Eureka to the Diggers

by Thomas Keneally

  In South Australia the owners of the Burra and Moonta copper mines built cottages for their employees and introduced compulsory medical benefits schemes at low weekly rates. These paid half-wages to disabled men, and at Moonta in 1873 introduced a minimum wage of £2 a week in bad years. (Previously there had been no bottom to the lowering of wages in hard periods.)

  George Marchant, a man from Kent who had arrived in Brisbane in 1874 ‘friendless and practically penniless’, had not only worked in the bush as a station hand. To earn a living in town he collected empty bottles and he and his wife Sarah opened a soft drink business which spread from Brisbane to branches in other states. The company was based on his invention and patenting of a bottling machine which came to be used all over the world. Like many such self-made men, he had begun his career as a staunch anti-unionist, but began to fraternise with Labor thinkers such as fiery William Lane, editor of the Boomerang, and during the 1890 shipping strike chaired meetings which raised funds to support the strikers. He too practised profit-sharing in his factories.

  The expectation that things would be better in Australia (whether they always were or not) was a powerful motivator for workers. W.H.S. Blake, a tailor employed by Alston and Brown in Melbourne who became a leader of the Early Closing Association, said that in his youth in England he had to start work at seven every morning and usually work until midnight—a working week of nearly 100 hours. To be employed in Alston and Brown’s factory or showroom, which always closed at 6 p.m., made him ecstatic. Extra time gave working men a chance to raise themselves; in Collingwood, Joel Eade, Cornishman and a former gold miner in California and Victoria, attended drawing classes at the Melbourne Mechanic’s Institute and was able to ‘lift himself’ from carpenter to town surveyor. He later founded the Collingwood School of Design for ‘rising operatives’.

  It was still true that most businessmen, from the ports to the remotest pastures, saw the unions as the serpent at society’s breast. And a sacking or an industrial accident could still impose acute misery and hunger even in the house of a skilled worker. Families tried to invest in ‘friendly societies’ which would support them through the illness of the injured worker, and in insurance against his death. One of the ‘friendly societies’ was the Independent Order of Oddfellows, open to all craftsmen. By 1865 there were 106 lodges in Victoria, forty-six in Sydney and sixty-four in Adelaide. Lodges often employed their own doctors to look after members.

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  For unskilled workers, living and working conditions were much more squalid, unhealthy and hopeful than for the ‘rising operative’. When Henry Lawson went to work at Hudson Brothers’ railway carriage works at Clyde in the 1880s, he had to rise at 5 a.m., walk across the city to catch the train at six from Redfern, and go to work painting and rubbing down carriages with ‘blood coming from finger ends and trickling over the pumice stone’. He would return home at 6.30 p.m. in a stupor of weariness. He knew what it was to wander from job to job and have the ‘furtive and criminal-like’ shame of his position. Such was his experience of the working man’s paradise. Later, in the midst of celebrations for the Queen’s Jubilee, he would write about workers with a personal fury:

  I listened through the music and the sounds of revelry

  And all the hollow noises of that year of Jubilee;

  I heard beyond the music and beyond the royal cheer,

  The steady tramp of thousands that were marching in the rear…

  I heard defiance ringing from the men of rags and dirt,

  I heard wan women singing that sad ‘Song of the Shirt’,

  And o’er the sounds of menace and moaning low and drear,

  I heard the steady tramping of their feet along the rear.

  Employees in newspaper and general printing offices were amongst the most misused. Indeed, many journalists in the 1880s received only 30 shillings a week. Compositors worked ten-hour night shifts with only a meal snatched while they worked. Their wages were about 27 shillings for the standard fifty-four hours’ work. Boys were employed sometimes for 2 shillings and sixpence a week, and in 1883 the Melbourne Herald and the World newspapers each employed about thirty boy compositors to every four tradesmen. A compositor who complained could quickly be replaced. The Typographical Society succeeded in banning boy labour from night work at the Age and Argus. But twelve-year-old boys were still being employed this way on other presses and in the larger regional towns. Here they worked from 3 p.m. until 3 a.m.

