When the Walls came tumbling down

In late 1989, my husband was on study leave in Paris while I was home in Brisbane finishing the teaching year. This was well before Skype, but we had email (cheap but clunky) and the telephone (landline only, fairly pricey). We phoned each other regularly.

As the end of the year approached, the political atmosphere both in Europe and here in Queensland seemed equally charged with promise. Mikhail Gorbachev had changed the landscape, and the Iron Curtain, rusting for a while, was now crumbling apace. Poland held elections in the summer, Hungary began to dismantle its section of the Wall, and popular demonstrations took place in East German cities, especially Leipzig and Dresden.

Walking through Checkpoint Charlie, 10 November 1989

On the night of 9 November, the East German authorities agreed to let people cross into West Berlin, and crowds of people converged at the crossing points along the Wall. Faced with the sheer weight of numbers trying to cross, the East German guards bowed to the inevitable and opened the gates so that the crowds could surge through.

My husband watched it all live on TV – Paris and Berlin are in the same time zone – and he rang me back home. It was early the next morning in Brisbane, 10 November. I could hardly get a word in edgewise, he was so keen to talk about what was going on in Germany.

Which was frustrating, because I wanted to talk about what I’d read in the morning’s local newspaper: another wall that was beginning the crack. The ruling conservative coalition in Queensland was about to be voted out of office, despite a gerrymander that had kept it in power since 1957 – four years before the Berlin Wall was built.

There were many reasons for the Queensland government to be on the nose. It had been rocked by the scandals unearthed by the Fitzgerald Inquiry into police corruption, which filled our newspapers and TV screens every night with lurid stories about brothels and money in brown paper bags. There were also growing internal divisions in the coalition, between city and country, Liberal and Country Party. These became more of an issue as Queensland grew up and lost its hayseed image. It was no longer acceptable to have a government led by a peanut farmer and his bunch of poorly educated rural ministers.

But the other reason why the Queensland government changed in 1989 was that the Labor Party finally got its act together under a small group of reformist politicians and backroom boys (nearly all boys). One of these was Wayne Goss, whose death aged only 63 was announced today.

By 9 November, when my husband rang from Paris to talk about the Wall coming down, I wanted to tell him what the polls were saying here in Queensland where it looked just possible that Labor could win. On 2 December, the polls were confirmed in a landslide, and the first Labor Government since 1957 was elected. Wayne Goss became Premier.

Goss was a gradualist. Unlike Gough Whitlam, he didn’t try to make too many changes, too quickly. This frustrated some of his supporters, but those changes have survived. In particular the gerrymander, which weighted votes so unfairly in favour of rural electorates that some votes were worth 3 times as much as others, has gone for good.

The Queensland gerrymander was a testament to failure: if politicians can only win an election by corrupting the voting process, they are doing something wrong as politicians.

The Berlin Wall was a testament to failure too: if politicians can only stop their people emigrating by imprisoning them behind a wall, they are doing something wrong as politicians.

Perhaps both Texas and North Korea should take note.

My Whitlam Hang-Up

I spent the afternoon of 11 November 1975, the day the Governor-General dismissed Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, marking essays on an earlier dismissal, when the New South Wales Governor, Sir Philip Game, sacked the Premier Jack Lang in 1932.

As a very junior tutor in Australian History, I had a desk in an outlying building well away from the hub of the History Department. By current standards, I had generous accommodation – a room on my own! – but also by current standards, I was isolated there: no internet, no phone, no tea room or gossip in the corridors. All I had was a deadline and a good 50 essays to mark and return before the students sat for their final exam. When I finally got to the bottom of the pile, in the mid-afternoon, I bundled them up and headed back to the department.

As soon as I entered the corridor of Forgan Smith – the original sandstone building at the centre of the University of Queensland – I knew something must be up: knots of people talking, radios switched on behind closed doors, notices pinned to those doors saying their occupants were elsewhere because of ‘reprehensible circumstances’. This was the phrase the opposition leader, Malcolm Fraser, had used to justify his decision to refuse to pass supply in the Senate.

As we all now know, that afternoon Sir John Kerr sacked Gough Whitlam and appointed Fraser as interim Prime Minister.

