9.
The oppressed fight back
Unity among the oppressed is, to adapt a phrase from Brecht, “that simple thing so hard to achieve”. But at least there is a starting point in the fact that their struggles so often overlap. In the Fraser era Aborigines spoke from anti-uranium platforms and were keen to take a shot at Joh Bjelke-Petersen. Women were active in strikes from the Latrobe Valley to the Pilbara, thousands of them took strike action in government offices and schools, and they led campaigns against environmental destruction. Every mass struggle was enriched by the migrant groups involved, who were sometimes very important indeed: for example, 80 percent of the Pagewood factory workforce were from migrant backgrounds. The lesbian and gay movements emerged in the wake of women’s liberation and would have been virtually inconceivable without it.
At the start of the seventies, the various movements against oppression tended to see themselves as part of a wider struggle to change society as a whole. This was partly because of the existence of a mass antiwar movement to which everyone felt they belonged, and partly because of the high levels of industrial struggle which gave people confidence in the labour movement as a force capable of seriously challenging capitalism. Even when the antiwar campaigns had ended, and the class struggle was in decline, the various movements continued to cross-fertilise. Take for example the emergence of protests against the Miss Victoria Quest in the early eighties, where women’s demands intersected with those of people with a disability. Demonstrators invaded the stage with placards, pointing out how the quest created an image of a supposedly ideal woman, which people with a disability found impossible to live up to. Provocative actions like these helped to change social attitudes quite a bit.
This book reflects the overlap between many struggles. The Aboriginal-led demonstrations at the Brisbane Commonwealth Games appear in the Queensland chapter -- as they must, for otherwise the struggle against Joh Bjelke-Petersen would appear to be a whites-only affair. Similarly, I consider feminism’s impact on the peace movement in an earlier chapter.
If there was much common ground, however, the seventies was also the decade that entrenched the idea of independent movements of the oppressed. At the start of the decade radical activists had emphasized the importance of understanding the specific oppression of Aborigines or women, and mobilising specific movements against each. These initiatives were valuable in opening up new fronts in the struggle against capitalism and developing critiques of the prevailing social order -- so valuable, perhaps, that it was easy to lose sight of their limitations. By the early 1980s, the belief that “autonomous” movements were needed for every oppressed sector had become an article of faith on the left; similarly, readers will automatically expect a history of the era to include several specific discussions of such movements.
This may help ensure that particular oppressions and particular struggles are more fully treated, but the obsession with autonomy also reflects the defeats of the seventies and eighties. As the various challenges to Fraser exhausted themselves, and in particular as organised labour looked less and less like a force capable of challenging capitalism, most people involved in fighting oppression withdrew into sectionalism. Autonomy theories made a virtue, not to say a shibboleth, out of what was really a retreat. The growing fragmentation made the “movements” weaker -- if one could still apply that term to what by the eighties might be small action groups, or lobbies trying to extract concessions from the welfare state, or at worst mere trendy networks designed to advance careers.
As the fragmentation continued, the “particularism” sometimes became very particular indeed, since there were black women, lesbians with disabilities, elderly migrants and so on. “Each attempt to claim representativeness for a particular oppressed group finds that that group must be further broken down,” observed marxist-feminist Ann Curthoys in 1986, and she explained how this could undermine our ability to develop a coherent alternative to the existing social order:
It is argued that nothing of value can be said about the position or policies of a particular group of people other than by members of that group. Thus only women can say anything of value about the position or the strategy of the women’s movement, only Aborigines likewise ... And so we are reduced to categories which supposedly define us ... we become white heterosexual women, or black homosexual men, or whatever ... Analysis is in this way confined to a smaller and smaller canvas. Attempts to understand experience across gender and ethnic lines become rarer, and when they exist are open to condemnation and ridicule ... Our problem now is how to regain a belief in the possibility and effectiveness of collective action across gender and racial boundaries, without losing that understanding of specific cultural situations that we have so painfully begun to acquire.
This discussion of Aborigines, migrants and sexual politics takes that challenge as its starting point. In the Fraser era different oppressed groups found themselves under fire, and resisted. Given the prejudices in society, they sometimes needed separate organisation. The history shows, however, that to win victories in the struggle they mostly needed unity, for which the soundest basis was working class solidarity.
1. The Aborigines
Aboriginal people have been besieged for two centuries. Under Whitlam some of the pressures abated, but under Fraser they again began to mount. In central Australia, blacks accounted for 663 out of 889 registered jobless in 1976, while the federal Government estimated that out of 30-35,000 Aborigines in the workforce nationwide, about 14,000 were unemployed. Mike Braham, director of the inner-suburban Chippendale community centre, described the consequences in Sydney, particularly for those in the grip of hire purchase companies:
Things are so tough here that about 12 people a week come to borrow a dollar or two for milk or a bit of food to see them through ... After seeing the way the blacks are hounded, hunted and impoverished I’d put South Africa on a pedestal.
The Aboriginal Medical Service reported that in nearby Redfern, 25 percent of children under five were so malnourished they would suffer brain damage, while 20 percent of children had spent more than two months in hospital before their first birthday. A continent away, in Perth, the Princess Margaret Hospital had admitted 20 percent of the city’s Aboriginal children in 1974, more than half of them undernourished. Things were no better in more remote areas; for example the infant mortality rate for Northern Territory Aborigines was 75 per thousand live births, compared to 16 for whites.
Black communities were often locked in conflict with the police. In August 1977 Brisbane police invaded two hostels and arrested activists, attacked a camp of homeless where they threw several elderly people into the river, then picked a brawl in the Ship Inn in Woolloongabba. When blacks at the Inn gave a rather good account of themselves in the fracas, the cops retaliated with a wave of harassment and arrests, charging three people with attempted murder. In rural areas the police complained bitterly at the role of the Aboriginal Legal Service in monitoring their work and documenting abuses. At that time, of course, the extent of black deaths in custody was not so widely known.
The land has an immense importance for Aborigines and the demand for land rights goes back a long way, but it was the struggles of the sixties and seventies which made it front page news. It formed the most important of two battlefields, with blacks’ call for better welfare provisions and community control constituting the other -- but no battle was easily won.
Aborigines’ political and social power was generally fairly limited. They had long been a small minority of the population. They did not form an important voting bloc outside the Northern Territory, nor did they have a middle class with economic leverage, nor were they concentrated in sufficient numbers in any urban area to use riots or the threat of them to put pressure on the state, in the way that ghetto blacks in America had done. (The 1976 census estimated 14,000 Aborigines in Sydney, the highest urban total.) Apart from a declining presence in the outback pastoral industry, they lacked industrial muscle. In all these ways they were in a far weaker position than, say, migrant workers or white women.
Consequently outside support was particularly important. They needed positive publicity both in Australia and overseas, and solidarity from sections of white society, in particular the trade unions and social movements such as that against uranium mining. Unfortunately, backing from these sources was in decline during the Fraser years. Attempts to gain widespread international publicity during the Brisbane Commonwealth Games were a failure -- partly, it seemed, because Fraser had managed to buy immunity on the issue of Australia’s indigenous people by conspicuously condemning racism in southern Africa. The unions were losing confidence in their ability to fight, while the anti-uranium campaign began to sag from 1978.
Whitlam’s reforms had encouraged some Aborigines to look to Canberra for help. But while the Fraser Government proceeded with legislation to grant large areas of land in the Northern Territory, Whitlam’s Act was scaled down, despite a 1000-strong Alice Springs protest rally. Aborigines were no longer to control all roads running through their land, and Fraser gave the Northern Territory government the power to pass laws on the day-to-day operation of land rights. (In 1978 the Territory passed laws allowing certain whites to enter black lands without permission.) Most crucially the Fraser version omitted a clause granting land rights based on need, which meant that people living in towns whose connections with particular areas had been destroyed, and those who worked and lived on cattle stations, could not establish land claims.
In every other area Fraser had only disappointments to offer. The Aboriginal Medical Service which had documented the grim health situation in Redfern applied for a grant to improve the local people’s nutrition, but only got half of what it wanted -- this from a Department of Aboriginal Affairs that finished 1976 with considerable unspent funds. The 150 Aboriginal housing associations which had been encouraged under Whitlam were obliged to dismiss employees. The government refused to fund a health service based in Darwin, pleading a lack of cash; it took two sit-ins at the DAA office before limited funding was made available. Despite the jobs crisis, the Government wound down the activities of the Department of Employment’s Aboriginal section, then demoted a black public servant who commented publicly on the cutbacks.
Fraser also scrapped the National Aboriginal Consultative Council. In its place he convened a National Aboriginal Conference, with electoral boundaries altered to give more weight to people in traditional rural areas, apparently in the hope they would be less demanding than the urban activists.
