Eureka to the Diggers

by Thomas Keneally

  Hughes blamed the Wobblies for orchestrating a waterfront strike in February 1916, and was all the more furious since he had just managed to achieve the first federal award for the industry and had been pleased by the patriotism which had kept industry humming through 1915. Soon the Wobblies would encourage wildcat strikes on the waterfront, in the North Queensland sugar mills, the Government Clothing Factory in Melbourne, the railways workshop in Sydney, and amongst railway construction workers in South and Western Australia. The Sydney Morning Herald declared, perhaps with a little hysteria, that the IWW had twenty to thirty thousand supporters in all the unions, and that they had worked in the campaign to defeat the conscription referenda.

  Many admired this side of the Wobblies’ activities. But the IWW were avowedly advocates too of ‘direct action’, sabotage and the ‘propaganda of the deed’, also referred to as ‘the black cat’ and ‘the wooden shoe’, all designed to erode conventional government. Direct Action was in fact the name of their newspaper. Russian anarchism had involved attacks on government figures from Tsars to policemen. Tsars were scarce on the Hunter Valley coalfields, while constables were tragically available. A police constable in Tottenham in the Hunter Valley was murdered through an open window in October 1916. Herbert Kennedy, one of the two brothers arrested for the murder, declared that the IWW did not believe in assassination. Kennedy might have been innocent, since the IWW had become the whipping boy for all unrest. But what is certain is that, whether they believed in murder or not, they certainly believed in arson.

  Fires had broken out in a number of buildings in Sydney, allegedly through the use of ‘fire dope’, a phosphorus incendiary much favoured by anarchists. During June and July 1916, there had been five spectacular fires in central Sydney commercial buildings, one of them being set in the Co-operative Building. The IWW was not backward in telling the world it was their work. ‘Far better to see Sydney melted to the ground than to see the men of Sydney taken away to be butchered,’ said Peter Larkin, brother of Irish revolutionary James Larkin, now released from gaol, at the Sydney Domain. Twelve Wobblies were arrested for arson, and in the subsequent court case the Crown witnesses, including the brothers Davis and Lewis Goldstein, gave evidence about the secret purchasing of fire dope, the instruction of Wobblies in its best use and the drawing of lots to decide who would set fires. Simultaneously with the Sydney trial there were arrests of Wobblies in Western Australia on the charge of seditious conspiracy.

  When one of the Wobbly leaders, Tom Barker, was imprisoned under the War Precautions Act there was open Wobbly talk of rescuing him from prison by the ‘wooden shoe’. Barker was author of a famous early World War I poster which urged, ‘Let Those Who Own Australia Do the Fighting. Put the wealthiest in the front rank’. At about the same time, in December 1916, Franz Franz and Roland Kennedy, Herbert’s brother, were found guilty of the murder of the constable at Tottenham and were sentenced to death.

  Meanwhile, in the incendiary trial in Sydney, each of the twelve accused declared themselves innocent. The judge, Justice Pring, was a passionate enemy of union or leftist activism, and passed a range of sentences. Eight of the Wobblies received fifteen years. Whether they were the actual fire-setters or targets of convenience is not known.

  On 15 December 1916 Hughes had introduced an Unlawful Associations Bill designed to make the IWW illegal, but the body continued to exist within the trade union movement under the mantra, ‘The IWW has no present intention of being closed up.’ Indeed, some members chose another form of sabotage, counterfeiting. In 1917, F.J. Morgan, a printer of Direct Action, had been arrested with other men for producing forged £5 notes. The two Goldstein brothers were worked on by the police to inform on Morgan, but would not do so. IWW premises in Sussex Street were raided by the police, and amongst those arrested was Peter Larkin. The charge was that he and Morgan and others ‘did compass, imagine, intent, devise or intend to levy war against the King’. Eight more Wobblies would be arrested.

