Episode on the early history of the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World union in Australia, in conversation with Paula DeAngelis. Paula is a historian and contributed to Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW.

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E19: The IWW in Australia – Working Class History

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IWW anti-war meeting in Sydney, September 11, 1916. Courtesy UW Digital Collections/Wikimedia Commons
IWW anti-war poster. Courtesy IWW

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While mostly known for its organisation in the U.S., the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World union has a significant history on the other side of the world in Australia, where IWW members organised strikes and sabotage, winning improvements for coal miners, fruit pickers, sheep shearers and others and helped stop conscription to the army during World War One. This is Working Class History.

[Bump Me Into Parliament by Warren Fahey played]

Today, we’re going to be talking about the history of the IWW union, also known as the Wobblies, in Australia. We introduce the union in our episode 6, so if you’re not acquainted with basic info about the union, I’d go back and listen to that first. We are very pleased to be joined by Paula DeAngelis, a contributor to Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW, who, like Verity Burgmann, wrote a chapter about the Australian Wobblies for the book. The IWW was a revolutionary syndicalist union. This means that instead of political parties or the ballot box, they saw direct action by workers at the point of production as being the most effective tool for social change. To start off with, Paula tells us about the historical background of the formation of the union in Australia.

Paula: The best place to start that story is with the maritime strike of 1890. It started with the officers in the merchant marine, so it came from the trade union movement or the craft union movement. It spread to a lot of other industries and it was a disaster for the union movement here in Australia because the state here deployed all of its weapons against it to crush that strike. It ended in a very bad failure and all those workers had their wages cut by 30%. In response to that, the Australian trade union movement set up the Labour Party and a whole other bunch of related institutions that were about giving the working class a voice within the state and within the parliamentary process so that it couldn’t be deployed against them again in that way. We had a Labour Party here functioning for 20 years and, in fact, Labour governments, so it was a very successful party. At the time the Wobblies were formed, the Labour Party was in power. The Australian trade union movement was basically an outpost of the British trade union movement. Another thing that you have developing out of there was something that was called, in Britain, new unionism. In 1889, there was a strike on the London docks and what that dealt with was unskilled and semi-skilled workers. In the United States, you’ve got a history there of a very strong conflict between skilled and unskilled workers but in Britain and Australia, people like Ben Tillet, Kier Hardie and Tom Mann realised and advocated for bringing skilled and unskilled workers into the ranks of the trade union movement. The Australian context for the development of the Wobblies came under that area, so the socialist movement was incorporated into the trade union movement that way. We had a form of industrial unionism here which was, essentially, under Labour Party control. It was hierarchical and top-down but the idea of bringing unskilled labourers of a certain type into the one union in a whole industry, that already existed and it had been incorporated into the political process here. You still have a similar situation in the sense that there’s still a difference in the way that unskilled labourers are regarded. The unskilled labourers were all the workers that came out of the second industrial revolution which was basically the invention of steel. The skilled workers’ unions came from an earlier era of the industrial revolution where the worker was at the centre of the production process. All the workers who joined the Wobblies and who, throughout the world, joined the syndicalist movement, which the Wobblies were connected to, they were dock workers and labourers. Basically, the difference was the way you were paid and the way you were hired. In the United States, the trade union movement, the craft unions there assumed that those workers were unorganisable. In Britain, Australia, New Zealand and anywhere in the British dominion, the union movement tried to control those workers by bringing them into their own ranks. You have to remember that Australia is not really a country in this sense, particularly not back then. It was an outpost of British colonialism. Most of the people here saw themselves as British. We were a British colony. Our entire economy was geared towards being a British colony, so we exported raw materials. In a sense, the only type of workers you have here are industrial workers. If you take construction into account and all of the steelworkers, there’s not a manufacturing base. In America, you had your own manufacturing base and your own markets. It was all very internal and there was a lot going on but our economy has always been directed outwards.

