YATLAXTUK

Bulgarian Kaba Gaida

Was Pablo Neruda Murdered?

Less than two weeks after the Salvador Allende-led Chilean government was overthrown in a violent coup d’etat, Pablo Neruda, Allende’s friend and comrade, died on September 23, 1973. Ramona Wadi investigates doubts about his death.

In October 2017, a group of international forensic investigators concluded that the official version of Pablo Neruda’s death from advanced prostate cancer is incorrect. However, the Chilean government has exhibited reticence in collaborating with the investigation that seeks to determine whether Neruda was, in fact, assassinated by the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, as claimed by the poet’s chauffeur, Manuel Araya.

Since Araya’s testimony in 2011, in which he stated that a doctor working at the Clinica Santa Maria injected Neruda with a toxic substance, there has been a divide between state and testimony that is reminiscent of the covering up of dictatorship crimes and human rights violations. In 2012, a book by investigative journalist and author Francesco Marin documented Araya’s testimony, juxtaposed against documents and expert forensic opinion which concurred with the later scientifically proven evidence.

Owing to his involvement in the Communist Party and political proximity to President Salvador Allende, Neruda would have loomed as a threat to the dictatorship. His alleged assassination happened just a day before Neruda was due to go into exile in Mexico. In the interim period, while arrangements were being made for his departure, Neruda, his wife Matilde, as well as Araya, were transferred to the Clinica Santa Maria.

In preparation for exile, Neruda had asked Matilde and Araya to fetch some belongings from his house known as La Isla Negra. It was during this time, it’s alleged, when Neruda was alone, that an unidentified doctor – possibly a DINA agent – injected Neruda with a substance in his stomach. Araya stated he saw a red mark on Neruda’s abdomen. That was the last time Araya saw Neruda – having been lured away on the pretext of buying medicine not available at the clinic, Araya was ambushed by dictatorship agents and taken to the Estadio Nacional to be tortured.

The first tests on Neruda’s exhumed remains were carried out in Chile, with Servicio Medico Legal (SML) insisting that there was no evidence to suggest that the poet might have met with foul play at the clinic. The Chilean state’s narrative was upheld for a few more years, until an international forensics team declared otherwise. Since then, the Chilean government has been prolonging the final phase of the investigation, which seeks to examine the earth samples taken from Neruda’s burial place to determine if the botolinum discovered in the poet’s molar tooth was an external contamination from the ground or specifically present in his body. The latter would vindicate Araya’s testimony and Neruda’s death, as many indeed suspect, would be added to the list of dictatorship-era assassinations.

In this case, the state is obstructing Chilean justice. Former President Michelle Bachelet had allocated funds for the investigation in 2015 which were transferred to the Ministry of Justice to pay for the forensic investigations carried out abroad. Right-wing President Sebastian Pinera has failed to issue the payments, thus halting the necessary investigations to proceed with the case.

Chile currently owes nearly $40,000 to laboratories in Canada and Denmark for previous investigations. Meanwhile, SML informed Judge Carroza that it is not in possession of the samples requires for further testing.

Building the case from Chilean collective memory

Thus far, the investigations have established that the state has played a role in falsifying Neruda’s death certificate. While the final verdict regarding Neruda’s possible assassination still need to be forensically proved, it is also pertinent to trace the Chilean state’s preparation for the falsification of Neruda’s death.

Neruda died, possibly murdered, on 23 September 1973, just 12 days after after a US-backed coup toppled Salvador Allende’s socialist government. A curious detail, relevant to the current investigations into the possibility that Neruda was assassinated, was a statement prepared by Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in the very early days of torturing, killing and disappearing his opponents. In his book, El Doble Asesinato de Neruda, Marin writes that the dictatorship and its press were preparing the public for Neruda’s impending death. While newspapers were running updates about Neruda’s allegedly fast deteriorating health, Pinochet broadcasted a statement on radio: “Neruda is not dead. He is alive and free to travel wherever he likes, as befits other people of old age and struck with infirmity. We do not kill anyone and, if Neruda dies, it will be of natural causes.”

On September 23, the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio issued its final update about Neruda’s health, on the same day its alleged the poet was injected with a substance in his abdomen and later died.

In 2013, Dr Sergio Draper, who assisted Neruda during his stay at the Clinica Santa Maria, alleged that a doctor by the alias of Dr Price, was with Neruda at the time of his death and the person who injected him with a toxic substance. No records have established the existence of Dr Price, while Draper’s descriptions match former CIA and DINA agent Michael Townley, who was responsible, together with Eduardo Berrios, for the manufacturing of chemical weapons – including sarin gas – to use against Chile’s political prisoners.

Following the 2017 forensic results, lawyer Eduardo Contreras, who represents the Chilean Communist Party in the Neruda case, requested court proceedings against Dr Draper for illicit association and homicide by omission. In his request, Contreras pointed out that Draper was working in a military hospital and had links to the Chilean Armed Forces complicit in the coup. He also accused Draper of “inventing” Dr Price and asserted that the doctors involved in Neruda’s possible murder were the same involved in the assassination of former Chilean president Eduardo Frei Montalva. Frei was poisoned by CNI agents at the Clinica Santa Maria during his recovery from a hernia operation, in 1982.

