Mannie de Saxe, who lived for an impressive 98 years, inspired many. From his early life in a Jewish family opposing apartheid in South Africa to his condemnation of apartheid Israel’s Gaza genocide, Mannie stood on the side of the oppressed, supporting workers’ rights and the fight for socialism. 
He argued for a fundamental change to society, to rid the world of capitalism’s stranglehold—for a world run by workers for human need. 
After living in a country in which “racism was institutionalised by law and life was based on race”, Mannie thought he was arriving in an egalitarian society when he migrated to Australia in 1978. But he was soon disabused of that notion when witnessing Australia’s treatment of Indigenous people. 
“Australia has institutionalised racism to a degree that almost puts racist South Africa and apartheid Israel to shame”, he angrily noted. “After all, from 1788 onwards a genocide has been practised”.
Mannie and his family’s move to Australia opened a whole new chapter—a mostly positive change, but one that also saw his marriage collapse and his family life disrupted for many years. But he began to get more politically active and felt more confident to come out as gay. 
From then on, he took on cause after cause and met his partner Ken Lovett at a rally in Sydney protesting British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Clause 28 bill, which made portraying LGBTI life to young people a crime. In Sydney, he participated in the Gay Solidarity Group’s many actions. In Melbourne, he was often photographed with Ken at various rallies, holding a Lesbian and Gay Solidarity banner. 
Although he and Ken never wanted to marry, they campaigned to support marriage equality and were very critical of the ALP’s opposition to change. They celebrated with everyone else when the law was finally changed under the Liberal government. It wasn’t lost on them that Labor supported equality only once it was out of government and the issue had become popular.
When HIV/AIDS hit Australia, Mannie and Ken were active in the protests for better care and against the homophobic backlash. They also became carers of many young men dying with the disease before effective treatment was discovered. Mannie also got a master’s degree, studying the role of health unions in the HIV/AIDS pandemic. They played a key role in establishing a memorial park in Sydney—SPAIDS—and helped to save the memorial gardens at the Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital in Melbourne.
“If you think activism doesn’t work”, he wrote in one online debate, “you are wrong—lobbying didn’t get legislation changed which decriminalised homosexuality in Australia—activism on the streets did; and the Gay Embassy caravan outside [then NSW Premier] Neville Wran’s house in Woollahra ultimately helped that tardy premier get the law in NSW changed with his private member’s bill in 1984”.
Living in inner Melbourne, he took up local issues. More recently, he supported a campaign to save the Preston Market, a hugely popular marketplace for thousands of working-class people in Melbourne’s inner north. 
Both supported refugee and migrant rights and worked with Meals on Wheels, reaching out to isolated and aged people. Mannie was always outspoken against South African apartheid and was known in the anti-Zionist Jewish community around the world. He proudly wore anti-Nazi badges and commemorative badges with the yellow star symbol overlaid with the pink triangle, the two symbols used by the Nazis in the concentration camps to identify Jews and homosexuals. He refused to accept the invocation of the Holocaust as a justification for the current war on Gaza.
He viewed socialism as the only solution to the world’s problems and joined the International Socialists and Socialist Action. Never one to shirk activity, he regularly sold socialist papers on street stalls and at protests and spoke up in meetings. While he didn’t remain a member after the early 1990s, he remained a socialist all his life.
<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/MANNIE-FOR-OMAR-23.10.2020.jpg?1732148778696" alt="Mannie for Omar" /><figcaption>Mannie with a Victorian Socialists corflute, 2020 council election in Darebin electorate, Melbourne PHOTO: Liz Ross</figcaption></figure>
When the Victorian Socialists was established, though no longer able to be as active, he was keen to support the party’s electoral campaigns. In 2020, he was particularly pleased to be photographed beside candidate Omar Hassan’s corflute to show his support for the socialist cause and against Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism.
Mannie has left a lifetime of memories. He had a vast collection of memorabilia and books and an amazing collection of T-shirts and tops with slogans for every progressive cause. Mannie remained mentally sharp, always up for a lively—and lengthy—discussion about the world. His interests spanned politics, music, film, literature and more. He was a generous, kind, fascinating friend of many, and he was loved by those friends, his daughters, son and grandchildren. 
Along with his partner Ken, he fought for a socialist world right to the end. 
Mannie passed away in Melbourne last Sunday. Rest in Power!

