Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  A small group of Trotskyists within the Communist movement considered themselves the true Communists; like Trotsky, they opposed the bureaucracy Stalin had erected after 1924 between himself and the true proletariat, and dissented from Stalin’s idea of building ‘Socialism in One Country’, the Soviet Union, rather than working for world revolution. The Trotskyists were led by Nick Origlass and Laurie Short. Short had joined the Communist Party of Australia and the FIA in 1931 but contested in court, on the basis of ballot-rigging, the FIA election which returned Ernie Thornton. Short ultimately became a Labor man and new leader of the FIA.

  The 1949 public perception of a man like Short, and that of hardline Communist Lance Sharkey, however, was that they were cut from the same cloth, that they were comrades together—even though doctrinally they abominated each other.

  A central figure of the anti-Communist fight was the FIA’s Frank Rooney. The New South Wales Trades and Labour Council was very worried about the power of the Communists, and in 1945 the New South Wales ALP agreed to form what became known as the ALP Industrial Groups. The ALP gave party authorisation to contest infiltration of the labour movement and provided a militant role to Catholic anti-Communist groups of unionists. B.A. Santamaria, the Italian grocer’s son from Melbourne and leader of the Catholic Action Movement, later insisted that the Groups were his idea and that he discussed the proposal with the Victorian premier Jack Cain, who helped organise ALP approval for them in 1947.

  With ASIO’s establishment in 1949, the Labor government had put in place all the major policies that the Menzies government was to use in its Cold/Class War. The notion that the December 1949 elections were a watershed at which anti-Communism took a new turn seems to be something of a myth when one is presented with these realities.

  THE WAR AFTER THE WAR

  Ben Chifley was a man of great national ambitions. But his capacity to spend the dollars we earned was limited by the agreement Commonwealth countries observed through their membership of ‘the sterling bloc’ that traded in pounds sterling. In the sterling bloc crisis beginning in 1947, the value of the pound sterling fell against the American dollar by 30 per cent or more, and since our currency was tied to sterling through commerce and in other ways, our currency also fell. This would have been good for exporting farmers and miners, except that seasons of lower production began and the price of imports rose over 9 per cent in 1947–48.

  Chifley had to meet some of the demands of the labour movement, of which the organisations run by Labor men were still militant, let alone those run by Communists. Labor possessed superior bargaining power. The unions believed there would be a depression of the kind that had followed World War I and which saw former Diggers selling pencils in the streets. They felt they had to make their gains before the economy dipped. For the moment the shortage of workers to manufacture the goods people wanted and to process bumper crops meant that in any direct conflict with Chifley the unions would win.

  Chifley had a tough, measured, calm and determined soul. His parents were Irish immigrants, and poverty and mental conflict meant that he lived with his grandparents at Limekilns near Bathurst, sleeping on a hessian bed and attending school two days one week and three the next. Yet he’d read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by the time he was a teenager and went on to George Bernard Shaw and, of course, Keynes. He was conscious that, as he said towards the end of his life, ‘I’m the descendant of a race that fought a long and bitter fight against perjurers and pimps and liars’. He had taught himself economics, not the first or last Treasurer to do so. His wife, Lizzie, was shy in the manner of Elsie Curtin, and made the care of her ninety-three-year-old mother the reason for her continuing to stay in South Bathurst. So rather than moving to the Lodge, Chifley stayed on at the Hotel Kurrajong, still in the company of his secretary Phyllis Donnelly. A young member of the House, Fred Daly, saw him often walking from the Kurrajong to Parliament House, reflectively smoking his pipe before entering the House ‘to belt the Opposition’ not with fury but with preciseness. He was not as good an orator as Curtin, but would produce one of Labor’s rallying symbols, ‘the light on the hill’, in 1949: ‘We have a great objective, the light on the hill, which we aim to reach by working [for] the betterment of mankind not only here but anywhere we can give a helping hand.’ He had none of Curtin’s bipolar extremes of being a bastion of the nation one week and an invalid the next. But he did fret that inflation from both the sterling bloc problems and the demands of unions would result in a falling off of investment and so in the end a lack of jobs. He had failed in his attempt to make state and local governments shift their banking to the Commonwealth, which would have given him greater financial support for his projects, when the High Court declared part of the Act to compel the states to do so invalid.