Meanwhile, the Neruda Foundation has remained averse to challenging the Chilean state’s official version of Neruda’s death. The Foundation had appointed Ricardo Claro as director, who had links to Pinochet and was one of DINA’s financiers. Neruda’s wife, Matilde, had appointed lawyer Juan Agustin Figueroa – also a friend of Claro – to manage the legal details of Neruda’s estate. More than $2 million dollars from the foundation were transferred to Cristalerias Chile – one of Claro’s companies and which Figueroa became director of, after Claro’s death.

Araya was a lone voice amid a web of complicity which has now seen its most visible premise shattered by the investigations determining that Neruda did not die of metastatic prostate cancer. Why is the Chilean government reluctant to allow the investigations to proceed? If it is discovered that Neruda was indeed poisoned, the Chilean state has a lot to answer for. Since the transition to democracy, memory groups in Chile have adamantly stated that Pinochet’s calls for oblivion have been rigorously upheld across the political spectrum. Uncovering the truth behind the torture, murder and disappearances of dictatorship opponents is an ongoing process largely due to the Chilean military’s pact of silence, and the refusal of governments to contest this deprivation of Chilean collective memory. It is why Chile is often described as a country where the tortured and the torturers live in close proximity –the former scarred and the latter cloaked in impunity.

Having confirmation that Neruda was indeed assassinated will likely put pressure on Pinera, and subsequent governments to make dictatorship secrecy accessible. The outcome can go both ways but as things stand, a weak government caving in to the military, even if Neruda was murdered, will likely reinforce the divisions in a country that operates like an extension of the Pinochet dictatorship.

Overtone Singing in Iceland

Inuit Throat Singing: Kathy Keknek and Janet Aglukkaq

Tom Barker 1887–1970

Tom Barker was born on 3 June 1887 at Crossthwaite, Westmorland, England, eldest child of Thomas Grainger Barker, farm labourer, and his wife Sarah, née Trotter.

As a boy he worked on farms, ran away to Liverpool, then enlisted in the army, under age. Discharged as medically unfit after three years service, he migrated to New Zealand in 1909.

In Auckland he was a tram conductor, active trade unionist and secretary of the New Zealand Socialist Party, working with future leaders of the Labour Party, such as H. E. Holland, Michael Savage, Peter Fraser and Robert Semple. Attracted by industrial unionism he became an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World. In Wellington during the violent strikes of 1913 he was arrested, charged with sedition and released on a bond.

Early in 1914 Barker arrived in Sydney where he was soon editing the I.W.W. paper, Direct Action. After August 1914 the I.W.W. was the most determined and vociferous opponent of the 'capitalist war'. Barker, who had escaped gaol on a technicality in 1915, was sentenced to twelve months imprisonment after his arrest in March 1916, but released in August after an aggressive campaign to free him.

Meanwhile the deep and bitter divisions over conscription were coming to dominate Australian life. The I.W.W., glorying in its stance of vanguard opponent to conscription, attracted militant and radical support; Prime Minister W. M. Hughes branded it as a set of vicious traitors. Barker, still at liberty after the arrest and imprisonment of twelve members on charges of treason, personified the I.W.W. propaganda which continued defiantly after the organization was declared unlawful in December 1916. His most-famous anti-conscription poster, the subject of a serious charge, read:



He and the remaining members were arrested next year at the time of the general strike in New South Wales and before the second conscription referendum in December. Barker was held in gaol until deported to Chile in 1918.

In South America he organized seamen;  in Moscow he was enthused by Lenin to work for the Kuzbas project of industrialization in Siberia and recruited technicians for it in the United States of America for five years to 1926.

Later he worked for the Soviet petroleum export organization, visiting Australia briefly in 1930-31, and settled in London.

As a member of the Labour Party, councillor and in 1959 mayor of St Pancras Borough, he was energetic in political, welfare and cultural fields until his death on 2 April 1970. He was survived by his wife Bertha, a Polish-born ballet-dancer.

Barker roamed the world as a worker and organizer, basing himself on the simple tenets of class struggle and socialism. In Australia, a time of crisis thrust him into prominence. Elsewhere he served the cause at hand selflessly. He was a slightly built man, lively in speech and manner, fighting his battles with laughter.

The People Sydney, NSW  Sat 25 Jun 1910 Page 3.

I.W.W. Notes.

The Industrial Workers of the World Clubs in Australia are plugging steadily. away. While there has not been a rush of membership to their ranks, they are  undoubtedly preparing the way for revolutionary unionism on this side.

In England and America, on the continent of Europe, even among the workers of Japan and China, industrial unionism finds earnest missionaries. When the workers of the world under
stand what industrial unionism means to them as a class, and the might- as a force it will give them to combat the capitalist class, there'll be no more hesitating, hailing, backing and filling.

Education is the preparatory work to organisation. To propagate I.W.W. unionism the function of the Clubs, join the Club and aid in the spread of its propaganda - you who profess it.

Emancipation and Economic Freedom can only be won and maintained by intelligence and organisation displayed on the part of those enslaved.

Quite a number of men express them selves as being in accord with the prin ciples of the Preamble of the Industrial Workers of the World, but apparently lack the courage to organise to hasten its achievement.

The germ of I.W.W. Unionism is in the above-mentioned Clubs, and not in the craft or sectional union. If you are convinced, that is your place.)

An industrial union must fight shy of all political bounders, adventurers, and fakirs. Never let the tail wag the dog.

Fellow workers Kitchener (chair), Ring and Judd held a good meeting at Newtown last Saturday night. There was plenty of swing and go in the speakers, and things were made fairly interesting.

Last meeting Sydney Club was held in No. 5 Room, Queens Hall, Pitt-street, H. Dobson in the
chair. 