Cuts to programs were so severe in 1976 that leaked public service documents expressed fears of “a sharp reaction in the black community”, and this was only the start. By 1982 Aborigines were $213 million short of what Fraser had promised them in 1975. In the 1981-82 budget, spending on Aboriginal Affairs was over 35 percent lower in real terms than under Whitlam. The first minister, Ian Viner, gradually exhausted his credibility; so Fraser put Fred Chaney in charge, whereupon the National Times naively boosted him as “the best Aboriginal Affairs minister since ... Arthur Phillip,” but Redfern blacks had a more realistic view of the Chaneys of this world. “They never leave their offices in North Sydney,” said Sylvia Scott of Murrawina (“black woman”) pre-school. “Fred Chaney has been in Redfern once: we expect to get a letter next year just on election time.”
It was hardly surprising that many communities joined the “outstation” movement, turning their backs on the marginal position white society allowed them and seeking to build new lives away from white-controlled centres. But others chose, or were obliged, to stand and fight, as symbolised by the decision in 1976 to set up an “Aboriginal embassy” in Canberra for the first time since 1972.
It was at Aurukun on the Gulf of Carpentaria that the Fraser Government prepared the most bitter disappointment for Aborigines. The strong Aurukun community had learned from the experience of nearby Weipa how destructive mining could be, and they had fended off mining companies in the past, but after Whitlam’s fall a consortium of these companies secured a mining lease from the Queensland government. This violated written promises from that government that no mining would go ahead without the community’s consent, making the people particularly determined to resist. Fourteen of them occupied an airfield and mining camp at Tipperary, while some trade unions expressed support.
The community took legal action and won in the Queensland Supreme Court, however Premier Petersen then appealed successfully to the Privy Council in Britain. The State government seized direct legal control of Aurukun and Mornington Island reserves from the churches (who had been too sympathetic to the black cause for Petersen’s liking) and sent in administrators in May 1978. In response the Aborigines refused to let them leave the airfield, and occupied community facilities to show they intended to control their own affairs.
The Aurukun community expected Canberra to help them -- after all, hadn’t Fraser told a national Aboriginal conference that “we will not fail these people”? Federal parliament did pass an Act in April allowing community control of Aurukun and Mornington Island reserves, but Petersen simply responded by declassifying them -- they were technically no longer reserves. Reluctantly the Aurukun and Mornington Island Councils agreed to a six-month trial of the new system. Before the six months had expired, however, Petersen dissolved both councils, replacing them with his own agents; in the mean time his government had constantly meddled in their affairs and withheld funds.
On 16 May the Queensland parliament passed an Act giving Petersen the power to sack the local councils and deny basic legal rights. Yet despite pleas from Liberal Senator Neville Bonner, himself an Aborigine, minister Ian Viner blandly announced that the federal government would accept Petersen’s actions. In fact the Fraser regime appeared to be implicated itself, for as The Age reported, “Mr Viner said he and his opposite number, Queensland’s Local Government minister, Mr Hinze, had worked hard on the legislation and it should be given every chance to work.”
Fraser had the power to declare the communities self-managing and free of State control, but refused to do so, preferring to posture about ending white rule in Zimbabwe. In 1979 four more Queensland reserves at Yarrabah, Kowanyama, Cherbourg and Mossman Gorge asked Canberra to declare them self-managing, to no avail. On the contrary, Canberra continued negotiating with the State government without reference to the Aborigines. When he did meet with Aboriginal Council members, who told him that the 50 year leases Bjelke-Petersen had provided were no substitute for full land ownership, Fred Chaney replied arrogantly that there was “too much sloganising” going on. No doubt he had the same attitude towards uranium mining.
Ranger and uranium
Uranium mines have cost the Aborigines dearly, beginning with the postwar mine at Rum Jungle in the Northern Territory, which resulted in the contamination of about 100 square kilometres of the Finniss River flood plain. In the seventies the miners again turned their attention to Aboriginal land, after finding huge deposits in Arnhem Land. This was a beautiful region populated mostly by blacks, and the local people feared that mining could ruin it and them. Oenpelli Council chairman Silas Maralngurra argued:
Balanda [white man] push, push, push, -- soon pubs everywhere and they will kill the race -- look at the Larrakia. Darwin is their country, and they are living on the rubbish tip.
Lucrative royalties (up to $25 million a year) could not begin to compensate, and the Commissioners believed the Aborigines “would happily forego the lot in exchange for an assurance the mining would not proceed”. Yet while recognising that the traditional owners of the Ranger site and the Northern Land Council were opposed to the mining of uranium, the Commission concluded that “their opposition should not be allowed to prevail.” The Commission, after all, belonged to Fraser, who wanted mining to go ahead. Aborigines would have the right to negotiate the terms, but not to refuse. If they refused, Fraser would install an arbitrator, and they risked losing the land along with the Land Rights Act and the Northern Land Council.
Thus the NLC was negotiating under duress. Even so it had two sources of bargaining power: the determination of Northern Territory black communities to resist, and their links to black and white supporters in the southern cities, where the land rights struggle was allied with the movement against uranium mining -- raising in turn the prospect of trade union action. As the black women’s paper Koori-Bina put it:
There are two ways in which we must proceed. First we must support the Aboriginal communities in developing the kind of determination and solidarity that began the modern land rights struggle ... The other way to proceed is to enlist the support of the white Australian working class culminating in union action to prevent the destruction of our lands. It was from the unions that the Gurindjis obtained their greatest support ... The Land Councils are aware of the critical need for union support and have asked supporters in the southern cities to ask for union bans.
Initially the union response looked fairly encouraging, so the government moved decisively to cut the links to the south.
NLC chairman Galarrwuy Yunupingu along with two traditional leaders from Oenpelli had decided on a speaking tour to coincide with anti-uranium demonstrations in Melbourne and Sydney at the end of March 1978. When he heard this, Ian Viner summoned Yunupingu and the NLC’s white manager Alex Bishaw to a conference. After the meetings, at which pressure from Viner was apparently complemented by advice from Bishaw and Charles Perkins to scrap the tour, Yunupingu cancelled it.
Marcia Langton, general secretary of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, responded sharply to this retreat, writing that “the repercussions are many, the most serious being the severing of ties with southern and urban blacks, and the consequent concession to the government-propagated myth of `southern stirrers’.” The NLC, said Langton, was “a victim of the power game of the government and the mining companies”. It was not to be the last time.
Negotiations proceeded until September 1978 when Stephen Zorn, a professional negotiator, initialled a draft agreement with the government. While it provided for substantial royalties (though some thought Zorn could have done better), the environmental safeguards left much to be desired -- plus there was wide scope for the government to decide it was “impossible or impracticable” for the miners to meet them. Zorn told the NLC that the deal was not as good as it should have been, but cited the “constant threat that the government would use arbitrators and take away what had been gained in the negotiations.”
Yunupingu said Fraser had threatened to stop Aborigines going back onto tribal lands. “They threatened us. It was long, tough and hard.” The NLC accepted the deal “under protest”, as its deputy chairman Gerry Blitner put it. Even as it did so, there were signs of mounting dissent.
In Darwin police had removed black and white demonstrators from the Ranger office. Telegrams arrived from four Aboriginal communities demanding the right to send representatives to the NLC’s deliberations. After these concluded, eight communities sought an injunction restraining the Council from signing the agreement, forcing it to review the issue. A thousand Aborigines arrived in Darwin to protest the deal, traditional landowners at Oenpelli voted to reject it, and 300 people from Goulburn Island angrily confronted Yunupingu. The NLC then agreed that the communities would be fully consulted about any agreements, including those living outside Oenpelli but with a traditional interest in the land.
The government was obliged to further apply pressure, inducing Yunupingu to call a secret meeting at a remote location. On the second day the Council met with Viner, who again secured its reluctant acceptance of the agreement, but very much on the understanding that the final say depended on the communities. Only two delegates voted against, but the decision was actually quite vague as one of the dissenters, Leo Finlay, indicated:
There was never an actual motion. We put up our hands but no one knew what exactly we were agreeing to. I relied on the Oenpelli people because I knew they were strong and would not let the NLC rush them.
Viner and some of the Council then flew to Oenpelli, but no real consultation took place. Only four of the thirty or more traditional landowners were present; the rest refused to appear. Silas Maralngurra left the meeting in disgust. After addressing those present, and without actually asking their consent, Viner flew to Darwin and announced they had agreed to uranium mining.
Later, in 1980, in order to force through a mining project at Nabarlek, the government announced special legislation to forestall a likely legal victory by Aborigines. A year after that it rushed through further legislation to change the boundaries of Kakadu National Park, so mining companies could once again pursue the almighty dollar with impunity. The anti-uranium campaigners in the south protested, but by now they were themselves a declining force.
In a 1977 interview, Bruce McGuiness of the Aboriginal Co-operative in Melbourne had warned on the subject of uranium mining: “They put up the pretence of consultation. They do it all the time. They have no intention in the first instance to listen to what Aboriginal people are saying.” It had not taken very long for Ian Viner and Malcolm Fraser to prove McGuiness right.
