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The strike that never ended
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There can be little doubt that Australia's once-legendary pastoral wealth was accrued at the expense of the Aboriginal people, on whose land and cheap labour it depended. Even John Forrest, WA's turn-of-the-twentieth-century premier, pastoralist and former explorer, conceded that "many of us could not be in the position we are today without native labour on our stations".
By the 1940s Australia was producing a sixth of the world's mutton and a quarter of its wool. In the Northwest, two million sheep grazed vast tracts of meagre land, a marginal enterprise made economical by the employment of black stockmen paid barely $2 a week. The archaic Native Administration Act protected the interests of rural industry by hampering mobility and sanctioning low or nonexistent pay for black workers. Around this time Don McLeod , a white prospector still active in Aboriginal rights campaigning today, encouraged Clancy McKenna and Dooley Binbin to defy their degrading conditions and, after several years of painstaking preparation, eight hundred black workers simultaneously walked off the stations in the Port Hedland/Nullagine region on May 1, 1946. Police were instructed to harass the two camps established near Port Hedland and east of Marble Bar, and arrested McKenna and Binbin for communist subversion. Postwar food coupons were withheld, so the strikers returned to traditional ways of feeding and trading among themselves. Port Hedland was at this time a small town with an "official" (white) population of just 150 and a "mob" of 400 strikers down the road. Jittery police arrested a visiting mediator, Padre Hodge, for being "within five miles of a congregation of natives", adding further support to the strike, coverage of which was largely censored from the national press.
In 1949 things came to a head, and a
station-to-station march
was organized calling all remaining workers to join the strike. Arrest for such defiance was certain, and the strikers cheerfully offered to fill up the jail at Marble Bar and others throughout the Northwest. Only when the Seamen's Union banned the handling of "slave station" wool did the government hastily concede to McLeod's proposals - though they swiftly reneged on the deal. All through the 1950s McLeod employed and assisted the strikers in mining ventures around Marble Bar until the big mining companies began taking an interest in the Pilbara's mineral wealth and pushed them off their claims. The strikers never returned to the stations, demonstrating black assertion long before the 1960s civil rights campaigning in the USA with which the movement is associated in the popular imagination. Other useful information
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Australia,
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