“There was a chap by the name of Whittaker ... He got shot right through the back of his neck. The bullet came out through his mouth. I saw Whittaker fall and I turned round and said, ‘You dirty bastards, are you fair dinkum?’”
—Jim Nagel, quoted in Under the Hook: Melbourne Waterside Workers Remember Working Lives and Class War 1900-1980
Jim Nagel saw the police murder his fellow stevedore and union comrade Alan Whittaker on a Port Melbourne picket line in 1925. An autopsy corroborated Nagel’s account of the execution, confirming that the bullet had indeed entered through the back of Whittaker’s neck. Yet a coronial inquiry, relying on police testimony, found that Whittaker had charged at officers, who discharged their weapons “in the legal execution of duty in the suppression of a riot and in self-defence”.
The official manner of death? “Justifiable homicide—by gun.”
Police perform many functions as enforcers of the capitalist order. But none is more central than maintaining the exploitation of workers by bosses. As long as they’ve been part of Australia’s state machinery, police have suppressed working-class resistance and protected the wealth and property of capitalists.
Colonial policing: keeping workers at work
The first police in Australia’s colonies imposed strict discipline on convict labourers and indentured servants, who were forced to work by—and often for—the military authorities overseeing and growing rich off the new society. As the ruling class established a permanent domestic workforce of migrants and freed convicts, they experimented with new forms of civilian policing. Wage labourers, no longer physically compelled to work, were now surveilled and intimidated into working for a boss.
Governor Macquarie’s first Sydney police regulations of 1811 outlined the new “freedoms” that released convicts would enjoy: “[A]ll poor persons not using proper means to get employment ... or wilfully absenting themselves from their work ... [will be] deemed to be idle and disorderly persons and punished as such”.
Those who failed to find work or took time off without permission faced punishments such as public whippings of up to 50 lashes or up to 30 days’ hard labour, imposed by newly appointed police superintendents. The superintendents were likely also to serve as magistrates, and to be drawn from the growing landed class of pastoral employers and military officers. Judge, jury, boss and executor of discipline: the new Australian ruling class did it all.
The legal system and police forces pursued the interests of employers from their earliest days. According to labour historian Michael Quinlan, almost 40 percent of all cases prosecuted under “masters and servants” legislation (the precursors to modern industrial relations laws) between 1845 and 1860 were related to unapproved absences and desertion from work. Workers’ complaints against employers were far less commonly heard, and almost never successful, which is unsurprising given that pastoral bosses generally ran the courts.
For most of the nineteenth century, unskilled and semi-skilled labourers in the sheep shearing, mining and maritime industries were the backbone of Australia’s export-oriented economy. The bosses wanted an ever-expanding pool of labour that could be put to work digging, fleecing, hauling and shipping. And they wanted the work done as quickly and intensively as possible so they could make as much money as possible in the international markets. This helps explain the colonial preoccupation with policing absenteeism and “idleness”; the worst-case scenario for the new capitalist class was unpredictable shortages of unskilled labour. Police were thus central to ensuring a stable and exploitable labour supply.
Maritime workers became a special target because they performed the crucial tasks of loading and transporting export commodities. The New South Wales government established a special “water police” branch in the 1840s to harass seamen and dockers, which Quinlan describes as Australia’s first “industrial police force” in his contribution to the book Foundations of Arbitration.
Maritime workers were subjected to an identity card and leave-approval scheme copied directly from the convict labour system. Police conducted regular warrantless searches of ships’ living quarters; workers caught without a card could be arrested on suspicion of desertion. Some 60 separate statutes in Australian law applied specifically to whalers and seamen, focusing heavily on expressions of collective dissent: mass insubordination, mutiny and simultaneous desertion from work.
The cops’ role enforcing industrial discipline bled over into attempts to control workers’ social activities. One Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) magistrate recorded on Boxing Day 1837: “[T]hree workers at Jackson and Addison’s Hobart timberyard were sentenced to the treadmill for being absent and too ‘celebratory’ on Christmas day. Two assaulted a constable trying to arrest them”.
The Australian working class, from its infancy, developed a deep hatred for police as enforcers of the bosses’ interests. Early rioting in working-class communities, even when triggered by shortages of food and alcohol, frequently involved storming or burning down police stations and jails.
Policing strikes and picket lines
By the 1860s, unions and informal workers’ societies began to challenge existing methods of policing industry. Fines incurred by individual workers under the masters and servants laws became less effective as unions established funds to pay their members’ penalties. Isolated cases of absconding were now less of a problem than collective refusals to work—laws were applied to punish those people and institutions “inducing” or “persuading” workers to abscond.
