A Waltz for Matilda (53 page)

The 1880s to the 1930s was a time of many poems and songs about the right of workers to join together to get better conditions. ‘Waltzing Matilda’ was just one of them; another was ‘The Ballad of Joe Hill’, the United States song that also spoke of an unjustly accused union man whose ghost reappears to inspire others.

We mostly think of Australia’s 1800s as a time of spreading rural stations, shearers and stockmen, and men panning for gold. But even then, most Australians lived in cities, and back then conditions in factories were as horrendous as they were in the United States and Europe: dangerous or even deadly machinery; impossibly long hours; small wages that weren’t enough for a family or even one person to eat well, much less pay rent; no holidays except Christmas Day and Sundays; no sick leave or pensions when you got old; and no compensation if you suffered an accident at work. Servants had easier conditions, but they usually only got an afternoon off a month, although considerate employers might let them go to church on Sunday mornings — as long as they sat at the back, and had got up before dawn to put on Sunday dinner and get their chores done.

But Australia was settled as much by people who had rebelled against authority, whether as criminals or as political protestors, as it had been by ‘respectable’ immigrants. The new colonies had
some of the earliest trade unions in the world. Even by the 1830s, shipwrights and then other craftsmen banded together to fight for better working conditions.

In the 1880s conditions for most people in Australia grew harder. The land was starting to show scars from decades of hard treatment. The native grasses were being eaten out as, especially in dry times, sheep nibbled the grass so close to the ground that the local perennial grasses died. A long and desperate drought lasted from the mid-1880s to the early 1900s in most parts of Australia. Prices for wheat and wool crashed too. The state governments had borrowed to fund projects when times were good. Now they weren’t able to repay their loans, and work on government projects stopped.

People lost their jobs; employers dropped wages and expected longer working hours. Strikes spread across the country in the late 1880s — ships’ officers, seamen, waterside workers, shearers, miners and many others announced they would stop working until their conditions improved. The colonial governments and their police forces supported the employers. And the bitterness between workers on the one side and employers on the other grew.

By the mid-1880s soup kitchens had to be set up in Sydney and Adelaide to feed the starving workers and their families. And by the early 1890s the Australian colonies were in a serious economic depression.

The swagmen took to the roads and tracks outback looking for work and a cheaper way to live. A swaggie had a spare pair of trousers, comb and towel wrapped up in his swag, or ‘Matilda’, or blanket, strapped to his back, with a billy — an old tin with a handle of fencing wire — in one hand and a hessian sack containing some flour and tea and sugar in the other.

This is a book about the land, as well as people. These days we often forget to take the effect of the environment into account. Even as I write this, economists around the world are expressing surprise at the ‘negative growth figures’ caused by the 2010 cold winter in the northern hemisphere — you can’t build houses when snowbound, and much else stops too. But few appear to have figured such possibilities into their forecasts.

If there had been no major 1880s-1903 drought there might not have been the shearers’ strike that was such a major part of the beginning of the labour movement. There might not have been the bank crashes, the hard economic times that led to demands to drop taxes between the states, the uniform immigration policies.

If it hadn’t been for the drought — and the men, waltzing their Matildas — we might still be a loose association of states, and not a nation.

In July 1886 the Shearers’ Union was formed after squatters wanted to lower the rate of pay. The shearers were also angry because squatters would claim that a sheep hadn’t been shorn properly and then refuse to pay anything for the rest of the sheep that had been shorn.

Of all the unions, the Shearers’ Union was the most militant. Members refused to work at stations around Barcaldine, in Queensland, unless the Squatters’ Association met their demands for better conditions. In January 1891 the union called out 200 shearers and rouseabouts as a protest against working with non-union shearers. The strike lasted till 7 August, when the last of
the shearers went back to work, after the leaders of the strike had been arrested for conspiracy and sentenced to three years’ gaol. But strikes broke out on other properties for many years, either for better wages and conditions or to protest against property owners employing non-union labour.

Members of the various unions had realised that they all wanted much the same thing: an eight-hour working day, a minimum wage for all men and women, workers’ causes represented in parliament, and a way of settling (arbitrating) disputes between unions and employers, instead of using strikes and lockouts, where unionists were locked out without pay and others were employed in their place. The first meeting of the Australian Labour Federation General Council was held in Brisbane on 31 August 1890.

Could the unionists’ dreams be fulfilled with a new national government? Many other Australians hoped the same thing: that a united Australia would mean free trade between the states, helping bring prosperity back again, and that a new federal government would give the vote to women, ensure young children went to school, rather than work in factories, and other just laws.

But other reasons were more selfish: the desire to stop anyone who wasn’t white and English-speaking from entering or settling in the country. This was partly to stop the (slave) ‘kanaka’ labourers who had been brought to Australia mostly to work the sugar fields — their low wages meant that there were no jobs for white workers — and to stop competition from Chinese migration.

Our nation’s founders also wanted uniform tariffs (taxes) on goods coming into Australia to help Australian factories, so
they could charge higher prices and pay higher wages. And they were seeking a government that could bring all states together on major projects from defence to building railways.

Australia was built on idealism — and on self-interest. Men over twenty-one could vote in the first federal election; women couldn’t, although the first parliament voted to give them the vote. Only British citizens could vote, and Aboriginal Australians were not counted as British citizens. South Australia had allowed white women and Aboriginal men to vote, but even they weren’t given the right to vote in a federal parliament. And Aboriginal Australians were not included in the census.

