by John Pilger
Broken Hill’s will to fight had been forged partly by its isolation from the rest of Australia. The New South Wales State Government in Sydney cared little about its distant outpost, and the indifference was mutual. With a population of 30,000, fifty-five hotels, brewery, Theatre Royal, two roller-skating rinks, two newspapers, the Barrier Miner and the Barrier Truth, and a brass band, Broken Hill regarded itself, justifiably, as an industrial principality with only a passing acquaintance with the nation emerging around it. When the States federated in 1901 in what was said to be the birth of the Commonwealth of Australia, Broken Hill was unmoved. The mayor, Jabez Wright, refused to attend the patriotic celebrations in Sydney and instead sent a cryptic telegram: ‘I have something more important to do than attend the National Drunk.’ In the same year Queen Victoria finally expired, and appeals were launched throughout Australia for public subscription to raise monuments to her in every centre, including Broken Hill. A derisory £29 9s was contributed by the Silver City, where no memorial was raised. The money instead was given to the widows of twenty miners who had been killed that year.23
In 1908–9 wages were cut to below subsistence level. Ordered by the new Arbitration Court to pay ‘a living wage’, the company responded by closing down production for two years.24 By the end of the First World War the miners were determined to ‘win the future’. They struck and for nineteen months bore what Thelma Thompson describes as ‘a kind of retribution’. ‘The hospital was like a relief station in wartime,’ she said. ‘The wives would drag themselves to us, after miscarriages brought on by malnutrition. The children were close to starving. No one had anything, but everyone stayed together: the shopkeepers: everyone. They’d parade every day, the miners, the women and kids, behind Bartley’s Barrier Band. Troops were sent, as if this was a revolution; and in some ways it was.’
The miners won because Broken Hill was theirs and only they would work the lode and suffer its misery. However, they won conditions of work up to half a century ahead of the rest of the world. These included the first thirty-five hour week. Night shifts, when most accidents occurred, were banned. Controlling the dust underground, and other safety measures, were given priority. For this, the owners were allowed to make bonanza profits.
When the strike was over, the unions formed the Barrier Industrial Council, for sixty years Broken Hill’s effective government. As well as determining who could or could not work in the mines, the BIC controlled prices in shops, published one of the two local newspapers, allowed and regulated illegal gambling and set the hours for trading in pubs. (The sale of bottled beer was banned on Sundays ‘to preserve family life’.) Trades Hall, with its stolid, rusticated stone façade facing on to Sulphide Street, was the most confident building in the town. It was here, every three years, that the miners’ representatives and the companies (there are now three), re-negotiated the ‘living wage’. As for the work and safety practices won in 1920, these were inviolable, sacrosanct. Today almost every mining family can name a grandfather, father, uncle or brother who has died beneath the ‘line of lode’ or from a disease of ‘the dust’.
Had Shorty O’Neil been a boxer, he would have struggled to reach featherweight. The impression is left, however, that he would have taken on and beaten big men. The deep scar on his face is part of the crust of his working life. As the longest-serving President of the Barrier Industrial Council, Shorty was ‘King of Broken Hill’. He is a voluble, irascible and sardonic man, as possessed of prejudice as he is of wilful courage. I met him standing among the stone gnomes in his small front garden. He had just turned eighty-three. ‘Some things are simple, mate,’ he said. ‘If you don’t kick, you get kicked.’
Like Thelma Thompson, he extolled the importance of memory, of ‘not writing off the past simply because it all looks different now’. ‘I watched a cage going down the shaft with four men in it,’ he said, ‘and I heard it crash to the ground, and I heard those blokes cry. Three of them were left crippled for life. The manager told the driver to be a bit careful next time. Three weeks later, the same driver dropped the cage on a horse and killed it. They sacked him for that. The same attitude remains.’