In 1910, Australia got the world’s first Labour Party government and the first social democratic, national government. Part of the reason for the popularity of the IWW were the failings of parliamentary socialism to bring real positive change for working people. This was well illustrated by the case of Billy Hughes.

Paula: He came from the union movement. Billy Hughes set up an industrial union within the Labour Party and that was the Waterside Workers’ Federation. He used that to get to power and became Prime Minister and then, from the union point of view, he turned on the working class. He cut wages, he tried to introduce conscription, he did over his own members, he sent in strike-breakers and all of those kinds of things. If you ask anybody in Australia, they’d say, hissing and spitting, ‘Billy Hughes’.

[That Dirty Little Traitor, Billy Hughes by Warren Fahey played]

The U.S. IWW was formed in 1905. The first branch in Australia was established two years later.

Paula: Initially, the Australian Wobblies were set up through the Democratic Socialist Party which, these days, is referred to as the DeLeonite wing of the IWW. They were socialist clubs, basically. They were little propaganda groups that were set up around Australia. However, industrially speaking, I’m sure Peter went into the initial split between the Chicago and the Detroit model and that was reflected here to some extent. Although, the Australian Wobblies were more syndicalist from the beginning and much more cynical about political action because of all those experiences with the Labour Party and the way the Labour Party had been incorporated into the government and sold out the workers. They were more anti-political anyway and then when the 1908 Chicago version of the Wobblies was set up, there was a group here in Adelaide who [08:14 – unclear] that organisation. The administration was initially here in Adelaide. They had direct connections, specifically to coal miners and also maritime workers. There were direct political connections between the U.S. and the Australian IWW. For example, William Trautmann, who was one of the founders of the leadership in the IWW in the United States, was actually New Zealand born and the son of German immigrants to New Zealand. In 1905, when the IWW was initially being set up, he made a trip back to Australia and spread the word, so there were some direct propaganda and organisational connections in that sense and they were maintained. There was also a parallel movement of industrial unionism which came from an earlier generation. The Western Federation of Miners were well-known here. Coal miners tended to travel around from coal-mining town to coal mining town, so there were a lot of direct connections and that comes up in our book. Peter Clayworth talks about it as he came from a New Zealand coal-mining town and ended up working in Colorado in a coal-mining town. He would go where the work was. You had a lot of Canadians, Americans and Europeans who’d spent time in Canada and the United States coming through Australia all the time, so they kept the connection. The Australian Wobblies imported a lot of literature from the United States. There’s a sort of rank and file influence going on and people would turn up, orate and spread the literature around which they’d brought with them on the ship. I think it’s an excellent example of the way that the IWW thought globally and acted locally because all of those workers brought with them their experiences of direct action in Canada, in Ireland and in the United States and adapted it to what was going on in front of them here in Australia. Historically speaking, in terms of the way that they enacted what they were doing, they went in quite a different direction because they were responding to local conditions and that is what syndicalism is all about.

Perhaps, unlike the American IWW whose founders were mostly born in the U.S., it appears that most of the founders of the Australian branch were immigrants.

Paula: In a sense, if you look at all those leading Wobblies who were from Ireland and Scotland, they weren’t really immigrants. They were Australians as much as any Australians are. They were quite a few Wobblies that were Australian born, like Monty Miller and Bill Beatty. It didn’t matter back then because that’s how the British worked. If you were part of the British Empire, you were a British citizen. Leading on from that, I think there is actually quite a lot of evidence that the influence of immigrants in the United States on the Wobblies has been underestimated because a lot of the early Wobbly history was about promoting how American they were. In reality, the various ethnic and immigrant communities in the United States had an enormous influence, like in the silk strike in Paterson, for example. That’s one of their more famous strikes and the reason that strike was so successful was that there was an Italian, immigrant, anarchist community there that had been there for a generation. They’d already organised the community and they just tapped into that. That kind of evidence pops up all the time if you go back over it. We’re a country of immigrants [laughter], so whether you were Australian born or not was irrelevant. There are Irish and Scottish names. Verity talks about how many Scotsmen and Irishmen there were in it but that was the trade union movement. The Scots and the Irish were the backbone of the Australian trade union movement.