As workers turned more and more to the strike weapon against employers in the second half of the nineteenth century, bosses in turn looked to the police to intervene against strikes. Again, the semi-skilled and unskilled export sectors were key. The first port of call for employers was usually to try to replace strikers with other workers. Because the work in agriculture, mining and transport was relatively unskilled, bosses didn’t need to exert special effort to source qualified labour or implement months of training. They simply had to find large numbers of people willing to work during a strike to restart production and keep their profits flowing.
The problem for employers came when strikers organised to physically resist the entry of this new labour into their workplaces. The “scab” workers, as they became known by trade unionists, were the capitalists’ main tool for circumventing strikes. The classic working-class tactic of mass picketing—forming defensive blockades around a striking workplace—emerged in response to this threat.
Faced with the organised might of picketing workers, bosses sought police assistance to break picket lines and, crucially, to escort scabs into workplaces. Indeed, this became the main industrial role for police in the modern era. Historian David Baker points out that random police violence against strikers is relatively rare in Australian history—overwhelmingly, cops intervene to facilitate mass scabbing operations.
The earliest recorded example of such an incident was the 1873 miners’ dispute at Clunes in western Victoria’s goldfields. There, bosses at the Lothair mine tried to impose an extra sixteen hours of work per week—without pay. The miners refused to resume work under these conditions and struck indefinitely with the support of a recently formed union: the Clunes Miners’ Association. In the fourteenth week of the strike, and with their profits now severely under threat, the Lothair directors organised with the chief commissioner of Victoria Police to bring in coachloads of non-unionised workers from the surrounding region under police guard.
Tipped off to the bosses’ plans, strikers rallied the entire community to barricade roads and form picket lines at the mine. Police and scab workers were repelled in spectacular fashion as they tried to enter Clunes, with around a thousand men, women and children pelting the coaches with stones and other improvised ammunition.
The Creswick Advertiser described how the collective activity of townspeople had overwhelmed the police operation: “[T]he great and real barricade was the living acting mass before them ... An attempt was made by the police to break through, but the attempt was easily frustrated”. In this case, police were forced to retreat, and the mine owners agreed to the workers’ demands after their attempt to bring in scab labour was defeated.
No serious injuries were recorded during this confrontation, but that is likely because police were unprepared for the sheer level of resistance they encountered. After this early embarrassment, the cops meted out unrelenting violence in later disputes, as Baker outlines in his book Police, Picket-lines and Fatalities.
Alan Whittaker, the striking Port Melbourne stevedore, was one victim of this violence. His 1925 murder took place during an attempt to chase scab labour from the wharves. Another death occurred in 1919 at Fremantle, when Tommy Edwards was struck on the head by a police baton in a scuffle to repel scabs. At Rothbury, New South Wales, in 1929, a young miner named Norman Brown was killed when police opened fire on 5,000 workers resisting scab labour in the Hunter Valley coalfields after a ten-month dispute.
In none of these cases did police officers face discipline or criminal charges. The deaths of Edwards and Brown were ruled accidental, and Whittaker’s homicide was found “justifiable” despite evidence of an execution-style shooting. The officer who bludgeoned Tommy Edwards to death in Fremantle was never identified, and an inquiry into the events at Rothbury lauded police for their “commendable restraint”. Whenever they are seriously threatened, Australia’s bosses unleash police to brutalise, even to murder, striking workers with impunity.
Occupying the mining centres
The police have mainly been used to escort non-union labour into workplaces during industrial disputes. One notable exception emerges in coalfields and mining towns, where the pattern is one of much more intensive, day-to-day harassment of the entire community.
Local economies in these areas tend to rely heavily on employment at a single large workplace. As the families and supporters of striking Clunes miners proved in 1873, the instinctive solidarity of a mining community can easily overpower one-off police operations. Police had to develop specific tactics for suppressing dissent in mining centres.
In his memoirs, syndicalist agitator Tom Mann recounts the Sydney police transferring hundreds of officers to Broken Hill during a miners’ lockout in 1908. Police were stationed in the town to intimidate locals. It was an early example of police “occupation” during a strike. By January 1909, the Sydney Morning Herald was reporting that tobacconists and butchers were refusing service to the invading officers, while “Servant girls in hotels and boarding houses where the police are quartered are ... harassing constables as much as possible in the way of inattention and neglect”.