I asked Shorty how his family survived during the Great Strike. ‘We lived next to the gaol,’ he said, ‘and I knew this warder who’d call me Billy. Mate, that gaol had the best garden in Broken Hill and this warder would say, “Billy, you better come over the wall tonight.” That’s how we kept going: by stealing from a bloody gaol . . . As for clothes, well we had this heavy brown material, thousands of yards of it which someone had donated. The women organised a sewing circle in the Socialist Hall and after that, you could pick every miner’s kid because they all had brown: brown dresses, brown shirts and brown trousers. I was a teenager and already in the mines. I wore the brown, mate. I was proud to be marked. You see, what was gained was phenomenal. There are workers in this country still fighting for a thirty-five hour week, and for the peace that working people crave. We got that peace, mate; we got agreements that allowed men to work out their lives, to build a home.’
I asked him, ‘Is Broken Hill a closed place where the men, and only the men, count?’
‘In my time’, he said, ‘I never let married women work. We’ve paid in blood for these jobs, mate. You have to understand the feeling here. I walked into a pub once and this bloke said, “Come and have a beer, Shorty.” Well, I had a beer with him, but then this mate of mine called me over and said, “What are you doing? He’s no bloody good; he’s got his wife working.”
‘There’s a law in Australia that says that any man that lives off the immoral earnings of a woman should be sent to gaol; and I say that a man that’s working, that’s taking money off his wife, he should be in bloody gaol, too. Look at it from the girl’s point of view. If a young girl marries a bloke who can’t earn enough to keep her, then she shouldn’t have married the bugger in the first place. We never stopped any woman on her own with a child; we never stopped any divorced woman. But if we ever found out that the husband and wife were both working, we’d give the woman three months to give it up.’
The Barrier Industrial Council amended this policy only under pressure from the New South Wales Government through its anti-discrimination laws. But one of Shorty’s rules remains. ‘You’ve got to be born, educated or have lived here for the last ten years before you get a job in the mines,’ he said. ‘That means, mate, we’re the only white city in Australia. You don’t see any Vietnamese and that sort wandering around the streets here.’
I mentioned that modern Australia had been built with the labour of immigrants from all over the world. ‘Not here, mate,’ said Shorty. ‘Before the Great Strike we had a lot of Yugoslavs. They were part of Austria in those days. My father used to say, “Bill, never do anything to the Austrians because there’s never been an Austrian scab in Broken Hill.” They’re all right, mate.’
By the early 1980s the ‘peace’ was in danger. Apprenticeships, the life blood of mining, were terminated. A recession debilitated the town’s commercial life; more than 4,000 people, or a third of the workforce, were retrenched or unable to find jobs. In 1986 the mining companies sought an end to many of the gains of sixty years earlier. Mineral prices had fallen, they argued, and Broken Hill was no longer ‘viable’. This was in contrast to the companies’ persistent lobby that Australia could solve its economic problems only by developing its mineral resources, regardless of fluctuating prices. The companies announced they would no longer help to pay for the regeneration of the surrounding parks and countryside, where the great dust storms used to gather. Their contribution to this had taken forty years’ persuasion.
For two months the men were locked out. Their wives put on their husband’s work clothes, blackened their faces and marched down Sulphide Street with their children behind a brass band. Shorty O’Neil held the banner with Heather Thomas; he cried and said the women’s support was ‘the best thing that has ever happened in the history of this town’. I told one of th
e wives that Shorty had said that women would never be equal to men in Broken Hill. ‘Oh he did, did he?’ she said. ‘The poor old bugger must be confused in his dotage. He should have learned that, without us, he would never have won a duck in a raffle, let alone a strike.’
When the men returned to work in the winter of 1986, to await the decision of an Arbitration Court judge, there was the usual defiant talk to mask their anxiety. Pam Byron, whose husband Dennis had been a miner for fifteen years, said, ‘Because we’re isolated the fear is different in Broken Hill. When the work goes, where do we go?’
Within days of their return to work, a familiar black flag was raised over Trades Hall. Ray Bloomfield, aged thirty-four, had fallen 100 feet down a shaft. The next shift stopped and the town filled for his funeral procession, which passed the length of the line of lode. In the church, men struggled to control their coughing.