  The Wobblies were seen as being behind all strikes, such as the great strike that occurred in August 1917 when some 6000 railway and tramway employees in New South Wales walked away in protest against the introduction of a work recording system. One of the strikers was far from being a Wobbly—the junior engine-driver and future prime minister Ben Chifley. The strike lasted eighty-one days and had by then been joined by 76 000 other workers, most of them not Wobblies. Forty thousand unionists marched through Sydney. J.C.L. Fitzpatrick of the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales saw the events as due purely to the influence of German agents and the Wobblies—the ‘I Won’t Work and the I Won’t Wash crowd’. The Riot Act was read in military camps to warn soldiers who might think of siding with the strikers and 1500 special constables were sworn in to guard trams, trains and workshops.

  Stories of attacks by non-combatants on the fabric of the society for which they had fought greeted soldiers on their homecoming in 1919. Many former officers in particular would begin to form their own ‘secret’ paramilitary groups to fight against Bolshevism. Their stories will be told soon. But even as the ‘secret’ armies mustered, the reality was that the Australian candidates for genuine Bolshevism were few in number.

  KEEPING THE FABRIC UP

  A Legion of Frontiersmen, a version of the ‘white armies’ which had fought off Asian infiltration in the novels of the day, had existed in Australia since 1906. But under pressure of the 1917 strike and of the divisions produced by war, a ‘farmer’s army’ was also forming and by 25 September 1917 the Farmers’ and Settlers’ Association and the Primary Producers’ Association had put together a group of 7300 strike breakers. The training camps of this unofficial force were openly held at the Sydney Cricket Ground and at Taronga Park. The Royal Agricultural Society provided stables for 3000 horses and storage for ammunition and even larger weapons, some of which had mysteriously turned up from AIF sources of supply. The businessman Henry Braddon formed a committee of New South Wales commercial leaders to give accommodation, provisions and evening entertainment for these ‘loyalists’ from the bush. Such was the leniency of the authorities to this unauthorised army that Braddon liaised daily with the state government and the Commissioner of Police. The force’s medical officer at the Cricket Ground told the gathered farmers, ‘We are here to do our duty to our country and our king, if we allow mob rule in Australia, then God help us.’

  Far from the onset of revolution, however, by October 1917 the unions gave way on the strike and the men returned to work not having extracted any concessions. The acting Premier George Fuller sent a message to the Farmers’ Army thanking them for their services on behalf of himself and the members of his cabinet. ‘You left your ordinary calling and at loss and inconvenience undertook whatever duties were assigned to you.’ They had enabled the sustaining of responsible government, said George Fuller. So the idea of private armies became normalised at the higher levels of government. Left-wing, ‘Red’, military mobilisation, always suspected to be in progress, did not occur on any scale like that of the Farmers’ Army.

  In late 1917 Prime Minister Hughes sent his friend, the Victorian businessman and future senator R.D. Elliott, to the United States to investigate the American Protective League, a secret network of volunteers supervised by the US Justice Department. The American League had begun a nationwide war against the IWW, destroying offices and beating up Wobblies before passing them onto the police. The League had its corruption problems, however. These ranged from members using their badges for free entry to theatres and free meals, to embezzling funds and bootlegging liquor. Elliott omitted all mention of these practices in his positive report to Hughes. On 29 May 1918 Senator George Pearce, Minister for Defence, who had followed Hughes out of the Labor Party, met with the Chief of the General Staff, Major General James Legge—back from Gallipoli and from France where he had commanded the Second Division at Pozières—and with leading businessmen, lawyers, bankers, insur
ance company men and academics in a Melbourne cabinet office to consider the founding of an Australian version of the League. Archibald Strong, Professor of English at the University of Melbourne, warned that if ever there was a national crisis from a Bolshevik-style insurgency, the only way to oppose it would be organising a counter-wave, something like the Protective League.

  A week after the first meeting, a further meeting was held in the business centre of Melbourne which formalised the Citizens’ Bureau of Intelligence and Propaganda. Various worthies, including the historian M.H. Ellis, were appointed to the Bureau. In Sydney there was a pre-existent group of leaders named the Round Table and it was their support which helped get the Bureau off the ground there and elsewhere. On military advice, the Bureau was now named the Directorate of War Propaganda.