  The first Factory Act in Australia was passed by the Victorian Parliament in 1873, initiated by William Collard Smith, son of a Cheshire cotton factory owner who had come to Australia for the gold rush. Smith, living in Ballarat, had also been a pioneer in mine safety inspection. He was appointed chairman of a Royal Commission to investigate working conditions in 1883, ten years after the first Factory Act, and found that for thousands of workers ‘a system of forced labour, repugnant to every sense of justice in humanity’, was in place. Many employees were obliged to work beyond the limits of physical endurance. Smith and his fellow commissioners reported that the worst abuses occurred in companies whose growth had been encouraged by protection: high tariffs. Deakin would always believe such industries should be able to afford high wage levels—high profits and high wages were the rationale of protectionism. But in many factories, protection as an engine of prosperity for workers was failing.

  In textile and clothing factories, men earned an average of 35 shillings a week, women only 10 shillings, boys about 7 shillings and girls 4 shillings. The mills secretly agreed to employ entire families so that pittances could be combined. Truant officers were supposed to extract child labourers from these factories, but were not always able to—the child’s own parents often worked there too and pleaded with the truant officers that they needed the child’s wages. According to the report of the Victorian Royal Commission 1882–84, to keep a child labourer in work the parents sidestepped the compulsory Education Act by putting their children’s names on a private school roll, such as that of a Catholic school, which were not available to the department’s inspectors. Inspectors might then lie in wait and catch the children as they went on their lunch break. But although the parents were fined, they would sometimes send the children back to work under different names.

  Nine- to twelve-year-olds also worked in the tobacco industry. At Feldheim, Jacobs and Company in Melbourne, nine-year-olds earned 7 shillings for working six days a week from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. producing 50 000 cigars a week. Needless to say, their conversations were said to have been of ‘the most filthy description’. A sign at the workshop door read All hands are liable to be discharged at one moment’s notice over the signature of the chairman, John A. Wilson.

  At one of the best mills, the Victorian Woollen and Cloth Manufactory in Geelong, all hands worked a sixty-hour week for which twelve-year-old boys were paid 8 shillings. The Victorian Royal Commission in 1883 visited some of the better clothing factories of Melbourne, and disapproved of many of them. Even twenty years later, at a further Victorian Royal Commission of 1900–03 on the Operation of the Factories and Shops Law, a woman who had an apparently invalided husband testified that she worked in a clothing factory from twelve to sixteen hours a day, six days a week, for which she was paid 12 shillings and sixpence weekly, and only survived because the employer took on two of her children to work the same hours at 5 shillings a week each. ‘I consider we are nothing lesser than white slaves with our employers,’ said one woman to the Victorian Royal Commission.

  The Tailoresses’s Union struggled with the issue for years. A coat machinist employed on piece work by Cohen & Lyon of Melbourne testified that she worked all day in the factory and another three hours each night at home but could rarely earn more than 17 shillings a week. A Mrs Adams and her two daughters, who sewed moleskin trousers at McIvor and Lincoln’s, worked from 8 a.m. till 11 p.m. each day, assisted at home by another child
when she came home from school. Between them, these four females earned £3 a week. The desperation of workers to continue receiving wages caused them to turn up to work even when they were ill, spreading diseases like typhoid fever.

  A witness quoted in the Report on the Condition of the Working Class, New South Wales, 1859–60, described living conditions as ‘worse than in any part of the world that I have seen—worse than in London’. The Benevolent Society and St Vincent de Paul handed out small amounts of bread and meat, salt and soap in cases of need. A Royal Commission on Public Charities in New South Wales, entering a slum off Gloucester Street in Sydney, found entire families trying to live off less than £1 a week. And in a house they visited there was merely ‘some bread, and a small quantity of pumpkin and turnips’. Even in Adelaide a slum developed from the 1850s near East Terrace in tenements built in the mid-nineteenth century. The landlord was the Adelaide entrepreneur and self-proclaimed radical William Peacock, MLC.

