by Wendy Scarfe
She looked at me coldly. ‘Stop ranting, Judith. Of course I’m coming.’
Miss Marie smiled benignly on her. ‘Of course you are.’
I gave up. ‘Very well, you can come, but see you look after yourself.’
She grinned at my surliness.
‘You and Harry,’ I said resignedly. ‘Two peas in a pod.’ Then a terrible thought struck me. ‘Winnie, you haven’t any marbles, have you? Harry didn’t give you any marbles?’
She glanced at me sidelong, half guilty, half defiant. ‘None of your business.’
‘Of course it’s my business.’
‘He gave you marbles,’ she retaliated.
I flushed. ‘Yes, but I’d never use them.’
‘What a Goody Two-Shoes you are, Judith. “I’d never use them”,’ she mimicked.
It was a vile habit. She and Harry both did it, mimicking me, often when I was most serious. ‘Harry should mind his own business,’ I flared.
‘A lovers’ tiff?’ Miss Marie grinned at Winnie, who giggled. ‘And I have my marbles, too, Winnie. It’s an old revolutionary trick. Who knows, we all might need them. The police, they can be canaille.’
Winnie paled. She had not really thought of such an event. I waited for her to make some excuse and leave, even to sniffle, but she rallied.
‘If I need them I’ll use them.’ She was defiant.
Cursing Harry for being so ill-advised, I felt dismayed and defeated.
It was not easy to organise the women into a procession. Rail tracks ran down the centre of some of the roads and any procession would need to split in two to let the cargo train pass. Inevitably there would be difficulties with traffic. As the start approached apprehension grew. It was obvious that some of the women now had misgivings. I saw frightened faces and shaking hands.
Mrs Danley called to me to find my mother. She looked doubtfully at Winnie but Winnie clung to my arm, so clearly she must be included in those who headed the march. I hadn’t noticed their arrival, but suddenly Nathan’s sisters shoved themselves to the front and positioned themselves beside us. Mrs Danley frowned in annoyance but accepted the inevitable.
There were eight of us in the front row: Winnie, myself and Miss Marie were in the middle, my mother and Mrs Danley on one side, Ailsa Thornhill and Nathan’s sisters on the other.
‘Fall in behind us,’ Mrs Danley called through her megaphone, ‘eight across each row. You know the route. Take your time, ladies, the streets are ours today. We have the numbers to command them.’
And, I thought, we did. There must have been nearly a thousand women there, many clutching or hugging the small placards they had made with such fervour at the soup kitchen. They were a pathetic collection of bits of cardboard stuck or tacked onto pieces of wood saved from the fire. After the march they would be treasured as fuel. They had made up their own messages, which were frequently mis-spelled, the lettering clumsy, the paintwork blotched. SCABS OUT. FOOD FOR OUR CHILDREN. WORK FOR OUR MEN.
They didn’t know what to do with these placards. Mrs Danley had bullied her son into making a dozen larger more sophisticated ones for those of us in the front to carry but most of the other women seemed hesitant to use theirs. Miss Marie surveyed them. She’d had many doubtful insecure students. She took the megaphone from Mrs Danley with a ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ and trilled, ‘Lift up your placards, ladies. Like this,’ as she held hers aloft. Still they hesitated, glancing from her to Mrs Danley, always their stalwart adviser.
Miss Marie was undaunted. ‘I will count one, two, three and on three we will all raise our placards and shout hurrah.’
It worked. The hurrahs were faint but the placards went up.
Mrs Danley reclaimed the megaphone. ‘Be strong, ladies,’ she called and we all set off. Beside me I felt Winnie quiver. If she started to cry I would slap her. ‘Don’t you dare sniffle, Winnie.’
She was indignant. ‘As if I would. Really, Judith, you know me better than that.’ If she hadn’t been so serious and solemn I would have laughed at her.
The crowd parted for the eight of us and slowly jostled themselves into position to fall in behind. A strange almost eerie silence had fallen. Even the children were subdued and quiet. It was as if the solemnity of the occasion possessed us all and we were awestruck by our own temerity. I was aware of this moving mass of women behind me. I could almost hear a great breath inhaled and exhaled to the rhythm of feet, slap slapping the pavement. At first the walking seemed tentative, as if a marching pace were briefly emulated and then abandoned. Now the pace was slow, steady and determined.
