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  Issue No 58 Official Organ of LaborNet 16 June 2000  

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Review

At the Barricades

By Zoe Reynolds

Denis Evans' photo essay on the Patrick dispute captures the camaraderie on the Melbourne picket lines - solidarity that, like solder, welded workers and their communities together into a human barricade.

 
 

A new photo exhibition has opened at the Theatreworks in Melbourne. It is called Barricade. And it is not only the work community radio personality, street worker, photographer and one time wharfie, Denis Evans - it is the work of a community.

Unlike the play or the book or the paintings, commemorating the Patrick Dispute, Barricade is the work of an artist with his feet planted firmly among the workers.

It not a middle class attempt to portray a working class struggle. Denis was rallying the community over the airwaves and down on the wharves as one of the crowd, not a mere observer.

His working class credentials are impeccable. Denis Evans, son of a wharfie, started out as an underage labourer on Melbourne's Appleton Dock, aged 15. He went on to become a trade union official for the Liquor and Hospitality Workers, then the Food Preservers, then the Transport Workers - 20 years in all.

Now, and at the time of the dispute, Denis was chairperson of community radio 3CR and a street worker caring for the homeless. "During the dispute 3CR broadcast 24 hours," he recalls.

"We put out a call to get people down on the picket and everyone came from everywhere - up to 7,000 people - community activists, teachers labourers, ethnic groups, Turkish and Lebanese workers, the God Squad..."

What happened next was among the more remarkable events of the dispute. The unionists and community collectively transformed the picket.

"People started collecting the iron rails that were just lying around, torn up and abandoned by train tracks," said Denis. "They carried them back to the picket, creating what we called a community art work."

The heavy iron rails, weighed in at around 500 pounds each, requiring the collective muscle of around a dozen people to lift and lug them to the picket.

"That's what I found so inspiring," said Denis. "It was a community effort." The rails were then soldered together, so nothing could could get in or out of the wharves.

The 'work of art' as it became known, was actually the brainwave of branch official John Higgins and a bunch of metal and construction workers. But it could just as well have been Christo.

Site art first emerged in the late 1960's as a reaction to the growing commercialisation of the art world.

Artists rebelled against a market in which art had become merely a commodity. Their art began as a model of dissent in a climate of political upheaval and social change. It was a time when accepted practices in many areas of life came under scrutiny.

People questioned the growing capitalist market influence within the art world in an era where art had become a commodity to be traded and bought. Urban community artists believed that operating within the market system meant the corruption and prostitution of the artist.

With these rebellions in mind, site artists began making works that restored the social function of art, through participatory and interactive art works, engaging the community and public space. The new emphasis was on collective and plural artworks.

Christo's works are legendary for this. Bulgarian born, Christo inherited the social and economic values of communism. He embraced the idea that art should not be private property. To Christo art belonged to the people.

Whole communities would become involved through the physical dynamism and enthusiasm of the projects. His works were a collective, communal activity.

Denis Evans' photos document the creation of the workers' art project which united the community and the workers enabling them, ultimately, to win a landmark battle.

His photos capture rows of men and women grasping the steel railway lines like rope in the tug of war for the wharves.

The main photo also records that memorable dawn in April, when 2000 construction workers marched to the rescue of a picket under siege.

"I'll never forget it," says Denis. "I've worked in the Balkans at the height of the war filing live for 3CR and it was nothing compared to the fear we all felt that night - hundreds of police, helicopters buzzing overhead shining spotlights onto us. I felt safer in Kosovo, than in Melbourne that evening. We didn't know what was going to happen. It was eerie."

It was pre-dawn when mounted police with dogs and full riot gear, 1000 strong, converged on the picket. The crowd, 3000 strong, stood their ground, linking arms bunching up, clasping fingers, making a solid human barricade. The unionists observed one minute silence. An ambulance waited nearby.

But the anticipated conflict, never took place. Just at the pickets darkest hour 2000 chanting construction workers marched from behind the police lines trapping them in a pincer movement between the picket and the rally. The police surrendered. "Get us out of here" they pleaded. The construction workers parted, the police retreated and the cry "MUA here to Stay" filled the dawn.

"They sent in the biggest, most burly coppers they could find that night to pull apart the barricade," said Denis. "They were at it all night breaking through the solder. You could hear them. By morning they were absolutely buggered, they could not do anything else, anyway. The photo of the policemen sitting in the gutter says it all."

Barricade is a metaphor for working class unity. It portrays the determination of the workers, hard as steel, the solidarity, like solder used to weld the rails and reinforce the human barricade. Arms interlocked to defeat battalions of police, steel soldered, flesh fused - an impenetrable barricade against all who tried to cross the picket or disperse the crowd.

Denis decided to become a photographer 15 years ago so he could keep a history of industrial disputes and record the wars he covered abroad. He has no formal training - 'couldn't even read a manual'. But he does use a professional camera, a Nikon, a keen eye and a lot of soul. "What moved me about the Patrick Dispute was the principle at stake," says Denis.

"Everyone should have that right to be in a union. And if there was anything won out of the dispute it was that - the right to belong to a union without a Mr Howard or a Mr Reith coming along and sacking you."

Barricade, an exhibition of 26 photographs of the Patrick Dispute, Theatre Works, 14 Acland Street, St Kilda, June 14-July 1.


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*    Visit the MUA to see more of the shots

*   View entire issue - print all of the articles!

*   Issue 58 contents

In this issue
Features
*  Interview: After the Gold Rush
NSW building union leader Andrew Ferguson on life after the Olympics and why Che Guevara is his political hero.
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*  Unions: MUA Women's Policy Back on Course
A hard hitting report by the Maritime Union's women's delegate Sue Gajdos prompts the union to, once again, promote its female members.
*
*  Politics: Raising the Rafters
Opposition leader Kim Beazley delivered a stirring address to last weekend's NSW ALP State Conference. Here's every word of it.
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*  History: Time and Tide
Greg Patmore surveys the themes of Working Lives in Regional Australia in this introduction to the latest issue of 'Labour History'
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*  International: Fair in the Land of the Free
More than 20,000 immigrant workers, union members and community and religious leaders packed a Los Angeles Sports Arena on June 10 in support of immigrant workers' rights.
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*  Environment: Life's a Beach
Workers are invited to join an environmental campaign to protect the coastal communities and coastline from exploitation by multinationals.
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*  Satire: More Pacific Coups Forecast
The popular holiday resort of Great Keppel Island is bracing itself for a bloody coup, following the rash of rebel uprisings in other parts of the Pacific.
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*  Review: At the Barricades
Denis Evans' photo essay on the Patrick dispute captures the camaraderie on the Melbourne picket lines - solidarity that, like solder, welded workers and their communities together into a human barricade.
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 Maude Barlow Public Lecture - Sydney June 27

Columns
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Letters to the editor
»  In Defence of Rallies
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»  The Cost of Activism
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