Let the Land Speak

by Jackie French

  These days Australia’s population can retreat to air-conditioned homes, offices or even malls on hot days. Imagine summer after summer with no retreat: no creek, foul water, sick children, the stench of dead rabbits, the white bones of the last of your stock, husband and sons old enough to work – twelve, or even younger – off droving, or shearing, on the wallaby.

  Then the bushfire smoke would come.

  The power of hope

  Hardship is not a reason to federate. My year eleven history teacher, Dr Martin Sullivan, once bounded into class and declared: ‘Revolutions don’t happen when things are at their worst. They happen when people begin to hope.’

  The shared experience of drought, heat and smoke did perhaps draw Australians into mutual sympathy. But starving, hopeless women and thirsty men droving far from towns do not lead or even join a movement advocating Federation. The lack of water even hindered the slowly stirring movement to join the states into one nation, with arguments between New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Queensland over the use of water in the Murray–Darling system (arguments that are still going on in much the same terms today, but with a fifth interested party, environmentalists).

  Ideas cost nothing. The dream of Federation gave people who were better off hope that a solution – many solutions – to social problems might be solved at the ballot box. Even in a drought you can dream. In a drought, dreams are probably more necessary: something good to work towards, even if the sky is too dry to weep. And this is even more essential when drought leads to economic depression.

  A drought-fuelled depression

  The drought – and the poor land management that created tragedy instead of the mere ‘lack of abundance’ it might have been two hundred years before – caused major long-term depression, in the cities as well as the bush. That 1880 to 1903 depression brought conditions so horrendous that it would spark passionate dreams of reform, dreams that could most easily be achieved by creating a national parliament that would pass new laws to encompass the entire country.

  By the 1880s, starving women, children and a few men (most had headed out ‘on the road’ to look for work) lined up for hours at city soup kitchens. By the 1890s, prices for both wool and wheat fell in Britain. State governments had borrowed heavily for large building projects, expecting that the prosperity of continuing high wheat and wool prices and the revenue from goldmining would keep their states prosperous.

  It didn’t. Land prices in both cities and rural areas had mushroomed beyond the land’s real worth. They crashed too.

  By the early 1890s crowds were gathering outside banks, desperate to withdraw their money so they could pay the rent or feed their families. Governments stopped public works. Even more people lost their jobs.

  Visionaries like Henry Parkes could see that it made economic sense to drop the tariffs on trade between the states and to standardise the width of state railway lines so that one train could carry goods and people into different states (without having to stop at state borders and move people and freight onto a different train). Uniform immigration laws would also stop what many regarded simply as cheap labour – the ‘blackbirding’ or kidnapping of Pacific Islanders to work on Queensland sugar farms, and the growing number of Chinese immigrants. The latter were unpopular as they seemed all too successful, even in the drought times, creating market gardens, working in furniture factories, and expanding into hardware stores and tanneries. When times are bad it is good to have a physically identifiable enemy to blame.

  Federation was something to hope for – you could harness dreams to the idea of national Federation. Federation might bring Australia back to prosperity. It might also alleviate the appalling poverty and squalor of the cities.

  Grinder Brothers’ Alley

  Sydney’s slums dated from the first arrival of Europeans and the ramshackle huts put up by the sailors of the First Fleet for their doxies, the female convicts, before the ships sailed back to England. Most harbours of the time had slums near the waterfront, where sailors could get pickled with cheap gin and women hired themselves out for five minutes in an alley. Slums also housed factory workers and the factories they worked in, as well as crooks and brothels. But recession meant hard times for factories too.

  I haven’t been able to find reliable figures for child labour in Australia during the 1877 to 1903 drought, but certainly child labour predated the Great Drought. In 1890s England, children as young as ten would ‘go into service’ as servants, be taken on as apprentices, work in woollen mills, and pull carts underground in Welsh coalmines because they were cheaper than pit ponies. Adults are stronger and have more endurance than children. They make better workers – if you can afford to pay them.

  * * *

  Exploiting the desperate

  The poverty and desperation of the 1880s and 1890s did not affect everyone. For the first time in the continent’s history, humans could be insulated from two of the country’s most persistent threats: heat and lack of water.

  Houses built in the 1880s and 1890s had solid, high ceilings, thick brick walls that helped keep out the heat, and decorative touches like leadlight windows, carved bannisters and decorative plaster ceilings. They could be kept snug in winter by wood fires. City water systems meant large green gardens. Those late Victorian houses are often far better built, insulated and soundproofed than the McMansions of today. Wages were low because of high unemployment, so a good house was relatively cheap to build.

  By the 1890s, the house of a middle-class city family where the male income earner still had a job (women were only supposed to work from absolute necessity, and even then their wages were difficult to survive on) would probably have a wood-burning stove instead of or as well as a kitchen fireplace and hearth, far easier to keep alight and to keep the kitchen free from dusty grease around the walls. A Coolgardie safe, using evaporating water to cool the contents, would act as a fridge. In larger towns and cities the ‘iceman’ in his sacking apron and with his giant tongs would bring blocks of ice once or twice a week. Middle-class houses also had running water, sewerage (or a dunny man to collect the pans), neat gardens with roses out the front and a vegetable garden out the back.