Liz Ross

Vale Mannie de Saxe

The Labor government’s deregistration of the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF) in 1986 was a pivotal moment in Australian trade union history. Backed by most unions, including the peak Australian Council of Trade Unions, the move against the BLF was brutal. 
The union and its members were stripped of their rights federally, in the ACT and the strongest branches: NSW and Victoria. BLF members were forced to join other unions, such as the Building Workers Industrial Union (BWIU) or Federated Engine Drivers and Firefighters Union (FEDFA), or be sacked. The BLF could no longer represent members or win legally binding gains in the industrial relations system. A code of conduct was introduced, enforcing fines or cutting off utilities to the construction companies if they allowed BLF members to stay on their jobs. 
The BLF, initially a union of downtrodden labourers, had built itself into one of the most militant Australian unions by the 1970s. Like several unions in construction, the waterfront, mining and manufacturing, it was led by the Communist Party of Australia and contributed to rising militancy in Australia, mirroring a worldwide upsurge during the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, workplace activism accompanied more political demands and action, including anti-apartheid and anti-Vietnam War movements, and support for Indigenous, women’s and gay rights. As the 1960s and 1970s militancy ebbed and bosses went on the offensive, the crucial question was which way the workers movement would go. 
Most unions embraced the politics of cosying up to the bosses. In Australia, the class collaboration of the ALP-ACTU Accord propelled the Australian Labor Party to electoral victory in 1983. Union activist Ronnie remembers “a whole layer who were sold on taking that corporate unionism line. They thought it was going to give them a power base and an ‘in’ in decision making [while] providing a minimum of protection for the working class ... a trickle-down effect”. It was “an easy option to say nothing, to sign up and shut up and collect your job and fees”. That’s the kind of unionism that rank-and-file labourer Ivor Lawrence dismisses as “just revenue making, like the bloody poker machines”. 
Apart from direct attacks, the Accord process continued to weaken union organisation. In the building and construction industry, union coverage fell to 47 percent by August 1988. The period between 1986 and 1988 marked the most dramatic decline, a fall of 58,000, the largest since 1929. 
Militancy fell off equally as dramatically, meaning that a construction boom in 1986-88 didn’t benefit workers. “I’ve been in the game since ’49”, said lifelong BL Kyran Nicholls. “I can’t remember any boom, at any time that we didn’t get something out of it. This was the biggest boom of all and we went backwards, thanks to the BWIU, the FEDFA, ACTU and mainly the Labor Party.” 
In the end, that was what even the architects of the Accord were forced to admit. The BWIU’s Tom McDonald later acknowledged that the Accord “disempowered workers and in the end undermined unionism—it took away workers’ right to struggle for higher wages and conditions with everything decided at the top echelons”. 
One of the keys to that disempowerment was the BLF deregistration. From the late 1970s, when the Liberal-National Party was in government, to the Hawke ALP government from 1983, the union was constantly investigated and threatened with fines and other legal penalties for its militancy and workplace gains. 
In 1986, after the latest investigation, which cited the union’s “addiction to slogans such as ‘Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win’” and its ability to act first and negotiate later, Labor used the combined forces of the state, the union bureaucracy and the employers against the BLF. When federal Labor delivered the deregistration blow, a triumphant industrial relations minister—or “minister of war”—in Victoria, Steve Crabb, was on the Sun’s
front page “beating [the union] into submission”. 
BLF leader Norm Gallagher dismissed the threat: “We have been deregistered before. We survived and during that time our membership increased ... We will look after ourselves, just wait and see”.
It was true that the BLF and other unions had previously overcome deregistration, or the draconian anti-union laws of the 1950s and 1960s. But this time was different. Then, other unions had rallied around the unions under attack. Now, almost everyone was acting against them.
Deregistration—D-Day 16 April 1986—and chaotic scenes spread across the industry in three states. Members were shocked on that first day. Melbourne shop steward Ivor and others felt, “How the hell can this happen? How the hell can workers do this to other workers? Disbelief”. On his job, Ivor Lawrence called a meeting, and they walked off, refusing to sign over to rival unions. Some went to the federation’s office, where other meetings and demos were being organised, determined to fight to get their jobs back.
Despite members being told the BLF had no legal status, no industrial rights and could no longer protect their wages and conditions, defiant BLs went to work determined to stay only on their federation tickets. “BLs arriving at work ... were faced with a combination of government officials armed with ‘union transfer’ documents, organisers from other unions, police on a number of sites and employers who had themselves been threatened”. As the
Age had warned earlier, solidarity would have to be broken by force. The paper assumed the government “must ... be ready to use police to clear the sites and make sure construction work can continue”.
The union kept up the struggle to survive for the rest of 1986 and into 1987. Members, many of whom kept their BLF tickets, also reluctantly joined the BWIU or FEDFA to continue the fight on the job, to fight for a principle—the right to be in the union of your choice. However, after the first few months, most of the action was in Victoria because NSW and the ACT branches were too weakened to respond effectively. 
The blows kept coming. On 13 October 1987, the BLF headquarters in Melbourne was raided by 150 Special Operations police in full attack gear amid government claims the union was funded by “Libyan money” and had $6 million in the bank. As the raid launched, a distraught unionist called out: “It’s World War Three! They’ve smashed the office like you wouldn’t believe, had a go at the staff, the women, cut the phones, tried to seize all the assets!” 
Outraged, protesters marched on parliament and again the next day as unionists walked off the Tennis Centre job and the waterfront shut down for three hours. On 15 October, a Trades Hall delegates meeting condemned the raid. At another protest, tramways union leader Clarrie O’Shea, whose jailing had led to a general strike in 1969 in defiance of anti-union laws, backed the BLF.
The raid wasn’t aimed just at the BLF; it was designed to undermine the ultimately unsuccessful attempts by ex-BLF members inside the BWIU to build a rank-and-file challenge in the 1987 elections.
Though the BLF survived the raid, the government had dealt a nearly fatal blow. It appointed a custodian and, on $1,000 a day, former Judge Ian Sharp was given control of all the funds and investigative powers over the running of the branches. Instigating a raft of charges against officials and organisers, he mired the union in court cases and in May 1988 froze the union funds until 1991, also refusing to pay the union’s wages and bills. 
Even when the BLF was forced into amalgamation with the Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union (CFMEU) in 1994, the custodian held control of the BLF funds and assets until the state finally relinquished them in 2002. Not one charge was ever laid over the original accusations.
Despite all this, amid a dramatic decline in Victorian labourers’ jobs, from 21,000 to 12,000, the remaining hope for a comeback was dashed when deregistration was extended for another five years. From 1991, the only choice left was amalgamation.
In the end, the BLF’s industrial militancy wasn’t enough. Most inside the union acknowledged the federation needed a more politically based response to the Accord and more organised opposition. After deregistration, there were attempts to build such opposition with groups such as “Defend the Unions, Defend the BLF” and a Fightback Conference pulling together activists and several unions and left-wing groups. But in the lead-up to the Accord, the BLF didn’t develop and cohere a more political opposition to counter the class-collaborationist politics of unions such as the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU), one of the key backers of the Accord. 
The federation was seldom able to go beyond the limits of trade union struggle and, up against the power of the state, Kyran Nicholls pointed out, no union on its own could have won. Nonetheless, it was more prepared than most to take that struggle to the edge. As John Cummins said: “If we hadn’t fought, hadn’t run the distance, it [the sacrifices of rank-and-file BLs], it would have all been lost”.
Organised building workers prepared to fight not just for themselves but also for the rights of other workers and many oppressed groups—that is what brought the BLF up against the forces of capitalism and led to the campaign to smash it. This is why we remember the union to this day.
All quotes are from Liz Ross’ book Dare to Struggle! Dare to Win! The 1986 deregistration of the BLF, available from Red Flag Books.

The last time Labor deregistered a construction union

The facts are undeniable. Women in 5,000 companies—covering almost five million workers—earn 21.7 percent less than their male colleagues’ median total remuneration. In some companies, the gap is as high as 31.8 percent. This is according to figures released by the Workplace Gender Equity Agency (WGEA) in the lead-up to International Women’s Day this year. 
A significant gender pay disparity in some areas with relatively small numbers of women, such as mining or construction companies, might not be surprising. But others, such as banks and airlines, often have even higher wage gaps. In retail women’s wear, for every dollar a man gets, women’s pay ranges from 42.3 to 79.1 cents. 
Importantly, the WGEA figures compare full-time work, with pay rates for part-time work translated into a full-time rate for the purposes of comparison. But because women disproportionately work part time, the actual amount they are paid—what goes into their bank account each fortnight—is even less compared to their male counterparts than what the pay gap alone suggests. 
Why does the pay gap exist? The problem is well illustrated by Bain Consulting. Bain is a company with a 31 percent wage gap, despite winning awards from the WGEA for gender equality. At Bain, women make up just 31 percent of its highest earning advisers, 45 percent of its second-highest ranks and 71 percent of its bottom quartile. 
A similar situation exists at the Commonwealth Bank, which has a 54.4 percent female workforce. Around 71 percent of the lower-paid customer service roles in branches and call centres are women, which accounts for its 29.8 percent pay gap. The bank may pay the same wage for the same work, but men get the higher paid jobs with all the perks and bonuses that go with them.
The solution, according to Angela Priestley in Women’s Agenda, is to “Bring on the heat around the gender pay gaps ... Bring on the scrutiny ... the awkward discussions” in companies championing the UN’s International Women’s Day slogan “count her in”. 
But while it’s welcome that the WGEA has published business names and matching figures of pay rates for the first time, transparency itself won’t necessarily improve things for women. In Denmark, when similar data was published, the gender pay gap narrowed because bosses responded by holding down men’s wages, rather than increasing women’s. 
Not mentioned by the WGEA, companies or media commentary is the one thing that has won gains for women in the past—militant union organising.
Since the 1800s, Australian unions have been organising for equal pay. As early as 1902, telegraphists and postmistresses in the new federal public service won equal pay after a determined campaign by the union. Later campaigns during WWII saw tram conductors, munitions workers and bread carters win after taking industrial action. 
Two campaigns particularly stand out: one by manufacturing workers in 1969 and the other by insurance workers in 1973. Several industrial campaigns in manufacturing in the early 1960s were instrumental in bringing about the 1969 decision that enshrined equal pay for the same work. This decision triggered a two-year campaign to win full equal pay for 72,000 women process workers. Concerted industrial action, including the unionisation of many new workplaces and joint action with their fellow male workers, got results.
After the second equal pay decision in 1972 broadened the scope for claims by requiring equal pay for comparable work, insurance workers initially relied on the courts to implement pay equality in their industry. When this didn’t happen, they started to organise and in 1973 several thousand workers demonstrated in Melbourne and stayed out for the rest of the day. They then went on to have a stop-work a week later and another strike, and a month later threatened a national strike—the first in the industry. The employers backed down and, though it took another year and a further threat of industrial action, pay equality was won for most of the workforce. 
We’ve now had decades of reports, committees, court rulings, new legislation undoing some of the structural barriers to women’s work—and yet the gender pay gap remains stubbornly high. It remains high because union leaders have forgotten the lessons of the past, relied on all these committees and laws instead of the industrial strength of their members. 
The 1980s ALP-ACTU Accord promised many things for women, but collaboration with the bosses led to women’s wages falling and big job losses in female-dominated industries as the economy was restructured. Unions held back from taking industrial action, unionisation and wages and conditions plummeted, while the bosses reaped the profits.
In the wake of this latest WGEA report, the ACTU released several memes, concluding that “There is much to be done, but union members are no stranger to getting things done”. Where we have actually won equal pay or broken through barriers, it is because we have used our industrial strength, not meme wars. Where is the call from the ACTU or individual unions for a stop-work on International Women’s Day? 
We can’t rely on naming and shaming the bosses into granting equal pay. We have to take on the system that reinforces inequality. If unions were prepared to take on the banks, the supermarkets and the airlines to demand better wages for women and back it up with industrial action—like workers did in the insurance industry in the 1970s—there is every indication it would be popular and they would be under huge pressure to pay up. But for all the talk of “breaking the rules”, there is clearly no appetite for that sort of action.
If we are to break through the gender pay gap, it will be necessary to follow the example of those before us who used their industrial power to win better conditions for women. And to do that, we need to start building power in our workplaces from the bottom up.

