My Newest Favourite Thing: The Wharfies' Mural

One of the most iconic treasures in the Australian National Maritime Museum is the Wharfies’ Mural. It is a window into the cultural movements that occurred among workers on the waterfront during the 20th century, and a reminder of their significant role in broader Australian politics and society.

This mural, an iconic example of Australian working-class cultural expression, originally adorned the canteen walls of the Waterside Workers' Federation building in the busy waterfront of Darling Harbour. Painted in stages mainly between 1953 and 1965, it was a collective effort by nine artists, including waterside labourers, or 'wharfies'. 

Though vital to Australia, wharf labouring was hard, dangerous, low-status work. The maritime unions had long fought for improved wages and conditions, and they took a lead role in national campaigns for social justice, minority rights and anti-war activism. This mural celebrates and memorialises that history.

The Waterside Workers' Federation encouraged the cultural and artistic development of its members. With the support of union leader Tom Nelson, artist Rod Shaw and wharfie Sonny Glynn developed a design that could intertwine maritime and labour history. For years wharfies ate their lunch as the artists worked, debating the social and political struggles as they appeared on the wall.

Reflecting the social and political ideals of those involved, the mural for the Waterside Workers' Federation (WWF) canteen was a collective effort. By the 1950s murals were important to left-wing and working-class cultural expression, particularly in communist circles. Rather than elite activities, artistic creation and appreciation were seen as accessible to everyone. Realist art and so-called 'conscious propaganda' were a focus. Producing banners and placards for May Day marches set the creative groundwork for the mural's creation. Mural artist Evelyn Healy for example, first painted banners for May Day in 1938.

Conversations between the artists, union leaders and wharf labourers guided the struggles and victories that the mural depicted. With the help of wharfie Sonny Glynn, Rod Shaw projected the initial sketches onto the wall and then outlined them in chalk. He then painted over them in oil paint created with pigments from the printery where he worked. Shaw conceived the mural's structure as major themes painted in dark, sepia tones with spaces left for cameos, or small windows, that would be painted in full colour by different artists. He described the effect as 'like a tapestry'.

From those first lines on the wall, the mural eventually wrapped around multiple surfaces in the canteen. It was created in four phases. The first was from 1953 to around 1956 by Rod Shaw with Sonny Glynn, Evelyn Healy, Vi Collings, Harry McDonald and Pat Kelk Graham. The second phase between 1957 and 1960 was painted by Clem Millward and Harry Reade, assisted by Ralph Sawyer. The third phase in the early 1960s saw Sonny Glynn returning to work on the mural with Sawyer. During the final phase after the mural was relocated in several pieces to the new union building, Swayer filled the remaining blank cameo in 1993.

"The ideas for the mural were discussed with a lot of people. Many of us did preliminary sketches for the General Strike of 1917; that's where we started... We got a rough idea and finally Rod put some rough-outs up on the wall." - Artist Vi Collins, 1992

The harsh physical and economic realities of waterside labouring drove the creation of maritime unions in the 1800s - collective effort to ensure safer and more just working conditions. The struggles, aspirations and victories expressed in The Wharfies' Mural reveal a far-reaching trajectory with implications for workers in Australia today. What began as a localised fight on the docks in the 19th century led to ongoing organised agitation for social change. Union support for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander justice, women's economic equality, worker's rights, internation solidarity and global peace continues well into the 21st century.

Art and politics are often intertwined. The mural examplifies this convergence. Local artists, inspired by Socialist Realism and left-wing thought, formed groups such as the Studio of Realist Art, hoping to take art from a prerogative of a few to a concern of the many. Likewise, progressive film-making, theatre and visual arts in the 1950s sought to depict the seemingly invisible experiences of the working class and make them accessible to all. Created through communal effort and now preserved for future generations, the mural speaks to the wharfies' trials, triumphs and shared cause. 

"I believe it is... a very early example of a cooperative work of art. It involved time, a lot of thought, you know, a lot of everything - a lot of heart." - Artist, Clem Millward, 1992

Bedtime stories: Witches Abroad

Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett

Corgi Books

Pp.286

This, the twelfth novel in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, is the second that revolves specifically around the three witches: Granny Weatherwax; Nanny Ogg and Magrat. In Wyrd Sisters, readers were introduced to these characters, and it is a delight to welcome them back like old friends. Magrat inherits a wand from Desiderata so she must become a fairy godmother and interfere in stories: she can’t help but turn things into pumpkins and she tries to stop Embers from going to the ball and marrying a prince, who is, in fact, a frog. Stories have power because they inform belief, and those who control the narrative have the greatest power of all.

