Transcript of Shadow On The Hill
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shadow Of the Hill
Colleen Heath | Chilla Bulbeck Originally published by the Fremantle Arts Centre Press for Chris Heath Husband, Father, union activist. Community serviceman; a good man overtaken by extraordinary events
acknowledgements
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for the use of some of the photographs appearing in this book Australian Iron and Steel Pty Ltd and the Battye Library of Western Australian History for the photographs appearing on pages 23 (27743P) and 25 (27744P) Mr Roger Garwood for the photographs on pages 27,28 and 82 Mr Doug White for the photographs on pages 40 and 43. Our thanks also go to Mr John Crowley of Mt Newman Mining’s Public Affairs section, Kevron Aerial Survey Pty Ltd and Mr Victor France for their assistance.
Fremantle Arts Centre Press recieved financial assistance from the Western Australian Arts Council, a statuatory authority of the government of Western Australia
Contents
- Introduction | 13
- Chris’ Story | 17
- Another View: Interview with Stuart Clements | 69
- Living and working in the Pilbara | 81
- Footnotes | 107
** CONVERSION TABLE ** 1 inch - 25.4 millimetres 1 foot - 30.5 centimetres 1 mile - 1.61 kilometres
1 ounce - 28.3 grams 1 pound - 454 grams 1 ton - 1.02 tonnes
INTRODUCTION
Chris heath’s story has its unusual aspects. The high incidence of illness piling one on top of each other escapes most Pilbara residents. The great love and respect Colleen and Chris felt for each other. While more common, is rare among couples anywhere in Australia. Although extraordinary circumstances overtook this family, they faced problems that all families living in the isolation of the north-west confront. This is why colleen has shared her story with me, and now with you. She believed more should be done for people in Western Australia’s north-west.
As her story unfolds, you will obtain a very concrete insight into the effects of isolation. Isolation from a full range of medical treatment; isolation from a variety of shops and the consequent reduced range and higher prices of goods isolation from community support services except the Department of Community Welfare (DCW) and the church minister. You will learn that a woman on her own, not employed by the company has to leave the town because the company owns the house and only lets them to employees. You will glimpse the tyranny of public opinion and gossip in a small town. However, unlike many women, Colleen enjoyed living in the Pilbara. You will sense her pleasure at living so close to the peace and variety of ’the bush’ and the freedom children enjoy in a much larger and safer environment than the city offers.
I have recorded and edited Colleen’s story becayse of my particular interest in the Pilbara. Industrial relations in the North-West are deservedly famous. Unions there have won rights to job control as well as conditions that city workers find hard to credit. They have won these rights through turbulent industrial action. The men and women who run the unions on each individual site, the conveners, are not paid and yet they perform a task which I belive to be well-nigh impossible.
In 1980, I spent some time with a convener at Tom Price, a young man still employed full-time at his trade. I saw him handle a meeting so that all the men could voice their grievances and yet a decision was taken. I saw him listen to the problems of the shutdown maintenance crew, a specialist and somewhat marginalised group of workers, and balance these against the needs of his whole membership. I saw him discuss the log og claims the union were developing for their next round of negoiations with the company.
A convener’s task is difficult, complex and thankless. These men pit themselves against the company’s full-time paid professionals and at the end of the day a good many of them still have the principles to refuse the company’s offer of a staff job with a thirty percent salary hike.
I have tremendous admiration for these unsung heroes of the iron ore saga. But their story has its sadder side. Because of the great pressures they face in their jobs, ‘something has to give’ as the saying goes. It is, unhappily, usually their families that are neglected. This is partly because tensions are relieved at the weakest link and many of these men put their family obligations (beside economic provier) as the lowest priority. It is also a reflection of the poor communication between husbands and wives in the North-West. Wives do not usually have direct experience of the workplace, often they do not understand why their men are on strike - as you will see in this story. On the other hand, unions take little interest in family concerns, eg day-care centres for the children, membership and voting rights for women whose spouses are in the unions. As a result they fail to reap the enourmous resources women could offer to the unions secretarial, organisational, and research work, to name just a few.
The story you are about to read is derived from two taped interviews with Colleen Heath, each lasting about three hours. The tapes were transcribed by Lianne Blackwell to whom goes my heartfelt gratitude for a difficult and time consuming task. I decided to leave Colleens story in the ‘as told’ form as much as possible, only deleting repeated statements and phrases, such as ‘you know’ which is used when talking but would not write down. I also rearranged the text in place in order to maintain continuity of the subject matter and the chronology of events. As Colleen and I talked, we sometimes moved off subject and returned to it later in the interview. As to the effects of my editing function, I was surprised when I returned to the interview transcript some months later to discover that I had blocked out some segments -things of which I didn’t entirely aqpprove or thought incidental. I reintroduced these into Colleen’s story.
Colleen was initially a little ambivalent about the project. On the one hand she wanted to share her story with people to set the record straight about the North-West. On the other hand, she was a little worried about the effects publication of the story may have on her children. As we proceeded, she overcame these fears and became increasingly pleased with the idea of publication. She read the manuscript I prepared from the interviews and made a number of changes, mostly minor. The major and amendment was to start with Chris’s life rather than her own childhood. As she said, it was his story, not hers. