Wharfies are a dying breed. These days you need a VCE to get the few jobs left. The hard men of Port Melbourne tell Larry Schwartz about the end of the glory days.
ONCE, talk on the Melbourne waterfront was of iron men and wooden ships. “Now,” muses Reg Sims, a burly man in white-on-black polka- dot shirt, gleam of gold at his wrist, “there’s wooden men and iron f….. ships”.
He takes you from North Wharf into a vanishing world where stevedoring was once more the work of man than machine. First stop is a vast, vacant building with clues to layer upon layer of wharf lore. Yellowed issues of `Maritime Worker’ strewn on the floor of a room where placards decry nuclear warships and bases, or demand better public transport and “free phone rental” for pensioners. Tattered posters on faded blackboard urging votes for union office candidates _ Joe Lynch, “Bunna” Walsh, Tom McCool …
Sims, 46, strides through this hangar-like building. “These were the pay windows. What they’d do, the foreman would come out here and yell the orders out. `So-and-so. Such-and-such. Day work at No.3 Vic Dock,’ whatever.
The building, in Piggot Street, West Melbourne, was used by the Waterside Workers Federation until three years ago. Earlier, it was known as “the compound”. A government authority, the Australian Employers of Waterside Labor, co-ordinated its “open pick-up” system of engaging wharf labor here until the late 1970s.
These days, wharfies are on the payroll of individual companies. But hundreds once thronged here, waiting for their registration number to be called. They would front up by 8am, not knowing if they would be loading flour, pig-iron, gelignite, timber, whatever. Not knowing where in the port, how many hours, day or night. If nothing came up, it was off to the waterfront pubs, such as the Hotham, the Great Britain, the Waterside. Or home.
Author John Morrison, a wharfie in the 1930s and ’40s, has written of the roar of men’s voices thrown back by the iron roof, the eager, upturned faces, tense lips, avid eyes. “You think of children waiting for an appearance of Santa Claus, you think of women watching a horror play, you think of men looking down the barrels of levelled rifles.
But nothing quite satisfies, and you realise you are witnessing something unique in human mass emotion. These men are only looking for work.
Among the veterans, Lew Hillier, 72, describes the hard times when work was scarce. “We used to go down into the compound there of a morning on cold winter days. It was bloody tragic … You’d go down there in the morning, all the men would be called into the compound.
No bloody work for them.
“There used to be a fellow from Port Melbourne, he used to ride a bike. He had the gout so bad he couldn’t wear normal shoes. He used to have to wear open sandals or sandshoes all cut out and tied on to his feet … I don’t know how the man got out of bed. He’d ride his bike and come to work to get his number called out. And then, might be 10o’clock, they’d send everyone home.
The old compound is as much a reminder of change on the waterfront as the row upon row of containers that squat on the docks, huge gantry cranes and “portainers” such as the one at Webb Dock in which Reg Sims takes us up a dizzying equivalent of 12
storeys in a cramped lift.
Back on the dock, you look up at a metal structure that can lift in minutes loads that took gangs of men hours, days. The waterside, where men once toiled, is now the dominion of long-legged, metal monsters from some sci-fi film.
The gateway to this working world is the compound. “Imagine this in the morning,” Graham Crowe, 49, says as we prepare to leave.
“There’d be heaps of blokes here. There’d be some playing cards. Some having cups of coffee. All standing here waiting for the number to come up. See the speakers. Your number would come over. You’d go to the window. He’d give you a job.
Ask Graham Crowe if it’s glib to talk of old-style waterside workers as a dying breed and he responds with a wry, “dead accurate”.
Late last year Crowe, the watersiders’ federation secretary, and Sims, its president, left the waterfront for offices alongside each other at the federation’s headquarters in Ireland Street, West Melbourne.
Both have seen a world slip by. When they started work, wharf employment could be cut short by the employer body’s chairman, nicknamed “The Judge”, ripping up wharfies’ work papers for misdemeanors.
Whatever became of the ferocious foreman dubbed “Whiplash”? The supervisor, “Channel O” (he had a round bald patch at the back of his head)? What of “The Hurricane Lamp” (a bit dim, he had to be carried)? “The Fruit Fly” (he came from New South Wales)? “Wobblehead”, “Pockets”, “Glass Arms” and “Tonnage Tom”? “It’s hard to give a fellow a nickname when all you hear is his voice over the radio,” says Billy Lowrie, 50, also elected to office with the federation late last year.
ONCE the waterfront provided work for sportsmen, giving them enough time for training: Boxing champions Billy Rainsbury and Mickey Tollis; Brownlow medal-winning footballer Peter Bedford, of South Melbourne, and legendary Port Melbourne player Bill Swan.