Noonkanbah: “If we all stand together”
The Northwest was the last Australian region apart from the central deserts to be invaded by Europeans, but as elsewhere, when white pastoralists arrived in the 1880s they imposed a system of virtual slavery. Finally, after the famous 1946 strike in the Pilbara, wage labour came to the Aborigines of the Northwest. The exploitation did not end, however, but rather took on new forms. When black people became eligible for social security benefits in the 1960s, the pastoralists found ways to channel much of the cash into their own pockets. In 1969, the standard pastoral award was applied to Aboriginal station hands, following the historic Gurindji strike of 1966, but with a “slow worker” provision allowing employers to pay as little as $20 per week.
By this time there was considerable unrest on the stations, and most Aboriginal people in the Kimberley either walked off or were evicted, gathering at the nearby township of Fitzroy Crossing. One of these groups was from a station called Noonkanbah.
At Fitzroy Crossing the Noonkanbah Aborigines found only squalor. What hopes the people held for the future lay in the demands for land they began making in 1972 and 1973, encouraged by the growth of the national black protest movement and the more enlightened policies of the Whitlam government. In 1976 the Noonkanbah station was advertised for sale. The Aboriginal Land Fund Commission acquired it and placed it in the hands of the WA Aboriginal Lands Trust, and a 200-strong black community returned to the station in September; finding it very run down, they set about restoring it. Over the next two years their confidence grew. But these years also saw a renewed interest in the region’s mineral wealth because WA Premier Charles Court, who had built his career on resource development, was keen to crown it with major projects in the Kimberley. Court had no patience with opponents:
Interviewed in 1977 ... he remarked that before any development project could begin, three things had to happen: first, the site would be deemed sacred or of historical significance to some group; secondly, the trade union movement would place it under a black ban; and thirdly, conservationists would declare it the last remaining location of some rare species ... Challenged on his basic beliefs, his reflex action was to portray opposition as left-wing conspiracy or anarchistic dementia.
By May 1978, 497 mineral claims had been pegged on Noonkanbah station without any consultation. One company interested in exploring for oil was Amax, a multinational with strong links to BHP and CSR. In October 1978 Amax selected a site for drilling, which it apparently believed would not infringe sacred sites. The WA Aboriginal Heritage Act allowed for protection of any “sacred, ritual or ceremonial site”, but the legislators had probably understood this to mean specific features, narrowly defined. At Noonbanbah, by contrast, as anthropologist Kingsley Palmer reported after visiting there, “although certain places ... were recognised as being of particular importance for one reason or another, the whole land was recognised as being endowed with spiritual essence.”
Capitalist society with its drilling projects could not be reconciled with the community’s culture and tradition. Peter Bindon of the Western Australian museum reported this after touring the area. Sent back to try again, he reported a second time that “the whole area within which any drill hole could be located by the company falls under the influence of the sacred sites.” A long, intricate tug of war followed, from which at times Amax seemed ready to pull out, but Charles Court dug in his heels.
In May 1979 the Noonkanbah people sent a representative, Dicky Skinner, to Perth with a petition against Amax:
These people have already made the place no good with their bulldozers ... They mess up our land. They expose our sacred objects. This breaks our spirit. We lose ourselves as a people.
The petition made a media splash, and Skinner followed it up with an address to the WA Trades and Labour Council, which carried motions of support and sent letters to Amax and CRA. But about the same time, Cabinet met and reaffirmed its hard line. “I do not want either the local or the overseas people in Amax to feel I have not personally followed this matter through,” wrote Court. Acting minister Dick Old formally instructed the State museum to give its consent, whereupon the government authorised the company to drill.
On 15 June, a company representative sought access to Noonkanbah station but was turned back at the gate after verbal exchanges. This event made the Perth papers, and either Court or the company apparently decided on a tactical retreat: for almost nine months, the issue disappeared. But in 1980, having won an election, Court was ready to try again; in March, contractors entered the property, accompanied by police. However resistance was also stiffening.
Sympathisers rallied at St George’s Cathedral in Perth. The relevant unions recommended bans on all work for the Noonkanbah drilling, the most important being the Transport Workers whose members would have to transport a rig from Broome, and the AWU which covered the drilling crew. Bob Hawke called on Amax to pull back, while the AWU suggested that all nine oil rigs operating in WA could be closed down if drilling at Noonkanbah went ahead. The unions’ assertiveness reflected the strengthening of their industrial position between 1979 and 1981. Noonkanbah was delighted. The community wrote:
So we are very pleased that all these people are coming out to help us, the Trade Union mob trying to stop Amax, and all the other people. That never happened in the first place. If we all stand together like this we can be friends and have respect for each other.
Ivan McPhee and Nipper Tabagee came from Noonkanbah to Perth to address supporters, including the TLC. Later some 30 fringe dwellers from Swan Valley briefly occupied the city’s main cemetery, saying that their sacred sites deserved the same respect as white cemeteries. April 2nd saw another Perth demonstration of 500 people. Back at Noonkanbah, a session of Aboriginal song and dance lasting until 3 am gave the local people enough of a psychological advantage to intimidate the contractors, who departed the site when the community confronted them the next day. This unexpected victory had an impact on blacks around the country. Said poet Jack Davis:
For years we had been demonstrating for land rights. I think to most blacks the call for land rights was slightly nebulous ... But what happened at Noonkanbah seemed to solidify their feelings.
Meanwhile the links with trade unions continued to improve, but outside Perth rank and file support was limited. In April Dicky Skinner met with a two-person TLC delegation in Derby, who had toured workplaces to assess the level of support. “The labour force in the Kimberley was largely ununionised and anti-Aboriginal, and it became clear that the muscle would have to be applied at higher levels to be successful.” In some cases unionists’ main motivation was to settle old scores with Charles Court.
Even so, the prospect of union intervention worried Amax. In late April there was speculation that the company was getting cold feet. Noonkanbah also showed signs of becoming an international issue, after Jim Hagan of the National Aboriginal Council addressed a United Nations sub-committee in Geneva, with US television networks picking up the story. But Court was tenacious. In May he visited Noonkanbah personally to talk to the Aborigines; the resulting exchange left both sides as far apart as ever. In July Amax transported a water drilling rig to the site despite a token blockade by the local people.
July also saw the first of two defections by prominent blacks. John Toby, who had previously led a struggle against attempts by CRA to mine diamonds at Argyle, suddenly made a private deal with the company, for which he was condemned by the Kimberley Land Council. It was an ominous precedent.
At 1 am on 7 August, a convoy of 49 vehicles set out from Perth. Near Karratha six picketing union officials were arrested, while in Roebourne 40 Aboriginal people protested as the convoy passed. Two more union officials were arrested at Port Hedland, then just north of the town 160 blacks blocked a bridge and police had to push them back. Another 200 protesters greeted the convoy near Broome. At Noonkanbah the community also decided to oppose the convoy: 60 men established a blockade at Mickey’s Pool where the road dipped into a sandy creek and no detours were possible. After a night-long stand-off, police and Aboriginal police aides cleared the blockade. The cause seemed lost when the news came through that the drilling crew, all trade unionists, had met and voted not to work the rig. Court’s hard-line tactics had exploded in his face.
Six months earlier the AWU had unionised the crew on this rig. They were not particularly pro-Aboriginal, but some of them felt important union principles were at stake. During several meetings they stood their ground while CSR, under ACTU pressure, announced it would not operate the rig without the union crew. At this point Amax, after talks with Bob Hawke, was again willing if not eager to pull out, but Court had an ace yet to play: he arranged for Amax to transfer its rights to the State government, which then passed them on to a $2 shelf company. The technicality got CSR off the hook, so drilling could go ahead with a new crew. Court also chose his moment well. For some time his government had secretly been cultivating Ken Colbung, black chairman of the Aboriginal Lands Trust. In August Colbung, who had previously backed the Noonkanbah community, suddenly called on them to lift the ban on drilling, arguing that Aboriginal sites were not at risk.
Court chose that day to start the drilling, and Bob Hawke immediately made conciliatory noises, forswearing any “retribution”. That was to be expected from the man who was soon to preside over “national reconciliation” -- then sell out the Aborigines in 1984 by scrapping plans for uniform land rights legislation. The bravery of an isolated black community, together with the honourable actions of a small minority of trade unionists, had given Court a tremendous battle, but the wider union mobilisation that could have defeated him did not occur. It was fitting in more ways than one that after this disgraceful chapter in Australian history, the drilling at Noonkanbah yielded a dry hole.
A fight on many fronts
Aborigines also fought for their rights on many smaller fronts. In New South Wales a 1976 Land Rights Conference elected an independent Land Council and demanded the abolition of the Lands Trust, an unrepresentative body to which the Wran Government had granted a small area for lease. Council president Allan Woods was one of a group occupying 56 acres owned by the Lands Trust at Llandilo near Penrith. This linked the land rights struggle directly to the needs of homeless blacks in Sydney, because the Gunya Way Council, organisers of the occupation, were simultaneously applying for funds to build emergency dwellings for the homeless.