It was decided, among other things, that Judd and Kitchener visit Woollongong this Saturday. 

W. Gail delivered an address, which caused some discussion. Next meeting above place Wednesday, June 29 at 8.

Pirates Of The Brig Cyprus

This is the first complete and accurate account of one of the most extraordinary adventures in the annals of seamanship and crime. On 14 August 1829 the brig Cyprus was sheltering in Recherche Bay on the south-east coast of Van Diemen's Land. She was taking a batch of convicts to the penal settlement at Macquarie Harbour. With the Captain drunk, the Mate and Army lieutenant lured out of the way by accident or design, the convicts mutinied under the skilfully disguised leadership of William Walker—alias William Swallow—who had, unknown to the authorities, al-ready once been transported to Van ( Diemen's Land and had escaped. Swallow's remarkable pertinacity in sailing the stolen brig to New Zealand, the Tonga Islands and Japan, before 'scuttling her in the China Sea, provides an epic of leadership and endurance, 'ward and the un mutinous convicts  the officers in charge, and heroism tale of vacillating pusillanimity and the adventures of the military who were marooned ashore is an extra-ism and enterprise in the little double-crossing cockney who did his best to go betray his fellow-convicts. The authors have based this book entirely on documentary evidence and hown not only considerable narrative ability but also much skill in disen-tangling the truth from the many contradictory accounts of an event about which most of the protagonists were only too keen to tell lies to save their own skins. 


ThIs is the first true and detailed story of the piratical seizure of the Cyprus brig. Many other writers have told the outlines of the story briefly, and usually inaccurately, adding fiction to fact, and substituting imagination for solid research; but this is the first book-length narrative of the events, and, further, every significant statement of facts in these pages is based on documentary evidence, most of which is now published for the first time. 

It would be invidious to name and blame other writers for inventing what they did not have the patience to investigate in the historical archives. It is enough to claim that, without exception, every former account of the Cyprus that has been published has been seriously deficient in some details, incorrect in other details, and in some cases grossly distorted and invented. 

For narrative convenience, the story in these pages is told in the technique partly of an historical novel, and not of an historical treatise. Dialogue and minor details are invented, and there is some use of rational conjecture, but in everything of factual importance there is documentary evidence in support of the narrative details. 

The documentary material in general, including as it does many depositions by individuals who sought to exculpate them-selves by inculpating others, is frequently conflicting in factual details. In such cases the historian must estimate the weight of probability, in relation to positively discernible facts, and this has been our method. 

The large amount of new material incorporated here has been unearthed chiefly in the Mitchell Library, Sydney; the Tasmanian State Archives, Hobart; the Public Records Office, London; and from contemporary newspapers and records of births, baptisms, marriages, and deaths. The story has been told entirely from these original contemporary sources of information, without drawing in the slightest on versions given by other writers, who sometimes contradict one another, and sometimes repeat one another's errors. 

Acknowledgement and thanks for assistance in research is gratefully made to the Librarian and staff of the Mitchell Library, Sydney, and to Miss Ida Leeson, former Mitchell Librarian; to the Librarian and staff of the State Library of Tasmania, and especially to Mr Robert Sharman, archivist; and to the late James Whittaker, of London, who was indefatigable in ferreting out facts in the Public Records Office and elsewhere in England. 

Sydney Australia 1960. 

FRANK CLUNE 
P. R. STEPHENSEN 

Jack Mundey and BLF Green Bans

Jack Mundey arrested in The Rocks in 1973

Originally from north-western Queensland, Jack Mundey – a card-carrying member of the Communist Party of Australia and elected official of the NSW Builders Labourers Federation (BLF) – became “the best known unionist and best known conservationist in Australia,”

“The battles that Mundey, the BLF and the various community organisations fought to defend urban amenity and inner-city heritage would place matters of conservation and integrated, living cities into the public consciousness for the first time.”

Mundey was well ahead of his time in his concern for the preservation of historic and culturally significant buildings and living spaces. Under his leadership, the BLF entered new territory by claiming it was a union’s right and responsibility to intervene into such matters, particularly when government and other institutions refused to do so.

Green Bans

'Green bans' and 'builders labourers' became household terms for Sydneysiders during the 1970s. A remarkable form of environmental activism was initiated by the builders labourers employed to construct the office-block skyscrapers, shopping precincts and luxury apartments that were rapidly encroaching upon green spaces or replacing older-style commercial and residential buildings in Sydney. The builders labourers refused to work on projects that were environmentally or socially undesirable. This green bans movement, as it became known, was the first of its type in the world.

In a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald in January 1972, Mundey articulated the union's principles:

Yes, we want to build. However, we prefer to build urgently-required hospitals, schools, other public utilities, high-quality flats, units and houses, provided they are designed with adequate concern for the environment, than to build ugly unimaginative architecturally-bankrupt blocks of concrete and glass offices…Though we want all our members employed, we will not just become robots directed by developer-builders who value the dollar at the expense of the environment. More and more, we are going to determine which buildings we will build …The environmental interests of three million people are at stake and cannot be left to developers and building employers whose main concern is making profit. Progressive unions, like ours, therefore have a very useful social role to play in the citizens' interest, and we intend to play it. 

During Mundey's visit to Liverpool in the UK he was met by veteran building worker Pete Carter who handed him a song composed in his honour to the tune of The Wild Colonial Boy.

It's of a wild colonial boy, Jack Mundey is his name.