  One of the leaders in this process was Herbert Brookes, the escapee aviator Tom White’s unwilling brother-in-law (he did not like White), an industrialist in Melbourne and a member of the Commonwealth Munitions Committee. He was a leading anti-Catholic campaigner, a cause revived, as if especially for his convenience, by the 1916 uprising and Catholic anti-conscriptionism. He combined this with an admirable progressive streak. Though not a mining magnate, he was particularly engaged in matters of the welfare of miners; at the Hollybush Coalmine he established schools out of his own pocket, and he campaigned for conditions designed to prevent miners’ lung diseases. In one of his own businesses, Australian Paper Mills, he introduced profit-sharing in 1917. He was a founder of the Australian Red Cross, and ran the Australian Comforts Fund which put everything from writing paper to fruitcake parcels into the hands of Diggers. Soon after joining the Board of Trade in 1918 he would demand information on European social insurance and profit-sharing and he believed managers’ wives on his sheep stations should be paid for the work they did. He was also a supporter of the arts and of the Melbourne Symphony. He was friendly with Rupert Bunny and E. Phillips Fox until the latter’s death in 1915, and opened his house to visits by musicians, notably Sir Bernard Heinze.

  But though Brookes admired his father-in-law Alfred Deakin, he had a tendency to fanaticism. After addressing a group of supporters in March 1918, he wrote, ‘It was a glorious experience to feel yourself not yourself, but an instrument in the hands of that Power that works for righteousness.’ A month or so after the Armistice, Brookes met up with Pearce and others, including F.C. Urquhart, the Queensland Police Commissioner, who was present without permission of the Queensland government. Urquhart had been disturbed by the socialism of the Queensland premier, P.J. Ryan, a premier who offended free enterprise by fostering state-owned butcheries to sell cheaper meat to the populace.

  Through Brookes in particular an Australian Protective League was gradually cobbled together. Brookes nominated various citizens to lead the state branches of the organisation. There already existed in New South Wales a similar group named the King’s Men, of whom Sir Edmund Barton, long-living first prime minister, was president and Lieutenant Colonel Reginald Rabett, recently returned from France, Honorary Secretary. Professor Mungo MacCallum was one of the vice presidents.

  The Protective League placed a series of spies within the Victorian Railways Union, the Wobblies’ organisation, the Melbourne Trades Hall and the Police Department. M.H. Ellis was able to send good intelligence from Brisbane, in that his brother, A.T. Ellis, was secretary to Premier Ryan. In Melbourne, by late 1918, the forces behind the Directorate of War Propaganda had already laid plans to blow up bridges across the Yarra if there were an uprising. But the activities of the League, like those of the Directorate, diminished with the coming of peace. Just the same, early in 1919 Billy Hughes had sent a consignment of machine guns and rifles to Brisbane in piano cases marked ‘Furniture’ for use by the Protective League.

  The mutinous streak that had emerged in many Diggers late in 1918, and even more notably after peace was declared, with men refusing to drill in the manner of regular soldiers, added to the concerns of the authorities and of the leaders of society. On troopships returning to Australia there was hostility or else a live-and-let-live attitude between the soldiers and the officers. A young Englishwoman named Angela Thirkell, who married her husband Captain George Thirkell in London in December 1918, describes in Trooper to the Southern Cross her voyage to Australia on the troopship Freidrichruh as one in which the soldiers’ decks became no-go zones for most officers. Such hostility had occurred elsewhere—in St Petersburg in 1917, when officers became victims of their men. In fact, on one Australian troopship a circular was discovered which called on AIF troops not to fire on their own people when a general uprising began. Already, in Melbourne in July 1919, returned soldiers invaded the office of the Conservative premier H.S.W. Lawson and threw an ink stand at him. This thrown ink stand represented in the minds of conservatives an act worthy of the fall of the Winter Palace to the Bolsheviks in 1917.