The intermittent occupation of mining towns by police continued well into the twentieth century. In the long and bitter disputes of the Depression era, when entire regions of New South Wales were gripped by strikes and lockouts, police superintendent McKay ordered the deployment of “flying squads” to travel across the state, visiting terror upon working-class communities. Trade unionists knew these special armed detachments as “basher gangs”.
When Norman Brown was killed at Rothbury, 290 officers had been sent to police 120-140 miners on strike—a ratio of around two officers per striker. At Mount Isa in 1964-65, the Queensland government granted special powers to police to control movement in and out of the town, to search and arrest without a warrant and to seize printing presses over the course of an eight-month miners’ strike.
This model of occupation during miners’ disputes was resource-intensive and tended to generate even greater class hostility towards mining bosses over generations. The Australian ruling class has found a structural solution. In former bastions of industrial militancy such as the Pilbara region of Western Australia, bosses have given preference to “fly-in-fly-out” (FIFO) workers who never settle permanently around their place of work.
A 2012 study from the Chamber of Minerals and Energy of Western Australia found that FIFO labour made up around 80 percent of the Pilbara minerals and energy workforce in 2011. Mining communities no longer need to be so heavily policed because FIFO work has broken down localised and intergenerational union traditions.
Federal policing: reaction to industrial unrest
If Australia’s working-class history is shaped by police repression, then the history of Australian policing institutions is also shaped by working-class struggle. The first ever federal police force was established in response to a wave of strike action and political agitation against conscription during World War One.
In 1917, the conservative Nationalist government of Billy Hughes created the Commonwealth Police Force to assist or replace state-based forces in the event of rioting or industrial unrest. Hughes harboured a deep distrust of state and territory Labor governments, especially in Queensland; he viewed them as beholden to working-class interests and not ruthless enough in their deployment of state police. In 1919, the Commonwealth Police was transformed into Australia’s first political surveillance apparatus—the Special Investigations Bureau—targeting trade union leaders, suspected communists and other “provocateurs” within the labour movement.
In 1925, a new federal force was created under the Peace Officers Act. Much like its 1917 predecessor, this body was designed to intervene industrially over the heads of a state Labor government, this time in New South Wales. The federal government was frustrated by the state police’s inability to end a mass seamen’s strike that was spreading to other states. Police in NSW, Victoria and South Australia had issued 1,500 arrest warrants for strikers in the space of two weeks in an attempt to intimidate the seamen back to work, but they stood fast.
Commonwealth authorities wanted NSW Premier Jack Lang to deport the union’s foreign-born leaders Tom Walsh and Jacob Johansen. But Lang, sensing this would undermine his legitimacy with Labor voters, refused. The Peace Officers Act allowed the federal government to arrest Walsh, Johansen and other militants as well as to deploy special officers to protect scabs crewing ships around the country. Unions did manage to stop the deportation of the seamen’s leaders, but the strike was eventually lost due to this unprecedented federal police intervention.
The police bodies set up in this period were ultimately consolidated into the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation by Labor Prime Minister Ben Chifley, who used the agency to persecute the communist leaders of the 1949 coal strike. Australia’s federal police and surveillance apparatuses were designed to curtail industrial militancy and to victimise political radicals inside the trade unions.
Police and industrial struggle: intertwined history
Police are capitalism’s attack dogs and its frontline defence against working-class resistance. At every stage, the police have bolstered the interests of Australian employers: imposing labour discipline in key industries, ensuring the smooth running of export sectors and breaking strikes.
Working-class resistance itself has shaped the development of police tactics. As workers began withdrawing their labour to win better wages and conditions, police intervened to allow scab labour to enter during disputes, often at an employer’s personal request.
Trade union organisation is weaker today than in the periods surveyed here. The lack of large-scale or long-running strike action makes the police’s industrial role less obvious. We see the cops harassing street protests or racially profiling minorities much more often than we see them attacking picket lines.
But repression of working-class struggle remains a central purpose for the police. Their brutality towards the Baiada Poultry picketers in 2011 and the riot-squad offensive against building workers at Melbourne’s Myer Emporium site in 2012 serve as recent reminders.
Even when police don’t physically attack workers, their presence at strikes carries an implicit threat of the violence they are mandated to perform. This threat hung heavy over the Maritime Union of Australia’s 1998 picket of Webb Dock, until a massive legion of unionised construction workers showed up in solidarity and forced the police to retreat.
Marxists have long maintained that the main function of the police is to enforce the rule of capital over labour. This is borne out by the historical record in Australia.