  Cheap servants made home life even more comfortable. Even households where the husband held only a labourer’s job could afford a woman to come in once or twice a week to ‘do the rough’ - stove blacking, floor scrubbing, carpet beating and laundry. Middle-class homes employed at least one servant as well as the ‘slavie’, who washed up, scrubbed the vegetables and the floor, someone to do the laundry, and a full- or part-time gardener. Smaller homes had a ‘couple’, husband and wife. But these neat houses were in suburbs carefully distant from the factories and the people that worked in them, the slums of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

  * * *

  Even if we don’t have reliable statistics for child labour in Australia in the 1890s, we do have the tragic images created by Henry Lawson and other writers of life in squalid alleys where children worked from dawn till dusk, sometimes sleeping on the factory floor, paid in pennies or even not paid at all. Henry Lawson is now remembered for his bush stories and poetry, but from the time Lawson moved to Sydney to be with his mother when he was sixteen, three years after his parents’ marriage had broken up for the last time in its crumbly history, Lawson was mostly a city dweller. His work also detailed the horrors of slum life but these stories and poems are, perhaps, too harsh and realistic to be as popular as his bush poetry today. Unlike Charles Dickens’s novels of English poverty, stories like ‘Arvie Aspinall’s Alarm Clock’ don’t have happy endings. Arvie dies sleeping in the Grinder Brothers’ factory doorway, so that he doesn’t oversleep and lose the job that – not quite – feeds his family.12

  It was the horrors of slum life – not just the child labour, endemic alcoholism and violence but also the casual prostitution (faced with a choice between a slow death in a factory or a life as a prostitute, it was no wonder that so many chose the latter) – t
hat led to the formation of groups like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.

  The demon drink

  The temperance movement began as a drive to stop the drinking of alcohol; ‘lips that have touched alcohol shall not touch mine’ is one of its more enduring slogans. It is easy now to portray the women of the 1890s temperance movement as wowsers – anti-sex, anti-grog and anti-fun – especially as in 1898 one of the Tasmanian branches urged that a bell be rung at 9 p.m. to send all young people, especially girls, off the streets.

  But there was a full and awful truth in their phrase ‘the demon drink’. Ever since spirits became cheap in Britain and Europe, thanks to the availability of slave-grown sugar in the seventeenth century and potatoes in Europe, much of society was drunk for at least part of each day. A male aristocrat’s worth was measured in how well he could hold his drink, measured by bottles, not glasses, of brandy, wine and port a night. Alcohol was the great solace of the poor, and gin was cheaper than bread. Bush songs like ‘Click Go the Shears’ extolled the place of the pub or shanty:

  The first pub we come to it’s there we’ll have a spree

  And everyone that comes along it’s, ‘Come and drink with me!’

  Shearers and drovers routinely cashed their cheques at the first pub they came to, and little if anything might make it back to their families. The ‘working man’ was paid in cash and, again, Friday night at the pub might see a large part or even all of the money gone in one glorious night of oblivion, as well as paying the ‘tab’ for the previous six nights’ drinking.

  Women were forced to take in washing, lodgers or mending to feed their families, even when their husbands were adequately paid, but spent most of their wages on grog. A drunk man was more likely to bash or rape his wife, an alcoholic more likely to abandon his family – or to be abandoned as they fled to safety.

  It was this true ‘demon’ that was the prime focus of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (later the National Women’s Christian Temperance Union), but they also had another cause: child labour, the curse of the alley where Lawson’s Grinder Brothers had their factory. Falling profits meant that factory owners needed to keep costs down and children were cheap, even expendable. They could be paid in food and sleep on the dirt of the factory floor. While the women of the union campaigned in streets and outside pubs, trying to get men to ‘sign the pledge’ to give up alcohol, they also saw that only legislative change could bring major relief in matters like child labour. But the women of the Temperance Union, like all women, did not have the right to vote.

  A new parliament – a national one – might see new labour laws brought in, and female suffrage across the continent.

  The mothers of Federation

  Henry Parkes, a constitutional lawyer, is called the father of Federation. Few Australians, perhaps, would be as comfortable acknowledging that our nation is as much, or even more, the child of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). They were indomitable.13

  The first local Temperance Union was set up in Sydney in 1882 and the first branch of the WCTU founded in Sydney in 1885, prompted by a visit by Mary Leavitt from the American union. Branches in Queensland, rural New South Wales, South Australia and Tasmania quickly followed. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union of Australasia (later renamed the National Women’s Christian Temperance Union of Australia) was formed in May 1891, Australia’s first national women’s organisation in the country. By 1894 they had 7400 members.