Political Climate Change

Last Saturday was the coldest morning in Brisbane for over a hundred years – so I was wondering how long it would take for someone to claim it for partisan purposes in the never-ending debate over climate change.

Sure enough someone raised the point during the debate yesterday, as our current government abolished the tax on carbon, at the moment the only legislation keeping us on track to meet our international commitment to reduce carbon emissions. It was really cold in Brisbane (2.6°C) so we don’t need to worry about rising temperatures. What a pity our politicians are such lousy statisticians that they can’t tell the difference between a trend and an outlier.

Dismissals and True Believers

In one of those weird moments when the whole universe seems to come into alignment, I spent the afternoon of 11 November 1975 marking undergraduate essays on the dismissal of Jack Lang.

I was a very junior tutor at the University of Queensland, with a phone-less office in an overflow building on the outskirts of campus.  There were neither mobile phones nor the Internet, so it wasn’t until I carried my pile of marked papers back to the History Department that I heard radios blaring from offices, and realised something extraordinary had happened.

Gracious words in a hung parliament

The last time Australia had a hung parliament was more than 60 years ago.  In 1939, Robert Menzies, an ambitious Victorian lawyer, became Prime Minister, replacing the more popular Joe Lyons, who came from the outer state of Tasmania.  The following year, Menzies scraped home in an election that failed to deliver him a clear majority.  His government hung on precariously with the support of a couple of independents until the following year, but his backbench became increasingly restless, and began to look around for other possible leaders.  Sound familiar?

Images of Cinderella

Footage of Julia Gillard in Canberra being dragged by a security detachment to a waiting car went viral yesterday.  At one stage, she was running neck and neck for top viewing on the BBC website with George Clooney.

There will be an investigation, endless analysis and blame – but the image of the stumbling PM was probably more striking than anything that may follow.  And the image reminded me of another picture, in grainy black and white, of another woman dragged across the bitumen by solid men without necks, and losing a shoe in the process – Evdokia Petrova, nearly 60 years ago.

Their ghosts may be heard: the rise and fall of the Australian Labor Party

Labor has just produced a report on the state of the Australian Labor Party and the 2010 election.  These reports usually amount to a statement of the bleeding obvious, but one issue reflects a global trend, true for other countries, and other political parties: people just aren’t joining things these days. Why?

An American sociologist, Robert D. Putnam, studied this trend in America in Bowling Alone. He described how Americans were dropping out of all sorts of organisations – including bowling leagues, which is where the title comes from. He looked for various reasons for this, but although he tried very hard not to, a lot of his explanation came down to the changing roles of women: as women join the workforce, they drop out of voluntary organisations, and a household with two workers has to share the burden of childcare, so men are less likely to join community organisations outside the home.

But there are other reasons, too.  One is the physical size of cities.  Earlier this week, I spent 7 hours on a computer, 2½ hours sitting in congested traffic, and when I finally got home we ate takeaway (hamburgers and a bottle of red).  And I’m retired!  There is no way, in these circumstances, that I would follow this up by going out to sit in a public hall somewhere, on a stackable chair, listening to somebody reading the minutes of the last meeting, and buying tickets in a chook raffle.  And I wouldn’t risk the breathalyser, either.  So those who are prepared to turn up for these things can find the plums of office fall into their laps – whether as treasurer of the Parrot Appreciation Society, or as preselected candidate for public office.  Parrots or pollies, there’s a similarity there.

Political organisations seem to play a different social role these days, too.  John and Janette Howard met through the Young Liberals, which was once considered a good place for young people from the right side of the tracks to meet suitable partners.  No doubt the same is true of political couples on the other side of politics (but the same side of the tracks).  But the days when women were content with auxiliary roles, handing out how-to-vote cards, is long gone.  We say today, of someone who is incompetent, that s/he couldn’t even run a chook raffle – but how easy is it? How many do it these days? And if these days there is nobody to take around the meat tray at the RSL, then how does an organisation raise funds for stationery and the hire of the hall and all those small but necessary functions?

Next week, I’m one of a few historians from the University of Queensland who will be giving talks to high school students in Toowoomba, 100 kilometres from here.  The theme this year is ‘Conflict’.  Australia is a bit lacking when it comes to conflict.  My colleagues will talk about sexy topics like Nazis and Cathar heretics (doubly sexy thanks to Dan Brown), but the options in Australian history are less obvious.  Years ago, I had a student who told me he wasn’t going on with Australian history because ‘there wasn’t enough blood in it’.  I hope he was happy with Russian history instead.