Equal pay: the solution is hiding in plain sight

Why teach kids how to save the planet, when we can encourage them to design killer submarines instead? High school students can now join the Defence Department’s Nuclear-Powered Submarine Propulsion Challenge. Defence will provide the resources for teachers to enable the project and student winners will get an all-expenses-paid trip to HMAS Sterling in Perth. 
It will, <a href="https://www.stemhub.com.au/nuclear-submarine-challenge">according to the Defence web page</a>, “inspire students to discover how [nuclear propulsion] works and ... makes submarines more capable”. Rear Admiral Jonathon Earley says that this will encourage students to see how science and maths subjects “are practically applied in the real world”. Students are, he adds, “our future submariners, engineers and technicians”—in other words, students fit for Australia’s multibillion-dollar war drive.
It’s not just at school that this pro-war, pro-nuclear message is being spread. Catriona Jackson, CEO of Universities Australia, toured the US looking for military partnerships after the government announced its $368 billion nuclear submarine deal. “The foundation has been laid so Australia’s universities can play their fullest role in supporting AUKUS”, she said. And Adelaide University <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/australian-universities-join-drive-war">dares prospective students</a> to “make history” with its revamped courses to construct and maintain the newest weapons of mass destruction.
This is what Earley means when he talks about applying knowledge in the “real world”: a world being prepared by our politicians for more imperialist war and the militarisation of society. Nowhere will there be discussion of the potential of nuclear war to destroy our world, let alone the elephant in the room—the real-world lack of any capacity to dispose of nuclear waste safely. 
Of course, it’s not just the nuclear and war industries that attempt such right-wing ideological programs to persuade young people of the benefits of destructive technology. In 2018, fossil fuel companies provided teacher training and free curriculum material, which contained not a word about climate change. The miners’ fear, said Rio Tinto’s CEO <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/mining-industry-in-promotional-push-targeting-school-students-20180723-p4zt36.html">in the Sydney Morning Herald</a>, is that “coal will become the next tobacco”—that is, recognised for the toxic substance that it is when burned. In 2017, more than 3,000 students were involved in this continuing project, run by the Queensland Minerals and Energy Academy.
Without a second thought, millions of dollars are being spent promoting dangerous, climate-destroying and warfare technologies. They’re indoctrinating the kids.
Compare the political right’s championing of these threats with their rants and vile campaigns over the supposed left-wing “indoctrination” of kids. Or their whipped-up panic about climate activists’ city stunts, leading to draconian anti-protest laws in several states.
From 2010, Safe Schools, a government-backed support program for LGBTI school students, was a lifesaver for many. But its very popularity and effectiveness drew the anger of the conservative political right—which wants non-heterosexual children to grow up hating themselves. 
Right-wing groups such as the fringe Australian Christian Lobby and some Liberal MPs attacked Safe Schools. In a matter of weeks, the Victorian program was gutted through a vicious campaign and the leaders of the program were publicly vilified. Federal funding was cut at the end of 2017—just when the mining companies were getting their hands on the kids in Queensland. 
For the political right, it’s okay to indoctrinate kids into accepting and even participating in human and planetary destruction. But they pour poison on programs that encourage people to embrace human decency.

