In this blog, Peter Woodley explores the place of gender in the Queensland Bush Workers’ Strike of 1891.
The Queensland bush workers’ strike of 1891 was, at face value, an almost exclusively male affair. Paid workers in the shearing sheds and camps were male; the pastoralists who engaged them were predominantly, if not entirely, male; and the politicians and judges who set and enforced the legislative and judicial frameworks within which the strike unfolded, were all men.
And yet, women must have been involved. Were women’s experiences of the strike consistent with men’s, that is, divided along class lines? How did gender influence the ways people interpreted and engaged with that tumultuous episode?
The strike was essentially over the issue of whether contracts between workers and employers should require that only union members be engaged. It caused enormous, if temporary, disruption to wool production and to the lives of those who depended on the wages derived from it. The longer term consequences of the unions’ defeat was as profound for women as for men.
One way or another, women were present: as family of shearers and strikers; as sympathisers, perhaps as members of sympathetic unions in other industries, where women were more likely to be in paid employment; and on the other side, as members of pastoral families.
Tracing the Strikers
One challenge in writing about the strike has been to uncover the lives of working class men who typically did not leave as much of a lasting mark in the archive as more prominent and powerful people. Even more difficult was finding the evidence to understand how the strike affected women.
The task is not made easier by the language and conventions of the time. The casual redaction of women from the strike is evident in English-born journalist William Lane’s well-known reflection on the idea of ‘freedom of contract’:
No man is free excepting the man who has the power to work without asking leave of another; no man but the citizen of the community which insures work to its citizens as a right.
Nor are the secondary sources helpful. The Historigraphy sheds no light on women’s experiences or influence. Notwithstanding these difficulties, women can be detected, though usually at the periphery of the main narrative.
In March 1891 Rockhampton’s Morning Bulletin reported ‘large numbers’ of women to be among protesters in Barcaldine when infantry arrived to contain and intimidate the striking workers. But even here, they were described as ‘women and children’, so diminishing women’s experiences as adults distinct from those of their daughters and sons.
If women were mentioned at all in general coverage or commentary on the strike, they were represented in the mainstream press as passive victims, either as spouses of the shearers, forced to make do with meagre and reduced incomes as their irresponsible menfolk declined to work, or allegedly being assaulted by marauding strikers. A correspondent to the Ballarat Star wrote of what they considered to be the typical shearing union official: ‘he lives upon the food that should go to starving women and children; by his efforts—for his own ends—thousands are kept in misery’.
Striking Women
From the pastoralists’ perspective, the only testimony I could find was Mary Montgomerie Bennett’s, which dealt with the strike thirty-six years after the event in her biography of her father, Robert Christison, who was proprietor of Lammermoor station in central Queensland.
Bennett was born in England, and lived only intermittently in the colony, though she returned to Australia in 1930 and spent the remainder of her life teaching and advocating for Aboriginal people’s rights in Western Australia. Though she was not ten years old at the time of the strike, and the family was then in England, she writes passionately about the event, setting the tone in her first paragraph:
The professional agitators who had captured the Trade Unions still believed in violence, and in 1891 they made another determined attempt to overthrow constitutional government and rule the country, as they rule the unions, by ukase: the means of a general strike.
Quoting extensively from a report issued in July 1891 by an official highly sympathetic towards the pastoralists, Police Magistrate Robert Ranking, she casts the striking shearers as delirious and murderous revolutionaries, in sharp contrast to the loyal and respectful stockmen employed on Lammermoor. There is little sense of a distinct gendered perspective here: Bennett gives every impression of sharing the class position of her father.
My article, ‘Entangled Experiences of Class: The 1891 Queensland Bush Workers’ Strike’, makes the case that the 1891 bush workers’ strike was a significant moment of intense class conflict in Australia that affected people differently according to their class position, but also the different ways working class participants interpreted their own class’s best interests once the fight had been lost. The evidence though, overwhelmingly concerns men’s experiences. Noting the meagre exceptions mentioned above, it leaves much scope for future researchers to uncover how the strike was experienced by women and how those experiences were shaped by their intersecting class and gender identities.
Peter Woodley studied economics and history at the Australia National University (ANU) before embarking on a career in the Australian Public Service where he was involved in health policy.
In 2021 he completed a PhD, again at the ANU, in Australian rural history. A book based on the thesis is being published by the ANU Press.
Peter is a research editor with the Australian Dictionary of Biography, and has taught history at the ANU and the University of New England. His interests include public and local history, as well as biography.
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