  The advice of his economists reinforced Chifley’s conviction as both prime minister and treasurer that advances in wages and working conditions must be gradual. So how was he to tamp down the demands of the labour movement and still lead a Labor government? He was respected by the citizenry; however, they were anxious for housing and the good life, and rationing scarcity still remained in many areas, in part to preserve those dollar reserves by not importing too much, in part because of the collapse of the pound.

  Cold War and conservative rhetoric depicted the high incidence of strikes at this time as part of a Moscow-organised Communist conspiracy to wreck the economy. The Australian Communist Party believed that capitalism was on the brink of crisis and that the time had arrived for the party to take leadership of the labour movement away from the ALP. By now Communist Party officials controlled the Australian Miners’ Federation (unlike when Curtin had pleaded with the same union), the Waterside Workers’ Federation, the Seamen’s Union and the Federated Ironworkers’ Association, and they were seen as traitors not only by Coalition—Liberal and Country Party—voters but by Labor voters too, and in particular by those from the Catholic tradition. Punitive measures aimed at these unions were presented by Chifley as a crucial aspect of the war against Communism. Because coal mining was essential for electricity and stevedoring industries to commerce, strikes took on a desperate character, and most people saw them as part of the worldwide Communist plot. The language of everyday industrial relations was so influenced by the Communist issue that it was impossible to see any union grievance as purely industrial. Chifley provided two special tribunals to settle disputes for these bottleneck industries—the Stevedoring Industry Commission and the Coal Industry Tribunal.

  Chifley was handicapped by the lack of constitutional powers to regulate wages after the wartime emergency regulations lapsed, and the 1948 price control referendum, in which he asked the people to give him control over prices and rents, was defeated by a clever, anti-socialist, ‘What will they try to control next?’ campaign.

  Ted Roach, assistant general secretary of the Waterside Workers’ Federation since 1942, would become a casualty of the trade union war against Communism. Roach had a place already in Australian history as the leader of the Port Kembla pig-iron dispute in 1938, when unionists tried to stop a cargo of pig iron the government of the time wanted consigned to Japan (hence Menzies’ nickname Pig Iron Bob), but this time, as poster boy for Communism, he was going to receive a twelve-month gaol sentence.

  In 1947, Chifley gave new powers to Conciliation and Arbitration commissioners, who were to help parties in industrial disputes to reach settlements. Employers resisted these moves for fear that appointments would be biased towards Labor and even include Communists. Some moderate unionists were appointed to the commission, but so was the RSL president in South Australia.

  As for matters the commissioners did not manage to settle, these were referred to the Arbitration Court, which could enforce anti-strike ban clauses in arbitration awards. Normal rules of evidence were not applied in the Arbitration Court and the onus of proof was on defendants. The accused also did not have the right to refuse to give incriminating evidence. Four j
udges out of the seven had been appointed by previous conservative governments, and Judge A.W. Foster, who had been appointed in 1944 by the Curtin government, would say in 1947 that ‘the awards of the Arbitration Court are legislation and not adjudication’. Foster had once been a revolutionary socialist, but now he too was ready to gaol trade unionists who broke anti-strike bans. These Arbitration Court judges may have felt a certain insecurity in that they ranked lower in the judicial hierarchy and received lower salaries than judges who sat in the ‘real’ superior point courts of record. Their tendency would be to treat defiant unionists as criminals.