  At work the health conditions mirrored the slums where the worker lived. In the 1880s, at Mitchell’s Brush Factory in Lonsdale Street, Melbourne, there was no privy at all for male employees. At F. Joseph and Company Clothing Factory in Flinders Lane, employing men and women, the same conditions prevailed. At some Sydney engineering works men had to walk as much as half a mile to the nearest public privies to urinate or excrete and lost wages in the process. As in Britain, there were diseases caused directly by work but for which there was no compensation. Watchmakers suffered a disease of the bones because of the use of phosphorus in their trade. Grocers suffered a skin disease—‘grocer’s itch’—from a mite which infested sugarbags, dried fruit and grain. Painters contracted painter’s colic, a form of crippling lead poisoning. Even knife grinders developed lung disease from the clouds of metal particles their machines generated. Children who were sent into confined spaces to service machinery often suffered accidents. A boy of twelve was crushed to death between the rollers of printing machinery. Machinery had no safety guards, and neither did sawmills or joineries have guards to prevent a bandsaw flying off the wheel.

  The safety and health inspectors put in place by safety laws such as the Deakin-inspired Shops and Factories Bill of 1885 were, by the time the law was chopped about and amended, under the authority of the municipal councils, many of whose aldermen owned factories. On the basis of the 1883 Royal Commission, and with the support of a number of manufacturers, Alfred Deakin introduced a strong bill, but he was only able to force limited changes through. He had wanted all workshops with two or more employees brought under the Act and the registration of companies, sanitary requirements, limits on the hours minors could work and compensation for injury. The Legislative Council diluted the bill so much that the question of closing hours was handed over to local Shopkeepers’ Associations and councils for separate decisions to be made in each suburb. So few changes were made that the trade unions began to found Labor Leagues with the goal of putting workers into Parliament, since well-meaning liberals like Deakin had failed them.

  In any case, when health inspectors prosecuted businesses, the workers were too frightened to give evidence for fear of dismissal, and magistrates were often manufacturers themselves.

  In 1896 Victoria established Australia’s first wages board, in which employers and employees’ representatives convened to agree upon minimum wages. The Shops and Factories Act was further strengthened in 1896 and 1900, though there was no overall reform. Victoria was considered to lead the world in enlightened legislation. By the end of the century, most Melbourne shops adopted standard hours of 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekdays and 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturdays. Packers, however, continued work for long hours behind the shopfront. Enoch Nickless, managing director of Mayne Nickless and Company Limited, which delivered parcels for most of Melbourne’s big stores, was unable to see how his carters’ hours could ever be shortened. Some ladies would wait up till one o’clock for a hat. ‘It would be impossible to work our business in sixty hours, not less than seventy hours per week are required.’

  While Victoria battled its way towards reform, other states did very little. In South Australia, a Royal Commission reported in 1892 on working conditions for the protection of women and children, but the first reform bill was thrown out by the South Australian Legislative Council in 1893. It was accepted the following year on condition that children of thirteen would still be legally permitted to work a forty-eight-hour week. Adelaide shops remained open at their discretion. Eight-hour bills were rejected in Queensland. Though Western Australia passed early closing and factory laws in 1897, Tasmania went without industrial legislation at all.

  In New South Wales, whether the government was led by the Free Traders Henry Parkes and George Reid or the Protectionist George Dibbs, industrial conditions were left to market forces. Only in 1896, when George Reid became dependent on a few Labor Members of Parliament to retain power, was the first attempt at a Factories and Shops Act made. All the scandals revealed in Melbourne in the early 1880s were current in Sydney up to Federation. There was no regulation of outworkers—women in the clothes industries who were given piece work to do at home were often deserted or widowed wives. A Daily Telegraph reporter visited a Surry Hills tenement just before midnight on 16 August 1901 to see ‘a tired looking woman busily working with her needle finishing the trousers, which her husband was machining, while two little eight- and-ten-year-old girls sewed the buttons on another pair of trousers’. William Lyne got a New South Wales Early Closing Act through Parliament in 1899 under pressure from the Toynbee Guild, an association of reforming university men. But as long as shops closed on Wednesday or Saturday afternoon, they were allowed to stay open as long as they liked on Friday and Saturday nights and employers were still allowed to work their carters any number of hours they liked. The fact was that shopkeepers could work their employees up to sixty hours a week without any extra pay.