The military is indoctrinating schoolchildren

Under the cover of darkness, at midnight on 7 April 1998, balaclava-hooded thugs swarmed onto Australian docks, confronting workers with orders to “Get out! You don’t work here any more!”. Shocked Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) members, employees of Patrick Stevedores, were frogmarched off the job and replaced by non-union scabs protected by security guards with dogs and mace.
The Australian Financial Review hailed this “brilliant, ruthless attack”, heralding the arrival of “a new world of industrial relations”, while government MPs were high-fiving and backslapping each other in Parliament House. Then Industrial Relations Minister Peter Reith saw the crushing of the MUA in the 1990s as “correcting the ruling class mistakes of 100 years ago”, when governments had failed to smash organised labour on the wharves in the 1890s.
But by the next morning there were picket lines at Patrick’s waterfront operations around the country, as hundreds of unionists, students and retirees rallied to protest the shock sacking. It was, said one dock worker, “the fight of the whole trade union movement and the whole working class of Australia”. Just one month later, 80,000 workers struck and marched through the streets of Melbourne roaring: “MUA—here to stay!”, and “The workers united will never be defeated!”. 
It’s now the 25th anniversary of this full-frontal attack on one of Australia’s most militant unions. The battle between Patrick Stevedores (attack dog of the Howard government) and the MUA appeared “like a flash of lightning across the political landscape”, as socialist writer Tom Bramble put it <a href="blank">in an essay</a> on the dispute. Open class warfare was on the front page of the newspapers and headed every evening news.
When the fight was over, Patrick’s boss Chris Corrigan was forced to take the MUA members back, the union stayed on the wharves, and the scabs were sacked. The national and international trade union solidarity demonstrated on the Australian waterfront in 1998 slowed the Howard government’s anti-union offensive, seriously damaged the political career of aspiring party leader Peter Reith and was in part responsible for the government losing fourteen seats at the federal election later that year. But many rank and file militants bitterly concluded in the aftermath that the union had won the battle but lost the war. 
During the 1996 election campaign, John Howard had claimed that his vision was for a “relaxed and comfortable” Australia. Within days of taking office, the new Coalition government demonstrated that this was a lie. One of its first acts was to set up task forces to design a new industrial relations regime, alongside so-called waterfront reform laws. A new Workplace Relations Act was enacted in January 1997, providing the laws necessary to hamper unions’ industrial power. The final plans for the waterfront, the “interventionist strategy”, were signed off by the government in July 1997. By 1998, the brutal class nature of John Howard’s Australia was on full display. 
From the early planning in 1997 through to the final days in May 1998, the government and Patrick’s Chris Corrigan plotted and schemed, twisting and rewriting the laws in their attempt to smash the Maritime Union of Australia.
There was an economic interest in this attack: to bring down the costs of stevedoring and boost the companies’ profits, and to stop the MUA from threatening bosses’ profits by shutting down the wharves and restricting trade. But there was politics to this as well. The MUA and its predecessors had a history of taking militant action over everything from supporting Indonesian independence, against South African apartheid, fighting for its own members’ wages and conditions, to solidarity actions with other workers. Smashing the militant waterfront union would be a foreboding message to every other union in the country.
Patrick Stevedores repeatedly tried to provoke the MUA into taking strike action, giving the government the trigger to deregister the union. The MUA didn’t bite, part of its questionable strategy of relying more on court action than its members’ industrial strength. Armed with millions of dollars of government funding, Patrick secretly recruited ex-military and police, planning to train them in Dubai to replace the union workforce. The manoeuvre failed spectacularly when the MUA called for international maritime bans. Another attempt to use non-union labour on the Cairns docks similarly fell afoul of international solidarity. 
Patrick’s next step was more successful. In January 1998, the company replaced union members with non-union labour at Webb Dock in Melbourne. Patrick succeeded in establishing this beachhead of non-unionism in no small part because the MUA refused to allow picketers to block the scabs, shut down the dock or close the waterfront nationwide by calling out all their members from Patrick and rival stevedore P&amp;O. No wonder the government and Patrick felt they were on the way to victory.
Getting wind of an imminent attack in early April, the MUA again went to court to stop Patrick’s plans to sack its entire workforce. But Patrick had already legally shed its workforce through outsourcing to a labour hire company. All it had to do was notify the firm it would no longer need its labour-hire workers, leaving the wharfies jobless and the stevedore free to hire directly this new, non-union, workforce. 
Now, with a trained non-union crew and full government support, Patrick was ready to move. On the night of 7 April, as the goons and dogs raided the docks, 1,700 were sacked. The government crowed that the MUA was off the wharves, soon to be finished for good. 
But they had underestimated Australian workers. The response around the country was electric—not just on that first day, but every day until the end. Community assemblies, pickets by another name, were set up at the entrance to every Patrick Stevedores operation in the country. Tens of thousands of workers walked off the job to go to the MUA picket lines, joined by students, community groups and the like, who supplied food, music and solidarity. 
During the lockout in Melbourne, warehouse workers from the big supermarket chains, construction workers, truck drivers, manufacturing workers and coal miners all took action in support of the wharfies. Several unions announced they would take illegal action if the MUA called for support. Unionists at Telstra told their officials they were prepared to “go to any extremes” to back the wharfies. The South Australian United Trades and Labour Council promised support for a general strike.
The biggest gathering on the waterfront was a major showdown on 17 April at Melbourne’s East Swanson Dock. Tipped off that the police were going to try to break the picket in the morning, thousands of unionists and supporters poured down to the wharves. Helicopters buzzed overhead, shining their lights down as the police formed into lines. Just as it looked like the cops would charge, several thousand construction workers marched over the hill to come to the aid of the picket. The cops were sandwiched between the construction workers and the picketers and had to beg to be let out!
Not for a long time in Australian society had the question “Which side are you on?” been so clearly posed. People who only a few months before had despaired of workers’ passivity now saw the class’s strength in the mass pickets and walkouts across the nation. 
There was so much potential for workers and unions to turn back the tide of union defeats that had blighted the workers’ movement for years. The union movement had the government and employers on the back foot. Laws prohibiting union solidarity action were powerless in the face of the mobilisations in support of the MUA. It was rank and file pressure that pushed the government to the brink, forced Victorian Trades Hall to hold the 80,000-strong rally and strike in May, kept the picket lines strong and built nationwide solidarity.
On 4 May, the High Court confirmed an earlier Federal Court decision to order Patrick to reinstate the sacked workers and to start negotiations over a new industrial agreement. But while wharfies were relieved to get their jobs back, the subsequent agreement was a disaster. It cut hundreds of permanent jobs, imposed significant wage cuts and introduced widespread casualisation. The union also agreed to drop court action against government ministers and the company for what it had argued was a conspiracy to destroy the union. One wharfie slammed the leadership for its “betrayal” over the final settlement, commenting that it “follows a decade-long pattern by union officials of acting as industrial police for the employers”. How did this happen?
At each point, there were decisive weaknesses in the union response. Despite nationwide pledges of solidarity action from many unions—enough to shut industry down—the Australian Council of Trade Unions and MUA leadership refused to call them out. When the Australian Workers’ Union promised a national oil strike if wharfies were sacked, the ACTU talked about raising funds instead. In Queensland, the local Trades and Labour Council leader even reported that he’d been “putting out fires” around the state. The ACTU and MUA leadership’s strategy was to rely on the courts and avoid militancy for fear of jeopardising the ALP’s prospects in the coming election.
It was a leadership strategy of “deflect and defeat” instead of “stand up and smash”.
There’s no doubt that it was the unions’ rank and file who held the line, making sure that the waterfront stayed unionised and that employers had to negotiate rather than dictate. 
In the MUA itself, the officials sidelined the members. The union had regular members’ meetings and a generally more democratic and representative structure than others. It took several heated meetings before the officials could force through the final agreement in Melbourne, and Sydney was a “go slow” port for months afterwards. But in the end, the rank and file weren’t able to break through the officials’ hold. The democratic culture of the union had been undermined by MUA leaders who had for years been trading away jobs and conditions.
Despite this, the struggle gave heart to many workers—you could sense the growing self-confidence at the time. But to have won that battle, and to win the battles of today, we need more than rank and file militancy: we need rank and file political leadership to challenge backsliding by the union leaders. We need a broader fight too, and a politics that links every attack on workers and the oppressed to its root cause, capitalism. 
No matter how much the union bureaucrats and politicians betray us, they can’t take away the memory of those days of solidarity on the docks. A chorus line from one of the songs written at the time sums it up: 
And with these arms our strength combined
And with these arms we turned them back
With these arms—Arms more used to holding babies, arms more used to sorting paper, arms that raise buildings to the sky—We held the line.

Like a flash of lightning across the political landscape: 25 years since the war on the waterfront

