Issue No 120 | 23 November 2001 | |
HistoryThe Speakers SquareExtracted from Radical Melbourne - A Secret History
A new book lifts the lid on Melbourne's radical past - including the soapboxes that dotted the city in the 1890s. ********************* From the metropolitan streets, laid in symmetrical grids to prevent twists or turns where the poor might fester, to the privately owned hotel erected upon what was once a city square, political control in Melbourne has invariably involved struggles over public space. In the earliest days of the colony, dissenters turned to open air meetings to express their views. Street oratory, after all, requires no capital or resources, other than a few sympathisers for moral (and, on occasion, physical) support and a makeshift platform from which to declaim. So by the depression of the 1890s, a series of regular Sunday forums had sprung up around the city. Radical speakers dodged the police to hold forth at the Eastern Market (facing Exhibition Street, between Little Collins and Bourke Streets), at Queens Wharf, outside Trades Hall, at Studley Park (down from the boatshed) and at an open area above the Merri Creek, near St George's Road. Detective Wardley, one of the many police assigned by Victoria's rulers to quell such dangerous eruptions of free speech, recorded orators speaking on 'Socialism, Anarchy, Democracy, Capitalism, Dynamite, One-Man-One-Vote and other social reforms'. He noted with some alarm that 'Her Majesty the Queen and members of the Royal Family, governments . . . landlords, capitalists and clergymen' all came in 'for a great deal of abuse'. But Melbourne's most successful stump - and certainly the longest lasting - proved to be that on the Yarra Bank. During the 1890s, radicals realised that large meetings could be held on the flat ground near the boatsheds on the south side of the Yarra, just down from Princes Bridge. This was the first forum, neatly intersecting with the route of the traditional promenade down from Flinders Street. Not surprisingly, the authorities proved less than enamoured of a motley collection of agitators delivering their harangues a stone's throw away from the CBD. After years of harassment, the forum was moved to the north side of the river, a barren patch of mud in line with Exhibition Street. In 1925, the city council - no doubt hoping to keep the whole business safely tucked away behind the railway yards - granted a degree of official sanction, with earthen mounds for speakers and freshly planted trees to shade spectators. The plain-clothes policemen, however, remained. Over the next forty years, the Sunday forum grew into an institution. The most regular Yarra Bankers - the Communist Party, religious groups, a number of determined individuals - maintained permanent stands from which they would speak each week. But anyone could join in, either mounting one of the ten or more stumps, or simply holding forth from where they stood. At the forum's height, it was not unknown for twenty or thirty meetings to proceed simultaneously, each speaker conducting a passionate, unamplified declamation, often punctuated by interjections and jeers. Hecklers didn't always restrain themselves to verbal interruptions - during the campaign against conscription it became common practice for anti-conscriptionists to remove their shoelaces before taking the stump, in the expectation that they would soon need their feet free to swim. Most of the time, in a wowserish city in which most amusements closed on Sundays, the Yarra Bank simply provided a form of free entertainment. For those interested in ideas, though, the forum offered what Labor Prime Minister John Curtin (himself no slouch on the stump) rightly described as Melbourne's 'university of the working class'. The centrality of the Bank - as well as the relative freedom accorded to those who met there - made it a popular location for demonstrations. Perhaps the Bank's most dramatic assembly came during the monster rally that crowned the 1890 maritime dispute. At its height, the strike (a complicated struggle where sailors, shearers and wharfies combined to defend the right to be unionists) virtually paralysed the city. An eerie darkness hung over Melbourne (the gas stokers were on strike) and, throughout the country, some fifty thousand people were thrown out of work. On 31 August, the unions called a mass rally for the Bank. As The Argus described: From the city proper, South Yarra, Jolimont, East Melbourne, and Richmond, continuous crowds of pedestrians made their way to one common centre. The suburban trains and trams coming into Melbourne found their way by vehicle or foot to the park. The Botanical Gardens and Jolimont Bridges presented a curious sight, being continuously occupied by a moving mass of humanity, and hundreds of people took a straight course over the railway lines choosing their opportunity between the passing of the trains. This vast throng - perhaps a hundred thousand people, from a city of four hundred thousand - confirmed for many that revolution was at hand. But the authorities had made their own preparations. The Chief Commissioner of Police had already brought reinforcements to Melbourne from the country districts, and stocked a large cache of rifles and carbines in stations in Bourke Street and Russell Street. A thousand 'special constables' had been sworn in to service in the basement of the Town Hall and presented with a baton, a badge and a sheet of instructions. On the day of the rally, mounted horsemen hid in the old morgue building near the corner of Batman and Swanston Streets. Hundreds more waited in the Victoria Barracks, where an impromptu army camp had been assembled. Preparing for the union march, the commander of the Mounted Rifles, Colonel Tom Price, addressed his men: One of your obligations imposes upon you the duty of resisting invasion by a foreign enemy; but you are also called upon to assist in preserving law and order in the colony . . . You will each be supplied with forty rounds of ammunition - leaden bullets - and if the order is given to fire don't let me see one rifle pointed up in the air. Fire low and lay them out - lay the disturbers of law and order out so that the duty will not have to be again performed. Let it be a lesson to them. In the event, the meeting passed uneventfully. The Social Democrats established a platform a hundred yards from the main stage, decorated with what The Age described as 'a hideous daub representing the dawn of socialism in appropriate shades of red and yellow as the background to a number of allegorical figures . . . precisely like those familiar announcements which invite the unwary public to "walk up and see the wild beasts".' But the official speeches were stolid and uninspired, and the rally as a whole remained remarkably well behaved. The strike itself dragged on for another