A building workers' leader from Australia he came.
He said you lads in Birmingham can beat the bosses plan;
Do like we did in Sydney - just put on the old green ban.

Than means you fight for wages, but you fight for something more-
Not only for the right to work - but what you're working for!
A place that's fit to live in, where your kids can thrive and grow,
And not a concrete jungle where you scurry to and fro.

The greedy men of property have knocked old 'Brum" around
Broad Street, Bull Ring, Aston Cross - they've razed it to the ground;
Put up skyscraper tombstones where a working city once stood But there is still time to call a halt, hold on to what is good.

So listen to Jack Mundey when he says 'Green bans are beaut'!
A Green ban on Victoria Square will surely bear some fruit.
If you can win the Post Office, you lads of high renown,
You'll win the right to take the fight to every part of town.

Joe Owens



With other BLF leaders Jack Mundey and Bob Pringle, Owens was an instrumental part of the Green Bans movement that saved some of Sydney’s now-iconic tourist sites such as The Rocks, the Museum of Contemporary Art building, Woolloomoolloo’s heritage and Centennial Park.

Owens played a key role in other social issues such as the push for Indigenous and women’s rights and the anti-Vietnam War campaign.

He was also a key player in the democratisation of the BLF that included a limit on tenure of the executive and was Secretary when BLF Federal Secretary Norm Gallagher took over the NSW Branch and blacklisted the former leaders.

Parker says the union movement has lost an outstanding leader.

“Joe Owens never took a backward step in his commitment to the betterment of workers’ lives.

“Through the Green Bans, with Jack Mundey and Bob Pringle, he sought to save our city from over-development.

“He did this in the belief that workers were not only concerned about better wages and conditions they also wanted to live in a better environment and protect their children’s future.”

Bob Pringle

Bob was born in Queensland 54 years ago. He was the quintessential Australian knockabout. He had a variety of jobs in Queensland, including a stint at that back-breaking job, cane-cutting.

He came to NSW and worked mainly as a scaffolder and rigger where he joined the then Builders Labourers Federation (BLF). Bob became president of the NSW branch in the late '60s, leading the struggle around wages and decent working conditions during the late '60s and early '70s. Those were the days when building workers did not have hot water on jobs to wash and changed in humpies containing cement bags. Bob went through the vicious margins strike of 1970 and the 1971 strike for full compo when off sick.

He was instrumental in gaining BLF support for the first green ban in Kelly's Bush, and was highly active in the Victoria Street green ban against the developers' thugs.

In his full and active life, Bob was an outstanding activist against racism. When the tent embassy was erected in Canberra, Bob was the only non-Koori received into the Koori caucus.

And one cannot forget that memorable night when Bob, with a mate Johnny Phillips, set out to saw the goalposts down the night before the Springboks game. He was half way through just as the coppers lifted them. It took four hours to get him out of jail because he was giving the coppers heaps.

His other interests were many and varied, including playing jazz on the drums and writing poetry, and he was often in the Harold Park Hotel, where his wake will be held.

Bob drowned on the central coast last week. His funeral service will be on August 7 at the Eastern Suburbs Crematorium at 2.30pm. Our condolences to his step-daughter Jane and to the myriad of friends who will miss him.

— Joe Owens

Tom Uren

Born 1921, Sydney NSW

Tom Uren is one of the most respected Labor politicians of his generation. His youthful plans for a career as a boxer were derailed by the outbreak of World War Two. 

His experiences as a P.O.W. slaving on the Burma-Thai Railway instilled in him a lifelong opposition to militarism and a belief in socialism and peaceful co-existence. 

At war's end, he joined the Australian Labor Party, entering Federal Parliament in 1958. In 1972 he became Minister for Urban and Regional Development in the Whitlam Government, setting up the Australian Heritage Commission and the National Estate and creating new national parks.

Percy Brookfield – (7 August 1875 – 22 March 1921)

Percy Brookfield in 1915

Brookfield was born in Wavertree, Lancashire, England, the son of a local grocer Cuthbert Brookfield and Jane Brookfield (née Peers) and after an elementary education went to sea at age 13. 

After spending about 6 years at sea working on various merchant ships, at his request he was discharged from his service on the vessel "Godiva", with an endorsement of good conduct, in Port Melbourne in 1894. 

He was a swagman and prospector in New South Wales and Queensland but had settled in Broken Hill by 1910. He became an official of the Amalgamated Miners' Association and led the Broken Hill campaign against the introduction of conscription. He was gaoled and reportedly fined ₤700 as a result of his anti-conscription activities.

In February 1917 he won ALP pre-selection for a by-election in the seat of Sturt. The by-election had been caused by the resignation of the previous member John Cann who had accepted the position of Railways Commissioner. 

Brookfield won the seat with 54% of the primary vote and increased this to 57% at the general election that was held one month later. In parliament he became a leading left-wing advocate and expressed sympathy for the Industrial Workers of the World and the Bolshevik Revolution. His radicalism led him into conflict with the rest of the ALP caucus and he resigned from it in July 1919. He was not readmitted to the party when he attempted to retract his resignation.

At the March 1920 state elections Brookfield contested the seat of Sturt for the Industrial Socialist Labor Party and, under the multi-member proportional representation system then used, he was the first candidate elected with 27% of the primary vote. Following the election he held the balance of power in the assembly. He supported the Labor government of John Storey and used his position to improve industrial conditions for Broken Hill miners and to overturn the convictions of Australian IWW members gaoled in 1916.