“Jack Charles is Up and Fighting” is the title of one of Uncle Jack Charles’ early shows for the Indigenous Theatre Group, Nindethana, and it sums up his life. An actor, musician, potter, activist, proud gay man, this Boon Wurrung, Dja Dja Wurrung, Woiwurrung, Palawa and Yorta Yorta elder was, as actor and director Rachel Maza put it, “a shining, vibrant celebration of life”.
His brilliance in so many fields is all the more exceptional given the brutality he faced in his early years. When he was a baby, he was stolen from his mother Blanche Charles, and did not see her again until he was 19. When he was taken and made a ward of the state, he was also given a criminal record. Later he commented, “So, my first offence ... was as an Aboriginal boy, four months old, child in need of care and attention. That was the offence”. 
Several actual offences followed. He was imprisoned 22 times for burglary and drug offences as a young man. Always ready to see the political side of his life, he half-jokingly justifies the burglaries as him being a “hunter gatherer on prime Aboriginal land” who was collecting dues from those living there rent-free.
Giving testimony to Victoria’s truth-telling inquiry, Uncle Jack talked about the years in the Salvation Army Boy’s Home, where he was physically and sexually abused. “It’s hard to convey the damage that place did to me. It wasn’t just the abuse that traumatised me, the Box Hill Boys Home stripped me of my Aboriginality.” 
It was only in 2021, during the making of the SBS documentary Who Do You Think You Are?, that he discovered the identity of his father and his family’s ties to more Aboriginal nations across Victoria and Tasmania. “My story has been lost, and with this story I’ve been healed again”, he said of the discovery. Over the years he found out his forebears had been part of the Blak political peoples who resisted government intervention at Coranderrk, a reserve for Aboriginal people in northern Victoria.
Acting was where he really shone. “I think I owe my life to having found theatre”, he once said. He established the first Indigenous theatre, Nindethana, with fellow activist and actor Bob Maza, in 1972. Stage, film and television were home to his performances in The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith through to Preppers, Cleverman and Mystery Road and the documentary Bastardry. 
In 2010, he gave a scorching performance in Jack Charles V the Crown with the Ilbijerri Theatre Company. From stolen generation childhood, imprisoned 22 times, he talks about his whitewashed existence, then sings tongue in cheek about how grand it was that the white man came. The play demands rights for Indigenous people and, for ex-prisoners like himself, the extinguishment of past criminal records.
He ends with a blues version of Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s poem “Son of Mine”, where she writes, “I could tell you of heartbreak, hatred blind ... But I’ll tell you instead of brave and fine”.
Only recently Uncle Jack declared he still had lots to say and fight for. Speaking to the Saturday Paper, he said ,“Old thieves like me, we cry loudest when we see injustice ... We still have a problem with unaccountable deaths—in custody, in police cells and sometimes in hospitals, especially over in the West [of Australia],” 
Uncle Jack was also politicised by his experience of being a gay man. In a 2019 interview with the Star Observer, his message for younger LGBTQ Indigenous people was to be true to themselves, as he was. “But always watch your back, because we’re not in a gay world. We’re living on the fringe of society, like Indigenous people, we’re fringe dwellers. So us gay and Indigenous mob, we’re fringe dwellers twice over, and that’s what gives us great strength.” 
In 2021 he was more positive saying, “I have no problems being a gay and old arty bloke, because I’ve been a gay and young arty bloke for many years and everyone’s accepted it”, not to mention how he was “tickled pink” when marriage equality was won, observing that he had “thought Australia was too much of a bastard country to get it through”. 
Oppression and discrimination didn’t go away for Uncle Jack, any more than for other Indigenous or LGBT people. But he always came back fighting. In 2015, hours after being named Victorian Senior Australian of the Year, he was twice refused a taxi. He told taxi companies when it happened again in 2016, “You need a bastard like me. A deadset, ridgy-didge, beyond redemption bastard like me to take on the taxi industry, to take on the challenge”.
We will remember Uncle Jack Charles in all his many attributes, as a fighter, an inspirational leader and elder, his cheeky humour, an icon of acting and so much more. Listen to him and the equally inspiring Archie Roach singing “We won’t cry”, and lift your spirits to the sky.
Rest in power, Uncle Jack Charles.

Uncle Jack Charles: 1943-2022

The chants rang out through cities and towns around the world as protesters defiantly challenged the US Supreme Court’s 1 July decision to end national access to abortion: “We won’t go back!” and “Our bodies! Our lives! Our right to decide!” 
The decision has encouraged bigots everywhere, including in Australia. But pro-choice activists have put the reactionaries on notice that their victory will be short-lived. And the activists are looking back in history to see how we’ve won before. 
In Australia, abortion laws, based on nineteenth century English precedents, were ambiguous. They allowed some leeway for doctors to terminate pregnancies, but the operations were expensive, and inconsistencies in the law opened the door to corruption.
For those who couldn’t get through the legal hoops, but could scrape up the money, there were doctors available. But for those with little cash, backyard operators or other desperate remedies were the only option. Hospitals were filled with women suffering the after-effects, sometimes fatal, of botched operations.
By the late 1960s, restrictions on abortion were being challenged as rising militancy among workers brought the social and economic structures of capitalism to account. Pressure was mounting to end the protection rackets surrounding illegal abortion, and to increase the availability of the procedure. Importantly, the contraceptive pill, expensive as it was in Australia (it had a “luxury” tax put on it), gave women sexual freedoms they hadn’t had before. An economic boom increased the demand for female labour, which in turn fostered confidence among women to demand greater independence and control over their lives, and women workers to fight for those and other working rights.
Initially, the push to change abortion laws came from civil liberties groups and doctors, some looking to the law reform introduced in Britain in 1967. Although some abortions were legal, many doctors and patients nevertheless felt vulnerable, a situation made worse when Victorian police began a blitz on abortion-providing doctors in 1965. 
Tackling law reform became more urgent, leading the Victorian Council for Civil Liberties (VCCL) to start a serious investigation into abortion in 1966, followed by the creation of a new organisation, the Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA) in 1968. Through clarifying the law and increasing public knowledge about reproductive rights, the VCCL hoped to improve women’s access and safety. More actively, the council backed the editor and distributor of the Melbourne University student publication Farrago when they were charged in 1967 with obscenity for publishing articles on contraception and abortion. Farrago won the case. 
To champion the rights of women most effectively, the VCCL and ALRA also needed doctors and nurses brave enough to take a stand against the police corruption and to campaign for law reform. In Victoria, one of the most important was Dr Bertram Wainer, an army doctor who had resigned when conservative Prime Minister Robert Menzies led Australia into the Vietnam War. 
After setting up his private clinic in 1967, Wainer was confronted by the issue of abortion when a young patient collapsed in his clinic, haemorrhaging after a botched abortion, too frightened to go to a hospital. The following year he became more concerned when police raided Dr James Troup’s surgery, seizing private medical files. Troup had been forced to pay local detectives cash bribes, ferried to them by his secretary Peggy Berman. 
Wainer, along with partner Jo, began planning a test case. He had joined ALRA in 1968 and met activists and journalists like Lionel Pugh, who were keen to expose police corruption and change the laws. Their activities were met with violence—bashings, shootings and fire-bombings—as well as ostracisation from some doctors and bankruptcy. Pugh was murdered and his evidence files taken from his house. 
It all came to a head in 1969, when Dr Ken Davidson was charged and his files seized. When Davidson was acquitted by Supreme Court Justice Clifford Menhennitt, the judge’s decision established a common law right to legal abortion. However, the civil law remained unchanged, with abortion still a criminal matter in the various states and territories. A similar case in New South Wales led to the Levine decision in 1971, with an equivalent relaxing of restrictions in that state. 
Wainer then led another challenge to the laws, inviting the state to prosecute him for arranging three abortions. He also provided evidence of police extortion of doctors providing abortions. Initially, the Attorney General Arthur Rylah refused to accept his statements, but eventually the government was forced to hold the 1971 Kaye Inquiry, resulting in the two police officers involved being jailed for five years. Later, further evidence from Wainer and journalists resulted in the Beach Inquiry into police corruption with less positive results. While more than 30 were charged, all were acquitted.
Interviewed in 1985, Wainer explained his stand: “Here was an issue where people because of their class origins ... and because there is something special about women being oppressed by laws, which were designed to keep the poor down and advantage the rich. I just saw it ...This woman can’t get an abortion, that woman can, and that is wrong.” 
ALRA itself was changing, turning its focus from reform to repeal of abortion laws and adopting the slogan “a woman’s right to choose” in 1971. The organisation became more radical, taking to the streets in demonstrations as well as disrupting anti-abortion meetings and church services. The movement also took on the anti-choice Right to Life organisation, which was formed in 1970. 
Women’s liberation activists were taking to the streets too. A still popular pro-choice poster of a very pregnant Victorian Premier Henry Bolte was pasted up around town in April 1971, followed by an action on Mother’s Day for “Contraceptives not Chrysanthemums”. In November 1971, US women demanding repeal of US laws called for solidarity from around the world. Five hundred marched in Melbourne, with protests also organised in Sydney.
During 1972 and 1973, a new organisation, Women’s Abortion Action Coalition, formed out of the women’s liberation movement. Their demands included repeal of abortion laws, freely available contraception, no forced sterilisation and sex education.
There was an uptick in action 1973 as two federal parliamentarians brought in a reform bill. In May 1973, ALRA backed a public statement, signed by 300 women who had had “illegal” abortions, challenging the state to arrest them. No arrests were ever made. In the month before the bill was presented, the Women’s Electoral Lobby, ALRA and WAAC held rallies around the country. 
On 1 May, WAAC set up a Women’s Tent Embassy outside federal parliament. On the first day people queued till nearly midnight to sign the petition. Over the next days, support, both financial and in person, flowed in. The embassy handed out thousands of flyers and pamphlets explaining their aims and giving advice on contraception and abortion. In Melbourne in June, women marched on police headquarters to hand in statutory declarations about their “illegal” abortions. Free Abortion on Demand banners led many International Women’s Day rallies in the following years.
During 1971 and 1972, both ALRA and WAAC, like women involved in the Rape Crisis Centres, considered setting up their own referral services and clinics alongside Wainer’s own Fertility Control Centre and a Planned Parenthood Clinic in Prahran. But providing services wasn’t the main focus of the campaign. Getting the laws reformed and winning support of the trade unions and Labor Party were the critical issues. 
The Labor Party and trade unions had many in support of abortion, but the influence of the Catholic Church and other religious groups, the Right to Life and the Democratic Labor Party, provided a bastion of reaction within the labour movement more generally. Despite the fact that abortion was supported by the majority of the Australian population, the influence of right-wing forces made some more reluctant to openly support women’s rights.
By the late 1970s, the Australian Council of Trade Unions, however, was supporting “access for all couples and individuals to the necessary information, education and means to exercise their basic right to decide freely and responsibly on the number and spacing of their children”. This policy enabled some left-wing unions to support abortion officially as an industrial issue and to back pro-abortion campaigns. In the late 1970s, the rank-and-file Reform Group in the federal clerical union ran on a successful ticket that included the right to abortion as a union demand. 
In the years after the first reform moves, the laws were gradually changed state by state, but not without some battles. The Greenslopes Abortion Clinic was one such battle in Queensland. Under the notoriously reactionary Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, abortion was banned, though clinics such as Greenslopes continued to operate. In 1979, when an anti-abortion motion was before federal parliament, the anti-choice Right to Life decided to push for the closure of Greenslopes and a Joh Bjelke-Petersen tightening of Queensland laws. A draft bill in the state parliament included long jail sentences with hard labour for doctors, nurses, social welfare workers and even friends for assisting with or performing abortion. It also restricted abortions to public hospitals, with compulsory notification to the Department of Health, and permitted it only in cases where the death of the woman concerned was imminent. 
The Women’s Campaign for Abortion (WCA) was quickly formed, but it was small compared to forces such as the Right To Life. However, there was support among Labor Party members and some MPs who stood on party policy and opposed the bill, alongside the Children by Choice group. Many unions passed motions, donated money, joined pickets and arranged workplace meetings, and their support was a crucial element in the bill’s defeat. 
As the bill came before parliament in March 1980, 600 marched in Brisbane on International Women’s Day, with fifty rallying in Townsville. Defying the bans on marching, the Brisbane march unfurled large banners, while a number of rallies outside parliament occurred in April. As cracks began showing in the government parties’ support for the bill, 2,000 packed the Town Hall in opposition on 17 May.
The Right to Life counter-rallied two days later with 5,000 on the street, but on 20 May another large pro-choice rally marched on parliament, with people from surrounding offices joining them as they headed through the city. Public opinion, many unions and the ALP were firmly on the side of the pro-abortion forces. In the face of this, one MP after the other told the premier they couldn’t support the bill. The government crumbled: militancy with widespread public support had won the day.
But Greenslopes was not out of the woods. In 1985, both it and another clinic in Townsville was raided, files were seized, and the chief doctors were charged with conspiracy to use force to procure an abortion. In direct defiance of this attempt by Bjelke-Petersen to force the clinics’ closure, Wainer flew to Brisbane to make sure they stayed open. The government was defeated again by rallies and public support. 
This time around, Queensland has again featured in the fight for abortion rights. Rockhampton’s only abortion provider closed in late 2021, and despite protests in 2022 calling for it be reopened, nothing happened. Then, on 2 July 2022, the day of national protests in solidarity with US protests against the dumping of Roe vs. Wade, the state government announced that abortion services will be provided by the local hospital. 
In 1972, WAAC wrote that women have learnt that waiting patiently for reforms has produced nothing, that only with campaigns that reach out to the masses of women (and I’d add men) for support and involvement can we win. Time and again, militancy, particularly working-class militancy, has led the way, and it is as true today as ever as we continue the fight for free, safe abortion on demand.