In 1980 Aborigines joined other protesters at Middle Head Beach in a campaign to stop sandmining. Along with the environmental issues the protesters were concerned about a sacred site at the southern end of the beach. It was quite an event:
The dredging goes on, but the backdrop is quite extraordinary -- mass confrontations, mass arrests, songs of solidarity ringing through the forest, protesters falling out of trees as bulldozers push them down. Whites and Aborigines, united in passionate defence of the beach, have broken down the barriers between them in a way that is unprecedented in the area.
In 1982 the Redfern Aboriginal Legal Service launched a supreme court action demanding the return of nearly 10,000 hectares they said had been taken from black people between 1893 and 1968. Around this time there was also violent unrest both in Redfern, where residents fought back against police harassment, and in the country centre of Moree. The Head of the NSW Department of Aboriginal Affairs, black activist Pat O’Shane, described as “justifiable under the circumstances” a riot which broke out after the shotgun death of one Aborigine and the wounding of two others.
Following the unrest, Attorney General Frank Walker said that the answer was land rights, however it was not until 1983 that the NSW government got around to passing a sort of land rights bill, which ensured that NSW Land Councils got 7.5 percent of land tax receipts but which also had major drawbacks. Lands under private ownership or lease were left untouched; blacks had no right to claim crown land being used for other purposes, no right of access to sacred sites or traditional hunting grounds, no rights to minerals or royalties. 2000 people marched in vain against these limitations.
In Victoria in 1979 Aborigines blockaded Framlingham Regional Park near Warrnambool over claims for 1000 hectares of forest. A year later they allied with white environmentalists to warn of the dangers posed by Alcoa’s giant aluminium smelter at Portland. The Gunditjmara tribe feared the destruction of relics and disturbance to sacred sites, and were prepared to confront police about it. Their leader Christina Frankland, won some legal battles along with eight other women. For her trouble she and about 50 other people were later driven out of Portland by racist harassment.
In 1978, after mass demonstrations, the Pitjanjatjara of South Australia won their claim to 160,000 square kilometres complementing areas they had gained under federal legislation in the Northern Territory. But then the Tonkin Liberal government, elected in 1979, allowed the legislation to lapse. It took a further campaign, with the Pitjantjatjara Council bussing demonstrators into Adelaide, before they got their land in 1981 -- without the right to veto mining.
In January 1979 the Northern Territory Central Land Council lodged a claim for Uluru (Ayers Rock) and the surrounding areas. Their case was powerful. Tourist industry spokesperson Keith Castle conceded it was “common knowledge, and we accept this, that there are areas of deep significance to the Aborigines around Ayers Rock.” But there were vested interests involved, too: Barry Bucholtz of the Ayers Rock Chalet warned that “if they say they want a piece of the action, it will be machine guns at 40 paces.” While in this case a victory for the Aborigines could not be denied, Bucholtz summed up perfectly the logic of a racist, capitalist system that never gave an inch where it could avoid doing so.
Against this system black people could make only limited gains on their own. In fact, they desperately needed allies, in the environmental movement for example, but especially in the white working class. Because union support for the Aurukun people never went beyond statements of principle, Aurukun could be isolated. In the Ranger disputes, blacks had more meaningful support in the anti-uranium movement with its strong working class component. Fraser recognised the threat this posed to his plans, and sought to weaken the links. Finally at Noonkanbah, it was union action which came close to foiling the WA government’s attacks on land rights. Still, these struggles were all defeated because the solidarity actions were not effective enough; it was another indication of the need to rebuild the labour movement on a new basis, with better leaders.
2. Migrants
Though their trials generally couldn’t compare with those facing Aborigines, immigrant workers had a hard time in the seventies. In mid-1977, for example, The Age reported that migrants (especially women) feared reprisals from employers if they reported discrimination on the job, that non-English speakers had immense difficulty participating in unions because the unions made little effort to meet them half way, and that “more than 30 percent of Melbourne’s migrant population is doomed to permanent poverty”.
The philosophy of “multi-culturalism” was coming into fashion, but while the cultural tolerance it encouraged was an advance on previous attitudes, the Fraser government found ways to reconcile it with conservative policies. Although the 1978 Galbally Report did advocate a range of programs for migrant communities, it also found ways to pay for them at migrants’ expense. Money saved by axing tax rebates on remittances to families overseas more than paid for all the new outlays, which were kept low by relying on volunteers in the communities to deliver the new services. Moreover the services were pretty limited. While Galbally called for preservation of migrant cultures, which he defined in rather grand terms, the only practical measures he recommended were facilities in libraries, cultural agreements with other countries, plus a bit of money for ethnic art from the Australia Council. The report devoted only four out of 122 pages to the mass unemployment which was savaging migrant communities. Fraser’s main political objective in developing “multi-cultural” policies was to build links to middle class community leaders, then use them to co-opt the various migrant groups.
In other words, it was “autonomy” in the service of the status quo, and the government was not so tolerant of those migrants who wished to challenge any aspect of the social order. Italian journalist Ignazio Salemi was kicked out of Australia after coming forward to declare himself an “overstayed” migrant during a government amnesty which had been announced with the words: “You have nothing to fear.” Immigration minister MacKellar decided for reasons never disclosed that Salemi was an exception (probably the journalist, who was involved with the migrant welfare group FILEF, had been singled out because of his membership of the Italian Communist Party). Days after the Salemi decision an exiled Malaysian student leader, Hishamuddin Rais, was forced to leave Australia even though he risked jail on returning to his native country.
Fraser was committed to substantial levels of immigration to fuel economic growth, but that hardly precluded racism. “We do have a non-discriminatory policy,” said MacKellar, “but it’s a selective one.” An analysis of statistics concerning where people came from and where officials were stationed revealed a bias in favour of Europe and America, and the high premium on family reunion naturally favoured families of migrants already in Australia, who were mostly white.
In 1979 Fraser’s attempts to prosecute 148 people, mainly Greeks, for social security fraud exploded in his face after revelations that the Commonwealth Police had engaged in entrapment and illegally recorded telephone conversations. The government had stopped social security payments to 720 people, prompting protests from the Greek community, including the paper Neos Kosmos, which said a New Year’s message from MacKellar “reminds us of the Mafia, which kills and then sends flowers to the funeral of its victims.”
Nothing, however, quite compared to the paranoia about Indochinese “boat people”. Whereas southern European migrants were becoming a familiar and comparatively accepted part of the Australian scene by the mid-1970s, Indo-Chinese refugees had to start from scratch, while even arguments for Asian immigration could reek of yellow-peril logic. A committee chaired by Fraser’s adviser Owen Harries warned of “a possible future situation where Australia came under strong pressure to accept more migrants, refugees and guest workers than it wanted from the over-populated parts of Asia.” Harries thought Australia would be better placed to “resist” the pressure if it had been “non-discriminatory and relatively liberal” in its immigration policy. This subtle racism in government reinforced more overt prejudices elsewhere.
Minor cultural differences became bogeys, as when four Vietnamese men were prosecuted for killing and eating a dog, and 40 racist demonstrators (claiming to defend the rights of animals!) turned up outside the court. And ridiculous accusations were levelled against the Indochinese. Some alleged the boat people were arriving with gold bars; these turned out to be paper thin gold tiles worth about $60 each. Others alleged they were prostitutes, drug-runners, covert Communists or anti-Hanoi fascists. Sections of the left found the latter theory a convenient excuse for capitulating to the paranoia, with Tom Uren, a prominent fan of the “gentle” Vietnamese regime, accusing the refugees of seeking a soft life. A more mainstream ALP figure such as Brian Burke, later WA Premier, could claim they were “not genuine refugees” and call on the federal government to “halt this refugee flood”.
Most of the charges were baseless. While the earliest groups to leave Vietnam had contained some affluent people and adherents of the previous regime, those arriving later were far more likely to be peasants or fisherfolk. The “genuineness” of political or “economic” refugees hadn’t been queried with other groups of new arrivals; why was it suddenly so important when dealing with Asians? And although unpleasant experiences with the authoritarian Hanoi government predisposed many of them initially to anti-communism, on arrival they generally showed little interest in the right wing Vietnamese Association.
In addition to the streak of racism long embedded in Australian culture and historically associated with the White Australia Policy, popular fears were exacerbated by economic insecurity. Just as women were accused of taking men’s jobs, so migrants were blamed for unemployment. A 1981 poll asked people to nominate their greatest fears about the country’s development. The same poll had been held a decade earlier, and two changes stood out: a 10 percent increase in those citing economic problems and an eight per cent rise in those citing immigration and race. The intersection of the two explained why Cliff Dolan of the ACTU reported Sydney workers as saying, “send the bloody wogs home and there’d be more jobs for us.” Dolan called such talk “ridiculous”, but unfortunately he added that “if the government does not cut the immigration program and cut it drastically, the tensions will inevitably increase.” Like many other labour movement leaders Dolan apparently believed you could combat racism by capitulating to it.