‘They’re getting used to it,’ Miss Marie said. ‘At first it is strange.’
‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘I hadn’t thought of it like that. I suppose they thought a march involved marching while a walk was walking, so how to decide between the two.’
Winnie giggled. ‘I feel like the Pied Piper. Do you remember that poem we had to learn in third grade, Judith?’
‘Of course. The Port Adelaide school had it, too. I can still recite it.’ I began, ‘“In Hamlyn town in Brunswick …”’
A train bisecting the road trundled towards us. The marchers split in two: Miss Marie, Ailsa and Nathan’s sisters on one side, myself, Winnie, Mrs Danley and my mother on the other. Between the train carriages I saw Miss Marie diverge to lead a group of women along the footpath and under the verandas. A clothing shop advertised its sale with a large red flag. Miss Marie hoisted it from its stand and wrapped it about herself. When she returned to the road she was garbed like a flame from head to toe. She laughed with satisfaction. ‘The colour of revolution, mes amies.’
‘Harry should have told me.’ Winnie looked at her wistfully. ‘He knows all about revolution. I have a beautiful red dress I could have worn. And it cost me only a shilling.’
Crowds gathered on the footpaths to watch us. Most vehicles pulled over to let us through. Comments thrown from the footpath reached us. ‘Good on yer, Mum. You tell the bastards. Cheers for the Bolshie women. Great stuff, girls, keep it up.’ And, of course, Miss Marie drew the ubiquitous whistles and cat-calls. She responded with a beaming smile. To crass invitations to take her home any time or doing anything tonight, she threw kisses and some boys in the crowd pretended to stagger, smitten to the heart they clutched.
Slowly we became aware that there were men joining the march, falling into step behind the last of the women. Near the Labour Exchange a large group of men waited quietly. Some of them carried iron bars, others hunks of wood. I saw Mrs Danley glance at them. Her face puckered in concern. She spoke to my mother who looked worried.
‘Judith, can you leave the march and speak with them? They mustn’t join us.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I can’t leave Winnie.’
‘And why not?’ Winnie hissed at me. ‘I’m not a baby. Miss Marie is here.’
‘No,’ I repeated, ‘I won’t.’
‘Perhaps Ailsa?’ But my mother was doubtful. Ailsa Thornhill was a staunch foot soldier but lacked the backbone to stop any nonsense.
By then it was too late. Propelled by those behind us we had passed the waiting men and knew that they, too, had joined us and added something unpredictable. Harry told me later that they had determined amongst themselves to protect us.
And then it happened. It was all so fast that none of us had time to think. A boy burst out of the crowd on the footpath and running alongside the men shouted, ‘The scabs are loading at Queens Wharf.’
Behind me some of the women halted, at first confused, then shoved forward by those behind. Mrs Danley shouted through her megaphone, ‘Ladies, continue the march. We must reach the Town Hall. Be calm.’
But we were already on North Parade, approaching the wharf. Obsessed with reaching the scabs, the men bulked behind us, herding us before them in their thirst for confrontation. The crowd surged at my back and clutching Winnie I had no choice but to hurtle forward with the protesters. I searched desperately for some means of escape from wha
t had now become a scrum of screaming, hysterical women and children. But there was no way out. We were being corralled between the warehouses and the river. The momentum precipitated us onto the wharf and there before us, lined up and immobile as carved granite, sat a row of mounted police. In unison they drew their batons from their holsters and waited.
One woman’s scream topped all others and ricocheted off the stone walls of the warehouses. A flock of seagulls perched on a rooftop took off in panic. I knew that behind me prams toppled and babies were thrown on the rail tracks. The crowd concertinaed as women braced themselves against the rush to save their children before they, too, were flung to the ground. Still on my feet, I pelted forward, Winnie and Marie running beside me. Mrs Danley, still on her feet in the crush, bellowed through her megaphone for the police to back off. ‘We’re women and children. Back off! You’re killing us!’ She might have been King Canute, ineffectively and hopelessly ordering the waves to retreat.