The Australian IWW organised in many ways which were similar to the U.S. but which differed in some key aspects.

Paula: The basic principles and tactics of the Australian IWW were the same as the ones in the U.S. They organised direct action at the point of production. A lot of this has been hidden history until recent but you can see, particularly, if you look in Queensland, there was a group of itinerant workers who followed the seasonal work. They went mining, and then they went shearing, and then they went fruit picking. They would work their way up and down the east coast of Australia. They were a very similar kind of grouping to the agricultural workers’ organisation which is a lot of what people think about when they think about the U.S. Wobblies and that whole hobo mythology. They were the Australian version. They were mostly single men who travelled and lived together in horrible conditions. There are stories of those guys taking a kind of sabotage direct action where the shearers, who were very militant, set fire to their accommodation in order to force the boss to build better accommodation. They did all of that sort of stuff but they also got involved in free speech fights and there were several of those. Tom Barker, who’s my subject in the book, talks about getting involved in free speech fights so that they were free to soapbox and speak in the Sydney domain. That happened right in the middle of Sydney and he really enjoyed that. A lot of those things were similar. The major difference, I think, in the method of organisation was the relationship that they had with the craft unions and with the trade union leadership. As I said before, they were much more incorporated into the trade union movements here. They were regarded as the left extremists down there with the Socialist Party and people like that but they were part of the movement and weren’t excluded from it the way they were in the United States. The other major difference was the development of the European war. World War One is what people mostly call it which I feel is inaccurate. The Wobblies got involved, in that era, in what you might call a very political campaign. The U.S. IWW took no position on World War One. The idea that they were anti-war was used by the state in the United States to repress them but they really weren’t because it didn’t affect them industrially.

Another significant difference was that union density in Australia was much higher at around half the workforce compared with only around 12% in the U.S. Many workers had to be members of craft unions in order to get employment at union workplaces, so most Wobblies in Australia were dual members of both the IWW and other unions. Paula explains more about other activities the IWW undertook.

Paula: Most of the key leaders of the Wobblies spent their time in pretty much the same way that the organisers in the IWW in the U.S. did. They took their literature and they travelled around. They got jobs, agitated while they were and sold their literature. They got fired, usually, and went on to the next job and agitated there and that happened all over the place. There are identifiable industrial disputes that are in the record, like in Broken Hill, which was a coal mining community and so it was a very stable place. Basically, the town was run by socialist miners. There were industrial disputes like that. The shearers got involved in a lot of industrial disputes. What the leadership and the ones that are in the historical record did was popped into Sydney, picked up a whole bunch of literature and then travelled the country soapboxing, organising and agitating, just like the Wobblies did in the United States. Throughout the First World War, they also ran daily political campaigns in Sydney, mainly, and also in Melbourne and they were much more traditional, propaganda demonstration campaigns. There was a point in time, in the middle of the war, where Tom Barker, the operations’ manager for the Sydney branch… the IWW had a hall in Castlereagh Street in Sydney and he lived there and basically ran the show. It served a whole bunch of purposes. One of the things he was doing was organising daily protests against the war and conscription in the Sydney domain where those things traditionally happened. They did a lot of that too. That kept him busy [laughter]. They were publishing Direct Action every week and then, for a while there, every day and that’s what they’re remembered for in Australian history. A lot of that history that comes out of the shearers in Queensland is more recent work and Rowan Day has uncovered a lot of that stuff but the Wobblies that everybody knows in Australian labour history comes from that Sydney branch. During the miners’ strike, Tom Barker went to Broken Hill. It was an era when strikes were going on all the time and not just here but also in the United States and the Wobblies were always there.

