyers and sellers of labour-power. One such
emergency was the demolition work following the Flinders street fire
in 1897 when the ruins had to be knocked down as quickly as possible
because they were a danger to passing traffic, Age,
22 November 1897, pp. 5-6, 25 November 1897, 5h-i, and
BLN, 12 May 1916, p. 3. A second instance came during the
Great War when a recruiting drive pushed the number of Victorian
volunteers up to 26,000 in July-August 1915, causing the Master
Builders’ Association to offer a 21.8% wage increase to match
rises in the cost of living - but on the “secret” condition that
the ABLF grant “absolute preference” in the supply of labourers
to MBA members, NAA A106 G1921/2019. A few months later, the Masters
offered inducements to the ABLF not to work for price-cutters, BLN,
4 August 1916, p. 4 and 18 August 1916, p. 5.
Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973, p. 524.
Final Report of Royal
Commission on the Building and Construction Industry,
volume six, AGPS,
Canberra
, 2003, p. 11.
Like many intellectuals, Ward
joined the Communist Party to be a more effective anti-fascist, but
unlike several other Party members at the ANU, erstwhile or not,
such as D. W. A. Baker, Eric Fry, Robin Gollan, Bernard Smith and
Oscar Spate, Ward’s scholarly writings showed no sign of political
economy, and only traces of historical materialism, a criticism
which applied to A New
Britannia, but see the “Afterword” to its 2004 revision, pp.
250-90. However, Ward relied on the Marxist founder of Pre-History,
V. Gordon Childe, for more than the title of his 1955 school text, Man Makes History. Ward did manage to reconcile J. V. Stalin, F. J.
Turner and W. K. Hancock, “Ethos of the Pastoral Workers”, Ph.
D. Thesis, ANU, 1955, p. 537.
At the ANU, Professor W. K. Hancock established an interdisciplinary
Wool Seminar from 1957 to 1959, which can now be viewed as an
obituary service for “Old Australia”,
Geoffrey Bolton, “Rediscovering Australia: Hancock and the Wool
Seminar”, D. A. Low (ed.), Keith Hancock, The Legacies of an Historian, MUP, Carlton, 2001, pp.
180-200.
N. G. Butlin,
“The State of the Australian Economy 1860-1890”, Economic
Record, 34 (67), April 1958, pp. 10-29; E. C. Fry, “The
Condition of Urban Wage-Earners in the 1880s”, Ph.D. ANU, 1956;
Nadel, op. cit.
Ward’s comparison coincided with the arrival at the ANU in 1953 of
H. C. Allen, author of Bush
and Backwoods, A
Comparison of the Frontier in Australia and the United States,
Michigan State University Press, Ann Arbor, MI,
1959; Ward did not mention Allen in his memoirs where he
attributed his awareness of Turner’s frontier thesis to C.M.H.
Clark, see A
Radical Life: the autobiography of Russel Ward, Macmillan,
Melbourne, 1988, chapter 10. The contrast of frontiers had been
illustrated in two motion pictures, Harry Watts’ 1946 The Overlanders and Howard Hawks’ 1948
Red River
.
Mark Finnane,
“Censorship and the Child: Explaining the Comics Campaign”, Australian
Historical Studies, 23 (92), April 1989, pp. 229-233; Michael
Sturma, “ The Politics of Dancing: When Rock ‘n’ Roll Came to
Australia
”, Journal of Popular Culture, 25 (4), Spring 1992, pp. 123-42; Square
Dancing posed a equal challenge to the bush dance and country ball.
Peter Groenewegen
and Bruce McFarlane, A History
of Australian Economic Thought, Routledge,
London
, 1990, p. 239n; William Cronon illustrated the dynamics between the
mobility and stasis of commodities around nineteenth-century Chicago
by quoting a British journalist: “The hog is regarded as the most
compact form in which the Indian corn crop … is sent to Chicago as
a package provided by nature for its utilization.” Nature’s
Metropolis, Chicago and the Great West, W. W. Norton,
New York
, 1991, pp. 208-9.
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