Tag Archives: wharfies

The seventh prime minister

26 Sunday Aug 2018

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Two wharf labourers’ unions were formed in Sydney in 1872 – the West Sydney Labouring Men’s Association and the Labouring Men’s Union of Circular Quay. In 1882 they became the Sydney Wharf Labourers’ Union, but this collapsed after the 1890 strike, a strike that ran on the Sydney wharves from 19 August to 5 November. According to the unions, one of the reasons that the strike failed was because:

The whole artillery of daily journalism opened fire upon us. The few breaches of the peace that occurred, so much to the disgust of the [NSW Labour] Defence Committee, were magnified into riots, for which the very principles of Trade Unionism were held responsible. The most trivial circumstances, perverted into acts of intimidation, were gathered like so many rusty nails from the journalistic gutter for explosion in the shape of paragraphic bombs on the following morning. On the other hand, when clerks were dismissed from their employment for refusing to parade as special constables, when sermons and addresses favourable to the cause of labour were delivered by men in responsible public positions, the leader writers maintained an ominous silence.[i]

When the workers returned to the wharves they had to endure a loss of conditions and pay, and the stevedoring and shipping companies blacklisted anyone who attempted to resurrect the unions – so when William (Billy) Hughes started working to establish a Wharf Labourers’ Union at the end of 1899, he did it secretly. His strategy worked, and the union survived. Hughes was elected secretary.

Born in London in 1862, Billy Hughes came to Australia in 1884. By 1893 he was an organiser for the Labor Electoral League, travelling through country NSW, setting up meetings and signing up members to the fledgling party. He stood for parliament himself in 1894, and was elected, earning a decent wage for the first time in his life. In 1902 a national body, the Waterside Workers’ Federation of Australia (WWF), was formed. Hughes became its president, and president of the Trolley, Draymen and Carters’ Union. In 1915 he became Australia’s seventh prime minister but left the Labor Party in 1916, walking out of caucus when the majority of his colleagues rejected conscription, despite his strong support for it. He was expelled from the Labor Party, and within weeks he had been expelled from the unions as well. Hughes retained the prime ministership until 1923, by forming new parties or setting up alliances with others.

 

[i]From the Official Report and Balance Sheet of the NSW Labour Defence Committee, Sydney 1890. Quoted in Select Documents in Australian History 1851-1900, CMH Clark. Angus & Robertson, 1955, p774.

On the wharves

18 Saturday Aug 2018

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Many years after Bennelong’s time, as Bill Gosling told me, Goat Island was the source of a strike.

I tell you what, they had a lot of sheep roaming loose on Goat Island. That was the cause of another disruption, because they had sheep on the island. One day the boss issued an instruction to the men to shear the sheep. They said we’re not bloody shearers and so they all sat down and went on strike.

… Talking about strikes, there was one occasion over Redfern they had a bit of trouble over the lack of repairs to the housing, which they complained they couldn’t get the corrugated iron needed to repair the roofs on all the houses.

And these were wharfies’ houses were they? I asked him.

No, this was general trouble. And a local parson had taken up the case to try and get supplies. There was a ship down in the Darling Harbour and it was loading steel, corrugated steel and that, to go up the islands and this parson chappy went down and addressed the wharfies, told them that the stuff they were exporting was needed at home here. So the wharfies went back to work, and instead of loading any more, they took out what they’d already put in. Of course, that caused a strike. But most of the things, when the wharfies went on strike, they usually had a very good reason and the way the waterfront was being run at the time gave them plenty of reasons. [i]

Bill Gosling was a senior inspector in the shipping branch, and his work covered everything on the waterfront: revenue, services, supplying ships with water, power supply from the shore, checking cargoes and dangerous goods. He was stationed at Glebe Island which, before containers took over shipping, was the main general cargo section of the waterfront.

I was Senior Patrolman, policing regulations, making sure that everyone had done the right thing … [One] time, I was working on a tanker at Balmain. One of the men that was working there said, you’re over here breathing down our necks, look across there. And I looked across the water to the other wharf where the wheat silos were, they were pouring wheat and the air was filled with wheat dust. And somebody was using an acetylene, a blowtorch on a winch, preparing a winch right alongside where they were pouring the wheat. Now, if a spark had ignited the dust it would have set up a chain reaction, like an atomic bomb. As soon as I saw it, I dived for the phone, rang up the boss of the silos and told him immediately to hit the emergency button which closed all the doors to stop the wheat from running until he’d investigated and stopped them alongside where the wheat was pouring. That chap had a reaction afterwards – that was the last thing he ever did. He had a heart attack at his desk that night.

[i]Interview with Bill Gosling, 9 April 2005.