Leviathan (12 page)

In the months leading up to the November strike, meetings like this were a regular feature of the city's night-life. The machinery of the movement had already been built for the campaigns against assisted British migrants. Whilst that had largely been a working class affair, opposition to the Chinese crossed class boundaries and left the shipping company largely isolated, save for lukewarm encouragement from the
Herald
and the Chamber of Commerce. Their argument that the Chinese were an inferior race whom working men could exploit, thus improving their own position, was recognised and denounced for the self-serving tosh that it was. A number of non-union and middle class organisations had grown out of that first anti-immigration meeting sponsored by the TLC in 1877. They included the Working Men's Defence Association (WMDA) and the Political Reform Union (PRU), the latter becoming a focal point of anti-Chinese agitation, organising most of the public meetings which took place each Saturday in Hyde Park and Haymarket.

In early August the WMDA called its own public meeting, attended by about 250 people. Several speeches denounced ‘the Chinese variously as inhuman, immoral, incapable of becoming civilised, and loathsome'. A much larger meeting about a fortnight later raised a petition, eventually carrying thousands of signatures, which was presented to the Legislative Assembly on 6 November, two weeks before the seamen walked off the job. In the meantime Thomas White had led a delegation to the Colonial Secretary, Michael Fitzpatrick, to present demands for legislative action. Fitzpatrick demurred, pointing out that not many Chinese had arrived and many who had were on their way somewhere else. He also had to consider British imperial obligations, ‘which involved a reluctance to offend China'. At this point, despite the anger and anxieties of the general populace, the TLC seemed to have lost. The decision to strike from 18 November, after another 109 Chinese had arrived to man five ASN ships, changed everything.

Although the strike was principally designed to force ASN's hand, it also revived the wider anti-Chinese movement. The
Evening News
reported that Angus Cameron received a wild, cheering reception when he addressed a ‘monster' gathering in Castlereagh Street on the first day of the walkout. Cameron admitted that Chinese labour might be excused under strict free-trade principles, but ‘in the eyes of God and man they had just grounds for rejecting these people'. Hard as it was, he could justify simple competition between Englishmen and Orientals, but ‘all the powers between heaven and earth could not justify the prostitution and the disease of their female population; the curse and the dregs of infamy which the Mongolian bore in his face when he came amongst us'. Previously the industrial issue of the Chinese seamen had been lost in this sort of rhetorical tumult over opium dens, disease, secret societies, down-breeding and the curious preference of some white women for yellow men. But with increasing numbers of idle ASN ships filling the harbour, the whole city could see the tangible effects of racial conflict. As the confrontation escalated it dragged in more and more people – waterside workers, businessmen, shopkeepers and finally, as the city's commercial arteries clogged up, the public themselves. The action spread to Newcastle and Brisbane within four days and ASN quickly found it did not have enough Chinese to replace the nearly 800 seamen and wharf labourers on strike.

On 19 November at a meeting between the union executive and company directors the union argued that the Chinese would cost all of their members their jobs and that they should be sent home. The directors refused to negotiate while the union was on strike, saying they were breaching their contracts, that ASN had been forced into this position by their competitors, and that the Chinese were only to be used in tropical waters, to which they were more suited than whites. The company thought the union would cave in under financial pressure and on 28 November it knocked back an offer by the seamen to pay the fares of the returning Chinese and to enter into a £500 bond not to strike for a year. A shareholders meeting the next day strongly supported the directors who announced they would use volunteers on their ships from 2 December and, far from backing down, they would now be sending to Hong Kong for another 300 Chinese.

The company was both overplaying its hand and underestimating the level of support for the strikers. The Queensland Government announced it would withdraw ASN's mail subsidy if it continued to use Chinese labour. Spontaneous donations from the public and from unions as far away as New Zealand poured thousands of pounds into the TLC's fighting fund while few volunteers materialised to help out the company. Tension climbed through the summer. A severe heatwave in the bush triggered the migration of millions of insects which descended on Sydney as the two sides geared down for a long and bitter confrontation. Residents in Ashfield were driven to hide in their houses as plagues of locusts and flying ants swarmed over their suburb. But even greater consternation was aroused by the approaching swarm of 300 Chinese, their progress charted in regular press reports. Public meetings grew in size and volatility. A speaker by the name of Stedman inflamed a meeting of 250 in the Oddfellows Hall at Balmain, telling them that the Chinese picked up dead and decaying dogs to eat, and that some even threw ‘the remains of children' into their cooking pots. Whilst 500 listened to the usual suspects at a Political Reform Union meeting in Woollahra, two men were taking more direct action in Essex Street where they attacked a man named Ah Gee with a hammer, smashing him about the head and face before being driven off by a cab driver. Indeed, a lot of people took to heart Thomas White's advice about shoving Chinamen out of their path. The
Herald
published a growing stream of letters detailing attacks on Chinese residents throughout the city. One reader described seeing ‘a respectably dressed Chinaman' try to hail a cab, only to be clouted in the face with the driver's whip. A crowd of up to 1000 materialised around the post office after a young man had intervened to protect a Chinaman from assault by ‘a number of roughs'. The good Samaritan was himself set upon and had to be escorted away by police. Another mob of ‘thirty or forty lads' chased a single Chinese man up William Street, pelting him with such a shower of stones that passersby had to duck and run for their own safety. One woman who argued with a member of the crowd was told, ‘the Chinamen are taking our country from us and we must kill them'.

In spite of White's inflammatory speeches, most press reports were careful to separate this anarchic, spontaneous violence from the actions of the striking seamen. The
Evening News
, a great supporter of the anti-Chinese movement, deplored the attacks, editorialising that they would rather have a population of Mongolians than a city full of these ‘low brutal fellows'. Even the
Herald
, which supported the ASN and the city's mercantile interests against the union's claims, described the strikers' overall behaviour as sober and orderly, only turning on them when a riot broke out on the afternoon of Saturday 9 December.