The Sydney Twelve – World War One Police Conspiracy

Following the raids, twelve men – Charles Reeve, Thomas Glynn, Peter Larkin, John Hamilton, Bernard Bob Besant, Thomas Moore, Donald McPherson, Donald Grant, William Teen, William Beatty, Morris Joseph Fagin and John Benjamin King – were charged with conspiracy to commit arson, conspiracy to prevent the course of justice (through the campaign to release Barker), and conspiracy to cause sedition. 

The men, who would become known to historians as the ‘Sydney twelve’, were all found guilty of at least one offence, with some being found guilty of multiple charges. Seven men were sentenced to 15 years’ jail, four to ten years and one to five years. In 1920 an inquiry into the trial and sentencing found that six of the men had not been ‘justly or rightly’ convicted of sedition. Four others were found to have been involved in conspiracy of a seditious nature but were recommended for release. These ten were released in August 1920. The remaining two were released slightly later, although one was judged to have been rightly convicted of sedition and the other found rightly convicted of arson.



Prosecutions under the Unlawful Associations Act were combined with deportations of non-Australian-born members of the IWW. Together these operations succeeded in effectively suppressing the organisation in Australia.

On the release of ten of the twelve IWW prisoners in Sydney in August 1920, the Sydney Morning Herald, reported the release under the heading “IWW MEN CHEERING CROWDS AT TOWN HALL”. The report begins:

The Town Hall was packed last night, when the Sydney Labour Council gave a reception to the ten I.W.W. men—Hamilton, Besant, Moore, McPherson, Teen, Fagin, Glynn, Larkin, Beatty, and Grant—who were recently released from gaol. Many hundreds were unable to obtain admission. Before Mr. Howie (president of the Labour Council) took the chair the city organist (Mr. Ernest Truman) rendered selections on the grand organ. When the I.W.W. men came onto the platform there was a storm of cheering, which lasted several minutes. Then the whole audience rose and sang the "Red Flag," a lady accompanying on the piano. Suspended from one of the galleries was a bannerette inscribed "Welcome to the martyrs." 

Mary Gilmore and Brookfield

Brookfield’s untimely death had enormous impact. He had been critical in securing the release of the IWW prisoners through his parliamentary insistence of an independent second Royal Commission into the IWW trials and the heavy sentences imposed. Collins was not alone in understanding this significance. Mary Gilmore, writer, labour movement activist and poet also wrote about Brookfield’s demise in ‘How Brookfield Died’ He account of his murder describes the scene and resulting loss for future generations:

Tell it abroad, tell it abroad,

Tell it by chapel and steeple,

How in the height of his manly prime

Brookfield died for the people!

Here was the station, there was the train,

And women and children crying;

And thick as a gallop of fiery rain

The madman's bullets came flying.

And there, in his own old quiet way,

Brookfield stepped to the breach–

And a man might wait for a thousand years

For a lesson like this to teach.

… 

Blood for blood, says the law; and blood

For blood on the earth was spilled,

As the rattling shots died, thud by thud,

And hell for a moment stilled!–

Was it for this that the Lord God made,

And gave to his heart its bent?

Only we know, at call, unafraid,

Brookfield answering went.

But where the Barrier women wept,

And its men thought tears no shame,

The child shall ask, ere it turns to sleep,

The story of Brookfield’s fame.

And on, through the years, forever he stands

A man among men, my brothers,

Who gave to the full of his kind, strong hands,

And died, as he lived, for others!

So tell it abroad, tell it abroad,

Tell it by chapel and steeple,

How, in the height of his manly prime,

Brookfield died for the people!

In 2016 Dr Barry York Revisted the conspiracy 

The ‘Sydney Twelve’ were members of an organisation known as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) who were arrested in Sydney on 23 September 1916 and charged with ‘treason felony’. The charge was later changed to conspiracies relating to arson, perverting the course of justice and sedition.

The timing of the arrests, during the campaign over the conscription plebiscite scheduled for 28 October, led many in the labour movement to view the charges with suspicion. The Hughes Labor government wanted a ‘Yes’ vote for conscription, and the IWW activists were proving effective in raising the question of opposition to the war as well as conscription.

This pitted the ‘Wobblies’, as they were known, against the Labor government and the mainstream labour movement. The latter opposed conscription but not the war.

The Twelve were formally charged at Sydney Central Court on 3 October. The trial took place on 20 November. All were convicted. Seven received sentences of fifteen years’ gaol with hard labour, four were sentenced to ten years and one to five years.

The government and the media tried to link the Twelve to the murder of a policeman in the mining town of Tottenham, in central west NSW. The three men arrested for the murder were IWW supporters. Two were executed for the crime.

Influenced by socialism, anarchism and Marxism, the IWW was established in Chicago, USA, in 1906 . Perhaps its most famous member was Helen Keller, celebrated as the first deaf-blind woman to obtain a university degree. The IWW believed in ‘One Big Union’ rather than trade-based unions, and a General Strike as a way of overthrowing the capitalist class and replacing it with workers’ control of the means of production.

The IWW’s ideas soon took root in Australia. The defeat of the great strikes of the 1890s had led to faith in a parliamentary road to socialism. With the formation of a Labor Party and its election to government, that faith gave way to disenchantment and an extra-parliamentary militancy among a hard core of workers. In the years leading to war, wages were pegged and prices and unemployment rose. IWW membership was small, peaking at about 2000 in 1916, but its influence within the labour movement was greater. Its weekly paper Direct Action sold at least 15,000 copies and was read by many more. The Wobblies’ opposition to the war saw its influence grow among the small minority of Australians who opposed it.

