Australian history is a rogues gallery of individual characters fighting against over-bearing government authority, especially tyrannical government which has little care for the political freedom and liberty of individuals. One of the more turbulent periods was the 1890's when industrial unrest led to a series of strikes. The Shearer's Strike led to the Pastoralist's and Shearer's facing off in central Queensland. Ultimately the strike was broken, as the forces of government and the pastoralists held the shearers out until they were penniless.
In this environment was one republican dissenter, James "Shearblade" Martin - who was imprisoned in 1894 on the back of the arbitrary policing of Horace Tozer's colonial Queensland.
The Shearer's Strike
Popular Australian history is rampant with the triumphalism of federation and how the "great liberalist", Henry Parkes, in the late 1800's had united divergent and bickering colonies into a wondrous federalist union. This is despite the fact that the Australian Constitution contained none of the innovations in constitutional law that the enlightenment had created. This does not deter popular historians from defining Australian prosperity as stemming from this node in Australian history and the "bearded fathers" wisdom in rejecting the enlightenment and cementing Australian Anglophilia.
Dissenters get painted out of Australian popular history, and if they are mentioned at all, they are commonly trivialised. This is often to hide the tyrannical actions of government. The 1890s in Australia were dominated by the constant battle between labour and capital. One of the biggest of these battle was the Shearer's Strike in central Queensland during the early half of 1891.
The Queensland Shearers Union had gathered in power with the growth of the wool industry. They leveraged the increasing demand for shearers to improve pay and conditions. Eventually the Union decided they would only work with other Union members. The squatters did not like this action and formed the Pastoral Employers Association in 1889. The Pastoralists proclaimed freedom of contract. They also cut wages and refused to negotiate with unions. In February, 1891 the Queensland Shearers Union issued the statement;
An unprovoked and unjustifiable attack as been made upon the above union by the squatter associations. It therefore becomes our duty to take such action as will best conserve our interests and frustrate the attempts of organized Capitalism to crush unionism and reduce wages in this districtWhile there was friction from both sides of the argument leading up to this strike, the Pastoralists did set out to break the union. They did this with the helping hand of the Queensland colonial government who supplied a thousand soldiers and constables - armed with the new "Nordenfeldt gun" to break the Shearer's Strike. Behind the government support for the Pastoralists was acting Premier Horace Tozer. Premier Samuel Griffiths was constantly down south attending the constitutional conventions that were being held at the time. Tozer was definitely no friend of unions, in 1894 he passed a bill in response to civil unrest over labor disputes, that dispensed with trial by jury and the right to silence. The bill also enabled a person to be imprisoned for six months without trial under suspicion of disturbing the peace. Tozer also drafted a pamphlet which encouraged police and JIPs to shoot - on sight - anyone suspected of committing a felony. Barcaldine The shearers established camps in several spots, the largest being Barcaldine, with about 4,500 people encamped there. Under the "tree of knowledge", the camp became the focal point for shearer union activity and for police suppression of the shearers. The police were also charged with protecting non-union labour that was working in the shearing sheds as well as arresting strike leaders. Unionists raided shearing sheds, harassed non-union labour and committed acts of sabotage. In March of 1891, police arrested the strike leaders in Barcaldine and Clermont. They were sentenced to three years hard labour in Moreton Bay. The strike and civil unrest continued through May, but by now the union camps were short on food, and the shearers were penniless. By June, the strike was broken, and ended on the 20th. The strike made obvious that the unionists needed to become electorally active in order to have their issues addressed. Consequently the Labor Party was established - and in 1892, the shearer Tommy Ryan won the seat of Barcoo. By 1899, Queensland had the world's first Labor Government. The Pastoralists also saw a need to politicize, and from the Graziers Association of Central and Northern Queensland, came the Country Party - which is the National Party of today. Paul "Shearblade" Martin Martin was in Barcaldine when the Shearer's Strike was occurring. He had managed to gather a crowd of 400 in the Forresters Hall when trying to establish electoral reform. He ended the meeting by calling for three groans for the queen and three cheers for an Australian Republic. He was also active in the camp as Manning Clark verbosely records;
Late summer rains turns the camps of both soldiers and bush workers into quagmires and impeded attempts to track down unionists on the black soil plains of Maranoa. The press, the parsons and other publicists urged the men to return to work, assuring them work was a greater solace than drink or the pleasures of love, as it brought comfort to a man not by bringing him ease but requiring effort.Martin later ran afoul of Tozer's tyrannical 1894 bill when Sir Thomas Mallwraith's Ayrshire Downs woolshed was burned to the ground. The government convicted six men including Martin, even though Martin may have been 70 miles from where the shed burnt down. Two others were convicted based on confessions from existing prisoners, undoubtedly swayed by the 1500 pound bounty they shared for it. Martin was released in 1900. Breaking The Law Much of the civil unrest in the 1890's led us to the form of government we have today. The "bearded men" protected their ability to act arbitrarily and tyrannically in the Australian Constitution by the omission of a Bill of Rights. Tozer acted in this manner, dispatching armed troops and enacting despotic legislation which promoted the shooting of dissenters on sight. The Shearer's Strike also led to the formation of the modern Labor Party, as well as one of the longest running anti-labour parties in the National Party. Both have been part of the federal political scene for a long period. But again, like all Australian history, we find a wonderful character - not scared to take on the government and demand a bigger Australia than the small Australia the government gives. Federation was the triumph of small Australia over "Greater Australia", of entrenched special interests and limited franchise. John Dunmore Lang's words from fifty years earlier proved prophetic;
As the steam rose from the boggy ground on which the men had pitched their camp at Barcaldine, union leaders warned the men of property that if the bush workers could not get what they wanted by constitutional means they must get their tucker somehow.
There on 21 March one of their leaders, Martin, roused them to fever pitch as he told them that already in Qld. 10,000 bushmen behind 10,000 steel blades were the only effective remedy for the unionists' grievances. There the men had held a mock trial of Sir Samuel Griffith and the local member.
After the court condemned them to death as tyrants and traitors the men saturated the effigies with kerosene and set them alight, belabouring them with sticks and howling like fiends until the flames subsided.
I have no hesitation in expressing it as my belief and conviction, that the very worst government which it is possible to suppose could ever emanate from popular election in these colonies, in the event of their attaining their freedom and independence, which would be incomparably better than the very best we are ever likely to under their connection with Great Britain.The manner in which the shearers were dealt with by the Queensland colony, and Tozer's later legislation against liberty and government restraint give Lang his strongest argument. When "Shearblade" Martin and his crowd of four hundred gave three groans for the Queen, there was never a chance that government would hear their groans as anything other then disloyalty or sedition. cam