“We saw the last of one era and the start of the next,” says Lowrie, who started work on the waterfront in 1963. “We’ve got people here that have never seen a struggle and can’t relate to struggle because they haven’t been out for a week at a time
or two weeks. We’ve lost lots and lots of money for principle. It’s not on today. The people don’t get that sort of result.
Wharfie David Hamkin, greying but still looking younger than his 44 years, has been on the waterside since 1969. “I used to come to work.
It was more of a lark, you know what I mean? It was more human. There was more of a human face to the waterfront. It’s like an identity is gradually disappearing from the Australian character.
The workplace as he had known it was gone by the start of the 1989 waterfront reform, which was aimed at improving efficiency and making Australian ports more internationally competitive. The restructure would not focus on wharfies but staff across the waterfront. The Port of Melbourne Authority will have reduced its workforce from 1600 to fewer than 600 by the end of the year. Even crews on tugs have been cut.
Voluntary redundancy offers during the reform process since 1989 accelerated a fall in wharfie numbers inevitable since containerisation changed the nature of the job. The federation says its membership in Melbourne has fallen from 7000 in the 1950s to about 800 wharfies of 1400 members.
There are those who recall days when a gang of 17 wharfies could be penalised for “insufficient effort” for failing to unload 100 tonnes of flour bags from a visiting Russian ship in one day. Now, the same amount, they say, is moved in 10 minutes by three men using a forklift, straddle and crane to shift four containers.
With this decline in need for muscle came a shift in power away from the federation, which is set to merge with the Seamen’s Union. Foreman Barry “Bomber” Mitchell, 51, a wharfie for 33 years, speaks ruefully of victory for the stevedoring bosses as he supervises the placing of containers of wool, milk powder and rice to be loaded on to a Chinese vessel due at East Swanston Dock.
Spoils to the victors, who demand a VCE for a waterside job, rendering the likes of Bomber Mitchell’s sons, aged 19 and 21, ineligible for work on the wharf.
For those who have remained, career and training opportunities have expanded, and pay is geared to productivity. Waterside work these days involves literacy, computer, radio and other skills. Yet there are some who smart at educational requirements for what they still deem a laboring job.
Here, there traditionally has been a “`heritage of hatred’ between master and man”, Wendy Lowenstein and Tom Hills note in their early- 1980s oral history, `Under the Hook’. “Class war was seen at its most ferocious on the watefront.
Cruising the waterside in his late-model Holden Commodore, Reg Sims talks of times when allegiance was to the workmates who were in the compound. Now, he says, “it’s like a factory”.
When Lew Hillier came down on the waterfront in the 1950s, the union was “at its maximum strength”. It had clout in the ACTU. In the days when it could muster thousands, halting ships that docked for weeks, not days, it exerted its muscle on international issues, taking industrial action against Dutch ships in support of Indonesian independence, banning work on South African ships, or Greek vessels while the military junta was in power.
Hillier tells how the federation had acted on behalf of visiting seamen sailing in “rotten ships sinking under them”. It had insisted that their wages be paid and even supervised the payment.
“From blind babies to lost-dogs homes to cat ladies, you name it, and this union took part,” he says. (On one occasion, a threat to prevent delivery of a load of Michelin tyres persuaded a prominent car dealer to refund an aggrieved federation member.) Graham Crowe: “Let me relate this to you, right. Football today, the biggest thing they’re into is getting the violence out of the game.
The violence and the hard stuff is gone from the waterfront.
“In the old days you had the foreman on one side of the fence and the wharfie on the other side of the fence and if you didn’t see eye to eye with some of these people it was, you know, up for grabs … Men were men, that’s what they say. But they were hard men. They didn’t take rubbish.
He says that, as well as numbers, union members have lost ground in wages with the restructuring, but concedes that watersiders are “still getting a reasonable living”. He says that earnings vary according to the amount of overtime worked. Base weekly wages (not counting overtime) range from $436 to $575.
Of course, waterside workers can earn significantly more than this.
Graham Crowe declines to put a figure on potential earnings but acknowledges that overtime, though variable, is a “big factor”.
LEGENDARY on the waterfront, Ted Bull, 79, is a former federation secretary and waterside worker. He walks stooped by spinal injury.
“You could have up to 250 wharfies working on a ship and the work they did was all manual. You worked on lumping wheat 10 hours a day or night. You were handling pig iron all day. You were on rock boats. You were on sulphur boats. It was all hard labor.
Usually there were 17 men in a gang, but there could be as many as 23.
“You worked together every day for weeks on end. The same gang. You became reliant on one another. You worked, you ate and you practically slept with one another. You knew what they were thinking. Everyone kept their eye out to protect one another.
When he worked the wharves there was no such thing as machinery. “Now you’ve got 40-tonne forklifts. You’ve got straddle trucks. Bloody machinery. You’ve got container trains. Handling more tonnage in less time and the quicker turnaround of the ships.