This was not only immoral but incredibly short-sighted. As Paula Kelly of the Indo-Chinese Refugees Association pointed out:
Of course, when the Vietnamese arrive they are right wing, anti-union. But because most of them get jobs in factories, they soon see that for their own future, trade unions are the thing. They are quite happy to fight for better conditions, for jobs -- as long as they understand the issues. Many of them are beginning to understand how trade unions work. Recently, they kicked out an anti-Vietnamese delegate in the Tramways Union. At another company, they organised and took action against a shop steward they accused of making sweetheart deals with the bosses.
Two wildcat strikes
Given their subordinate status in much of the union movement, it was not surprising that migrant workers often had to resort to unofficial strike action. In those areas where they had been largely frozen out of the official structures of the unions, this very fact meant they could burst into the leadership of particularly militant struggles. The most impressive example during the Fraser era was the 1981 strike by women at Kortex in Melbourne, but because that dispute summarises the entire argument of this chapter, it is discussed at the end. However two other struggles, by male workers, also illustrate the point extremely well.
Labourers on Sydney railway construction sites began agitating in January 1977 for pay and conditions comparable to those enjoyed by builders’ labourers. In addition to equal pay they wanted 32 hours wet pay per month -- i.e. payment for time lost due to wet weather -- and an end to arbitrary sackings and transfers (because management was using transfers to break up job organisation).
This was a disparate group of largely overseas-born workers. In a letter to Neville Wran in July they estimated that “of the approximate number of 300 men on strike only about 20 are White Australians. We have a number of Aboriginal men, one Black South African and the rest of us are from European countries.” At various stages English speakers from both factions of the BLF appeared on the scene. The talented young Irishman Sean Cody was an early leader of the struggle, though unfortunately Cody turned out to be a careerist, who disappeared when offered a full time position with the pro-Gallagher BLF office. Later Bob Pringle, former official of the old NSW branch, appeared on the scene and played a valuable leadership role.
From a distance, these two high-profile individuals appeared to dominate events. In reality, while the workforce was delighted with the leadership they provided at times, the core leaders of the strike were themselves mostly Mediterranean migrants. The most important single figure was Tony Perera, who had a history of radical activity in the Canary Islands. Each language group (Yugoslav, Arabic, Greek and Spanish) had its own leaders and interpreters and the mass meetings were multilingual affairs, which generally suited the militants since they controlled the translations, though at one point the defection of a leading Arab cost them a swag of votes.
The Australian Workers Union office was largely indifferent until the first big strike hit Eastern Suburbs Railway sites in March. Two men had been sacked for refusing to operate concrete pumps for substandard pay, and three hundred workers stopped work in their defence after job delegates organised a march through the underground tunnels to bring out the construction sites. Fitters and plumbers stopped in solidarity and even some clerks joined them. After a week the two were reinstated, with the Commission promising an early hearing on their claims.
On returning to work the labourers began consolidating their job organisation, formally electing an Action Committee. When management offered gangers’ positions to key delegates on the Chalmers Street site in an attempt to buy them off, they refused to abandon their members. May saw more disputation, including bans on concrete. Management organised a bogus meeting to throw out Tony Perera as delegate, with AWU secretary Charlie Oliver hastening to recognise the new rep, but the Action Committee simply held another meeting to reinstate Perera.
In July, after they had brought out additional construction sites at Meadowbank, Chullora and Clyde and marched on the Industrial Court, the workers won some of their claims. The Public Transport Commission agreed to give a week’s notice before any dismissal, to ensure there would be no stand downs because of wet weather, and to increase weekly pay by up to $13. It also recognised the Action Committee. The delegates immediately approached the carpenters’ unions about forming an inter-union committee, but were stymied by these unions’ full time officials.
The PTC hadn’t given up yet. Management went to the AWU officials to seek a different agreement, so it took a further mass meeting of the labourers followed by a march on the Minister’s office and continuing strike action before the PTC reconfirmed the original deal. This was consistent with the workers’ previous experience of the Labor government. In the July letter to Wran they had written: “We wonder if you are giving us this treatment because you think that we are just WOGS and anything is good enough for us.” But the “wogs” had shown Wran a thing or two.
Carworkers in Melbourne could have hurled the same accusations at their management. The vehicle building industry had long employed migrants at poor wages and under oppressive conditions, and partly for this reason it had been an industrial volcano. The Ford plant at Broadmeadows had a history of industrial explosions with spontaneous strikes in 1963, 1969 and 1973, with the 1973 upheaval leading to stronger organisation on the job: “in the next years there were a lot of small actions and after each stewards would resign and be replaced by more militant ones.” In 1981 there were 41 Vehicle Builders Union shop stewards meeting regularly, most of them militants. There were Australian born workers among them, but the migrants tended to take the lead in combativeness. 1981 was also the year the ACTU claimed a $30 rise for all workers. At Ford, the workforce decided to take the claim seriously, and despite active hostility from their union officials, the stewards were able to lead a six-week strike.
The strikers defied threats from the company to withdraw their annual leave and a previous pay rise; a mass meeting called in response to these threats culminated in a demonstration outside Ford’s head office. VBU and ACTU officials, however, were manoeuvring so diligently to secure a return to work that senior shop steward Frank Argondizzo denounced them publicly as “bureaucrats with big cigars in their mouths.”
Ford’s next move was to get the Arbitration Commission to order a secret ballot. Both the ACTU and the VBU had policies against secret ballots during industrial disputes, on the grounds that workers could best make democratic decisions at open mass meetings after hearing debate, whereas secret ballots meant workers voted as atomised individuals under pressure from the media. While they criticised the move for the record, however, the union officials went along with the secret ballot, which resulted in a narrow majority for returning to work -- by 169 votes out of 4000.
This needn’t have been the end of the struggle. At a subsequent mass meeting the shop stewards pointed out that at least 850 workers hadn’t voted, including many who never got ballot papers. The meeting voted overwhelmingly to fight on and initially, comparatively few of the strikers actually went back to work. But over the following days the media created the impression the strike front had crumbled, and this became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The shop stewards’ organisation had not been sufficient. To withstand all the forces opposing them, the militants needed a much wider strike committee capable of organising a boycott of the secret ballot or mass pickets in defiance of the results. They also needed solidarity from the wider labour movement. They weren’t well enough organised to mobilise this either. Even so, they were proud of their strike. “What we have done has been a lesson to workers all over Australia”, said shop steward Habib Haddad, “we have stood up to the boss and said: We won’t be treated like animals.”
Habib Haddad was not just addressing fellow migrants. The Eastern Suburbs Railway and Ford struggles were important assertions of strength and pride by non English-speaking migrant workers, but these had never seen the English-speaking workers who joined their strikes as having different interests. They needed and sought the solidarity which only class organisation could provide.
3. Women and sexual politics
Until Fraser’s election the women’s movement had enjoyed the illusion of steady progress. While the Whitlam Government was in political retreat on this front as on most others, a surge of funding for International Women’s Year in 1975 together with laws allowing federal funds to go direct to women’s health centres had enabled a range of women’s service projects to go ahead. In NSW alone, health centres opened in Bankstown, Parramattta, Wagga Wagga, the Blue Mountains, Newcastle and Gosford.
In the wider social context these were relatively minor concessions, but to feminists they assumed considerable importance. Fraser’s arrival seemed to place them under threat. Having grown accustomed to pressing for new initiatives, women suddenly found themselves battling to preserve what existed. In May 1976, under the banner of his “new federalism”, Fraser handed control of funding for the refuges and centres to the States, ensuring widespread cuts. His government’s only new initiative on women’s affairs in the first year was a family allowance scheme, which fitted neatly into the conservative ideological framework of the coalition parties and whose payments, not being indexed for inflation, rapidly declined in value.
Even so, Anne Summers was unduly pessimistic to think that “women’s affairs ceased to be a political issue at the end of 1975”. This might have been partly true for the Canberra parliamentary scene but in much of society women’s liberation -- or feminism as it was coming to be called -- remained a major force. Eva Cox was closer to the mark in her insistence that “very few people now disagree with our basic claims on child care, employment, maternity leave ... And the movement and its issues are no longer regarded as coming from a ratbag fringe.” It would not be so easy for the new government to roll back these gains.
In fact by the end of 1976 it was clear that the welfare network would survive. Summers herself reported: “There are now 24 women’s refuges, two working women’s centres, five rape crisis centres and at least six women’s health centres.” Rather than destroy the various centres, the Fraser government had essentially continued Whitlam’s strategy of using them to defuse and incorporate women’s struggles. If the centres were given just enough funding to survive, Fraser could get feminists to deliver welfare on the cheap, while contrary to some people’s hopes, the centres were not a breeding ground for radical politics. Bon Hull of the Women’s Health Collective in Melbourne had said flatly in early 1975: “We would never open again ... We didn’t change one single thing. We were just providing a nice friendly service for women. Where we fell down was on politicisation.”
