| Review of: | Australia's Own Cold War: The Waterfront Under Menzies by Tom Sheridan |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Frank Bongiorno |
| Reviewed in: | Australian Journal of Politics and History |
| Date accepted online: | 14/01/2008 |
| Published in print: | Volume 53, Issue 03, Pages 465-504 |
Book Reviews
Australia's wharfies feature in both popular imagination and the national historiography as the proletarian trench warriors
Yet this isn't its main theme. Both Communists and their opponents exaggerated the influence exercised by the Party on the affairs of the Waterside Workers' Federation (WWF). And Menzies himself is ironically a rather minor figure in Sheridan's story. The Coalition Ministers for Labour, Harold Holt and William McMahon, feature more prominently, but it's the Secretary of the Department of Labour and National Service, Harry Bland, who was the key state player in the industry.
Sheridan's picture of Bland isn't an attractive one. Quite apart from his conveniently selective memory when dealing with historians, he was instrumental in the use of the state to prevent wharfies from deploying the bargaining power offered by full employment and their own cohesiveness to ameliorate wages and conditions - improvements that Sheridan shows to have been long overdue. His approach to the WWF was essentially confrontational.
Employers, journalists, politicians and public servants often found it convenient to blame the waterfront's problems on the "reds" - a technique especially useful to the shipping companies, who were thereby able to divert attention from their own many failings. One of Sheridan's most striking findings is that not only were employers responsible for many of the industry's problems, but that even the likes of Holt and Bland recognised, especially in private, that the industry's difficulties were
But Sheridan argues that the union leadership was mainly responsible and cautious. He is especially impressed by their federal leader, Jim Healy, a prominent Communist who, while retaining his militancy and integrity, also had to spend a great deal of time and energy urging moderation on hot-headed members of the rank and file and rebellious WWF branches. Sheridan's narrative moreover reveals the increasingly significant role played by the ACTU in the industrial relations of the post-war era, especially through its president, Albert Monk. And despite the fierce ideological conflict
This is a fine institutional labour history. As is the case in many such accounts, it has less to say about the social and cultural dimensions of working life than some readers might like. Wharfies' wives and families occasionally flit in and out of the text, but you gain little sense of how the world of work related to the rest of waterside workers' lives; the kind of theme, for instance, touched on in some of John Morrison's stories of the Melbourne waterfront.
But to expect detailed treatment of such matters would be to ask for another kind of history. This is a marvellously informative study, based on massive and meticulous research. The author's knowledge of his subject is deep, and he explains with great skill the intricacies of a complex story, successfully capturing "the unpredictable interplay between a complex mosaic of economic and political factors and the varying motives, psychology and bargaining power of each waterfront actor" (p. 244).