Our bodies, our lives! A history of abortion rights activism in Australia

Around the US, tens of thousands have hit the streets slamming the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that established abortion as a right. In Manhattan, a large crowd of young, multiracial activists marched, chanting “Fuck the Supreme Court!” 
The decision will activate a range of state laws that will mean abortion is criminalised across nearly half of the country. Millions of women, especially working-class women and women of colour, stand to lose the right to make basic decisions about their bodies and lives in as little as weeks or months. 
<img alt="Upcoming demonstrations" src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/Demos.jpg" />
Of course, this decision doesn’t mean abortions will stop, only that safe ones will. Abortions will still happen, but without proper medical supervision, in secret and on pain of criminal penalties for pregnant women and those who help them. 
This decision is a part of the right’s long-term campaign in the US to strip ordinary people of their rights and roll back the gains of the 1960s and ’70s. Historic though it is, they will not stop at this victory. In his concurring opinion, conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas indicated his openness to reconsidering all similar previous decisions of the court, making specific mention of those that guaranteed access to contraception, prohibited states criminalising sex between men and legalised same-sex marriage. 
It’s increasingly clear that activists can’t rely on the Democrats to stand up to this assault and protect abortion rights. The party won’t discipline anti-choice bigots in its own ranks, and seems mainly interested in using this decision to improve its prospects in the upcoming mid-term elections. Instead of backing protests, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi begged voters to focus on the November elections, while President Biden’s response was just as pathetic, saying to protesters: “I call on everyone, no matter how deeply they care about this decision, to keep all protests peaceful. Peaceful, peaceful, peaceful”.
But despair cannot be our response. Instead, we need burning rage—rage that can fuel a campaign to push back against these attacks. Courts are rarely on our side: what’s needed is pressure from below that can force them to concede our rights. Activists in the US are arguing for people everywhere to get out in the streets, protest, organise and demand free abortion on demand. 
Here in Australia, we can help by getting the word out about the rallies that are happening around the country in solidarity with women in the US. We need to help turn this setback into a catalyst for action, and revive the sort of radical, disruptive politics that won abortion rights in the US 50 years ago. This also means rebuilding union power, because unions have been important allies in the struggle for reproductive freedom here and in the US, recognising it as a class issue as well as one of women’s rights. We have a fight on our hands, a fight we must win!

