Ballad of a Wobbly 2018 WORLD TOUR – David Rovics

Transit of Venus Camp, New South Wales, 9 Dec 1874

 Photographer: Joseph Bischoff Source: Museums Victoria

WAR on the WHARVES – 1998

Book of Cartoons – Overwhelming support for MUA

Peter Reith and his Army

The ex-members of Reith's army who took Patrick's to court recently told The Sunday Age that they had been betrayed and abandoned when the union-busting exercise went wrong.

Many soldiers had given up careers in the armed forces to be trained to operate giant waterfront cranes in Dubai. After international unions forced the Dubai operation's closure, they received further training in Australia.

Many lost friends when it became known they worked for Patrick's and have been unable to find other employment.

"I'd like to have a few minutes alone with Corrigan," former soldier Ken Caldow told The Sunday Age. "I knew the government had something to do with it because when we first came on board they said it was Peter Reith's baby.

"The government has used us as much as Corrigan. They've got no morals as far as I'm concerned."

International Support for MUA

The international response to the use of non-union labour in Australian ports is also a component of the settlement.

The Columbus Canada (loaded by non union labour in April) returned to Sydney on 17 June to be relieved of its 'black' cargo.

It was also reported that the US ILWU (Longshoremen's union) had struck a deal with the Columbus line to unload all but non-union loaded cargo.

Some cargo was to be returned to the USA via the Columbus Star due to arrive in the USA on 11 July.

Some containers were to be returned to shippers who had sold their contents elsewhere; other container contents were to be destroyed.

US waterside workers resented the earlier snub proffered by the National Farmers Federation's Donald McGauchie that the ITF was a 'paper tiger'.

LATEST UPDATE January 2019

MUA – Cabinet Papers Show You Can’t Trust the Coalition on Industrial Relations

Posted by Mua communications on January 01, 2019

The Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) says the release of the latest batch of Cabinet papers from 1996/97 shows that the Howard Government was planning the infamous 1998 Patrick Waterfront Dispute well in advance while denying all knowledge of what the High Court found to be a probable conspiracy against the union and its members.

“The Cabinet documents demonstrate unequivocally that in April 1998, Patrick Stevedores, with support from the Howard Government, sacked its entire workforce, locking them outside the gates of their legal workplace,” said CFMMEU MUA division National Secretary Paddy Crumlin

For two decades, former Prime Minister John Howard has denied his Government instigated the 1998 waterfront dispute, saying the company headed by Chris Corrigan was behind the plan.

“The 1998 dispute is the clearest indicator of the disgraceful attitude of Coalition governments to workers in unions, all the way through to the current mob,” MUA National Secretary Paddy Crumlin said.

 “Guards with attack dogs removing MUA wharfies and balaclava-clad scab labour being bussed into union worksites are permanently etched into the memories of many Australians as a prime example of how governments and big business must not be allowed to treat Australian workers.”

 “The Trade Union Royal Commission along with the aggressive ongoing attacks from the ABCC and ROC just says that bugger-all has changed with this crew in Canberra and consequently is a timely reminder to working men and women in Australia that the Coalition doesn’t give a rat’s arse for them then, now and into the future.”

 The documents show that the Howard Cabinet met in April 1996 to discuss the problems facing the shipping line ANL. Then Transport Minister John Sharp raised concerns of industrial troubles ahead.

“I have discussed the industrial relations implications of this dilemma with the Minister for Industrial Relations, who indicated that a strike now could be far less manageable than after our industrial legislation is enacted and all other maritime reform issues likely to provoke strike action (eg waterfront) are ready to be dealt with,” Sharp said in his Cabinet submission.

In a separate letter to Reith 12 months before the lockout, Howard signed off on an “interventionist” strategy and the papers show that on December 16, 1997, Cabinet decided that funds would be made available to employers whose workers were made redundant owing “to restructuring and reform of the waterfront”.

Howard reportedly said this week: "It was an open secret that you wouldn't be able to get waterfront reform unless you had a combination of a government determined to do it and an employer with the backbone to stand up. Certainly, Patrick’s showed backbone.”

