Now, Bogan has made a claim that the Unions worked actively against the war effort during WWII. He bases this on a book he has read (I wonder if Bogan has ever belong to the Electricians' Trade Union?) entitled Australia's Secret War by Hal Colebatch. I haven't read the book, I have to admit but in researching it, I did find the following article by the noted Australian War Historian, Peter Stanley who was forced out of his position as chief historian at the War Memorial because he upset the then PM John Howard with his "leftist" approach to history.
[Source]Australia's Secret (And Unhistorical) War
By Peter Stanley
Posted 11 Dec 2014, 2:38pm
Hal Colebatch's book claiming that Australian unions sabotaged their nation's war effort is deeply unsatisfactory. How did it win the Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History? Peter Stanley writes.
The award of the 2014 Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History jointly to Hal Colebatch for his book Australia's Secret War, which purports to show "How Unions Sabotaged Our Troops in World War II", has aroused both praise and condemnation.
Conservative columnists such as Miranda Devine and Andrew Bolt have applauded the book for supposedly telling us things about Australia's Second World War history that (they think) had been suppressed, while liberal commentators such as Rowan Cahill and history buffs on specialist websites have either roundly criticised Colebatch's book or questioned the veracity of his accounts.
Journalist and author Mike Carlton, whose account of the Sydney-Emden fight was a contender for the Prime Minister's prize but dipped out, has attacked Colebatch's book as a 'farrago', listing errors in detail.
The specialists who have looked into his versions of the events he cites have found many errors. For example, he claims that the pilfering (possibly by wharf labourers) of valves rendered a radar station inoperative and led to the loss of American bombers returning from a raid on Rabaul. On investigation, Colebatch got wrong at least the identity of the supposed radar unit, the type of aircraft involved, the air force to which they belonged and, indeed, whether the incident actually happened.
One commentator on a specialist website concluded that "hyperbole like 'sabotaging the war effort' in the Australian case suggests Colebatch is pushing his usual right-wing agenda". (The book is, indeed, published by Quadrant, the journal that has become increasingly right-wing as its cadre of writers age and sink into a furious, fulminating dotage.)
Colebatch may well be "pushing his usual right-wing agenda", though that does not necessarily mean it is bad history. There is no reason why writers should not be clear about their political orientation and intention: good history is ambidextrous. But writers also have an obligation to respect the practice of history as it is pursued in the western liberal empirical tradition, and that means above all that they should seek out diverse sources and consider and criticise them in the light of evidence that does not necessarily endorse or accord with a writer's starting assumptions.
Colebatch has left his starting assumptions and his conclusions untested.
He is on uncertain ground. His book seems to be based on little but secondary sources, and the only arguably 'primary' evidence he draws upon are the memories of veterans of the Second World War: though 60 or more years after the events he seeks to describe. This faith in the veracity of oral history (especially from men in their eighties or older) is touchingly naïve. It makes for striking and shocking stories but it does not necessarily produce reliable, verifiable, justifiable history.
Sadly, Colebatch appears not to have attempted to check any of the stories he was told, but has simply replicated them and on that basis constructed a narrative of Australia in the Second World War in which 'the unions' 'sabotaged' 'the war effort'. He fails to test any of his examples against available primary sources, either public - such as newspapers which are available thanks to the National Library's 'Trove' data base - or government or union archives. This does not prevent him from condemning 'unions' as a whole: a stance that explains the way conservative columnists have embraced his book.
While sceptical of Colebatch's approach on methodological, and not just ideological, grounds, I do not have the time to critique his book as a whole. Rather, my purpose is to test one aspect of his assertions against the kinds of primary sources that he did not use himself.
In two chapters on waterside unions, Colebatch retails a number of stories about the laziness, vandalism and malice of wharfies at ports all around Australia's coast. The Waterside-Workers' Federation are a particular target of his ire (though he does not seem to confront the awkward fact that while the union was dominated by 'Communists', between 1941 and 1945 the Communist Party of Australia was "the leading war party", whose officials strove to reduce industrial action and who supported more than most Australians the most vigorous prosecution of the war). While individual members of the union may well have lacked the ideological purity of their officials and may well have pilfered, struck and vandalised cargos, they were doing so in defiance of 'the union'. Colebatch never grapples with this fundamental conundrum.