It transpires that Granny Weatherwax has a sister, Lily – now calling herself Lilith – who wants to force people into enacting the stereotypes of the fairytales, living in a land where everyone must be happy whether they like it or not. Lily lets several stories happen simultaneously; like the evil queen who appears in the mirror, she uses mirror magic as a form of control. She has her own form of power (is she the good or the bad witch, and which one does that make Granny Weatherwax?). “She had buried three husbands, and at least two of them had been already dead.” Pratchett touches upon myths and legends as well as fairytales, so Circe, Bluebeard, Casanova, vampires and the Wizard of Oz intermingle with Cinderella, Rumpelstiltskin, the Three Little Pigs, Little Red Riding Hood, the Three Bears, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty – “There’ll be a spinning wheel at the bottom of all this, you mark my words.”

As the witches set off to right the wrongs of the world, they learn about the structure of stories: “Three was an important number for stories. Three wishes, three princes, three billy goats, three guesses… three witches. The maiden, the mother and the… other one. That was one of the oldest stories of all.” Naturally, not all these conventions are true, for example, “The natural size of a coven is one. Witches only get together when they can’t avoid it.” Meanwhile, Nanny Ogg sends postcards home to our Jason, about what it’s like to be abroad or in foreign parts (where they do odd things like ‘drink fizzy wine out of ladies’ boots’) and obviously the structure and convention of writing postcards is its own artform – sadly, practically lost in 2023.

Granny Weatherwax dislikes stories because she thinks they are unnatural, and they try to make people conform. “You get too involved with stories, you get confused. You don’t know what’s really real and what isn’t. And they get you in the end. They send you weird in the head. I don’t like stories. They’re not real. I don’t like things that ain’t real.” She explains the laissez-faire approach to life. “You can’t go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it’s just a cage.” One could contend that she (and by association Pratchett) is arguing against interventional socialism. “No more stories. No more godmothers. Just people, deciding for themselves. For good or bad. Right or wrong.” Or one could just enjoy it as a right rollicking story of witches abroad.

Power to the people!

The Grapes of Wrath, Canberra Repertory Society
Theatre 3
13-29 February 2020

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (published 1939) is one of those classic great American novels – it is taught in American high schools to the point that everybody knows it, even if they’ve only read the cheat notes or seen the 1940 film (directed by Tom Ford and starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad) in order to pass the test. And it is a test. Full disclosure: I studied it at High School in New York (U.S.A), and I studied it for my university degree at Manchester (U.K.). It’s a tale that spans continents.

The 1988 play adapted by Frank Galati won the Tony Award for best play in 1990, and in the last thirty years has become a perennial favourite of high school productions. This is both a good and a bad thing, and a context with which to inform the Canberra Repertory production, directed by Chris Baldock.

The plot is fairly simple. During the Great Depression, the Joad family are driven off their land in Oklahoma due to a combination of drought, economic hardship, bank foreclosures and agricultural industry changes. They light out for the West (it is the American Dream, after all) in hopes of finding solid work and good fortune. It is not a spoiler to say things don’t turn out that way.

The set (designed by Chris Baldock; co-ordinated by Russell Brown) drew rounds of applause from the audience. It is a good set, made from pallets and angular constructions which variously represent houses, riverbanks and graves. The scene changes are complex and occasionally clunky, diverting attention from the dialogue or the emotion on stage to appreciation of the artifice.

The jalopy which the Joads load to travel to California is created on stage from flats and loaded up with bags and wheels, although it recalls The Wiggles more than the spirit of desperate adventure. At one point a rain curtain creates a deafening noise over which the actors cannot be heard, and soaks the stage although, strangely, not the actors. I refer to them as actors rather than characters, as this is another of those ‘stepping outside of the scene for the sake of the set’ moments.

The theme of family, friendship and community is one of the most powerful aspects of the story, and initially this is well handled as the multi-generational Joad family bustles about the stage doing chores and preparing a communal meal. It is also nicely contrasted with the isolation felt by Tom Joad (James McMahon) as he returns from a stretch in prison and encounters Jim Casey (Michael Sparks), the ex-preacher, who is struggling to come to terms with his new identity and the situation that has forced them away from all they have known.