When Australians today talk of our ‘constitutional rights’ they often assume that we have the rights that are enshrined in the American constitution. We don’t. Our only ‘right’ is freedom of religion — and that was really only meant to allow Catholics the same rights as Protestant Christians. It’s likely that if those who drew up our constitution ever suspected that Australia might have a large number of people practising non-Christian religions, they would have excluded them from this constitutional right.

Our nation was created by idealists. But their ideals weren’t all ones that most modern Australians would agree with.

James Drinkwater’s fate of course is based on that of Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant, who was tried and shot for killing Boer commandos who might, or might not, have already surrendered, but who had killed and possibly horrendously mutilated his friend. (Morant was accused of other crimes too, but those charges were dropped.) Breaker Morant’s story is fascinating,
but too long to go into here; and, apart from his final fate, he and the James in this book had nothing else in common.

Breaker Morant’s story however is important: the Australian government and public were infuriated over the British government’s refusal to officially inform them about the Breaker Morant case; the official records were lost — or possibly deliberately mislaid — and even his next of kin weren’t officially informed of his sentence.

The feeling that justice had not been done to an Australian by a British military court resulted in the ruling that, from then on, all Australian service people would be tried by Australian military tribunals. In World War I many British soldiers were shot for cowardice, when they were simply suffering from shellshock or unbearable horror at what they faced. No Australian in World War I was shot for cowardice and, from then until today, Australian forces remain under direct Australian command, even if general control of the operation is given to an ally.

This led to greater emphasis on ‘Australian units within joint forces’ — and the Anzac legend. It was also the start of a growing feeling that we were Australians, not British. While most Australians fervently supported the ‘Empire’ in World War I, there was still a feeling of distrust — often justified — about the competency of British officers and the feeling that Australian troops might be more ‘dispensable’ than British ones.

The Boer War (1899–1902) was about which of two European countries, England or Holland, was going to control South Africa. Most of the fighting was between the farming descendants of the Dutch settlers — the Boers — and the British army.

The conflict had nothing to do with Australia, but we were part of the British Empire, so Australians flocked to fight. The Boer farmers fought the British army by hiding, ambushing them, then retreating to the country they knew so well.

About 20,000 Australian men served in the Boer War and about eighty Australian women as nurses. It is difficult to know exact numbers as some men enlisted more than once. Other regiments were ‘irregulars’ and their men weren’t counted in official numbers. It was an enormous number, though, for such a small nation. Most families had someone fighting or knew someone who was.

About 600 Australians died and six were awarded the Victoria Cross for their Boer War service.

In this book Tommy invents the conveyor belt before Henry Ford in the United States. In fact many inventions and achievements — like the Wright brothers’ first manned flight — were based on articles by other people or invented several times. At that time a young man like Tommy could have easily created a conveyor belt and later written about it, so that it was adopted elsewhere.

As a beekeeper, many years ago, I mostly took honey from our hives in mid to late summer. These were European bees, long-bodied and golden, not the smaller and mostly stingless native bees, which are either almost black or a bright clear blue. (The blue bees don’t form hives and prefer to collect nectar from blue flowers.)

It has been over twenty-five years since I collected ‘sugar bag’, or wild honey, and even then it may have been from wild European bees. There are still purebred native bees in Australia, but in the area where I live there are only native ‘blue bees’ — solitary ones that are not good for sugar bag. Sugar bag is collected just after the local gum-tree flowering. Here this is in August or September, although there isn’t a massive flowering every year, and some years the flowers don’t contain much nectar.

The bees’ behaviour, though, tells you how much honey you can take without danger of taking too much and killing the hive. It would take a whole book to explain this properly, but one way is to see how many young bees there are — they have hairy legs that collect pollen to feed to more young bees. A sudden increase in fluffy-legged bees means that the hive is hatching a lot of young and expecting good honey flow soon. Honey colour varies a lot, depending on what the bees have been feeding on.

There are hundreds of good native fruits and vegetables — possibly thousands that I have never heard of. I haven’t given the names of them here because it is very easy to mistake a tasty berry for one that might kill you, though each is based on a native plant that I harvest at the time Matilda gathers them in this book. Some fruits should only be eaten when they are at a particular stage of ripeness or they can be toxic, and others should be tasted first. Bitter or almond-smelling ones should be thrown away as they may be poisonous enough to kill you, while others on a bush nearby that look almost exactly the same may
be sweet and can be eaten. Identifying the ‘good’ fruits needs at the very least photos and a map for each fruit, plus a few paragraphs of information. Even better, you need to be shown by someone who knows the land and how its fruits can change from year to year, or decade to decade.

Do not try this.

It’s illegal — all native animals are protected. It may also kill you — both snakes and goannas have poison glands. While it is possible to eat the meat, you have to know exactly what you are doing or you may end up dead. There is also increasingly less land for wildlife, and we need to cherish what we have — even if, like snakes, they can just possibly kill us too.

It is also illegal to eat swan, though early settlers did. I never have, but am told by a friend, who did once eat swan for Christmas dinner more than half a century ago when her bush parents were very poor indeed, that swan meat is very tough, though a large swan can have quite a lot of meat on it.

The techniques that Auntie Love used to leave no tracks and become invisible were shown to me decades ago. They are of course more complex than I’ve written here — it’s much easier to demonstrate in person than write down. I have only tried the invisibility once, to frighten a group of trespassers. It worked so well I scared myself too!