Australian Wobblies were involved in too many disputes to list but some of them included fruit pickers in Victoria getting a pay increase after the union threatened to destroy the fruit trees and miners in Broken Hill taking Saturday afternoons off to give themselves a 44-hour week and then later going on strike for the 8-hour day, a strike which spread across the country. In 1916, the IWW organised a slowdown in New South Wales’ railway workshops. One of my favourite ever political posters that I read about was put up by Australian Wobbly rail workers and it basically said this – ‘Slow down. Slow work means more workers are needed. More workers mean lower unemployment. Lower unemployment means greater demand for labour which means higher wages for all.’ That kind of radical analysis put forward in straightforward language appealed to large numbers of people and, as in the U.S., Australian Wobblies also created and fed a lively working-class counter-culture using things like music and cartoons.

Paula: Industrial Workers of the World recognised the ways in which the working class communicated and music was a very important part of that. You’re trying to organise a group of people who don’t necessarily speak the same language and they come from different industries. The cultural production was a very important part of what the Smithsonian Institute call their ‘organising tools’. The music, the cartoons and the newspapers were all very much organising tools for the Wobblies and that was because that was the way the working class communicated and shared information and that’s a very old tradition that goes back centuries. I think one of the major reasons that they had such an influence on working-class history here, and in the United States and in Canada, was because they gave the working class a forum for their own cultural production. As far as they were concerned, all that stuff was there. It was workers who drew those amazing cartoons and made up those songs and it kept everybody united. It was a method of solidarity and that comes from their work experience. Society thinks of industrial unskilled workers as an undifferentiated mass and interchangeable and that was a very disempowering way of looking at it. The Wobblies turned that around. You can see it in the cartoons which is always visually represented with the industrial worker being a big, strong, masculine, powerful figure and capitalists being fat and awkward [laughter]. They were very much about promoting the self-sufficiency, the independence, the creativity of their own people. The cultural production was equally important here because there was no way to organise unskilled labourers without it. We happened to get some cultural geniuses and so that had a lasting effect. Syd Nicholls was an incredible artist and it was the same in the U.S. and they’re the ones you remember but people were writing songs all the time. You can read the newspapers and people send them in. People write poems and they’re just workers. They take the time out from their night shifts to draw these beautiful pictures or write a poem and all of those kinds of things and the Wobblies had a forum for publishing them and they did. Yeah, it was equally important and the published bit is only the small part of the story because that’s the bit we have left. They sang American songs as well. They would import The Little Red Songbook which included all of Joe HIll’s songs. It didn’t matter where the song came from because they were true internationalists.

With the outbreak of World War I, the Australian IWW threw itself whole-heartedly into campaigning against the war and, in particular, against conscription and at times, organising public meetings of tens of thousands of people.

Paula: In Australia, the First World War had a very detrimental and profound effect on the economic situation of the working class here which meant that the Wobblies had a responsibility here to organise around that issue. It was an industrial issue and not a political one and they got very involved in that and they were violently opposed to it. The U.S. IWW was very interested in what was going on with the war and they took the position that it was a way of turning the working class into cannon fodder. That was their basic position on it. If you read the issues of Solidarity from that era, they publish stuff about what’s going on in Europe all of the time but it didn’t affect their economy and it wasn’t part of their day-to-day life. However, the first and immediate effect was that our exports dried up which was an economic disaster because after Britain, our second biggest importer of raw materials was Germany. So when war was declared, we immediately lost that part of the economy. The way that worked is we exported raw materials to Britain, they manufactured goods and sent them back here. That stopped happening as well because the British economy was entirely turned to war production. You can see that immediately, and the Wobblies would have seen this, there’s not just a life and death relationship in a direct sense of sending soldiers off to die but the working class here came very close to starving. The Wobblies were very opposed to the war which most of the working class wasn’t and I think that’s an important point too. The trade unions supported Australia’s entry into the war on patriotic grounds because we saw ourselves as British and that led to some strange and quite nasty effects. The unions voluntarily implemented a no-strike rule for the duration of the war because they saw it as their patriotic duty. Lots and lots of trade unions signed up and they volunteered. The problem they had was with conscription but not really with the war because we’ve got a long history with press gangs [laughter]. The British tended to use coercive methods to get the working class to do what they wanted and the trade unions were very well aware of that history. They didn’t want to give the government the power to conscript and, in fact, they saw that as a betrayal because they were doing their patriotic duty. The Wobblies practised coalition politics there. They were quite publicly opposed to the war itself and said it was a bosses’ war and it was turning the working class into cannon fodder. That was the difference because the Wobblies devoted a lot of time to those anti-conscription campaigns and that’s what they’re famous for these days, I think, and it’s the influence they had on preventing conscription from being instituted in Australia. There were two referenda and both times, the Australian population, despite the best efforts of the government, voted against instituting conscription right down to the soldiers in the trenches who were there.