As the family and a few extras embark on their journey this sense of community falls apart. Partly this is as members of the clan drop off by the wayside – Noah’s defection as played by John Whinfield is particularly affecting – but also because there is no sense of unity between the company. This should be an ensemble piece, but various actors proclaim and hold forth in a singular way without any perceivable warmth for their fellow cast. James McMahon and Amy Dunham (in a welcome return to the stage as Rose of Sharon) make overtures to the rest of the family, but they are almost rebuffed by a fearsome Ma (Karen Vickery), whose defensiveness is overplayed to the exclusion of the softer side of the matriarch.

Tom, Casey, and also Uncle John (played with hyper intensity by an almost unrecognisable Jerry Hearn), undergo personal, political and spiritual development with sensitivity and depth, dealing with hokey hillbilly dialogue – ‘There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do’ – in a way that credits the acting and directing skills of all concerned. Considering this is a tale that led many to consider the implications of social economics, the differences between the socialist site and the capitalist camp are understated. Sure, the row of tents looks lovely, and the wire fence is an obvious allusion to camps closer to home, but the imminent threat is absent and the discussions about self-determination, unions, the rights of the worker, and responsibilities of the employer lack passion and are uninspiring.  

Essential qualities such as honour and resistance are given every chance to shine, and they do in solitary monologues but are lost in group moments: the dance and fight scenes are awkward, and the characters are not believable as the rough-and-ready types they represent. It is a stretch to believe in the resilience and perseverance of these average people whom circumstances have made extraordinary and it is not always clear that “We’re the people that live. They can’t wipe us out, they can’t lick us. We’ll go on forever, cos we’re the people.”

That’s not to say that there aren’t emotional scenes: the choices made in the face of starvation and the compassion shown by those suffering personal hurts are at times beautifully portrayed, not least by Dunham in the final scene. The lights fade on a touching tableau, highlighting human dignity; finally the motif of individual sacrifice to the greater good of the community is clear – and that is a wonderful way to finish. Power to the people.

'Above all things, avoid vagueness'

William Morris: A Life for our Time by Fiona MacCarthy

(Faber & Faber), Pp. 800

This is a massive book, because Morris was a great man. He has done so many things with his life, being a poet and novelist; print maker; designer; weaver; Socialist; reformer; speaker, and described as ‘the greatest artist-craftsman of his period’. Fiona MacCarthy has a huge job on her hands to capture the vibrancy and energy of the man on paper, and she does it well and thoroughly, as this is researched from letters, diaries and memoirs of Morris himself and those who knew him. Educated at Oxford and destined for the cloth, Morris gave up the priesthood (and, later, architecture) to make and produce things. “To Morris the idea of work became equated with creative vigour and directness: a mental and manual effort resulted in the actual production of a carpet, a story, a translation of The Iliad.”

The Oxford intelligentsia at the time was obsessed with poetry (Tennyson in particular) and the Arthurian cult. Morris and his great companion, Edward Burne-Jones laid their own claims on the Arthurian myth, with Morris writing verses and Burne-Jones dwelling on themes of the San Graal in his paintings and tapestries throughout his life. “Arthurianism, as Burne-Jones and Morris saw it, was not merely an intellectual exercise. They fell upon it as an extension of religion, adopting the chivalric as a rule of life.” Morris loved the idea of a fraternity and felt the importance of the brotherhood; a group of men with chivalric codes. “If Morris had a need for the intimate companion he had an even stronger yearning for the group.”

King Arthur and Sir Lancelot, stained glass panel designed by William Morris 

One of the celebrated members of this group was Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who later went on to have an affair with Morris’s wife, Jane (née Burden). MacCarthy doesn’t shy away from the affair, but neither does she dwell upon it in any length. Indeed, the relationship between Jane Morris (or Janey as she was known) and Rossetti seems slightly sordid and not even very interesting; in their correspondence they are “intertwined in illness, in solicitous inquiry, exchanging news of treatments: theirs was hypochondriac passion, taken to extremes.” Janey was a constant invalid, as Victorian women often seem to have been. Morris, although clearly uncomfortable with the arrangement, never sued for divorce which suggests sensitivity to Janey and their children rather than any wilful ignorance.

“It was while he was at Oxford that Morris’s wild temper began to take on the quality of legend. In these rages he was accredited with superhuman strength.” He used to head-butt walls, bite through window frames, lift up heavy weights in his teeth and beat himself about the head in fits of masochism. He became the butt of jokes; the comic character; the basis of a legend. He was mocked for his size and appearance, his rages, and his wild hair and beard – the rest of the group nicknamed him Topsy. Burne-Jones and Rossetti drew caricatures of him, which are partly affectionate, but they are also a little cruel. Morris payed along with the joke, “But it would be difficult for somebody as sensitive as Morris to withstand unscathed such a long barrage of ridicule. It must to some extent have damaged his self-confidence, especially with women, and intensified his feeling that he was the outcast, even in his own close group.”