There was no shortage of politically charged questions to fight around, however. One of them was abortion. Polls repeatedly showed most Australians favoured liberal abortion laws, but well-organised anti-choice “Right to Life” (RTL) forces were able to keep the issue in contention. It was literally impossible to prevent abortions: the Royal Commission on Human Relationships estimated that 40-80,000 illegal abortions had taken place between 1965 and 1970. What was at stake was the rights of poor and working class women, who found it hard to get around restrictive laws without resort to backyard butchers, and beyond that the issue of who in society was to make “moral” judgements.
Women -- and men -- had to rally repeatedly for the right to choose during the Fraser years. Harassment of abortion clinics was not unusual in the mid-seventies, with demonstrators shouting at women entering the Fertility Control Clinic in East Melbourne, and Sydney clinics receiving a series of phoney bookings. Population Services International in Sydney was firebombed. Meanwhile government policy made life harder for those seeking abortions: in 1978 parliament abolished bulk billing except for pensioners and allowed health funds to exclude certain items, making abortions more costly for working class people.
But the attempts to turn back the clock were defeated. While the struggle in Queensland, already discussed, was the most spectacular, pro-choice forces won most other battles nationwide.
In early 1979, National Party backbencher Stephen Lusher moved a parliamentary motion demanding a ban on medical benefits for abortion, except where the mother’s life was in danger. It was so poorly formulated that Lusher lost votes on technicalities. Even so the debate was intense. Liberal James Bradfield warned of “an abortion supermarket” if Lusher failed, to which Stewart West from the Labor left retorted that the anti-abortion push talked about the right to life, “but it fails to consider the right of a woman to her own life.” There was much more on both sides but Lusher lost the vote overwhelmingly, 98 votes to 23.
Lusher himself conceded his opponents had won an important victory, saying “there will probably have to be a reassessment of what influence the Church and moral groups have over the Legislature.” Pro-choice activists built on their success by holding demonstrations on the “International Day of Action” at the end of March, well aware that future battles were likely.
Later in 1979 the Fraser Government prosecuted 14 doctors, supposedly for defrauding Medibank. However, most had worked in feminist abortion clinics and referral centres, and their supporters alleged the prosecutions amounted to political harassment. In the same year the Commonwealth public service union ACOA adopted a policy supporting women’s right to control their fertility, whereupon in 1981 the anti-abortion side was able to force a plebiscite and get the policy scrapped. It seemed an endless struggle, one which in the early eighties was fought out twice on Melbourne streets.
In 1980 the Right to Life decided to march on May Day. This proved a major tactical error, for the left were also in the streets in large numbers: a crowd of about a thousand marched up from post-May Day march festivities at the Yarra Bank to confront them. Charging past police horses, the counter-demonstrators proceeded up Bourke Street to Parliament House, where they pushed their way into the RTL throng. While the anti-abortionists were more numerous, the families bused in after Sunday mass were hardly prepared for a street battle. Little or no violence occurred, but finding themselves eyeball to eyeball with leftists chanting “Not the church, not the state, women must decide their fate!”, the RTL’s supporters dispersed.
Two years later a smaller RTL march was again challenged by a few hundred pro-choice demonstrators, who managed to occupy a position at the front of the anti-abortion crowd, then “led” the march with banners proclaiming women’s right to choose. Once again a street confrontation ensued near Parliament, and this time the police prevailed on the Right to Life to retreat into Fitzroy Gardens. Both events presented dilemmas for some feminists, because they challenged certain preconceptions: the RTL had mobilised thousands of female marchers, while the counter-demonstrations had been led by socialists rather than feminists and contained large numbers of men. It was a women’s issue in being profoundly linked to female oppression, but at the same time it was a class issue, since working class people were most affected by bans on abortion. Finally it was an issue dividing people on political lines independent of gender. There was no single “women’s side” and feminist autonomy theories were spectacularly irrelevant. If you wanted to defend abortion rights, you needed the widest possible unity between all women and men prepared to fight.
The growth of women’s liberation had provoked a reaction from the political right, which provided another eloquent confirmation that there was no monolithic “women’s side” to sexual politics. When people associated with the National Civic Council established the Women’s Action Alliance, it attracted a significant female membership. WAA claimed to particularly champion the needs of housewives (supposedly ignored by liberationists), and its first public meeting in Melbourne did attract a large crowd. One analysis of WAA’s membership found a large proportion were “young wives and mothers living the suburban dream on a new housing estate. Some, until recently, had been independent wage-earners ... Now that these women have chosen motherhood ... they feel ignored by the community and without any status in it. The early 1980s recession with rising interest rates and unemployment made them feel extremely vulnerable ...”
The group’s declared priority was defending the economic interests of single-income families, for example by lobbying for higher family allowances and spouse rebates. Thus WAA was clearly in the National Civic Council tradition of offering a conservative, family-oriented but in some ways socially aware program.
Babette Francis’ “Women Who Want to be Women” (WWWW), founded over dinner at her Toorak home, were a rather different outfit, strongly anti-abortion in emphasis with some half-baked intellectual pretensions. The group proclaimed a “third stage of feminism” which on closer examination seemed to be drawn largely from the pages of the Women’s Weekly -- they presented a cake to the Fraser Government with pink icing inscribed: “To the men of the House from the women in the home.”
The right and left currents, both female, fought it out in 1979 for control of Fraser’s token advisory body, the National Women’s Advisory Council. Over 4000 women had registered for a NWAC conference planned for November as part of the United Nations Mid Decade for Women, but the organisers cancelled it, claiming no suitable venue was available. Right wing groups had apparently swelled the numbers with block registrations. The right had also managed to get a number of anti-abortion amendments through pre-conference workshops. Alarmed by a Melbourne Age article about these developments, 400 women gathered in Melbourne to set up a lobby aimed at countering the conservatives, but the composition of the new Coalition for Women’s Rights showed that the dangers did not only come from the far right.
The Coalition’s founders included the “Business and Professional Women”, and when it drew up a ticket for elections to the next conference, company director and Liberal Party activist Eve Mahlab appeared at its head. There were no workers on it at all. Contrary to those who defended the ticket as clever tactics for achieving unity against the common foe, it was really a political capitulation to the Liberals. Organising on the basis of a classless “sisterhood”, the feminists had legitimised the party of Malcolm Fraser. They had also won 11 out of 15 places, but when the government simply added extra conservatives to the conference, all the compromising went for nothing.
Fortunately, it later became clear that the threat from right wing groups had been exaggerated. A 1981 survey of 300 Melbourne housewives, supposedly these groups’ best hunting-ground, showed that while 46 percent approved of the aims of women’s liberation as they understood them, the approval ratings for WAA and WWWW were only 3 and 5 percent respectively.
Women in the working class
Despite economic stagnation the number of women working continued to rise. This was partly because of an increase in part time employment, and partly because some women were forced to seek work when their husbands were retrenched. As their numbers grew, they also became more combative.
Nurses began to shed the Florence Nightingale image, taking to Sydney streets as early as 1976 (see chapter four). At Royal Brisbane Hospital in 1979 they wore street clothes instead of uniforms, while banning non-essential clerical work in protest against the demotion of their matron. The protest actions later widened to include work-to-rules and stopwork meetings, and after six months they forced the Queensland government to dismiss the hospital board. In Sydney in 1982 nurses along with other health workers led protests of up to 10,000 people against government plans to close two hospitals. Stopwork action prevented the closure of Gloucester House at the Royal Prince Alfred, saving 200 jobs. The Royal Australian Nursing Federation scrapped its long-standing no-strike commitment and in 1982 several hundred nurses marched through Newcastle to show their anger over cuts in health services.
In 1976, 500 female public servants stopped work in South Australia in protest against unequal pay scales. There were even sporadic attempts to form unions among prostitutes, although these apparently failed because “it was too complicated -- and too many muscles were flexed”, presumably by pimps.
However the largest struggles involving women were mixed struggles involving unions representing both sexes. Between 1970 and 1975, the number of female union members increased by 50 percent, while male membership only increased by 12 percent. By 1980, nearly 32 percent of trade unionists were women. The trends are best documented in the white collar and professional sectors, where “proletarianisation” and “feminisation” went together, with both trends linked to growing industrial militancy. For example, the number of female staff in the Department of Social Security doubled from 1976 to 1983, while the number of males rose by just over 50 percent. These were also the years in which DSS saw its first industrial action. DSS staff had first applied work bans in 1977, there was a service-wide stoppage in 1979 over anti-union legislation, and the growing militancy culminated in a prolonged strike in 1981.