  The same could even be said of R.C. Kirby, Chifley’s 1947 nominee, a barrister in the Sydney trade union and Labor Party orbit. The conservatives included E.A. Drake-Brockman, formerly a Nationalist senator and president of the Employers’ Federation, who was senior judge. ‘The Drake’, as unionists called him, had become more flexible in his awards as the war went on, and he and Foster favoured but were defeated for the time being on a prescriptive 75 per cent of the male awards being paid to women workers. This was considered progressive for the times. On his death in 1949 he was replaced by R.C. Kelly, one of the founders of the National Catholic Rural Movement, and thus also a devout anti-Communist.

  In 1949, a Communist unionist, L.J. McPhillips, assistant secretary of the Federated Ironworkers’ Association and a member of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, was gaoled for trying to bypass the court and give employers an ultimatum he would negotiate only outside it. McPhillips’ argument was, ‘This issue will be determined outside the Arbitration Court. We do not trust the people in charge of the court to play the game.’ He was charged with contempt and after a two-day hearing was found guilty and sentenced to one month in Long Bay Gaol.

  More significant was the 1949 trial of Lance Sharkey, general secretary of the Communist Party, who had, it was believed, urged the Malayan Communists to rise up their insurgency and said that if Soviet troops entered Australia the Australian workers would welcome them. He was subject to continual surveillance from the newly formed Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), and the stress of that was believed to have added to his drinking binges. He was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for sedition, a harsh sentence that nonetheless reflected the life-and-death feelings of the time. On appeal the term was reduced to thirteen months, and when it ended he went on a national speaking tour and visited Russia, where he sought treatment for heart problems.

  Wharfies had a long tradition of taking action on political issues, and when on 28 March 1949 they held a two-hour stop-work meeting to protest against Sharkey’s trial for sedition, Kirby used his casting vote to prevent penalties being imposed by the court. But when the federal executive of the Waterside Workers’ Federation (WWF) called on members to strike for twenty-four hours on 11 April to protest against the gaoling of McPhillips, Kirby moved to impose discipline. He demanded undertakings from the leaders, Jim Healy and Eddie Roach, that they would abide by their State Industrial Council’s (SIC) decisions. Chifley declared that he was not against a union’s right to strike but was against wharfies being misled by Communists with ulterior motives. Despite the influence of Industrial Groups, made up of Catholic Labor men within the WWF, the federal executive unanimously reaffirmed the basic trade-union principles of the rights to strike and to elect its own representatives, and it confirmed the appointments of Healy and Roach. One of the Groupers, Paddy Kenneally, former Timor commando, warned Roach and Healy that if they kept on strangling the waterfront it would bring about the end of the Australian shipping industry. Nonetheless, the meeting also endorsed the federal executive’s directions to stop work over Sharkey and McPhillips, though only by ten votes to nine. Chifley’s Cabinet supported Kirby’s ultimatum that Healy and Roach should support the SIC decisions. Since they hadn’t, Cabinet dismissed them from their union positions. When the WWF refused to nominate replacements, Cabinet abolished the SIC, and Evatt passed its powers to the Arbitration Court.

  In June 1949, volatile elements of the Cold/Class War interacted to produce the momentous coal strike. The Miners’ Federation had a long history of militancy and was labelled a ‘Communist union’ even though it had a mixture of officials. But the general president and the vice president were Communists, and there were other Communists at district level who would play leading roles in the strike. Depiction of the miners and their WWF counterparts as Communist puppets must have felt demeaning to many men, and there were a number of unauthorised local stoppages of miners and wharfies that happened without union executive input. The coal strike that began in June 1949 was seen as a war between Communism and the nation. In fact, the union shared the widespread fear amongst unions that the present favourable conditions would not last, so they would now pursue claims for a thirty-five-hour week (which made considerable sense in terms of miners’ health) and long service leave. Negotiations stalled before the Coal Industry Tribunal, and the Miners’ Federation decided to call stop-work meetings that would consider a recommendation to strike on 27 June. The chairman of the tribunal issued a no-strike order and threatened to prosecute the officials, while the president of the Miners’ Federation, Idris Williams, warned that ‘we will never sell out the right to strike . . . the trade union would become non-existent if we sold that right’.