Roe vs. Wade overturned: a hammer blow against women’s rights

Crises tumble around our world, challenging certainties, destabilising regimes and shaking-up people’s understanding of society. Out of the disruption comes political analysis and organising, a battle between left and right—liberation or barbarism. Alongside the organisers and agitators are the writers, poets, filmmakers, photographers and artists whose work documents our world of change, forging iconic images that provide fuel for the struggle. 
Among the greatest such figures of the 20th century was US poet Thomas McGrath. McGrath was born in 1916 into an Irish farming community in North Dakota. His poems are products and markers of some of the most significant periods and events of the US workers’ movement in the middle decades of the century.
McGrath is a poet of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, of the pre-World War II militancy and post-war sell-outs on the New York waterfront, of the initial soaring hopes and ultimate crushing defeat of the Spanish revolution, of the radical life of members and supporters of the US Communist Party, and of the dark days of the anti-communist witch-hunts of McCarthyism. Through it all McGrath maintained his hope for the future, and faith in the power of the working class to build a better world. His poems are, as his friend Dale Jacobsen writes, “flames cast against the darkness”.
The rural North Dakota of McGrath’s childhood wasn’t so much redneck as just plain red—influenced by the militant class struggle politics of the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies) and the earlier left-populism of the Farmers Alliance. The Alliance won power in the state for a brief period in the late 19th century and passed a number of significant reforms. It created a state bank and state-owned grain elevators to stop price gouging by private capitalists, and it legalised strikes and brought in stricter safety regulations in the mines.
The Wobblies were particularly popular with itinerant farm, mining and timber workers. McGrath’s earliest working years were spent among timber workers from a multitude of countries. In one poem, he recalls the radical conversations:
The talk flickered like fires. 
The gist of it was, it was a bad world and we were the boys to change it. 
And it was a bad world; and we might have.
Later they talk of the hunger marchers who’d occupied the local city hall:
Bricklayer, watchmaker, Communists, hoped they were building 
The new society, inside the shell of the old ...
Another poem describes a strike during the harvest, and references the popular Wobblies’ image of the worker with folded arms:
The strike started then. Why then I don’t know. 
Cal spoke for the men ... 
There were strikes on other rigs that day, most of them lost, 
And, on the second night, a few barns burned. 
After that a scattering of flat alky bottles, 
Gasoline filled, were found, buried in bundles. 
“The folded arms of the workers.”
Just before World War II, McGrath worked on the New York waterfront. Writing in the TriQuarterly Magazine about the political atmosphere of the docks during McGrath’s time there, Terrence Des Pres describes how “the fight for reform went forward on the piers and in the bars and walk-ups of Chelsea”. Nonetheless, despite the radicalism of many dock workers, being a communist wasn’t always easy. To be a red on the waterfront, Des Pres goes on, “was to be natural prey of goon squads patrolling ... for the bosses and the racketeers”.
During his time on the docks McGrath met the likes of “Packy O’Sullivan”:
‘After the war we'll get them,’ Packy says. 
...
‘After 
The war we'll shake the bosses' tree till the money rains 
Like crab-apples. Faith, we'll put them under the ground.’
After the war. 
Faith. 
Left wing of the IRA 
That one, 
Still dreaming of dynamite. 
I nod my head.
But after the war the bosses had won and Packy O’Sullivan and his like were gone. McGrath found his friends dead or departed, the pre-war radicalism of the National Maritime Union (NMU) bought off and entangled with the racketeers and gangs, and a new breed of “labor fakers” running the show. McGrath’s words turn bitter as he describes how:
The talking walls had forgotten our names, down at the Front, 
Where the seamen fought and the longshoremen struck the great ships 
In the War of the Poor.
And the NMU had moved to the deep south 
(Below Fourteenth) and built them a kind of Moorish whorehouse 
For a union hall. And the lads who built that union are gone. 
Dead. Deep sixed. Read out of the books. Expelled ...
McGrath had enlisted in 1942 and he spent most of the war at a provisions base on the remote Aleutian Islands—effectively sidelined from the front along with a bunch of other radicals. Following the war he moved to Hollywood. With the beginning of the Cold War with Russia in the late 1940s, the political atmosphere took a sharp turn for the worse. “Now, in the chill streets”, McGrath wrote, “I hear the hunting and the long thunder of money”.
In 1953 McGrath—by then lecturing at the State University of Los Angeles—was hauled before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He refused to answer any questions about himself or to betray his friends. “Poets have been notorious non-cooperators where committees of this sort are concerned”, he wrote. “I would prefer to take my stand with Marvell, Blake, Shelley and García Lorca.”
His non-cooperation got him fired from his lecturing job. Outraged, students and fellow academics formed a committee to defend academic freedom, staged several protests, and arranged to publish a book of his poems—Witness to the Times!—to honour McGrath and record the moment. In the book’s foreword McGrath wrote that “A teacher who will tack and turn with every shift of the political wind cannot be a good teacher. I have never done this myself, nor will I ever”.
Like many communists of that era, McGrath was blacklisted, and unable to find work for the remainder of the 1950s. It was during that time that he began writing his book length poem, Letter to an Imaginary Friend—a broad sweep of his life. The critic Roger Mitchell described it, in the American Book Review, as in part, “a personalized history of 'the generous wish' of the far Left in our country, tender and raucous, damning and hoping, a poem written in an uncongenial time in which he writhes and rages to keep the hope of ‘the solidarity/In the circle of hungry equals’ alive”.
McGrath saw how the anti-communist hysteria of McCarthyism led so many to choose the side of the ruling class, and the impact this had on the diminishing ranks of the left. He wrote of “the internal collapse of that culture of the Left as it disappeared into betrayals, self-accusation and disavowals, ‘do-it-yourself’ Judas kits ... the predicament of any dissidents isolated within a conformist society”. He nevertheless embraced the role of the isolated dissident, seeing it as one of remembering, documenting, and preparing for future battles.
In the dark days of the left’s isolation in the 1950s and early ‘60s he was unafraid to look the dispiriting reality in the face. He railed against those who argued for more “positivity”:
Comrades you must be more positive! 
You must have confidence in the international working class movement! 
And what if that movement was collapsing in ruins and bad faith all around us, 
Did not poets then have the duty to warn?
In particular McGrath opposed the US Communist Party’s Popular Front strategy which he saw as an abandonment of revolutionary activity. Revolutionaries, he lamented, were now supposed to believe that “somehow or other there was going to be this wonderful accord between the powers who had defeated the Nazis. And that one might go forward with a kind of ... benevolent gradualism. Which I thought was total bullshit”.
He mourned the loss of revolutionary politics which left a “terrible emptiness in the whole life of the country”, but pledged himself to fight on:
But where is the steering star 
Where 
The Plow? The Wheel? 
Made this song in a bad time ... 
No revolutionary song now, no revolutionary 
Party 
Sell out 
False consciousness 
Yet I will 
Sing 
For those poor 
For the victory still to come.
Many other poems from the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s bear witness to his ongoing revolt against the barbarism of capitalist society. His work covers Auschwitz, the Korean and Vietnam wars, Chile and El Salvador. Because Nothing Endures is a protest against the relentless freeway building in Los Angeles—the construction of one of which, Interstate 5, demolished McGrath’s entire neighbourhood.
He returns again and again to war—the losses, the threat of nuclear war, and the way it is celebrated. One particularly bitter reality he confronted was the fact that his beloved North Dakota came to be a major centre for the US’s nuclear arsenal. At one point the concentration of nuclear weapons kept there was so high that, if it seceded from the US, the state would have been the third most powerful nuclear power in the world—a state, as McGrath put it, “where all money is armed”.
Later in his life he was also forced to confront the reality that the world of his childhood in rural North Dakota was built—as recently as the generation of his parents and grandparents—through the dispossession of the original Sioux people. White America, he wrote:
... gained a freedom by taking theirs ... 
We learned the pious and patriotic art of extermination 
And no uneasy conscience where the man’s skin was the wrong 
Color; or his vowels shaped wrong; or his haircut; or his country possessed of 
Oil; or holding the wrong place on the map—whatever 
The master races wants it will find good reasons for having.
Elsewhere, in words that will resonate with readers in Australia confronting our own history of dispossession and genocide, he pointed to the fundamental dishonesty of the myth of the “frontier”, of:
... the deep, heroic and dishonest past 
Of the national myth of the frontier spirit and the free West— 
Oh, nightmare, nightmare, dream and despair and dream!
McGrath welcomed the radicalisation of the 1960s and early 70s, but he wasn’t carried away totally by the moment. He continued to foreground the history of the US workers’ movement, and the lessons that could be drawn from it. He pointed to the economic realities and the entrenched power of the rich—the fact that the banks wouldn’t simply volunteer to be socialised in the name of brotherly love.
In interviews in TriQuarterly Magazine, McGrath explained how the crises and uprisings of each historic period can open people’s eyes to the reality of class society and the opposing sides of the class struggle. Finally, McGrath said, you have to choose: “like the old song says, ‘which side are you on?’”. He didn’t believe, however, in the inevitability of revolution. Instead, he thought, you needed organisation—a party like the Bolsheviks which he saw as being “one of the most heroic revolutionary organisations that has ever existed”. He retained the conviction that, despite every defeat, it is the last battle that counts—that is the one we have to win.
McGrath wrote some 30 books of poems, two novels, two books for children, and 25 scripts for feature and documentary films. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABDUGe2kGNs">The Movie at the End of the World</a>—made in 1982—is a documentary about McGrath which takes its name from one of his books of poetry. Throughout his whole life, despite the many disappointments and defeats, his revolutionary spirit never dimmed. As Robert Blei, writing at <a href="https://poetrydispatch.wordpress.com/2008/06/24/thomas-mcgrath-death-song-poems/">Poetry Dispatch</a>, put it, “There are a lot of writers who claim to be revolutionaries. A lot of talk. A lot of dramatics. A lot of words. But damn few who lay it on the line the way McGrath did”.