The M's at Ems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Although he is now remembered more for his manual creativity, he was a prolific novelist and poet. He wrote The Earthly Paradise as his homage to Chaucer and the English tradition of ceremonial story-telling. This is the “vast narrative that was to make him, for a decade, the most popular poet of his period and eventually put him in the running for Poet Laureate in succession to Tennyson.” The women in Morris’s novels are strong characters who are guided by their own sense of value and self-determination. He writes of utopian themes where people live together without false hierarchies and are fully committed to the work they do. He enjoyed the minutiae of life and believed more care should be taken over individual duties.

Perhaps his most influential stamp upon the world, however, was his approach to craftsmanship, visible in his designs for everything from tapestries and textiles to wallpaper and bookplates. The earliest of his wallpaper designs are of fruits and flowers with a fluid sense of movement. “They are gentle flowing patterns which show Morris’s belief in the purpose of pattern to impose a rhythm, to soothe and civilize.” Designs such as ‘Rose and Thistle’, ‘Bird and Anemone’, and ‘Brother Rabbit’ are complex, finely detailed and confident designs. They are “very English in their range of reference, their observation of the life of the hedgerows, their fondness for the sleek, evasive creatures of the woodlands, but also clearly influenced by Morris’s study of historical textiles.”

Brother Rabbit design by William Morris

Morris’s attitude to manufacture and design is what really sets him apart from his fellow craftsmen. He famously said, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful” and this was an adage he brought to his work and artefacts. Steadfastly against art only for the few, Morris maintained that all could be taught the ethics and the practice. In his first public speech, The Decorative Arts: Their Relation to Modern Life and Progress (1877) he proclaimed, “I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few or freedom for a few.”

He visited Iceland on a number of occasions and kept detailed diaries, which MacCarthy mines for clues as to his future Socialism. She believes the trips had a profound effect on his art and politics, and he declared, “That the most grinding poverty is a trifling evil compared with the inequality of classes.” It seems inevitable that Morris should have been drawn into politics, and he embraced Socialism and toured the country speaking at rallies and promoting the cause. He revelled in being given a task and an active purpose. He kept a diary of his findings and experiences, and never became hardened or inured to the inequality, appreciating that it was his only good luck which made him born prosperous. Reminiscent of George Orwell, “He travels around England with such great reserves of stamina, watchful and concerned, but never sentimental, recording the depressing details of the scene.”

William Morris (right) with Edward Burne-Jones

William Morris was not optimistic about the future of culture which he felt was being destroyed by rampant consumerism and global greed. He wanted to “transform the world with beauty” and felt that if he succeeded in “some small way, in only one small corner of the world” he would count himself blessed. His enduring influence must be taken as a measure of his success, but as he said himself, “the work goes on”. It does, indeed.

World Cup 2014: Today's Talking Point - Changing of the Guard?

The beautiful game is often referred to as the world game; it is played in and by more countries than any other sport. For all of it's global appeal, however, it has historically been dominated by teams from Europe and South America. Since the first World Cup in 1930, the winners have come from Europe ten times and South America nine times. (There were no World Cups in 1942 or 1946 due to WWII.)

Now it seems the old guard may be giving way. As in 2010, only six European teams made it through to the knock-out stages. Obviously I was disappointed (but not surprised) by England's premature exit, although one could argue they were in good company with Spain, Portugal and Italy all booking early flights home. By contrast, Central American and African nations are performing well and adding extra excitement to the tournament. 

And what about the U.S.A.? No one really expects them to progress much further; even if they beat Belgium (which is not outside the realms of possibility), they will probably be facing Argentina, which may be too high a hurdle to overcome. But how exciting to see them get this far. Their TV viewing figures suggest their football team is the most-watched national side the country has ever produced. This is great news for football (America and Australia are the only two countries in the world that don't call it football) and encouraging for the good of the American public.

It is also amusing to note the vitriol of certain neo-Conservative American columnists trying their best to deride football as dull, unskillful or noncompetitive. I'm not actually sure what they are watching. I would post a link, but I don't want to give them any more publicity. Suffice to say these are people who think being called a socialist is an insult.