  The strike began, and the Labor government, through Chifley, vowed to fight them ‘Boots and All’. On 29 June, ministers rushed through Parliament the National Emergency (Coal Strike) Act. Its purpose was to deny financial support for the miners and their families, and it gave the Arbitration Court power to issue injunctions to ensure compliance with the Act. On Saturday, 2 July, in a special session of the Arbitration Court, Chief Judge Kelly issued an injunction prohibiting four unions from disposing of funds withdrawn from banks for strike purposes, including support for strikers’ families, and on 5 July he followed up with an order requiring the unions to pay the monies to the court’s registrar. Kelly himself fell ill and was replaced by Foster. Foster sentenced seven officials to twelve months’ gaol and McPhillips to six months, and also fined five officials and three unions—the fines for the Miners’ and the WWF were £2000 for each union.

  When Healy and Roach appeared before him, Foster rejected the submission that each of the accused had the right to a separate trial. In defending his refusal to pay over the funds to the court, Roach declared, ‘I’m not prepared to accept the right of anybody to interfere in the domestic affairs of a trade union.’ He said that unions were the fighting organisations of the workers who, throughout history, had had to resist bad laws. Foster cut this short—he wasn’t interested in whether it was a bad law or not. ‘It is the law,’ he said, to which Roach answered, ‘It is a law to starve miners into submission.’

  When Roach claimed the right to argue why his liberty should not be taken away, Foster pre-empted him by sentencing him and Healy to twelve months with ‘light labour’. The unionists had already been brought into court in handcuffs, and in Long Bay Gaol they were treated as normal criminals, not political prisoners.

  The coal strike continued, and produced unemployment widely in factories that could not depend on power and brought social and economic disruption. In hospital for pneumonia at the end of the war, the author made the acquaintance of a young man who had contracted polio in childhood, now studying for the Leaving Certificate while encased permanently in an ‘iron lung’, a coffin-like, electrically driven ventilator from which only the head protruded and in which changes of pressure enabled his lungs to inhale and exhale. The long power failures associated with the coal strike killed him. This tragedy was but one small corner of the strike’s impact. Chifley, the man who as punishment for being a striker had been demoted from locomotive driver to fireman, sent in troops on 1 August to work in open-cut mines. Coerced by the government and with division spreading within their ranks, the miners capitulated and agreed to resume work on 15 August. Applications were made to the Arbitration
Court so that the gaoled union leaders could be released, which occurred on 24 August.

  Roach and the others, to get out of gaol, had to affirm their acceptance of the orders Foster had made as in accordance with the Coal Strike Act, which had supremacy over union rules. They accepted that large proposition. The miners’ defeat was a success for Chifley. But remarkably it had been Evatt, with his record of upholding democratic rights, who as Attorney-General had enacted the Coal Strike Act and crafted the formula by which the troops were brought in.

  It was under pressure from these emergencies, and from the Americans who told him they would no longer be sharing intelligence with him, that Chifley founded ASIO, whose work was to locate Soviet spies and to advise on Communist ambitions for upheaval and influence in Australia. He refused, though the Liberal Party urged him, to winnow supposed Communists out of the public service. ASIO was an organisation Menzies would soon make extensive use of.

  SNOWY

  Nelson Lemmon was the crusty minister appointed by Ben Chifley as Minister for Works and Housing to oversee the building of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric scheme between 1946 and 1949. His chief conflict was with John Joseph (Joe) Cahill, the Labor deputy premier of New South Wales. When Lemmon was working on the housing scheme for the project, Cahill declared that he wouldn’t listen to a wheat grower from Western Australia telling the sovereign capital state of New South Wales how to build houses. Lemmon therefore went to Chifley and said, ‘There’s only one way to handle this . . . put the whole thing under the Defence Act . . . and we’ll be boss.’ Chifley answered, ‘WHAT! Your name’s Nelson Lemmon, not Ned Kelly.’ But Chifley conceded they might get away with it if they could get Evatt to agree.