Probably the most famous Australian IWW poster read ‘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.’ This poster, in particular, led to Tom Barker’s arrest, despite the fact it was cleverly worded to avoid calling on workers directly to refuse military service, which would have been a serious criminal offence. Another prominent Wobbly, who was arrested in 1917, was the 84-year-old Monty Miller.

Paula: Monty Miller lived in Western Australia. He was an anarchist all of his life and he lived well into his 80s. He was a writer, a philosopher and an excellent soapbox orator which is a very common characteristic with the IWW. I think a big reason why they lasted was that they attracted orators and propagandists of enormous calibre and Monty was one of them. He was tall, charming and erudite. When the Wobblies were established here, he joined because he was an anarchist and a syndicalist. He ended up being prosecuted several times and jailed for being a Wobbly in his 80s because he was very old when it all started. He was also hilarious [laughter]. The Western Australian Wobblies, as often happens with Western Australia, developed their own history and their own relationship with the Western Australian government. The West Australian government used a bunch of repressive tactics and one of them was to arrest and put on trial Monty Miller. So he and his fellow Wobbly, whose name escapes me, decided to defend themselves so they could cross-examine each other and turn the court into a farce, basically [laughter]. That was the kind of person he was. He was one of the legendary figures of the Australian revolutionary movement and came through the Wobblies and so he sort of has a status like Eugene Debs in the United States. He had a well-established career as an activist and as a revolutionary before the Wobblies came and then he contributed to the establishment and spread of Wobbly ideas. As with the U.S., they were all characters in some fashion or another. Donald Grant had an enormous influence on the Labour Party in later years. He was a magnificent orator according to all reports. Quite a few Wobblies became card-carrying members of the Communist Party, just as they did in the United States. They disseminated the culture into that area as well.

As in, probably, every radical movement, women and LGBTQ people played an important role in the union which, unfortunately, there’s not much written about in the historical record.

Paula: Just as they were in the United States, women played a key role in the IWW which is something that’s not necessarily reflected in the historical record. In particular, there was a woman here named Violet Wilkins who was a very staunch member of the Wobblies and Verity Burgmann describes her as ‘indefatigable’. The Wobblies came to an end here as a big movement in the 1920s but she spent the rest of her life trying to revive it [laughter]. She spent the whole rest of her life setting up branches, trying to get them to work and then doing it again. There are letters in the U.S. IWW records because that she would send her reports [laughter]. No labour movement and no revolutionary movement works unless the women are contributing to it and that’s particularly true of the kind of communities that the Wobblies sprang from which were basically miners and dockers. There’s a whole background story there that we don’t know too much about other than knowing prominent women who were opposed to the war, like Vida Goldstein and all of those sorts of people. It’s definitely a project worth investigating. As far as sexual minorities go, the most notable example that you’re bringing up here is the story of Charlie Reeve. Verity and I did a book launch together a couple of months ago and [laughter] she mentions that because when she wrote that book, at the time, she didn’t know that Charlie Reeve was gay. She found out because after she published Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, a descendent of his got in touch with her and passed on all of these letters which were Charlie writing to his sailor partner, Carl [s.l. Benson – 32:02]. She really wanted to put that in. Something that is often brought up is their remarkable lack of discrimination against minority groups of any kind. They were not into race lines. They were not into colour lines or gender and sexual lines. It wasn’t relevant and that’s because their value was universal class solidarity. The fact that you were working-class overrode any other consideration. It didn’t matter what country you came from. It didn’t matter what your sexual preferences were. It didn’t matter if you were a man or a woman. If you were working class and class conscious, you were one of them. If you weren’t class conscious, you still had the potential to be. That’s the way they operated and I think that’s what allowed that sort of flexibility in the movement. To do them credit, that carried on into the Australian Communist Party and Charlie Reeve, I’m pretty sure, ran a bookshop in Melbourne for decades and was part of the left-wing scene there.

