EUREKA - WHY THE BLUE & WHITE FLAG IS STILL FLYING by Paddy Gorman

(Speaking at Politics in the Pub, at the Gaelic Club, Sydney, November, 2005)

This time last year, as Australia prepared to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Eureka Rebellion, the Miners Union held its triennial National Convention.

Rank and file delegates from every one of the 160 CFMEU mining Lodges and Branches throughout Australia attended and the theme chosen to reflect the character of the Union's many struggles was "Keeping the Eureka Spirit Alive - 150 years of fighting for a Fair Go".

For mineworkers today, the Eureka miners rebellion is not a far off historical clash that occurred 151 years ago and is frozen in time; it is alive in our struggles today.

And for miners today, there is no more fitting emblem of the spirit of a Fair Go than the Eureka flag. It stands as the powerful symbol of resistance to injustice.

Legacy of Eureka While the legacy of Eureka rightly belongs to all Australians, it is at the sharp end of workers struggles that it is at its most prominent.

This should be hardly surprising given the events that led to the Eureka uprising.

A much neglected factor is the role played by the business community and the Squattocracy at the time and their class demands for labour.

In his excellent book, Bob Walshe points out that in the six year period of the goldrush from 1851, Australia's population doubled from 400,000 to 800,000.

It's recorded that by 1854 there were almost 70,000 men, women and children living on the Victorian goldfields chasing their fortune. Ballarat alone had a population of some 20,000, including immigrants from Ireland, North America, Britain, Europe and China.

The rush to the gold fields created a shortage of labour as many workers left the factories, service industries and the land in search of their fortune. This greatly concerned the captains of industry and the squattocracy.

At the behest of the employers and squatters, the Governor of Victoria, Sir Charles Hotham, moved to force workers out of the gold fields and back to the cities.

Up to the middle of September 1854, the search for licences on the gold fields occurred about once a month.

Hotham decreed that license hunts become the order of the day. He ordered that fines be substantially increased to five pounds for a first offence, ten pounds for a second and fifteen pounds for a third.

As an incentive to purge the goldfields and force workers back into the arms of employers, Hotham generously ordered that half the value of every fine be given to the arresting police man.

To fight the injustices inflicted on them, the Eureka miners responded by banding together. There were no trade unions in the goldfields at the time. Indeed, the first mining unions were only emerging on the coalfields in the colony.

Nevertheless, the essence of trade unionism is collectivism and there is no greater definition of collectivism than the oath sworn by the Eureka Diggers "to stand truly by each other and fight to defend our rights and liberties".

The Irish at Eureka

The Eureka Rebellion is rightly defined by its multicultural character.

Among those who defended the Stockade were people from 16 nations, including many predecessors from my native land, Ireland and I would like to offer a few observations on this:

Many of the Irish who were drawn to the Victorian goldfields were Irish migrants who had escaped the horrors of the famine of the 1840s, in which the population of Ireland had been halved by starvation and immigration from 8 million to 4 million within a generation.

(Population of England 11 million, then - today almost 60 million today)

Those immigrant Irish had experienced great injustice and repression in their homeland and hoped that they had escaped it in their migration to Australia.

Among their number was a 25-year old civil engineer, Peter Lalor, who came to Australia in 1852.

He was the younger brother of James Fintan Lalor who was one of the leaders of the Young Irelanders Rebellion against the Crown in 1848, that had sprung from the injustices of the famine.

James Fintan Lalor was an outstanding radical leader whose work and writings were to help inspire the formation of the Fenian Movement in Ireland. He died in 1849 aged 42 from ill-health but not before he led a Young Irelanders assault on a British garrison in Ireland and was charged with treason.

When the Irish on the Victorian goldfields once again found themselves facing injustice and tyranny they took their stand in helping draw a line in the sand at Eureka.

Outside the resistance of the Aboriginal people to colonisation, Eureka was the second armed insurrection in Australia's colonial history.

The first was at Vinegar Hill in western Sydney in 1804 when Irish convicts rebelled and were brutally crushed.

Fittingly, 50 years later, the Eureka rebels password was 'Vinegar Hill'

There seems to be a difference in estimates of the Diggers who were killed at the Eureka Stockade but what is not in question is that the majority of the killed and wounded were Irish, including the leader, Peter Lalor, who lost an arm.

Within a year of Eureka, Peter Lalor was elected to the Victorian Legislative Council and from there to the Legislative Assembly where he served three terms as Speaker of the House.

While Eureka has secured Peter Lalor's place in Austalia's history, there are two other episodes in his later life that do him little credit.

In 1874, in a break from his Parliamentary career, Peter Lalor resided in Clunes near Ballarat. Here he became chairman of the town's water commission and a mine owner.

The mineworkers at Clunes went on strike in support of having Saturday afternoons off and in the ensuing confrontation the mineowners attempted to bring in scabs to break the strike.

They didn't succeed and this led directly to the formation of the Amalgamated Miners Association, the first attempt to set up a national miners union in Australia.

In 1880, Peter Lalor joined the Establishment in supporting the outlawing of Ned Kelly and his Gang. In 1881 when Ned Kelly faced the gallows and Victorians signed what was then the biggest petition in Australia's history to save Ned, Peter Lalor refused to support it.

Eureka and workers today

The test of the historical significance of an event is measured not only by its enduring longevity but also by the impact it continues to exert on society.

151 years on, Eureka has not only stood the test of time, it is perhaps more celebrated now than at any other time in Australia's history, certainly in the industrial arena.

With the Howard Government's new repressive IR laws determined to smash collectivism and destroy the trade union movement, the fighting spirit of Eureka will never be needed more than now.