I joined a shift and walked downhill through a fog of dust, judging the man in front from the beam of his lamp. ‘Wait!’ said a voice. Ahead, silhouettes tapped the roof with crowbars. A crack appeared and another blow with a bar brought down a raft of stone, only inches from its tormentors. The company had no quarrel with this ‘work practice’.
The shaft narrowed. The noise of drilling was now constant, and the ricochet of water and dust stung exposed skin. Those ahead gently moved the timber supports, as heavy as cannons, that propped up the roof. They reminded me of troops bringing up artillery under fire, with their lives depending upon how each man worked; and in every sense – the clipped commands, the tense, planned assault on a stubborn adversary, the degradation of a filthy wet trench and the spirit of comradeship, of watching out for each other – this was mining’s universal front line.
In February 1987 the Sydney Morning Herald reported:
A meeting of mine workers at Broken Hill yesterday voted to accept the introduction of new work practices underground . . . The decision marks the end of a yearlong dispute [and] spells the end of work practices which have remained virtually unchanged since the 1920s . . .
The changes to be introduced include the firing of explosives while men remain underground on their meal break . . . Firings have occurred at the end of each shift for more than 60 years, with the next shift waiting an hour for dust and fumes to clear before going underground.
The President of the Mining Managers’ Association, Mr Craig Bermingham, said the rest of the world was moving a bit faster than the Broken Hill mines.
At the annual Broken Hill Eisteddfod in the R. K. Sanderson Basketball Stadium the ‘Gnomes Dance’ was being performed in the ‘Piano Solo Ten Years and Under’ category. This was followed by ‘Highland Dancing, Ballet, Tap and Modern’. Mothers wore taffeta and fathers long white socks. The applause was sparse. Unlike previous years, there were empty seats. People were leaving Broken Hill. At the ‘Bachelors’ and Spinsters’ Ball’ held in a large iron shed with a concrete floor, the ‘belle of the ball’ wore a leopard-skin hat, gloves and shoes and a large rose behind her ear. The ‘beau of the ball’ wore a baggy suit and left town the next day to look for work. The young leave mostly on Sundays in old Holden cars, Valiants and Datsuns, usually in convoy. Pam Byron said, ‘Both my son and daughter have been unemployed for nearly three years after leaving school. My daughter was put off during the disputes. My son has never had a job. They’ll have to go eventually. I can’t remember so many young people leaving, just driving out.’
As in other parts of Australia, tourism is regarded as a possible solution. People from Adelaide and Sydney have opened restaurants serving expensive and pretentious food. One of the main tourist attractions is at nearby Silverton, once a prosperous town of 25,000 people until the mining companies decided that Broken Hill offered greater profit. Silverton retains the empty shells of two-storey stone hotels, banks, the Silver Age newspaper office and the brewery. An occasional tourist bus comes through and people are taken to the Silverton pub, where television commercials for Castlemaine beer are made. (‘Australians wouldn’t give a XXXX for anything else.’) The parrot that appears in these commercials resides in the pub. The tour guide explains that although the parrot is depicted drinking a can of XXXX, the parrot hates beer. The can contains raspberry juice, which the parrot likes.
On their return to Broken Hill the buses pass the cemetery on Rakow Road, but they do not stop. There is no regeneration here; no grass grows in the dry and dusty earth between the plots. Row upon row of the gravestones are those of miners who died on the line of lode. Dominating them is an obelisk commemorating the death of Percy Brookfield, an independent socialist who was elected to represent Broken Hill early in the century and held the balance of power in the New South Wales Parliament during the Great Strike.
After the strike had been won, Percy Brookfield was killed as he tried to disarm a Russian who had fired on a train filled with passengers. His death was believed by many of his supporters to have been a political assassination, although it was not. He was a brave and principled man who fought hard for the miners when others in the labour movement saw their cause as lost. On his obelisk are inscribed the words, ‘Workers of the World Unite!’ Every day, for almost seventy years, fresh red flowers have been placed here, in the dust.