In desperation she turned and struck the nearest horse with her placard. A baton thumped her raised arm. Men now grappled with police, struggling to drag them out of their saddles. The baton attacks became more vicious and indiscriminate.
In front of me, wedged beneath the belly of a horse, a toddler crouched, frozen with terror. In a minute he would be trampled to death. I dropped Winnie’s hand and leapt forward. I smelled the horse’s sweat and saw warm damp beads glisten along its belly. A baton struck my shoulder, nearly knocking me over but I reached out, grabbed the child’s arm and yanked. The baton descended again but I had freed him. Beside me Miss Marie seized hold of him.
Through the excruciating pain in my shoulder I looked up and met the stoniest eyes I ever remembered having seen. With my uninjured hand I searched my pocket and felt the cold hard comfort of the marbles. A moment and I had them out. I cast them viciously beneath the horse.
Beside me Winnie screeched, ‘You swine! You dirty bloody rotten swine!’ And simultaneously she lobbed her handful of marbles, not on the roadway, but straight upwards at the policeman’s face. I saw him rear back, lifting his baton arm to protect his eyes. Through a sick haze, I watched the marbles, a shower of glinting colour, fall about him. One stuck briefly in the horse’s mane before it rolled to the ground. I noted it was a brilliant turquoise.
Faintly I heard Miss Marie gasp before she also hurled her marbles onto the road. There followed a wild skittering of hooves, a slithering, a snorting and a neighing, followed by a series of crashes. Helpless as wooden pegs in a bowling alley and almost in unison, the row of mounted police lost their balance and horses and men pitched to the ground.
The crowd, no longer penned, flowed over and around them and the three of us. Winnie and Marie helped me across the concrete apron to the side of the warehouse and an old bench. I sat down nursing my arm. ‘The others,’ I muttered. ‘My mother?’ And then I fainted.
My mother, shocked but unhurt, eventually found the three of us. She was torn between her concern for Mrs Danley, whose arm was obviously broken, and her worry about where I might be and if I were hurt. Miss Marie took over, reassured her about my welfare, and sent her back to help Mrs Danley who was stranded with Ailsa.
I was rather hazy about how I reached home but had a vague memory of Miss Marie finding a taxi. Winnie sat beside me cradling my hand and weeping hysterically. ‘Don’t die, Judith, please don’t die.’
I managed a weak ‘Don’t be silly, Winnie, of course I won’t die.’ But she would not be consoled.
Before the march I would have been impatient with her tears but I recalled the shower of marbles, a kaleidoscope of colour in the brilliant sunshine, cascading in deadly beauty about the mounted policeman.
‘Winnie, didn’t Harry tell you where to throw the marbles?’
‘Of course,’ she hiccuped, ‘but a lot of use that would have been. He was hurting you. I had to use my own initiative.’
‘Oh, Winnie,’ I said tearfully. ‘Oh Winnie, you’re such a card.’
Miss Marie ordered the taxi to take me first to the small casualty hospital where Dr Banks was in attendance. I was in such pain that he saw me immediately, although there were other women waiting, most of them distressed. He probed and pushed and made me move my fingers and open and shut my hand and finally pronounced that I had been lucky. There were no broken bones, only severe bruising.
‘And where have you been to get like this?’ he admonished.
‘The women’s march,’ I said flatly. ‘The police beat us up.’
Of course he had heard. ‘Harumph,’ he said. ‘Such brutality.’ He pursed his lips disapprovingly. ‘What is our society coming to? Such brutality.’
He put a sling on my arm and told me to take painkillers and rest. ‘No more marches,’ he ordered as if I was still a child engaging in naughty practices. He stumped off and called his next patient from the long line of battered women.
Fortunately for me my left arm was damaged, not my right, so I could still draw. It was a miracle that in the mayhem on the wharf no one was killed. Babies, although tipped from their prams, had rolled harmlessly and been retrieved, crying but uninjured. One five-year-old boy had his front teeth broken but I heard his mother had been philosophical: they were baby teeth and he would lose them soon anyway. But many of the women were severely bruised from falls, batons and horse kicks. All were shocked and terrified by what might have been a more disastrous outcome.