  In March and April 1919, the so-called ‘Red Flag Riots’ were a further sign of volatility. After display of red flags at a march organised by the Queensland Trades and Labor Union Council (in which a number of Russian radicals fled from Tsarist prisons to Brisbane participated) loyalist forces, returned soldiers prominent amongst them, counter-marched on the Russian quarter in South Brisbane. There was a three-hour siege on the Russian Club, the storming of the offices of the ALP newspaper the Daily Standard, and the marshalling in early April by the RSL of a returned soldiers’ army with 2000 members. Also cooperating were a group known as the United Loyalist Executive, a body Herbert Brookes had been involved with. Police Commissioner F.C. Urquhart was not at all dampened in his enthusiasm for the Red Flag Riots by the fact that outside the Russian Club on 24 March 1919 he had been accidentally but seriously wounded by a bayonet wielded by a loyalist returned soldier.

  Everywhere from the establishment Union Club in Sydney to the Masonic lodges of Toorak, there was an expectation that something dire would happen in mid-1919. By mid-winter ex-servicemen were called together to form up in the gardens near Victoria Barracks in Melbourne, taking their place in their old platoons ready to be drilled by their former sergeants. They were addressed by six generals, three lieutenant-colonels and other officers. Brigadier General Grimwade, a Melbourne chemical company executive who had commanded the artillery of the Third Division in France, urged the men to organise themselves in small bodies to operate against law-breaking and disorder, and Pompey Elliott declared, ‘Forces of disorder were arising in this country . . . they [the soldiers] must unite, as they had united before, to defend the Government and to maintain order.’

  WESTERN FRONT MUTINY

  In late September 1918 General John Monash and Major General John Gellibrand, Commander of the 3rd Division, had a passionate exchange, in which Gellibrand complained that battalions of only 200 men were being pushed into battle and the diggers were exhausted. Monash found it hard to believe that the troops were approaching the end of their strength. ‘Six days’ rest and a bath restores the elasticity of a division,’ he said, even though he himself was exhausted.

  On 21 September Australian soldiers of the 1st Battalion became restive. Three days before they had attacked the Hindenburg Line near Bellicourt and their brigade had taken over 4000 prisoners. They had been due to be relieved the day before but had been disappointed to have to stay on another night in the trenches and then to learn that the relief had been cancelled, and that they were to go back into the line to support an attack by the British to their north. This order was resented by the men, who even complained that they were being called again to do ‘other people’s work’. There was a strong sense that they were being kept in the line because they were more effective than British units. Some men refused to draw their ammunition from stores and others started walking back along a sunken road to the rear. Officers established a straggler post to round up those going absent, but the soldiers ordered to man it mysteriously reported that they had not encountered anyone leaving th
e line. When the 1st Battalion moved to its start tape on 21 September, more than half the battalion was missing. The assault was nevertheless a success.

  One hundred and twenty-seven Australians were arrested and tried, and received sentences ranging from three to ten years, which they served in grim Dartmoor prison in England. Some accused Monash of being too soft on these men but, in any case, less than a year passed from the end of the war before their sentences were suspended. Peace brought with it no need to set an example any more.

  Pompey Elliott had also faced a 5 September 1918 rebellion by the 59th Battalion of his brigade, who refused to follow orders near Pèronne on the Somme. It occurred when soldiers of the 59th were about to leave the line for a rest, but before leaving were ordered back into the frontline. Sixty men refused to go. Elliott behaved with great understanding. He urged the men to reconsider, and uttered no threats, and the men rejoined their units and engaged in the operations that had been ordered. But later in the month there occurred another mutiny over the disbandment of old battalions and their amalgamation into new ones. Some men of Elliott’s 60th Battalion refused to be absorbed into the 59th. These amalgamations and disbandments were not popular anywhere amongst the Australian troops on the Western Front, even though they were obviously necessary because of losses. This time Elliott became angry and warned soldiers that the death penalty could be used in the case of mutiny. He even threatened that one man in ten could be shot. There was a cry from a man in the ranks: ‘We’ve got bullets too.’ On 25 September thirteen men of the 3rd Australian Tunnelling Company refused to go forward to the frontline. They received sentences of one to two years.

  When at last the men of the AIF did fall back for rest, it was apparent to Australian commanders that for the time being nothing more could be asked of them. This was a crisis for the Australian forces, as conscription had failed and recruitment was inadequate. No one knew that the war had only a short time left to run. The Armistice would come as a great relief to the commanders of the AIF.