The Labor government of Andrew Fisher declared that it would support Britain’s war effort ‘to our last man and shilling’ and brought in the War Precautions Act in October 1914, allowing for imprisonment of ‘disaffected and disloyal’ subjects.

A ‘recruitment’ poster produced by IWW leader Tom Barker in 1915 expressed the Wobblies’ position very well. It declared:

TO ARMS!

Capitalists, Parsons, Politicians

Landlords, Newspaper Editors, and

Other Stay-at-home Patriots

YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU IN THE TRENCHES

WORKERS

FOLLOW YOUR MASTERS

For expressing such a sentiment, Barker was arrested under the War Precautions Act but, on appeal, acquitted on a technicality. A repeat offence in March 1916, for ‘prejudicing recruitment’ in the IWW newspaper, Direct Action, led to a sentence of 12 months’ gaol with hard labour.

Following Barker’s gaoling, there were arson attacks on factories, warehouses, and business premises, including the Grace Brothers store in Sydney. One of the Twelve had declared publicly that "For every day that Tom Barker is in gaol it will cost the capitalist class £10,000".

The late historian, Ian Turner, in his book Sydney’s burning (1969) says that some of the Twelve ‘were incendiarists or would-be incendiarists’. Nonetheless, he concluded that they were framed up on the charges brought against them. He argues that it was the work of senior police and paid informers, including chief witness Harry Scully, who concocted evidence.

The Counter Espionage Bureau, the Chief Censor’s Office and the police were out to destroy the Wobblies, and toward the end of 1916 Hughes relied on the Liberals to secure passage of the Unlawful Associations Act. The Act resulted in scores of gaolings of IWW members for periods of up to six months, and deportations.

None of the Twelve served their full sentences. A campaign was mounted in their defence, with the support of some Labor parliamentarians. In 1918 the Labor Council of New South Wales commissioned a report, and a judicial enquiry into the case was conducted by Judge Street. Both revealed problems with the case, though Street found no new evidence warranting the men’s release or a retrial.

After the Storey Labor government was elected in New South Wales in 1920, Judge Ewing was appointed to inquire into the trial and sentencing. The judge rejected any suggestion that the men had been framed but recommended their release, finding that six were not ‘justly or rightly’ convicted of sedition. All were released later that year. 

NTL is The Wokers Theatre 1940 People's Domain For the Peopl's Plays

Tom Roberts – Shearing the Rams

Tom Roberts – Shearing the Rams 1890

Ray Fisher Folksinger 1940 – 2011

Ray Fisher, folksinger. Born: 26 November, 1940, in Glasgow. Died: 31 August, 2011, in North Shields, Tyne and Wear, aged 70.

Along with her elder brother Archie, Ray Fisher was one of the “Glasgow boys and girls” in the vanguard of the UK folk revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s. She became perhaps the best-known Scots folksinger of her generation, not only in her homeland but south of the Border and among the Scots diaspora worldwide.

Having started in a 1950s skiffle group with her brother, she joined him in a folk duo – Ray and Archie Fisher – her bespectacled face becoming well-known on numerous TV programmes including the BBC’s Hootenanny and STV’s Here and Now, presented by Bill Tennent. She was also part of the trio The Wayfarers along with Archie and singer/fiddler Bobby Campbell.

Ray and Archie also recorded as the Fisher Family, along with their parents, their young sister Cilla and later Cilla’s husband Artie Trezise. Cilla and Artie later became part of the popular Singing Kettle group while Ray and Archie each went solo.

It was during a solo gig at the Bridge Folk Club in Newcastle in the early 1960s that Ray met English folk musician Colin Ross, the club’s founder, a fiddler and piper who became one of the creators of the modern Scottish smallpipes, including the breakthrough standardisation of bagpipe hole spacings and reeds.

They married in 1962. Fisher guested with Ross in his group the High Level Ranters, playing the traditional music of the Borders, and she settled in his native North Shields area for the rest of her life. She nevertheless remained a passionate ambassador for Scots’ folk music and the ballad tradition, toured the world, giving gigs from Canada to Hong Kong to New Zealand, wherever there were congregations of homesick Scots.

She also returned regularly to take part in the Edinburgh Festival, where, as early as 1963-64, she had sung on the classic albums Edinburgh Folk Festival volumes one and two, released by Decca, joining Archie in Whiskey in the Jar on the first volume .

Offstage, Fisher was a feisty fighter against nuclear weapons housed in Scotland, angry that Scottish people and her beloved landscape could be the first target of the then Soviet union, or any rogue nuclear state or terrorist group with a grievance against the US. She marched against the presence of American nuclear submarines at the Holy Loch and was a regular at the peace camp outside the Trident base at Faslane on the Gare Loch.

Ray Fisher was born “in the shadow of the Fairfield Crane” by the river Clyde in Glasgow on 26 November, 1940, one of six sisters with one brother, Archie. She was only 15 weeks old when Clydeside was devastated by the Luftwaffe in March 1941.

Her father was a soloist in the City of Glasgow Police Choir while her mother, a Gaelic-speaker from Vatersay, instilled in her a love for traditional ballads and stories handed down by word of mouth.