Half a dozen mounted police and up to sixty uniformed and plain-clothes police were patrolling Lower George Street around ASN's wharf. A crowd of a few hundred had gathered there to harass a smaller number of strikebreakers due to leave the company's premises after four o'clock. The police directed the men to leave via a small street which ran beside the Mariner's Church, but no sooner had they stepped out than the crowd rushed them, screaming abuse. The police formed a thin shell around the workmen and attempted to move into George Street, the crowd tearing along after them ‘hustling, jeering, hooting and attempting to seize and assault some of the workmen'. The paper described the crowd as ferocious and their victims as being in great fear despite the armed escort.

Distinctions between the mob, the police and the strikebreakers became confused, the violence cranking up as they surged and fought. At Charlotte Place the police suddenly regrouped, turned on the attackers and charged into them with whips and billy clubs. The
Herald
's man watched as ‘the blows of the police fell fast and heavy', unleashing panic and confusion amongst the ‘roughs' who scattered ‘like chaff' in their attempts to flee, quickly leaving the scene deserted save for the police, their charges and a score of injured bystanders. The
Evening News
reported that after the skirmish such fears were held about an assault on the company's property that No. 2 Battery of the Permanent Artillery was issued with rifles and live ammunition, marching from Victoria Barracks in Paddington to put down any trouble.

The idea of the military being called into the streets to fire on the populace was considered a routine, if regrettable, precaution. Just a few days previously an ugly mob had broken away from a huge congregation in Hyde Park to rampage through the city attacking any Chinamen they could find. The night-time rally, complete with burning torches and ‘the ascent of a rocket' to draw a crowd of 10–15 000, had dispatched a deputation to Parliament with another petition calling for legislative action to ban Chinese from the colony. Many of the protesters were described as ‘larrikins', an all-purpose label for the thousands of shiftless, teenaged criminals who haunted the city streets. These were the ‘low brutal fellows' who had been increasingly drawn to the anti-Chinese movement by the opportunity it presented for a spree of community-sponsored violence. At least 2000 of them left the Hyde Park demonstration to trawl the city in packs, seeking out victims. With large numbers of plain-clothes police on patrol around the park, one group of larrikins made their way at ‘full speed' to Lower George Street where many Chinese merchants and warehouses were located. Lit by burning branches, they gathered stones to hurl against the walls and shuttered windows of the shops while a smaller party charged the premises of a furniture maker called Ah Toy. They tried to hurl their torches inside the building, where dozens of Chinese lived and worked, but were thwarted by a nearby constable. More police appeared, formed up and charged. The
Herald
reported that the riot line ‘unmercifully' laid into the seething, raucous mob ‘with whip, staves and sticks', driving them back up George Street.

These scenes did not discourage the leaders of the anti-Chinese movement. After a delegation of Chinese merchants and their supporters called on the Colonial Secretary demanding protection from the attacks, Angus Cameron addressed another big public meeting, describing the move as ‘a dodge' by ASN. There was no reason to invoke extra protection, he said. ‘The assaults of which they had read so much had been tortured and twisted and magnified tenfold to do injury to the men who had so nobly resisted a momentous evil.' The attackers were most likely ‘little boys' aroused by the righteous indignation of their parents' dinner table conversation about the Asian invasion. Any slurs against the strikers or other supporters of the movement were a perversion of the truth. So the meetings continued.

When the strike spread to the mining industry after the Seamen's Union asked coalminers not to service ASN vessels, the company rolled over. It had lost a fortune by miscalculating the strength of opposition, both to its immediate scheme and to the perceived implications for the wider community. The
Sydney Morning Herald
was its most enthusiastic backer in the press, and that enthusiasm was lukewarm at best. Other papers such as the
News
, whilst criticising the violence of sections of the movement, were otherwise bombastic in their support. They never turned any serious forensic gaze on the records, the agenda or the performance of men like White and Cameron. They were acting on very strongly held beliefs, but that was not enough to stop them from indulging in naked power plays and demagoguery. Cameron, most prominent of a number of parliamentary activists, played a very important part in pitching the anti-Chinese message beyond the limits of the aggrieved working classes.

When increasing numbers of parliamentarians, mayors and aldermen appeared on platforms with the representatives of small business, middle-class reformers and the union movement, the forces arrayed against ASN and its supporters in the Chamber of Commerce became unstoppable. Drawing support from around the nation, the anti-Chinese movement crossed boundaries of geography and class. It forged alliances between shopkeepers and criminals, bosses and workers, Irish and English, migrant and native born. According to Curthoys it demonstrated ‘the political impossibility of importing cheap Chinese labour, and so laid the basis, more clearly than any other single event, for the weakening of capital's interest in the Chinese as a source of cheap, or even simply extra, labour'. The colonial ministry, which had been crippled through the period of the strike by a conflict over land law, collapsed in late December, about the same time ASN's 300 approaching Chinamen were shipwrecked without loss of life. The new ministry, led by Henry Parkes, quickly announced that it would introduce laws restricting Chinese immigration. Parkes, who thought of the Chinese as a ‘degraded race' which would ‘always pull down the superior British race morally, intellectually and even physically', had to fight big-business representatives who clung to the dream of importing cheap Asian labour. But with another surge in Chinese migrant numbers in 1881 being blamed for a smallpox epidemic, and with extra-parliamentary agitation continuing, conservative resistance was overcome. It was the end of this interest in the Chinese as a cheap, superexploitable labour source which laid the basis ‘for the emergence of a nationally supported White Australia Policy'.