“And the ship owner, this is what he’s got from those thousands down to hundreds now. He’s eliminated thousands of bloody weeks of salary, thousands of annual leave, thousands of sick leave. That’s all his.
What has the wharfie got? The wharfie doesn’t even own one bloody rivet in one ship.
“It’s only a short time ago that Princes Pier and Station Pier didn’t even have a shithouse for the toilers that produced the wealth. That loaded the ship and unloaded the ship … The wharfies, they had to go down underneath the pier, squat on a beam …
The changes on the docks coincides with the dispersal of a community.
“That’s Garden City,” says Reg Sims, gesturing from his blue sedan at the Port Melbourne housing estate developed in the 1920s along the lines of English council estates with low-cost accommodation surrounded by nature strips, parks and gardens.
“It used to be called Baghdad because you went in there and you mightn’t come out … The 40 Thieves.
Raised in this neighborhood, he recalls the days when Port Melbourne people either worked on the waterside, the Dunlop tyre factory, or Swallow and Aeriell biscuits.
“It was like a little village. Everybody knew everybody and generation after generation got up here. Your mum and dad lived here and then you lived here. You never moved out of the area. But now it’s starting to become a trendy area and the children, unless they’ve got a very good job, can’t afford to buy a house in Port Melbourne.
Still, there is a strong emotive tie. Billy Lowrie, who has moved out to Werribee, still identifies with his former home. “People say you come from Werribee. I say I come from Port Melbourne. I mean, that goes way back. You can run that by anyone who’s moved away from the area.
It’s still home to the likes of Tom Hills and “Bomber” Mitchell, who was mayor in 1988-1989, and plenty of older waterside workers still live there.
At the kiosk at Station Pier, a man who identifies himself only as Ted is reminiscing with a customer about times when it would be packed with post-World War II European migrants “three or four deep”.
Leaning on the counter is a man called Brian, with a black dog, Spot, who remembers selling sixpenny streamers for departing vessels, chocolates to be hurled at arriving passengers, to be scooped up from the fenders for resale when they fell short.
This is their world too. But, at the heart of it remain the wharfies, decimated by change but still a vital link in the two-way movement of cargo between ship and truck or train.
They way they talk you might imagine they were ghosts revisiting old haunts. Theirs is a bond in talk of hard work. Reg Sims: “What about those little bags of roof-tile shit?” Graham Crowe: “Christ, it was sand. But Jesus, I couldn’t lift it. It was unbelievable.
Sims remembers the hazards they faced while loading gelignite. “The blokes used to get picked up and they’d leave from Station Pier in a little punt. Away they’d go. It was a hated job. You’d go out in a little boat and it’d be rough weather or whatever. They used to have the ship anchored out in the middle of the bay.
“The barges would come up alongside. The wharfies would be on the barges and on the ship and they’d take it out into the nets, up on the deck and then down below. Stand on the barge as they’re rocking around all day. The whole purpose of it was if it blows up, the only ….
who’re going to be killed are wharfies and the crew. No one else.
Crowe remembers being given gloves without instructions to offload the gelignite. “They’d be slipping. So you take them off, don’t you? Then, of course I started to sweat. So I wipe my brow … had the biggest headache you’ve ever seen.
OTHERS talk of injuries they carry. “Everyone on the joint got a bad back you can bet on that,” says Crowe.
During the 1920s, Tom Hills, 89, rowed the ferry across the Yarra at the Swinging Basin, near Johnson Street. He married a Port Melbourne woman and, during the Depression, was president of the central unemployed committee. In the 1930s, he found work with the federation, campaigning for Jim Healey, who was elected general secretary in 1937.
He talks of a past militancy in the federation. “Some of the things we done, today we mightn’t have gotten away with it and won, some of them. Nevertheless, it did build the union up and then come these changes …
He tells of the bond between men of the waterside. “A wharfie goes home and his wife says `you’re home early today’ _ this is one of the tales of the waterfront _ `what are you doing bloody home so early?’ … and he says `we’re on bloody strike, that’s why we’re home’. She says `what for?’ `What the bloody hell’s that got to do with it. I’ll find out tomorrow.’ See? it was that trust among workers.
He sees the separation of waterside workers into companies as a big mistake. Not that there had not been gains. Waterside workers were once “treated like cattle”, Hills says. Facilities have improved as has the awareness of need for protective clothing and safety.
What has been lost is a way of work on the waterfront. It is almost the end of the era when men can remember, as Ted Bull does, the days when “the only machinery we had were winches on the ship … What we had was bloody horses dragging our bloody load with a trap or a trolley. Weaving bloody in and out and trying to keep it straight.
THE SUNDAY AGE, 20-Jun-1993
Larry Schwartz Writer 