Along with Archie, Ray became drawn to the new 50s craze, skiffle, headed by her fellow Glaswegian Lonnie Donegan. Archie then “discovered” politically-motivated American singers such as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, while Ray became highly-influenced by both the powerful voice and the outspoken leftist sympathies of Ronnie Gilbert, who sang with Seeger in one of the huge folk groups of the 1960s, the Weavers. (Years later, one of Ray’s greatest thrills was to back Woody Guthrie’s famous war buddy, soulmate and harmoniser Cisco Houston in a gig at Glasgow’s Berkeley Hall).

When Ray was still in her late teens, Archie took her to what had become known as the Ballads Club, run by a folk music-loving teacher at Rutherglen Academy in Glasgow. His name was Norman Buchan and he would go on to become Labour MP for West Renfrewshire, and later Paisley South, for more than half a century until his death in 1990.

John Pilger on Wilfred Burchett

In the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombing of Japan in August 1945, the official lying began. The Allied occupation authorities banned all mention of radiation poisoning and insisted that the victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been killed or injured only by the atomic blast.  ‘No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin’ said the front page of the New York Times, a classic of disinformation and journalistic abdication.

There was one exception: the Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett.

‘I write this as a warning to the world,’ reported Burchett in the London Daily Express, having reached Hiroshima after a perilous journey across Japan, the first reporter to dare. Burchett described hospital wards filled with people with no visible injuries, who were dying from what he called ‘an atomic plague’. For telling this truth, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and smeared – and vindicated.



John Pilger first met Wilfred Burchett in Vietnam in the 1970s. ‘I have never known a journalist so at ease in a different culture,’ he said.

‘Wilfred's empathy with the people of Asia was matched by his remarkable knowledge and understanding of the past and present, and his sense of comradeship. I may owe him my life. He warned me about a planned Khmer Rouge attack on the convoy in which my film crew and I were travelling in Cambodia. When it happened, we were ready.’

Burchett grew up in Gippsland, in rural Victoria, the son of a Methodist minister. He was 19 at the beginning of the Great Depression, which marked him for life. In his autobiography At the Barricades, he wrote that during his wartime reporting behind the lines in Vietnam he would ‘thank his lucky stars’ his legs had found their strength as a young man looking for work.

In The Outsiders, Pilger’s 1983 TV interview series, Burchett describes Hiroshima in 1945 as ‘a city steamrollered’. ‘I was in a state of permanent shock,’ he says. His first dispatch was sent to London via Morse code and was the scoop of the century. 

For good measure, reported the Brisbane Courier-Mail, ‘armed with a typewriter, seven packets of K rations, a Colt revolver and incredible hope, [Burchett] “liberated” five Allied prison-of war camps’.

Pilger describes Wilfred Burchett as ‘the only Western journalist to consistently report events from the other side in the Korean War and the Cold War, and from China, the Soviet Union and Vietnam’.
Bertrand Russell had written, ‘If any one man is responsible for alerting Western opinion to the struggle of the people of Vietnam, it is Wilfred Burchett.’ 

Florian Geyer, and German Peasant War of 1524

When the German Peasants' War broke out in 1524, spurred on by Martin Luther's teachings, German Protestants were divided along class lines. Protestant peasants and silver miners, led by Thomas Müntzer, began taking over farms and mines. Müntzer also called for the abolition of all political posts except for that of the Emperor (who in the Holy Roman Empire was elected by landholders—which Müntzer asserted would now include peasants and miners).

Martin Luther thought this had gone too far, and sided with Protestant aristocrats who only wanted clerical reforms, calling upon peasants to put down their arms and surrender their farms. Müntzer's radical faction concluded that Luther was a traitor and continued to fight against both Catholic and Lutheran nobles.

Florian Geyer, together with a handful of dissident low-ranking knights and several hundred hastily trained peasant militiamen, established the Black Company (often called the Black Host or Black Band), which was possibly the only heavy cavalry division in European history to fight on the side of a peasant revolution.

















Listen to Bill Berry sing the song online on the Union Songs Website

http://unionsong.com/u079.html

Troops of Geyer clad in black are we
Heia o-ho
And we will stamp out tyranny
Heia o-ho

Chorus

Spearmen ho! Forward go!
On the castle roof let the Red Cock crow
Spearmen ho! Forward go!
On the castle roof let the Red Cock crow

When Adam dug and Eve did toil
Heia o-ho
No princes trespassed on their soil
Heia o-ho

Bold Geyer's men their arrows shoot
The knights are laid low
His banner bears a peasant's boot
To stamp out the foe

The noble's only God is pride
Heia o-ho
The Holy Scripture is our guide
Heia o-ho

We're beaten though our cause is right
Heia o-ho
Our sons will carry on the fight
Heia o-ho

Notes

Words from the singing of Bill Berry. According to Chris Kempster this song was brought back by Australians returning from a work brigade in Yugoslavia in the late 1940's. Werner Lowenstein tells me that he learnt it as boy in Germany and brought it to Australia as a refugee from the Nazis during World War II. He sang it in the Austral Singers in Melbourne. As far as I know this English version is only sung in Australia. "On the castle roof let the Red Cock crow" is a euphamism for burning the castle down.

Bank of England Honours Alan Turing on £50 note

Bank of England Honours Alan Turing on £50 note

During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking centre that produced Ultra intelligence. For a time he led Hut 8, the section that was responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. Here, he devised a number of techniques for speeding the breaking of German ciphers, including improvements to the pre-war Polish bombe method, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine.