  A number of wages boards existed under the legislation, but of five workers who became members of the Jam Industry Wages Board and voted in 1900 to increase adult wages from 30 shillings to 35 shillings a week, four were immediately sacked. Similarly, all five operatives on the Fellmongers’ Board were warned what would happen if they voted against their employer’s wishes. William McVicars, owner with his brother of the Sydney Woollen Mills and president of the New South Wales Chamber of Manufacturers, declared in 1901 that ‘Shops and Factories Acts, that is, regulating the conditions of employment, was carrying legislation too far’. Many employers argued that lack of regulation allowed them to keep on slower workers at less wages who under fixed-wage situations would be thrown out of work and die of disease. By the birth of the Commonwealth, there was a lack of shared wealth amongst many bush and urban citizens of the new Australia. It is therefore easy to see why the new-born Labor Party and the trade unions did not consider Federation the primary issue.

  THE GODLY RADICALS

  A Staffordshire coal miner, Joseph Cook, like many early Labor men, combined socialist vision with religious orthodoxy. In his English youth he was a lay preacher of theology for the Primitive Methodists, whose eschewing of all sin suited his dour soul. Being the breadwinner for the family—his father had been killed in a mine accident—he did not emigrate to Australia until the age of twenty-five, after his siblings had grown up and were self-sufficient.

  He was, like a young shopkeeper of Balmain, William Morris Hughes, a Free Trader to begin with, and believed that there should be but a single tax, and that on land. Married to a schoolteacher, he lived and worked in Lithgow. In August 1890, during the Maritime Strike, he served on the Labor Defence Committee at a time when the Lithgow mines were being worked by non-unionists, all under the protection of the New South Wales’ small permanent army. The following year this honest, glum fellow was elected to the New South Wales Parliament.

  At a Labor conference in March 1894 a resolution was passed that members had to bind themselves to espouse the
official position reached by a vote in caucus. Cook and a number of others refused to sign this ‘solidarity pledge’, and he was voted as a Labor Independent. He would almost immediately take a cabinet position in George Reid’s conservative Free Trade government, and would be increasingly abominated by his former fellow workers in the solidarity movement, including William Morris Hughes. But only fourteen members of ‘solidarity Labor’ were elected to that Parliament in 1894.

  If the election of Labor members was noticed in the broader world, and it was by many people, it was often suspected by conservatives to be the appearance of a dogmatically socialist clique instead of the bunch of pragmatists the party was from the start. It disappointed radicals by showing little interest in the overthrow of society and too much in improving lives of working men and women by degrees—a shorter week here, a few more shillings in pay packets there, an improved safety law somewhere else. And in that vein the vivid Billy Hughes became a potent operator from the start. Elected to the New South Wales Parliament in 1894, a solidarity man, this amusing cynic looked with a little bemusement at the religious devotion of his fellow Labor men—five were lay preachers, James McGowen was a Sunday school superintendent. ‘As a set off,’ he wrote, however, ‘I ought to let you know that two of the most notable of our members have been in gaol as a result of their activities in the Broken Hill strike.’ They were idealists but ready to make a deal. They quickly understood that they held the balance of power between Sir George Reid’s Free Traders and Sir William Lyne’s Protectionists. The Labor Party in Parliament had supported Reid because he had in turn introduced legislation which favoured their interests—early closing of shops and navigation bills. The time was, as Hughes said, ‘rotten ripe’ for the working hours to be cut. Reid made the mistake of promising to limit the hours of shop assistants, but not to shorten the hours that the shops stayed open. Believing that the shop workers would be under pressure from their bosses to keep working the long hours they always had anyway, Billy Hughes went as an emissary to see lanky, amiable Sir William Lyne. Lyne promised that if Labor came over to him he would pass an Early Closing Bill as drafted by Hughes. Labor members, through Billy, then assured Sir William Lyne that they would support him if he moved a No Confidence Bill. The No Confidence Bill against George Reid was promptly proposed and was passed; Lyne came to power and early closing became law.