While the IWW didn’t appear to say much specifically about the rights of Indigenous peoples in Australia, a number of Aboriginal people were involved in the union. Although, unfortunately, it would be very difficult to determine the extent of this as the union didn’t record people’s ethnicity and British colonial policy was to, essentially, erase Indigenous culture and give anglicised names to Indigenous people, often, who were abducted from their families.

Paula: There were a pair of brothers here in Adelaide, in this era around the First World War, in the ’20s. They had incredibly Irish names and they were well-known as soapbox orators in this area. They probably had a presence in the shearers’ unions as a lot of Aboriginal people worked in the industries up north and I suspect that a lot of those people an influence on the Australian Communist Party position which was very advanced and anti-colonialist. There’s definitely an anti-colonial thread in the Australian IWW and so they would have seen supporting indigenous rights and Aboriginal people as part of that because they were, again, working class. They were being done over by the British Empire and everybody else was also being done over by the British Empire. That’s the position that the Australian Communist Party took and the Wobblies were a very strong underground influence in the Australian Communist Party. Very little is known about them and that’s partly because the Wobblies were colour blind to the extent that they even make a big deal of that kind of thing.

As in the United States, Wobblies in Australia came under attack by the authorities and the press.

Paula: I think the union had a very similar set of responses to the authorities in the United States. It took slightly different forms but authorities here used the Wobbly opposition to the war, in part, to jail and deport. The most famous case was the IWW 12 who were accused of arson. They go rounding up the leadership and putting them in jail, just like they did in the U.S. where that happened. Deportation is a favourite tactic of the Australian government. We deport people all the time. They deported a lot of Australian Wobblies of foreign extraction but they couldn’t get away with deporting the locally born ones. Obviously, there were cultural campaigns and propaganda campaigns against them and associating them with foreign revolutionary ideas, like Bolshevism and all that sort of stuff. That happened as well. They were a very similar set of tactics that were used in the U.S.

The biggest single act of repression against the union was the arrest of the IWW 12 in Sydney for crimes including treason, which was a hanging offence, as well as arson, sedition and forgery.

Paula: The IWW 12 were the core leadership of the Wobblies in Sydney. Administration of the Wobblies had moved to Sydney by this stage and they were all very successful IWW leaders and organisers. The police here used a lot of the same tactics that the Department of Justice used in the United States. They would raid Wobbly halls and they would confiscate documents. They worked very hard to censor the mail and getting Wobbly literature out through the post was really hard. So ultimately, they rounded up 12 Wobblies, including some of their key leaders, like Tom Glynn, put them in jail and they accused them of arson. It was all a very dodgy court proceeding and they had a paid informant, basically. It was a serious miscarriage of justice but they were, pretty much, all given 20 years in jail. That galvanised the union movement and so they were all actually released four years later in 1920/21. A lot of people, like the subject of my chapter Tom Barker, were deported and he was deported to Chile. There are lots of stories. An Australian historian has written a whole book on how Australia deals with its social radicals by deporting them which is a whole British tactic and the U.S. and Australia both use it. There were situations where Wobblies were being deported from Australia to the American continent and Wobblies from the American continent were being deported back to Australia and the ships passed each other [laughter]. The problem with being deported is you’re in jail for a very long time first and that was Tom Barker’s experience. He was in jail in [s.l. Albury – 38:09], in the middle of nowhere, for nine or ten months before he was deported and it drove him a little nuts [laughter].