But are today's workers up to the challenge?

I believe they are and this is based on my experiences over the past 10 years with the Miners Union, the CFMEU, locked in a series of bitter and protracted struggles with some of the biggest multinationals in the world supported by the Howard Government.

I'd like to share some of these with you:

Weipa: In far North Queensland, at Rio Tinto's Weipa bauxite mine in October 1995, 75 trade unionists took a stand against discrimination. The 75 were all that remained in unions after Rio Tinto had succeeded in bribing the rest of the workforce onto individual contracts with wage increases of up to $15,000 a year for leaving the union.

Those who stuck to the Union were vehemently discriminated against. In some cases, fully qualified and experienced union tradespeople were earning less than third-year apprentices they were charged with training.

The Weipa union miners drew their line in the sand when they walked off the job on 13 October 1995. They gathered at the Mission River Bridge on the fringes of the company town and with one of the strikers galloping across the 2km bridge bearing the Eureka flag, they marched to set up their Picket Point beneath the flag of the Southern Cross.

Their strike lasted 50-days and sparked a magnificent campaign of industrial solidarity that included a national maritime strike and a coal strike.

With unions and community groups rallying throughout Australia to support them, the Weipa union miners won their dispute and discrimination against union workers at Weipa was defeated.

Vickery miners strike While the Weipa workers were locked in their campaign, Rio Tinto was engaged in its first attempt to deunionise workers at its Australian coal operations.

In August 1995, Rio attempted to impose 12.5 hour shifts on its Vickery coal miners. They refused and went on strike.

As they set up their Picket Line outside the mine, they were presented with a Eureka flag by a group of miners who had staged a world record 55-day stay down strike at the nearby Preston coal mine in 1983. During their stay down the pit, that Eureka flag had flown over the mine entrance as a symbol of defiance. The flag was now handed over to fly over the Vickery Picket Line.

The Vickery strike lasted 51-weeks before the company backed down. The Picket Line had been manned 24-hours a day, 7-days a week for the entire dispute.

In the course of the industrial stand-off, Rio Tinto had advertised for some 30 new positions at the mine to be filled when it reopened. It received over 800 applications. The company hand-picked those it thought would be most anti-union. However, when the mine reopened after the strike, every single one of Rio's specially chosen new employees joined the Miners Union .Rio later closed the mine spitefully citing that it was a 'trial operation'.

Hunter Valley

Rio Tinto didn't lick its Vickery wounds for long. Iin 1996 it moved against its unionised workforce at the Hunter Valley No.1 mine.

Individual contracts were offered to the mining workforce of 450 with significant pay bribes for those who took them. At the same time, Rio announced it planned to retrench over 100 miners. The workers were told that not only would they be better paid on individual contracts but that their jobs were guaranteed. Less than a dozen took the bribe. The rest stuck with the Union and fought collectively for their rights.

A bitter strike erupted at the giant Hunter Valley open cut and the miners erected Picket Lines at all entrances, with the Eureka flag flying proudly over each of them.

The Miners Union and the community rallied behind the Hunter Valley workers and when 114 of them were unfairly sacked, it kicked off a campaign of action that was to last over four years.

Meanwhile, at Rio's nearby Mount Thorley coal mine, management embarked on the same anti-union campaign, in this case sacking 90 miners weeks before Christmas, triggering a three-year campaign at that mine.

The miners from both operations set up a Protest Hut along the New England Highway and for years fought a magnificent community campaign against Rio's victimisation of the union miners.

Finally, Rio Tinto cracked and in Australia's largest ever unfair dismissal settlement paid out $25milion to the victimised miners.

It was a stunning win culminating in Rio Tinto's current workforce in the Hunter Valley covered by collective agreements with the Union.

Blair Athol victimisation

In what turned out to be the longest ever industrial dispute in Australia's history, 16 coal miners at Rio Tinto's Blair Athol operation in Central Queensland fought a 7-year campaign against victimisation.

The dispute was only finally settled this year in the workers favour. They received a confidential settlement for the 7-years of victimisation and those who wanted jobs back are were fit enough to return are now back on the job.

Rio Tinto had spent over $20 million in legal fees to keep the16 Union miners out of work.

Eureka and the challenges ahead

These are only a brief cross section of the bitter disputes that have gripped Australia during the almost 10-years of the Howard Government. There are many, many others.

Perhaps the most notable of all the struggles involved the MUA in the Patrick dispute during which an outraged public rallied against armed goons and attack dogs on the waterfront to support the workers against an aggressive anti-union employer backed to the hilt by the Howard Government.

These successful workers struggles have all had one thing in common - they were all imbued with the Eureka spirit. They encompassed workers having the courage and unity to fight against the odds. They showed the courage and determination of workers not to flinch in the face of injustice and tyranny. And they were all supported by large sections of the community rallying behind the workers.

These struggles show that Eureka Spirit is not only alive and well in Australia, it is thriving.

If anyone is in any doubt about the determination of Australian workers today to fight for their rights they only have to look at the mobilisation of 540,000 people throughout Australia on 15 November in the ACTU's National Day of Community Protest against Howard's repressive IR laws.

On that day, more than 210,000 people rallied in Melbourne alone in the biggest protest in Australia's history. And fittingly they did so as the Melbourne Town Hall stood draped in a giant Eureka flag.

From Eureka in 1854 to Melbourne in 2005 and right throughout Australia, the Southern Cross is still the rallying emblem for all those who refuse to be cowered and who take their stand to demand justice and a Fair Go.

Paddy Gorman is the National Media Director, CFMEU Mining Division