Running east from Perth is C. Y. O’Connor’s Great Pipe. Like an iron worm beside the highway, it carries water from the coastal dams of the Darling Range to a wheat belt surrounded by salt bed and sand. C. Y. O’Connor, an Irish engineer, shot himself dead at South Beach near Perth on March 10, 1902 after a campaign of vilification in which he was accused of building a pipe that would not work. His farewell note to his wife and seven children included instructions for the completion of his dream, which was later described as ‘an engineering wonder of the world’. It is a peculiarly Australian story of vision, farce and tragedy.
The State of Western Australia, into which Europe would fit with room to spare, occupies a third of the continent. Less than 9 per cent of the Australian population live here, about 1,407,000 people, a million of whom live in Perth, the most isolated city in the world. Perth, the home of Alan Bond and other Mates, is said to have the highest concentration of millionaires in Australia.
When C. Y. O’Connor’s Great Pipe reaches Goomaling, there are no millionaires. There are prefabricated houses, and a garage that puts back together old cars; and a shop with a Billabong ice-cream sign and a large hole in its flyscreen door. The first abandoned farmhouse is here. Beyond the railway line at Wyalkatchem there is another, and another.
Near Koorda on a straight empty road, a patrol car appeared and a cop silently handed out a speeding ticket. The owner of the Koorda Hotel, Mike Kelly, said, ‘You must’ve run into Al Boyer. Al likes to hand out parking tickets in places where there’s more space to park than on the moon. What gets up people’s noses is that Al won half a million bucks on Lotto, and he wants to stay being a cop!’
Land around Koorda was cleared only in the 1950s. The atmosphere is of a town half born, a community half formed in a country half won. Koorda was the site of one of the ill-fated ‘soldier settler schemes’, in which returning veterans of the Second World War were sent to struggle, unskilled, with the bush from which eventually they fled in despair. There is more than an echo of this today. In the local paper a page is given over to the ‘rural facilitator’ explaining his mission. ‘My name is Francis,’ he wrote. ‘I have been recently appointed by Mount Marshall Shire to help people see more objectively their financial and personal situations . . . In times of crisis we all experience stress or pressure and tend to feel isolated and alone with our problems . . . so it is essential to have someone who in the strictest confidence is interested in listening.’25
There is an apprehensive edge to local pride. Bert Street was named ‘Street of the Year’ in 1986, the year the Homestead Store closed down and the population dropped to 350. Hazel Jones, the local historian, has placed a sign over her one-room museum: ‘Patrons – in the event of earth tremors please vacate p
remises quickly for mutual safety.’ This is said to stimulate ‘the Japanese tourists’, although only one has been sighted.
North from Koorda the earth moves. Sand scuds across the road and the horizon shimmers with the silver and gold of salt bed, desert and, miraculously, wheat. Harry and Kath King live here, on a farm optimistically called Golden Acres. Their address is Mollerin North Road, Mollerin North. But there is no Mollerin, north or south. Their farm is the last one; the town itself died in May 1984. Harry’s father came here in 1930 from the gold fields at Kalgoorlie. ‘He had an axe and a big heart,’ said Harry, of whom the same ought to be said. Harry and Kath married young and cleared their own land in 1959, nurtured it and became, against all sensible odds, successful wheat farmers.
The Kings borrowed money in the late 1970s when wheat prices were up and interest rates down. After constant drought, a contracting market for Australian wheat and interest rates of more than 20 per cent, they fell into serious debt for the first time. To keep up his repayments Harry has had to lease more and more land and so increase the area of his wheat crop. ‘At the moment I’m putting in about 7,500 acres at a cost of around 130,000 dollars,’ he said. ‘I’ve no guarantee I’ll even get that money back, let alone make any profit. If it doesn’t rain, the desert will take it; and it’s got to be the sort of rain that doesn’t disappear the moment it hits the ground.’