Corrigan told The Australian newspaper on the 20th anniversary of the dispute in April 2017: “People get this a little bit back to front. Howard was elected on a platform of industrial reform ... we went to see the government and said we agree with you about the opportunities here.”

 “The Cabinet papers released this week from December 1997 did not mention Patrick specifically because the government was still shortlisting,” Mr Crumlin said.

“From day one, this had Howard and Reith’s fingerprints all over it and they have been lying about it ever since,” he said.

“What a political quinella they are.”

Western Australia – Colonial Water Dreaming

http://fadlmedia.s3.amazonaws.com/constructing/clips/oconnor_bb.mp4

In 1896, Western Australia’s water dreamer, the engineer C.Y. O’Connor, designed a system to transport water from the Darling Range via a pipeline to the thirsty mines of the arid goldfields, nearly six hundred kilometres away.

Even the engineering schemes of ancient Rome had not been so bold as to pump water such a distance, let alone uphill.

At its opening in 1903, Sir John Forrest, the state’s first premier, referred to Isaiah (43:19) when he suggested that future generations would remember this achievement: ‘They made a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.’

This so-called ‘Golden Pipeline’ followed a trail of waterholes that local Aboriginal guides had revealed to colonial explorers in the 1860s, who sought to develop a pastoral economy in a region where permanent water sources were scarce.

With pastoralism and gold came more people and livestock, which combined to exert unprecedented pressures on these shallow groundwater reserves.

Around the goldfields, for instance, Kalamaia Indigenous peoples found themselves competing with prospectors, cameleers, horses and camels for access to these precious reserves.

Such an analysis of the social worlds of water (and its absence) sheds light on the prevailing ideologies of aridity and the broader dynamics of colonial rule in this dryland outpost of the British empire.

MUA Centenary CD – With These Arms

Wharfie Tom Hills with Wendy Lowenstein – Authors of Oral History 'Under the Hook'

Centenary CD – Songs and Poems of the MUA

Molly Hadfield (front right during the 1998 waterfront dispute. Cheerful crusader for the community
SMH Obituary by Melissa Marino 19 December 2012

MOLLY HADFIELD, OAM ACTIVIST
14-7-1922 — 10-11-2012
It's hard to do justice to Mary Catherine ''Molly'' Hadfield's life in an obituary because while Molly loved and worked with words, her real power came from turning those words into action. And Molly was a woman of action.

She took words - and ideas - off the page and into the streets. Into committee rooms. Into the ears of politicians and commissioners, aiming to change things for the better.

She was an activist and a humanist, working tirelessly and largely voluntarily for social justice right to the end of her 90-year life. Better conditions for women, the aged, and those experiencing housing stress were among her chief concerns.

Anne Sgro, president of the Union of Australian Women, of which Molly was a member for more than 50 years, said Molly was a determined and skilled negotiator. "She had a way of finding common ground," she said.

In 2006 Molly was recognised formally for her work, awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for service to aged care, community health and youth. She was inducted on to the Victorian Honour Roll of Women in the same year.

Molly achieved all this largely without the benefit of a formal education. Born in 1922 in Balldale, New South Wales, to an Irish farming family, she had an idyllic early childhood, playing hide-and-seek in the moonlight as visitors talked unions and politics with her parents.

But her family's plans for their curious and intelligent oldest child to continue her schooling were thwarted by the Great Depression and a personal tragedy. Her mother died when Molly was 10. Molly's childhood was effectively over: she had to assume a greater responsibility for her two younger sisters, and by 14 had left school.

Her first job soon followed at an uncle's farm nearby, caring for their baby along with twin cousins. At 16 she was working in Wahgunyah as a nursemaid, waitress and barmaid, all the time listening and observing the social conditions around her.

It was the social conditions she witnessed two years later, when she moved to her aunt's house in North Carlton that really began to radicalise Molly. Through jobs at factories and in sales she saw dreadful working conditions and heard workmates talking of their struggle to raise children in poverty.

But amid the hardships, Molly also knew how to have fun and, while she worked hard by day, she loved dancing the night away with her cousins. At one of those dances, she met Fred Hadfield, who in 1942 went AWOL to marry her. He would be her husband for 61 years until his death.