  By 1900 the constitution of the national union outlined their aims: ‘We believe in total abstinence for the individual, prohibition for the state and nation, equal standard of purity for men and women, equal wages for equal work without regard to sex, the ballot in the hands of women, arbitration between nations.’14

  They were not alone. By the 1890s there were many groups of women, often associated with literary societies15, gathering signatures for petitions and lobbying both for female suffrage and laws to give women equal rights and to protect children. (Henry Lawson’s mother, Louisa Lawson, was prominent both as a political radical, writer and publisher.) The Australian Women’s Suffrage Society had been formed in 1889 to win the right to vote as well as equal rights in marriage and divorce, equal rights to own property and the right for women to be given custody of children in the event of divorce.

  The fight for female suffrage was inextricably linked with both the move to Federation and the battle to improve the lot of women and children. British women wouldn’t get the vote on the same terms as men till the 1920s, despite what might arguably be a larger class of articulate, educated women with strong political connections. Even the major contribution of women to the war effort from 1914 to 1918 didn’t earn all women a place at the ballot box.

  Why did Australian (and New Zealander) women win the vote so early? It may be partly because while the role of an English woman of a certain class in Victorian times was still to arrange tennis parties and the church flowers, Australian women had had more experience of managing properties and businesses while the men of the family were off looking for gold, droving, shearing or working at other jobs due to the drought. Many of the prominent women in the Temperance and Suffrage movements came from rural backgrounds, where women worked, even if their management role was never acknowledged. Once again the land played an active role in our history, forging women such as Louisa Lawson who’d had to simultaneously run a business, a farm and a household, giving them both confidence in their own ability as well as the experience of the suffering of women unprotected by just laws.

  But there were many other factors, including a radical, often Irish Roman Catholic anti-authoritarianism simmering in the community that may also have contributed to a broader sense of social justice. But the groups who campaigned for female suffrage weren’t arguing just to have a basic human right to share in public decisions. They were also fighting for the laws that a new federal parliament might pass, ones that restricted child labour and protected and gave educational opportunities to women and children. Once again, the horrors of the drought fuelled the passion of the campaigners.

  Large petitions urging female suffrage were gathered in the various states. South Australia collected 11,600 signatures in 1894, Queensland collected 11,366 signatures in 1894 and 4000 more in 1897, and Tasmania collected 2278 signatures in 1896. In New South Wales petitions were gathered from 1891, and from 1899 in Western Australia. But none were as large as the 1891 Victorian one that had 30,000 signatures and became known as the ‘Monster Petition’.16

  The dreams that came out of the drought were never entirely fulfilled. South Australian women were granted the right to vote in 1895, followed by Western Australia in 1899, New South Wales in 1902, Tasmania in 1903, Queensland in 1905 and finally Victoria in 1908. Australian women (except Aboriginal women) were enfranchised for the new Commonwealth Parliament in 1902 and first voted in its second election of 1903. And yes, some new federal laws did help women and children, but politicians would mostly be male for the next seventy years. It wouldn’t be until the late 1960s (and a far less socially relevant drought) that the votes of women were even partially harnessed to fight for reform.

  How drought created the Labor Party

  Australia, like Britain, would almost certainly have eventually developed a party to represent the working class, but in Australia the Great Drought provided the trigger and much of the passion.

  Worsening economic conditions due to the drought and its consequences led to lower wages and harsher working conditions. Strikes spread across the country in the late 1880s, from ship’s officers to seamen, waterside workers, shearers, miners and many others. The colonial governments and their police forces supported the employers. Bitterness grew between workers and employers. Worsening conditions increased the sense of solidarity among workers – and solidarity increased militancy.

  Australia’s first workers’ organisation was the Shipwrights’ Union, formed in 1830. Others followed, even though in Britain unions we
re illegal until 1871. But by the 1880s, drought-fuelled desperation from appalling – and worsening – working conditions made the Shearers’ Union the most militant of all Australian unions of the time.

  The Shearers’ Union was formed in July 1886 when squatters wanted to lower the rate of pay, and refuse payment for any sheep not ‘properly shorn’. Its militancy may also have been partly due to the comradeship of the outback, men willing to work together for a common cause. Its stroppiness might equally have been partly due to grog and hangovers.

  In 1891 around the Barcaldine area in central western Queensland members refused to work at stations unless the Squatters’ Association met their demands for better conditions. Eventually 50,000 miners, transport workers, shearers and other farm workers were on strike along the east coast, some for up to three months. The army, police and special police were called in to break up mobs of protesting workers. The strike lasted till 7 August, when the last of the shearers went back to work after the leaders of the strike had been arrested for conspiracy and sentenced to three years’ jail. But strikes broke out on other properties for many years, either for better wages and conditions or to protest against property owners’ employing non-union labour.

  * * *

  Labor not Labour

  ‘Labor’ was not a spelling mistake. It is American English spelling, and the US ‘labor’ movement was influential in Australia. It also differentiated the federal party from the many local labour movements.

  * * *

  In June 1894 Queensland pastoralists decided to offer shearers less money. On 2 July unionists fought with strikebreakers at Oondooroo Station. When the river steamer Rodney arrived laden with strikebreakers on the Darling River on 6 August, it was met by a furious mob and burnt. Dagworth Station’s shearing shed was burnt down. On 9 September the Queensland parliament passed the Peace Preservation Act, giving itself exceptional powers to deal with the strike – and the strike was called off.