Turing played a pivotal role in cracking intercepted coded messages that enabled the Allies to defeat the Nazis in many crucial engagements, including the Battle of the Atlantic, and in so doing helped win the war. Due to the problems of counterfactual history, it's hard to estimate what effect Ultra intelligence had on the war, but at the upper end it has been estimated that this work shortened the war in Europe by more than two years and saved over 14 million lives.

Adam Meredith Champion Bridge Player 


Born in Bangor, County Down, Ireland, (now Northern Ireland), to Hugh Owen Meredith and Olive Christabel Margaret Meredith Little is published about his early life, excepting that he was well educated.

Fearlessly honest, he refused to claim his ill-health from severe asthma and acute diabetes as a basis to avoid military service for World War II and instead registered as a conscientious objector.

Initially allocated to work as an ambulance driver and ARP warden, he was petitioned against by those who objected to working with "conchies" (conscientious objectors) and was reassigned to farm work, highly problematic for an asthmatic.

It was no secret, however, that for a great deal of the war he was in London; and when he was in London, he was playing cards. After the war, he spent months each year in the south of France where the dry climate helped his asthmatic lungs.

Adam Meredith was passionately artistic with interests in ballet and theatre. When the Ballet Nègre (a creation of Katherine Dunham) came to London "and teetered between success and failure ... he backed it with hard-earned savings he had amassed at bridge.

At bridge he liked to seize the initiative early in a match; some of his bidding manoeuvres (which often centred round the spade suit) became legendary. He was also a remarkable dummy player.[5] Regarding his fondness for the spade suit, Victor Mollo wrote: "No man, no three men, for that matter, have bid spades so often or so devotedly as Plum."Mollo also wrote that he "has been known to play brilliantly after despatching eleven glasses of green Chartreuse"

Newnham College Cambridge

Newnham College was founded in 1871 and is the best. Write something about why it is good that it's all women's, and also about how great the community is. Lots of opportunities to fulfil our potential and make wonderful memories.

The MCR, which stands for Middle Combination Room, is the community of graduate students at Newnham College. Funds are allocated to the MCR to create enjoyable experiences for the graduate community.

The MCR committee represents the interests of the wider Newnham graduate body and is charged with organising events, attending college and university-wide meetings, and signposting Newnhamites to the appropriate support and information.

The MCR is also a room, think of it as a common room, with a TV, bookshelf and grand piano. It is well decorated and contains comfortable furniture and space for social events.

History of the Bank of England Christabel Margaret Meredith

Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface.

The Educational Bearings of Modern Psychology by Christabel Margaret (Iles) Meredith

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

Historical materialism and the economics of Karl Marx
by Benedetto Croce  (Author), Christabel M. b. 1876 Meredith 

As a Newham Scholar Christabel finished her degree but like so many others was not awarded any recognition of her work at the time. Her son Christopher Meredith was able to remedy this later when Newnham changed its original prohibition.

Kings Road Chelsea

Upware Fenland Pub 5 Miles from Anywhere

Powering the Underground – Lots Road Power Station

Lots Road Power Station is a disused coal and later oil-fired and later gas-fired power station on the River Thames at Lots Road in Chelsea, London in the south-west of The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, which supplied electricity to the London Underground system. It is sometimes erroneously referred to as Fulham Power Station, a name properly applied to another former station a mile upriver.

White Colne

White Colne is a village and parish in Essex, England, on the north side of the River Colne, opposite Earls Colne, and on the Colchester road, 4 miles East South East of Halstead.[2] It traces its history back to the Domesday book and beyond. There is evidence of Palaeolithic and Mesolithic settlement in the area. White Colne railway station was a station on the Colne Valley and Halstead Railway.

Tunbridge Farm Low Road Burwell Cambs

A Peter Gregory Restoration with the help of Ann, Scarlett, Ruth, Mark, John, Michael and Ralph. 

Skara Brae and Gordon Childe

Childe's best known excavation was undertaken from 1928 to 1930 at Skara Brae in the Orkney Islands. Having uncovered a well-preserved Neolithic village, in 1931 he published the excavation results in a book titled Skara Brae.

After publishing Prehistory of Scotland (1935), Childe produced one of the defining books of his career, Man Makes Himself (1936)

In April 1956, Childe was awarded the Gold Medal of the Society of Antiquaries for his services to archaeology. He was invited to lecture in the United States on multiple occasions, by Robert Braidwood, William Duncan Strong, and Leslie White, but the U.S. State Department barred him from entering the country due to his Marxist beliefs.

After a February 1957 holiday visiting archaeological sites in Gibraltar and Spain, he sailed to Australia, reaching Sydney on his 65th birthday. Here, the University of Sydney, which had once barred him from working there, awarded him an honorary degree.

Looking into Australian prehistory, he found it a profitable field for research, and lectured to archaeological and leftist groups on this and other topics, taking to Australian radio to criticise academic racism towards Indigenous Australians.

Pete Seeger on being Black Listed

Rhiannon Giddens I/V by David Holt

Huun Hvor Tu – Chiraa-Khoor

Head of Bottisham Lode

Head of BottishamLode

Soham Grammar School

This is the main building of Soham Village College, a state secondary school. It was the home of Charles Moreby and built in 1901. The school moved there in 1925 having originated in 1686. The school is comprised of several buildings on two adjacent sites.

John Christopher Gregory – Photo Darcy Wilms

Percy Grainger House Tour

Visitors from the University of Melbourne to the Percy Grainger House, 

White Plains, NY, October 4, 2014.