After conscription was defeated in October 1916, which the Labour Prime Minister, Billy Hughes, blamed on the IWW, he had the IWW declared an unlawful association. They then banned their publication Direct Action from being sent through the post and later seized all copies of it. In 1917, again with the support of the Labour Party, the government strengthened the Unlawful Association Bill which meant that anyone who couldn’t prove they weren’t a member of the union was sentenced to six months in prison. While this and other attacks largely led to the demise of the union as a significant force, Wobbly activists, ideas and tactics lived on.

Paula: The IWW here has never entirely demised. That period of time was really the only period of time where you might say they had an influence on the broader culture of Australia and they had a significant impact. After that, their influence becomes a little harder to track and a little more nebulous because the organisation itself was pretty much destroyed in terms of it being a viable union. However, all of those people didn’t go away. The split between the left and the right happened during the First World War, so that was already done. What happened here, and I think this happened in the United States, was that all those people looked for other ways to bring about the revolution. It wasn’t about the organisation but about your agenda. What they did, and this happened in Britain too with the syndicalist movement, was they moved on to the next form of organisation. Again the Wobblies weren’t a vanguard. They followed what the working class decided to do [laughter]. It wasn’t the organisation that was important. It was where the working class was going and a lot of those people joined the Communist Party. In an organisational sense, it was definitely the repression from the state that caused the demise of the union in that sense. It existed on paper for a long time and there was a branch in Melbourne which was pretty much continuous but it was mostly a little group of musicians, poets and people who were into the cultural aspect of it. There’s no doubt, and it’s the same in the United States, that the Industrial Workers of the World had an enormous influence way beyond their membership. There’s a good piece of evidence for that, at the time, with Direct Action. The Wobblies never had more than a couple of thousand members but everybody read their newspaper. Everybody read Direct Action. Direct Action had a circulation of thousands. With working-class papers like that, it’s not just the people who buy them that read them. Everybody reads them because they get passed around. There was an extent to which the Wobblies filtered into the working-class culture, the trade union culture, the Communist Party culture and connected up with Australian mythologies about the larrikin and the [s.l. Slag Man – 41:33]. We like hobos here [laughter]. We’re into trouble-makers and all that sort of stuff. The Wobbly ethic intersected with Australian radical culture in an important way. I’m a ‘red baby’ and so I was raised in the communist, Marxist- Leninist tradition here in Australia and I spent all of my life singing Wobbly songs without even really realising where they came from. They were all in the May Day Songbook and I would go to May Day every year and I would sing these songs. It was only much later, when I started investigating history, that I worked out where all this stuff came from. They were the Wobbly songs [laughter].

[Outro music].

That’s all the time we have for today. For our Patreon supporters, we have a bit of bonus audio where Paula tells the story of how the largely forgotten history of the IWW in Australia got rediscovered in the 1960s. For more Wobbly history, as well as our episode 6 that we mentioned, our episode 9 is about the later period in the union’s history in the U.S. and episode 16 is about women in the early IWW. As always, we’ve got lots of footnotes with links to more information and further reading in the show notes, as well as where you can get Wobblies of the World. Massive thanks to our Patreon supporters who make this podcast possible. You can support us as well and get early access to episodes and other neat things like free and discounted merch at patreon.com/workingclasshistory. Thanks also to Warren Fahey for permission to use his rendition of the Australian Wobbly song Bump Me Into Parliament. This episode was edited by Louise Barry. Catch you next time.

Transcribed by PODTRANSCRIBE

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