‘Flames cast against the darkness’: The radical poetry of Thomas McGrath

The Australian ruling class has long enthused about a nuclear-fuelled future. And as most of the rest of the world powers reduce their commitment to nuclear energy—Germany plans to shut down all of its nuclear plants by 2022, and only 16 percent of countries today have operational nuclear reactors—the Australian government wants to power up. 
Australian governments have been nuclear supporters since the technology first emerged in the 1940s. The country had scientists <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-an-australian-scientist-tried-to-stop-the-us-plan-to-monopolise-the-nuclear-arms-race-96539">involved in bomb research</a> in the US during World War Two. During and after the war, in the wake of the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it readily responded to UK and US requests for uranium, primarily for nuclear weaponry.
In his book <a href="https://www.mup.com.au/books/australias-bid-for-the-atomic-bomb-paperback-softback">Australia’s Bid for the Atomic Bomb</a>, Wayne Reynolds spells out in detail the nuclear ambitions of wartime Labor Prime Minister John Curtin, his successor Ben Chifley and Liberal Party Prime Minister of the 1950s and ’60s Robert Menzies. He writes that many major projects of the postwar years, such as the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowy_Mountains_Scheme">Snowy Mountains scheme</a>, were undertaken with a view to Australia becoming a nuclear state.
In 1952 the <a href="https://www.naa.gov.auhttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/2020-05/fs-253-australian-atomic-energy-commission.pdf">Australian Atomic Energy Commission</a> was established to develop and train a cohort of researchers and workers to support a future nuclear industry. Defence and security planning also foresaw a central role for nuclear—the Australian air force, for example, purchased F-111 fighter jets precisely because of their nuclear weapons capability. The vision was not of an Australian state armed with nuclear weapons for defence, but one that could use such weapons to enhance its position as a regional imperialist power.
The main thing that has prevented the development of a nuclear industry in Australia is the anti-nuclear campaign and strong opposition from unions in the 1970s and ’80s. This campaign pushed state and federal governments to implement a moratorium on nuclear energy that has held ever since.
In recent years, however, there have been growing calls for the question to be revisited. Today’s nuclear proponents have a fresh angle for their propaganda campaign: a newly discovered concern about climate change. Though the Australian government refuses to commit to zero-carbon goals and pours billions into coal and gas, the need for improved sustainability is suddenly front and centre when it comes to arguments for nuclear power.
The government hasn’t wasted time in attempting to leverage nuclear energy’s supposed green credentials to shift public sentiment and open the door to overturning the moratorium. In August 2019 Energy Minister Angus Taylor set up a parliamentary inquiry—led by the Standing Committee on Energy and Environment—into “the prerequisites for nuclear energy in Australia”.
The result was a foregone conclusion because the Liberals hold four out of seven seats on the committee, although its two Labor members and the independent Zali Steggall wrote <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House/Environment_and_Energy/Nuclearenergy/Report">dissenting reports</a>. “The Australian government”, the inquiry found, “should further consider the prospect of nuclear technology as part of its future energy mix”, and “consider lifting the current moratorium on nuclear energy ... for new and emerging nuclear technologies”.
Recent reports suggest the government may be preparing to make good on these recommendations. “Morrison ministers lay groundwork for nuclear energy election plan”, read the headline of a 22 June <a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/morrison-ministers-lay-groundwork-for-nuclear-energy-election-plan/news-story/e2566b9d6138e83f30faaae9d26598f3">article</a> by Australian national editor Dennis Shanahan. According to Shanahan, “The option of taking a proposal for nuclear power in Australia to the next election has been considered in cabinet-level discussions as pressure grows within the Morrison government to prepare for a nuclear energy industry”.
“The top-level political and policy discussions including Liberal and Nationals ministers involved the argument that the moratorium on nuclear energy could be lifted in the decades ahead to cut greenhouse gas emissions and replace reliance on fossil fuels.”
Plans for a nuclear-fuelled Australia must be opposed. Nuclear is the “fool’s gold” solution to the climate crisis. As environmental scientist Mark Diesendorf says, “On top of the perennial challenges of global poverty and injustice, the two biggest threats facing human civilisation in the 21st century are climate change and nuclear war. It would be absurd to respond to one by increasing the risks of the other. Yet that is what nuclear power does”.
The case for nuclear can also be countered with cold, hard economics. Nuclear energy is much more expensive than the many low or zero-emissions alternatives. International financial advisory firm Lazard’s <a href="https://www.lazard.com/media/451419/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-140.pdf">2020 </a><a href="https://www.lazard.com/media/451419/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-140.pdf">Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis</a><a href="https://www.lazard.com/media/451419/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-140.pdf"> found</a> that the cost of new nuclear works out to US$129-198 per megawatt hour. By comparison, it estimated the cost of utility scale solar at US$29-42 and wind power at US$26-54. Nuclear energy has never stacked up economically. In the 50-year history of the industry, it has always relied on massive government subsidies.
The real motivation for the push for nuclear energy in Australia remains the same as it was in the 1950s and ’60s: the potential to develop nuclear weapons. The government, of course, isn’t prepared to say the quiet part out loud. Others, however, have no such qualms.
In an <a href="https://www.afr.com/policy/foreign-affairs/australia-needs-a-bomb-in-the-basement-20210329-p57eya">article</a> published in the Financial Review in April, Patrick Porter—a professor of international security and strategy at the University of Birmingham—said what many in the Australian military and political establishment are no doubt thinking. In the context of growing instability in the region and the possibility of a war between the US and China, Australia should at least “create the option” to build its own nuclear arsenal, becoming “a latent nuclear state, with a so-called ‘bomb in the basement’: the ability to swiftly generate a deployable atomic arsenal if the world turns more threatening”.
A nuclear-armed Australia would be a disaster for workers here and around the world. It’s time to recapture the spirit of the anti-nuclear campaign of the 1970s and ’80s. And once again, if we’re to win we’ll need workers and unions at the forefront. Recent statements opposing the nuclear industry by the <a href="https://www.etunational.asn.au/etu_calls_on_australian_unions_industry_super_to_back_its_unanimous_anti_nuclear_stance">Electrical Trades Union</a> and the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/cfmeuvic/posts/1628269517340018">Victorian branch of the CFMEU</a> provide an example that other unions should follow.

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