The mounted police were constabulary enlisted from outside the Port. As it was useless to vent rage on them, the local police became the town’s target of jibes and abuse. In shops and bars they found themselves jostled and harangued.
There may have been abuse of women at home but public abuse was seen as an outrage, a threat to everything society said it held dear—the sanctity of women, children and the home. From my experience at the soup kitchen I no longer believed that all the homes in the Port were sanctified but it was always good in a cartoon to appeal to what people thought they valued. So I worked on a cartoon entitled The hand that rocks the cradle and beneath the hooves of horses, and under the batons of police, women and babies were heaped on the road. Underneath it I penned the caption Great Expectations: Women & children first. And in a second cartoon I drew a woman bandaged from head to foot in a hospital bed while her skeletal child weeping beside her says, But, Mummy, the nice policeman said the horse did it.
Although I heard the story from Harry, who heard it from Nathan, it was all over town that an incensed Mrs Danley, impressive with her broken arm in a sling and her face purple and swollen with bruises, stalked into the premises of the Despatch newspaper and demanded to see the editor. When he scuttled in she commanded him to print in full the petition we had been prevented from presenting at the Port Town Hall.
Unwisely, he demurred, even having the temerity to suggest that the women had brought the trouble on themselves by lacking ‘political wisdom’. It would have been better for him if he had kept a still tongue in his head. Enraged by his attitude, Mrs Danley told him roundly that if he refused he would be blacklisted by the congregation of St Paul’s Anglican church and not one churchgoer would dare speak with him again.
Faced with her threat, he buckled, and the petition appeared in large print on the second page. In addition there was a statement about the number of people who had signed it and a grovelling sentence or two suggesting that the younger members of the police might have ‘over-reacted’. After all, they were dealing with women and children, not burly wharf-labourers.
But from then on he ordered his staff to keep watch for Mrs Danley, and, on the few occasions she went to place an advertisement in the column for church news, he fled out the back and hid in the lavatory.
Of course the Despatch and the Register had proclaimed a victory for the police in preventing the illegal attack on volunteer labourers who were merely doing their job loading wheat onto the Van Spilbergen. The women marchers were ill-advised in allowing themselves to be used by gangs of hoodlums who ca
me armed with bottles and chunks of wood to throw at police also doing their duty. And it was disgraceful that some women were heard to use the sort of foul language only heard in bar rooms.
The Workers’ Weekly on the other hand hailed it as a triumph for working-class action. Women who had previously been politically dormant had now erupted into a major force to be contended with. All hail the mothers of the revolution, it proclaimed.
A meeting of the Port Adelaide Trades and Labour Council passed a motion that ‘We protest strongly against the action of some mounted police riding down inoffensive citizens under verandas and along footpaths and using batons in defiance of British law and the Constitution which says a baton should be used only as a last resource and the Commissioner of Police is not under law an infallible authority to deprive citizens of their rights’.
When my father read this he hawked up a rich globule of yellow saliva and spat into the river. It was always his way of dispelling his disgust. ‘Feeble, futile bastards. Couldn’t they come up with something better than that? Like supporting us to get the scabs off the wharves and back into our own jobs?’ He spat again.
When Harry visited we sat together quietly, often not speaking while he held my hand. I asked him if Nathan’s sisters had come out of it unscathed.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘not like you. They were unharmed, but Nathan said they were very distressed and quite affronted. He didn’t seem to feel that their comment was strange so I said nothing.’
But I told my mother that they had been distressed and affronted. She guffawed. ‘Affronted? That’s a good one. What next? Women chasing their babies all over the wharf, terrified that they’d be trampled to death or knocked into the river, but Nathan’s sisters are merely “affronted”.’ She slammed the lid on a saucepan of stew she was cooking. ‘Affronted? Go and have a good spit over the side into the river for me, Niels.’
Of course, Miss Marie also visited and after she had inquired about my health we discussed my work and I told her that cartoons were my compensation for not being physically able to change the course of things and I needed this emotional consolation.