While women in the public service union ACOA were under-represented among workplace delegates, they still made up 20-25 percent of these by the 1980s. They were an important part of the rank and file unrest that propelled a new Reform Group leadership to power. The Reform Group in turn championed such issues as child care, and one of its leading figures, Ann Forward, became the first woman to hold a federal office in ACOA. Her success owed far more to united organising by both sexes than to any separate women’s grouping; the establishment of separate women’s committees in the union was a result rather than a cause of the Reform Group’s success.
As women workers’ numbers and confidence grew, the official union structures began responding to their demands. Unions began electing more female officials. Jennie George became secretary of the NSW Teachers’ Federation and Jan Marsh became ACTU industrial advocate, having made her mark in 1978 by winning a crucial test case for maternity leave and protection against dismissal on account of pregnancy. The arrival of these officials was not decisive in itself -- Jan Marsh, for her part, let it be known that she was not “vociferously libbish”. More important were the new avenues opening up for rank and file activists. The white collar unions funded a Working Women’s Centre in Melbourne, while a Women’s Trade Union Conference in Sydney in August 1976 attracted 500 delegates, mostly from white collar unions, but also some from the AMWU.
The AMWU delegates reported that the participants were “prepared to fight ... as part of the labour and union movements to strengthen the whole movement. They want unions to give leadership in mobilising women workers.” Some were planning to organise around the Working Women’s Charter (officially adopted by the ACTU in 1977) and wanted action “at the grassroots level”.
The Working Women’s Charter campaign created local activist groups in most States. In 1977, 300 delegates attended a national Charter Campaign Conference, then the ACTU called a special unions’ conference in 1978 to discuss the Charter’s demands on equal pay, childcare, union training and other issues. With only 62 out of 132 unions bothering to attend the latter event, however, it became clear that progress would not come from relying on the top union structures. It would take action at the grassroots -- but fortunately there was quite a bit of that. In Sydney for example, a rank and file newsletter called The Paper Factory spoke for “clerical workers who want to see a society where sexism has no place”. In Melbourne the paper Women At Work interviewed Gail Cotton of the Food Preservers’ Union, who had organised factory meetings to set up Charter committees:
I asked for volunteers for the committees and was inundated. In some places there were more women wanting to be on the committee than there were places. I had the ACTU Charter translated and I used an interpreter, so we could discuss the Charter point by point. It was a fantastic boost of confidence ... They all endorsed the Charter, but they were really more interested in what they could do. In one factory they decided to draw up their own Charter. One demand was that every job in the factory had to be open to both males and females.
“The next thing,” Cotton continued, “will be to hold meetings of all the workers to explain what the committees have been doing and to get men and women to work together.”While the Charter drew its initial inspiration from a specific focus on women’s oppression, to win demands based on it, as Cotton recognised, required unity between both sexes on the job.
Women still faced discrimination but they were winning victories. In the mid-seventies they overturned the rules which said only men could drive Melbourne’s trams, after a stiff fight inside the union. When the Rockhampton Council in North Queensland sacked Janine Marshall because she was married, the Municipal Officers’ Association got the award varied so it couldn’t happen again. Although Janet Oakden never got to be a train driver in NSW, Deborah Wardley, backed by demonstrations, forced Ansett to employ her as a pilot. An increasing number of young women took apprenticeships in jobs such as automechanics or fitters. And Wollongong saw an important struggle against job discrimination at BHP.
Women had long been “underemployed” on the NSW South Coast, but nevertheless, when mass unemployment arrived in the seventies, they often got accused of taking men’s jobs. Despite this hostile environment, a Jobs For Women campaign took on BHP in 1978 and again in 1980. Having applied for work in the steel mills and been knocked back, they lodged a complaint with the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board, circulated petitions in the steelworks, marched in the streets, set up a “tent embassy” in front of BHP’s employment office. The campaign involved quite a few migrants, for whom the rigours of the steel mills were less than daunting after their experience of clothing sweatshops. While some men were hostile, others backed them: one of the campaigners, Slavadenka, later recalled with satisfaction “the cold windy night ... when we have given leaflets to the men ... We asked them, ‘How you feel the womans to work with you?’ They says, ‘Great, why not?’”
Finally the company gave in, and within a year 700 women were working in the steelworks. This, however, was by no means the end of the tale: the leaders were given heart-breaking labouring jobs in an attempt to drive them out. These tactics failed, but BHP needed only to bide its time till the next industry downturn; when that arrived at the end of 1982, the company simply applied the “last on, first off” rule and retrenched them.
Forty-four of them went to the Anti-Discrimination Board. They might have demanded reinstatement, but they decided against it since this could lead to other people being sacked, thereby undermining traditional trade union principles embodied in the “last on, first off” rule. It might also have strengthened the “women-take-men’s-jobs” argument. Instead they successfully demanded compensation on the grounds that the company’s previous refusal to hire them had cost them seniority. This way they could avoid undermining solidarity with their male fellow workers.
That solidarity could be important. In 1978, 15 female canteen staff at Williamstown Dockyard struck for a week because of delays in their pay, whereupon the dockyard’s 1500 male unionists came out in their support. “We didn’t ask the men to go out,” said Monica Cullinan. “But we’ve always gone out for them and they stuck behind us on this issue.” The canteen staff went to the Arbitration Commission when their case was heard, carrying placards and wearing badges saying, “Unions are for women, too!” Their strike not only won compensation for the delays, but also the right to be paid weekly instead of fortnightly.
A 1981 ACTU women’s conference gave some measure of progress made. The ACTU’s president Cliff Dolan was on hand to open proceedings. The 140 delegates agreed that equality of opportunity was yet to be achieved, both in industry and the trade union movement, yet at the same time it was clear that women’s concerns had gained much greater recognition. In the same year the ACTU Congress passed a motion for “free safe legal abortion” by 528 to 392 after intense debate, and for the first time it mentioned migrant women under the Migrant Workers’ Policy. 1981 also saw 250 attend a conference on “Sexism -- an Industrial Issue” held by Victoria’s three teacher unions.
Of course, as organisations functioning on capitalist terrain the unions were infected with sexism. Because they were also an expression of the class struggle, however, they remained the most important single vehicle for working class women to make gains. These gains, for the most part, were won by fighting alongside men, with women frequently in the leadership.
Lesbians and gay men
Having won victories in the early seventies, lesbians and gay men feared a backlash in the second half of the decade. For a time, it seemed to be happening. In 1976, The Age reported that police had used entrapment to make mass arrests at a beat at Black Rock beach; then in 1977 the Queensland government banned Greg Weir from teaching because of his membership of a Homosexual and Lesbian Group. There were demonstrations supporting Weir in Melbourne and Sydney, but the ban stayed. In early 1978 it emerged that following the murder of a gay man in Newcastle, the local police had investigated other homosexuals not connected to the crime, while in Brisbane the police launched a wave of harassment against lesbians and gay men in their ranks.
The attacks reached their peak in Sydney in mid-1978. After a successful gay solidarity march and public meeting in June, crowds turned out in Taylor Square for a Mardi Gras parade. Police attempts to curtail the event succeeded only in turning it into a second demonstration, to which they responded by arresting 53 people. The Sydney Morning Herald helpfully published the names and occupations of those arrested. Around this time Victoria banned the book Young, Gay and Proud from its schools.
But 1978 also saw unprecedented levels of resistance. Protest meetings over the arrests drew 400 people in Sydney, several hundred demonstrated in Melbourne, 50 rallied in Brisbane. Then 1000 people marched through Sydney on 15 July, and were again set upon by police. Undaunted, the movement returned to Sydney streets in August after its national conference. The conference participants had decided to march on the footpath on a quiet Sunday afternoon, but the police still surrounded the crowd. After ordering it to disperse they moved in almost immediately, beginning to make arrests before anyone could leave the scene -- in fact leaving the scene without walking into the arms of hostile police was almost impossible. Supposedly they had acted to prevent the demonstrators disrupting an anti-abortion rally underway in Hyde Park. Ironically, this happened anyway, as the Right to Life organisers cancelled their march on police advice.
The attempts at intimidation were not working; November saw a sizeable march in solidarity with Californians opposing the homophobic Briggs initiative. In July 1979 Gay Solidarity Week climaxed with the largest mobilisation seen to that time: 5000 people chanted and danced their way through Sydney streets during a festival which, as the Mardi Gras, was to become an annual event. In early 1980 a large street march concluded the Summer Offensive for Gay Rights. For the community and for a lot of other people, to succeed in holding these processions was an important victory for freedom of political and cultural expression.
With the police faltering the guardians of morality cast about for other forces, placing their hopes in British morals campaigner Mary Whitehouse, who toured Australia in September 1980. A Coalition Against Repression set out to oppose her, beginning in Adelaide. CAR organised forums, radio programs, two rock festivals, pickets and a fund-raising dance during her Adelaide visit, while Melbourne saw a public meeting and demonstration -- but Sydney was inevitably the main battleground.