Through the 1940s and 1950s, hard times ensued for the couple, who had two children, Susan in 1948 and Robert in 1952. They worked in a variety of businesses and by the time they bought their first home in Chelsea Heights in the 1960s, the family had lived in at least 10 different houses. They had also been evicted twice.

Molly's experiences had taught her about the struggles of working people and hardened her resolve to be a part of improving conditions, especially housing security. In her first act of political activism, soon after moving to Chelsea Heights, she campaigned successfully for a bus service to help children get to school.

Not only did the bus help the children, it provided an opportunity for women to do their shopping, access services and have a life outside the house. Molly joined the local progress association and was immensely proud of her role helping to create a community in her fledgling neighbourhood, working to acquire land for parks and improving infrastructure.

Buoyed by this success, she embraced the peace and women's movements, taking part in many protests and marches. By the 1970s, in the decade she turned 50 - when she always said her life "began" - she had really hit her stride. Landing her ''dream job'' at the International Bookshop, where she worked into the 1980s, she was in her element and her activism flourished.

Among her many achievements, largely to do with empowering women in her community, she was instrumental in establishing a community health centre, play groups, and the 50 and Over Get Up and Go Group. She was a foundation member of the Older Persons Action Centre (OPAC) and helped establish the Housing for the Aged Action Group (HAAG) - on whose committee she served for 29 years, until her resignation just months ago.

Molly's activism may have started with obtaining a bus, but perhaps her most memorable was stopping a train at the docks at the height of the 1998 waterfront dispute. There Molly was photographed, arm in arm with her dear friend Edith Morgan, leading a charge of women in an image that became synonymous with the dispute and that has been republished several times.

In fact, Molly had a knack for courting the media. She was the face of the 2005 Victorian Seniors Festival and the subject of many articles highlighting the issues that concerned her. She was also frequently photographed at protests, the most recent at a rally during Seniors Week in October, where she was campaigning for pensioners, fist pumped and waving a placard, just weeks before she died.

Perhaps it was due to her formidable sense of style, for Molly always stood out in a crowd, with beautifully coloured co-ordinated clothes, hats, scarves and jewellery put together on a meagre budget. "We may be feminists but that is no reason to be sloppy," she would say.

Molly never let the political get in the way of the personal. She was a protective and loving mother, an inspirational and devoted grandmother and a delighted great-grandmother. She was a loyal, fun and fantastic friend. She liked people and people liked her. This was key to her success as an activist.

She engaged with people, listened to their stories, found out what their needs were and went about getting them met. She was, as HAAG co-manager Jeff Fiedler said, "the best networker I have ever seen".

Molly's motives were always genuine and it helped her get results. She would contact people from all levels of government after decisions were made on issues she was campaigning about, often with positive feedback. This in turn led to her being appointed to ministerial and other advisory committees.

The farm girl with no formal education beyond the age of 14 had gained the inside running and influence in the political process thanks to old-fashioned manners, an intimate knowledge of her subject, a genuine interest in people and a passion for the issues that affected them. She was an inspiration to everyone who knew her. She will be deeply missed, but her legacy will live on.

When the MUA Centenary CD above was released Molly proudly kept a copy by the bedside and referred to it as "My CD"

Molly died peacefully, surrounded by family, at St Vincent's after complications from a heart attack.

Melissa Marino is Molly Hadfield's granddaughter.

Doc Watson and Gaither Carlton – And Am I Born To Die

Doc Watson And Gaither Carlton - And Am I Born To Die?

From The Watson Family Tradition...

Field Recordings by Ralph Rinzler and Daniel Seeger, Deep Gap, North Carolina, September 1964; Doc Watson, vcl; Gaither Carlton, fiddle

Spoken passages by Doc Watson recorded by A.L. Lloyd, 1976 

"The old-time fiddle tunes and ballads, there's never been anything prettier, nor ever will be." ~ Doc Watson 

Images: Doc Watson at age 16 with one of his first guitars; Doc Watson sings while his father-in-law, Gaither Carlton, accompanies on violin in New York, circa 1961 by John Cohen

MUA HERE TO STAY !