two months, before most of the unionists were forced back on the employers' terms. But Tom Price's speech still resonates today, as a warning that in Australia, as elsewhere, the final recourse of the powers-that-be is always naked violence. The Bank provided a venue for major rallies on many other issues, from the fight against conscription (during which The Argus managed to describe a mass anti-war stop work as being both 'futile and ridiculous' and 'dangerous and sinister') to the struggle against fascism. Its more customary role, though, was as the locus for that most durable of working class festivities, the annual May Day procession. The first May Day in 1893 was more than a celebration. Several hundred workers tramped down from the Burke and Wills statue to the south side of the Yarra Bank (opposite Government House) in a consciously radical alternative to the somewhat staid Eight-Hour Day march. Once assembled, they heard addresses from a slate of well-known militants, including the anarchist Chummy Fleming, who had earlier shocked union officials by leading an unemployed rally behind the banner: 'Feed on our flesh and blood you capitalist hyenas: It is your funeral feast'. The course of Fleming's political career is worth noting, for it coincides neatly with the rise and fall of the Yarra Bank as an institution. As May Day's founder, Chummy insisted on taking pride of place in the march, waving his anarchist flag defiantly. In the 1930s, when the less-than-sympathetic Communist Party dominated proceedings, he maintained his position, starting a block ahead of the other marchers, and proceeding so slowly that the rest of the procession gradually caught up to him. Each Sunday, Chummy gave voice to his anarchist principles from his private stump on the Bank. Unless ill or in gaol (he was a constant target of police harassment), he could be relied upon for a weekly defence of libertarianism from the 1890s until his death in 1950. On occasions, his lectures attracted sizeable crowds. More often, he stood with a flag proclaiming 'No Gods, No Masters', facing an audience that was small and sometimes hostile. It was not unknown for him to be physically attacked. When Fleming died, his friends (in accordance with his wishes) took his ashes (augmented to make a respectable pile with some char from a fireplace) to scatter on the Yarra Bank. In the mid-1970s the veteran Communist Party orator Jim Coull recalled the event: We'd arranged to hold a meeting, had a lorry there, where they have the May Day platform . . . There were different meetings and groups on the Bank, and I was to blow a whistle and all meetings would stop, and the people would gather round the Party platform. There was a big crowd. Ralph [Gibson] spoke first then myself. I said that we were there to remember Chummy Fleming, say a few words about his activities, and his loyalty to the working class which was never, ever in doubt. Then I called on Neville Preston, who was a personal friend of Chummy's to say a few words and distribute the ashes. Naturally I thought that he'd have a little box like a snuff box or a matchbox and he'd blow them away as we'd usually seen it done. But another man hands him up a Groves and McVities Biscuit tin. And this tin is filled with sand and what looked like powder. And it was funny . . . it was a very windy day, really blowing . . . So the man said, 'I will now cast the ashes of my dear departed comrade to the winds', and he dived his hand into the biscuit tin, and heaves forth these ashes. And he didn't use just one hand, but he went on with three or four and more. And the people are staggering back. It was blowing in their faces. And they'd had Chummy - didn't care what happened to him. Much later, Coull was recorded as declaring: 'I still after all these years can't get the taste of Chummy Fleming out of my mouth'. As a forum, the Yarra Bank outlived Chummy but not by long. The social ferment of the 1960s and 1970s did not prevent its gradual decline. The universities provided sites for discussions on the Vietnam war; the streets themselves the venue for protests. The forum became the property of a diminishing group of diehards, and eventually collapsed altogether. Today, the area around the speakers' mounds has been sliced into by the Tennis Centre, a huge extension of Exhibition Street and, most recently, ornamental ponds. It's now a shady triangle of about an acre, at the south-eastern corner of Birrarang Marr. The developers have attempted to compensate for obscuring the site by installing some historical plaques, additions that serve only to more clearly identify the forum as a museum exhibit rather than part of a living culture. However, in a new century, the problem that motivated Chummy Fleming and his comrades to take to the Bank has reasserted itself with a vengeance. In the new Melbourne of casinos and giant outdoor television screens, there are almost no places in which people can congregate. The inadequate space outside the State Library has become the focus for every rally and demonstration, simply because nowhere else exists. Radical Melbourne - A Secret History is published by Vulgar Press
|
Interview: Civilising Capital Peter Butler is a global investor with a difference. He believes that environment, shareholder democracy and workers rights make good business sense. Industrial: All In The Family In his opening submission to the landmark case, ACTU assistant secretary Richard Marles argues working hours are vital to life. Unions: Saving Cinderella It is a modern day fairy tale - a Cinderella from the suburbs, worked like a slave from morning to night injured and then abandoned. International: Recognising China Gough Whitlam draws the links, past and present, between recognition of China and the continuing struggle to achieve a genuinely inclusive Australian democracy. History: The Speakers Square A new book lifts the lid on Melbourne's radical past - including the soapboxes that dotted the city in the 1890s. Economics: Back to the Pack The big story in this year�s State of the States League Table is the end of the long reign of New South Wales at the top of the heap. Satire: Man Reneges On Promise To Leave The Country If Howard Re-Elected A Sydney man has decided he won�t leave Australia despite the re-election of the Howard Government. Review: When Hippes Meet Unionists A new book investigates how links between politics and culture reached a high point in the 1970s
Notice Board View entire latest issue
|
© 1999-2000 Labor Council of NSW LaborNET is a resource for the labour movement provided by the Labor Council of NSW URL: http://workers.labor.net.au/120/c_historicalfeature_speakers.htmlLast Modified: 15 Nov 2005 [ Privacy Statement | Disclaimer | Credits ] LaborNET is proudly created, designed and programmed by Social Change Online for the Labor Council of NSW |