Her visit to Sydney University was a disaster for the organisers, with Whitehouse supporters outnumbered by protestors. The same happened at a “shoppers’ rally.” Her main march on 24 September was not quite so tiny, and 600 people did join a “March for the Child”, but compared to the thousands who had joined previous Festival of Light processions, both events were dismal flops. The CAR protestors provided most of the highlights, including a spectacular pie-throwing.
Tensions between lesbians and gay men persisted throughout this era, primarily because sexism among gay men remained. Yet clearly conditions for fighting that sexism were much better because the right wing attacks had been beaten off. And to do that had required a united mobilisation of lesbians, gay men, and quite a few straights, in opposition to reactionaries of both sexes.
Around the same time that lesbians and gay men were repulsing right wing attacks in the late seventies, they were also beginning to win support in the unions. As early as 1973 the NSW BLF had banned work at Macquarie University when a homosexual student was excluded from the Robert Menzies College, but of course the BLF was a rather unusual organisation. The first breakthroughs in other areas came in the second half of the decade in clerical and teacher unions, with the ACOA Reform Group (public servants) backing anti-discrimination policies in 1978 and the Australian Teachers Federation doing the same in 1979. In 1980 the Plumbers and Gasfitters followed suit and the NSW Labor Council decided to support law reform.
Then in October 1980, cafeteria staff at Melbourne University stopped work to demand reinstatement of a gay student, Terry Stokes, who had been expelled from Graduate House. Not only formal union policies, but rank and file workers’ attitudes were changing, and they could be won to the fight for gay rights. That was partly a consequence of the courageous struggles waged by lesbians and gay men, but these were hardly “autonomous”. They had generally relied on mobilising other people in their support, something they could do more readily because of the favourable climate created by the wider struggles of workers and social movements since 1968.
4. Migrant women workers: building unity
Migrant women are among the most oppressed workers. What better test, for the argument about autonomy versus unity, than three strikes among female migrants during the Fraser era?
In June 1977, 39 cleaners at BHP, members of the Miscellaneous Workers’ Union, struck on receiving dismissal notices from the Newcastle Cleaning Company. The company had lost its contract to Keir Cleaning, after BHP approached Keir about cutting costs. The new employers wanted to employ 16 full time employees instead of the 39 part-timers who had been working there, and to cut back the total number of hours worked by the workforce as a whole. Newcastle Cleaning had itself previously carried out cuts in hours and staff, putting the cleaners under immense stress -- some of those not sacked had still been forced to leave the job temporarily, forfeiting long service entitlements. This time they took collective action.
They arranged pickets, collected money, spoke at lunchtime meetings at other jobs. One of the barriers to their organising had been the division between migrant workers and Australians; before the strike, each group had been blaming the other for their problems on the job, but in the course of the dispute, these divisions were forgotten for a while.
Half of the cleaners were Yugoslavs, of whom one with enough English language skills became a union delegate and translated for the others. Unity was emerging in the struggle.
Theoretically the dispute was with Keir’s. In reality BHP’s pressure for lower costs was the root of the problem, but BHP steadfastly refused to meet the union, so the strikers decided to take matters into their own hands:
They entered the building through a side door [and] walked quickly through the corridors until they came to the purchasing officer’s comfortable office, and demanded to see him. They were told he was unavailable [and] they then occupied his office ... As an outcome of the occupation, the purchasing officer agreed to meet with the union.
In August the Arbitration Commission decided that 18 full-time workers would be employed; a small victory for the cleaners. Just as importantly, the strikers returned to work much better organised, with four union delegates. The company was obliged to move two of the delegates to day shift and promote the two others to leading hands in order to undermine this assertion of union power.
Laundry workers at the Hospital Laundry and Linen Service in Murdoch (Perth), all migrants, struck early in 1982 over demands for a 35 hour week, $30 and some additional benefits. This strike was defeated by the use of scab labour and the failure of the wider union movement to organise solidarity, a failure which partly reflected the general ebbing of militancy following the 1981 metal trades agreement (see chapter eleven). In addition, gender loomed large as an issue. According to Janet Greenwood, “the women I have talked to have unhesitatingly said, ‘It’s because we are women’” that they faced obstruction not only from employers, but also from the Trades and Labour Council.
It is evident from Greenwood’s account, however, that the problem was not men per se. The local union organiser was ignorant on some issues but clearly sympathetic. Most importantly, while the TLC’s Disputes Committee said the strike would be unlikely to attract support from other unions, this was mainly a problem with the full time officials:
The strikers know they received support from other unionists but see it as coming from the rank and file. Ordinary union members in Western Australia contributed between $6000 and $8000 per week to the strike fund.
Clearly these women didn’t need autonomy -- on the contrary, their main complaint was that they “were told again and again we were on our own.” What they needed was some way to build solidarity with other rank and file workers, male and female.
The 1981 textile workers’ strike at Kortex in Melbourne was part of the “wage push” militancy at the start of the eighties. It was also influenced by leftist currents within the Turkish immigrant community. One of the Kortex workers had a husband working at Rowntree’s, where the unions had won a pay rise through industrial action, while others had husbands involved in the tumultuous unofficial strike at Ford. Some were members of the left wing Victorian Turkish Labourers’ Association (VTEB). The printing shop next door was on strike. These were strong influences on a workforce which in itself had little trade union tradition.
The strike began when officials of the Textile Workers’ Union failed to show up for discussions on a $25 pay claim. Angered, women at the Albert Street factory walked out anyway and made plans for a mass picket. The following Monday they not only picketed in Albert Street, but marched to another nearby Kortex factory to bring it out on strike. Emboldened by success, they began to discuss issues beyond the original $25 claim. Sandra Bloodworth recounts:
They wanted an end to the compulsory “bonus” system [which] meant that if you didn’t get the extra amount of work done for the bonus, you were sacked ... They wanted a canteen so they had somewhere decent to have lunch and tea breaks so they didn’t have to smoke in the toilets ... They wanted the right to visit the toilet when they chose and for as long as they chose. The existing system was two visits a day, and these for only three minutes. And perhaps the most galling of all was the compulsory donations they had to make for the bosses’ birthdays. They wanted that stopped.
The fight for pay was now a fight for dignity as well. They got no help from the union, but here was a case where women’s lack of union tradition had its advantages. Not being used to looking to the union to solve their problems, they were capable of by-passing it when they needed to. When the union officials refused to bring out non-strikers working inside, the women’s response was to strengthen their picket lines. They were unconcerned about looking respectable, and welcomed participation by “outside” leftists. Management hired enforcers to escort strike-breakers in to work, but found the women were able to win many non-strikers over by steady argument.
Finally, no longer able to ignore the dispute, the union officials called a mass meeting. The employers sent busloads of workers from other factories to stack it, and circulated multi-lingual leaflets arguing for acceptance of the $13.50 the Arbitration Commission had awarded the whole industry. Their thugs were inside the hall. The strikers refused to be intimidated, and occupied the stage brandishing placards and chanting slogans. They made such a row that the thugs were withdrawn, then they demanded a vote by division, and won it. The union officials had to make the dispute official, closing down all three Kortex factories.
At a second mass meeting two days later, the bosses supplied the officials with a list of employees so they could vet people. Once more there were non-strikers present, and some of the enforcers were again inside. A donnybrook ensued. The officials announced a secret ballot, leading to a second uproar: the strikers were against secret ballots on principle -- they thought everyone should show where they stood in front of their fellow workers -- but also they didn’t trust the union leaders. When it became clear the ballot would proceed, they participated, but neither side was so naive as to treat it as an exercise in democracy:
When the vote came out it was 365 for staying out; 362 to go back -- out of a meeting of no more than 500! The officials had set it up, so they had to accept the vote ... this victory had depended on the fighting spirit of the young women ... Some of them had fought their way in and voted up to ten times.
Management and the union officials now cooked up a third meeting, to be held with selected workers inside the factory. This meeting proved impossible to stop, and it yielded a return to work, but the workforce were offered an extra $11.50 to be paid in three months. Just as importantly, perhaps, the climate inside the factory was transformed, with the workers electing shop stewards and some working conditions improving. On the last day before the Christmas break the women stopped for a party, for the first time ever.
Whereas migrant women had traditionally been seen as meek and passive, Kortex showed how that could change in struggle. The women’s family relationships changed too: men visiting the picket fell in behind the women’s leadership, bought coffee, minded children. At home the men took over child care and domestic chores to free their wives for strike agitation.
It was a dispute that drew together many strands -- migrant issues, women’s oppression and class -- in a struggle to which arguments about “autonomy” could add nothing. But then, there were no feminists present to raise them. Whereas Women’s Liberation had embraced the 1975 Everhot strike as a cause célèbre, the feminists were conspicuous by their absence at Kortex, a fact that was disappointing though not surprising, for the women’s movement was shifting conspicuously to the right. It was not alone in that: much of the left was doing likewise. The next chapter considers why.