In fact there is plenty of blood in Australian history, but it is too often anonymous blood.  We know the names of the men hanged for the Myall Creek Massacre in 1838, but not the names or life stories of the Aboriginal men, women and children they slaughtered as they slept in their camp by the creek.  Often we know nothing about the people on either side in the race wars of the 19^th century.

Hence my decision, for pedagogic rather than political reasons, to talk about another sort of conflict, the class war of the Shearers Strikes of the 1890s, one of the key moments in the labour movement, and part of the foundation myth of the Australian Labor Party, a conflict with identifiable heroes and villains.  The trouble is, it’s mostly mythology.

The story of the strikes is fairly straightforward.  There was a long economic boom in the 1880s.  Shearers haggled for improved wages and conditions, and threatened to walk off if the graziers brought in non-union labour, or employed any Chinese workers.  Then in the 1890s conditions changed.  There was drought, falling wool prices, and tighter organisation amongst employers.  The Australian Workers Union confronted the United Graziers Association in a series of strikes – and lost.

There was violence on both sides.  Unionists were accused of destroying Chinese market gardens, burning woolsheds, and of several unproven murders of ‘scab’ labour.  There was even a threat of environmental terrorism, 19^th century style, with rumours that someone planned to import 100 pairs of rabbits into western Queensland, where there were as yet no rabbits.

On the other side, the Queensland government supported the graziers and sent soldiers with machine guns to defend their non-union workers.  By the end of 1894, the ringleaders were in gaol, some of the most radical agitators had left Australia to form a workers paradise in Paraguay, and the remaining moderates turned away from industrial action to politics.  One of those moderates, T.J. (Tommy) Ryan, later became Premier of Queensland.  And Banjo Paterson wrote Waltzing Matilda.

Thus – according to the legend – the ALP was born, under a ghost gum known as the Tree of Knowledge in the western town of Barcaldine where the unionists met.  The reality is much more chaotic and complicated – it always is – but it makes a good story.  Today the ALP seems to retain only the ghost of that old passionate class war – and a good thing too, I would argue.  The old ALP was racist, sexist and violent, and contained its fair share of villains along with the heroes.  But something has been lost, too.

The ALP has always thrived on myths.  But how will Toowoomba schoolkids respond today?  Union membership is in freefall, and the idea of Class War seems as archaic to them as the Cold War.  Joining organisations – whether unions, political parties or an orchid society – seem just too hard, especially for teenagers who are juggling study with casual jobs and surging hormones.

Meanwhile the story of the Tree of Knowledge ends with a moment of drama.  In 2006 somebody killed the tree, boring holes in it and filling them with a herbicide.  For someone, at least, the birth of the Australian Labor Party still arouses passion.  It takes real passion to take out your hatred on a tree.

Update: Shearing the Rams

I should add something about the illustration, another example of myth-making at work.  Tom Roberts painted Shearing the Rams at Brocklesby Station, near Corowa on the Murray River, in 1890.  Mechanised shearing machines had reached the shearing shed by 1885, but Roberts shows the men shearing by hand, because he thought this made a more heroic image of labour.  At that time only the rams were hand shorn.  They were more valuable, and the slower hand shears meant the men could take more care around the dangly bits.  So Roberts chose a title that adjusted the reality of the shearing shed to match his painting.

He adjusted reality in another way too.  The young boy on the extreme left, holding a shorn fleece, was originally a girl, the daughter of Brocklesby Station’s owner.  Roberts may had hoped to sell him the painting, and his daughter’s presence would help sell it.  But that didn’t happen, so he repainted the figure as a youth.  If you look closely, you can just make out the edge of her long skirt to the right hand side of his legs.

So there you have it.  This is one of the most famous Australian images – and everyone in it, even the sheep, are male.

Elizabeth Huf, ‘Great Shearers’ Strike of 1891′ in Queensland Historical Atlas

Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000)

Stuart Svensen, The Shearers’ War: the story of the 1891 shearers’ strike (1989)