One of the ports in which Colebatch claims wharfies impeded the loading of ships is Townsville, which in 1945 became the base for the logistic effort that took I Australian Corps - the 7th and 9th Divisions - from their camps on the Atherton tableland to Morotai and on to Borneo. In researching my book Tarakan: an Australian Tragedy, published in 1997, like Colebatch I too had veterans of the Tarakan campaign tell me that wharfies had impeded the loading of their ships. Unlike Colebatch, I sought to establish the basis of these claims (based on memories 50 years later) by checking contemporary sources - the records of the branch of the union specifically involved.
Here's what I found:
This account is very different to the sensational, but vague, accounts Colebatch offers, based on hearsay but unchecked against the primary evidence - available in the Waterside Workers' Federation records held in the Noel Butlin Archives at ANU.Many former soldiers recall their embarkation as marked by obstruction and inefficiency on the waterfront, and they remain bitter at what they regard as the wharfies' intransigence. Some believe that the wharfies went on strike even as the troops destined for Tarakan passed through Townsville. In contravention of AIF folklore, in early 1945 there was almost no industrial action among the north Queensland wharfies, and certainly no strike. The port of Townsville had found the transition from minor sugar port to major military base a difficult one. An American report on Australian ports in 1943 had identified shortcomings 'along the usual lines - low efficiency (40% of U.S. average) … stoppage of work at the slightest indication of rain, etc.' By 1945, however, new arrangements had been successful for some time.
The rapid increase in traffic following Operation Instruction No. 99 [the orders that sent the 9th Division to Tarakan] precipitated a fresh, if brief and minor, collision between two working cultures. Troops, accustomed to intensive bursts of effort, often involving danger and discomfort, expected loading to proceed swiftly and without regard to time or hazard. The wharfies, on the job literally for the long haul, worked according to long-established and hard-won practices which conceded little to wartime emergencies. They would not work in the rain, for instance, and enforced rigid demarcation agreements: the branch executive included an official significantly titled the 'Vigilance Officer', alert to breaches of awards and customary work practices. Despite these divergent approaches the wharfies agreed to train troops in the operation of winches and in handling cargo, and the two groups rubbed along better than might have been expected. The accelerated pace of embarkation in March 1945 did not lead to any dispute. The only friction appears to have occurred on the afternoon of Saturday 11 March, coincidentally as the Townsville branch of the Waterside Workers' Federation held its monthly meeting. Just as Comrades Marles and Kerby had proposed and seconded a motion that the correspondence be accepted (the branch's minutes suggest that members espoused communist principles and procedural rigour with equal fervour) Comrade J. Foreman burst into the Waterside Workers' Hall, telling the meeting that a dispute had erupted at the Jetty. True to their principles, Comrades McNamara and Khan moved that standing orders be suspended, and Foreman reported that his gang had been dismissed and replaced by 'solder labour' without explanation. It appeared that an officer had insisted on deploying troops to load a cargo even though a civilian gang was available, but negotiation forestalled any escalation of the dispute. Unease persisted, and when the US Army trans-Pacific transport, General H.W. Buttner, docked early in April, troops were held nearby in case of a dispute. That it did not develop owed more to the wharfies' restraint than the soldiers' tact. Allen Haines of the 2/7th Field Regiment recalled watching from the rail of the General H.W. Buttner as a 'loot' (a lieutenant) intimidated wharf labourers and organised working parties to load the boxes of unfused grenades which they had declined to handle. Apart from a minor dispute over the loading of sugar, a traditional issue in north Queensland ports and unconnected with the embarkation of the Oboe forces, no other industrial action occurred.
There was indeed tension between two very different work cultures, but they worked together: there were no strikes. This case does nothing to support, and much to question, Colebatch's interpretation.
Colebatch's Australia's Secret War offers a dubious version of the industrial history of Australia in the Second World War. It is based on an inadequate range of sources. It fails to question the evidence of oral history. It presents a view of unions that is determinedly antagonistic and unsympathetic, and in failing to explain why 'unions' and their members might 'sabotage' their nation's war effort is deeply unsatisfactory.
It makes many mistakes, again because Colebatch fails to check his sources. He also fails to consult or quote secondary works (indeed, like my Tarakan) that would tend to modify or contest his interpretation. Whether such a book deserves the accolade of a prize awarded to published histories that meet the highest standards of the discipline is a question that must now be asked.
Professor Peter Stanley of UNSW Canberra is the president of Honest History. His book Bad Characters: Sex, Crime, Mutiny, Murder and the Australian Imperial Force was jointly awarded the Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History in 2011. View his full profile here.
It appears that Bogan is basing his views on very, very, dubious research. Tsk, tsk. How typical of Bogan to live in a fantasy world fuelled by Conspiracies...
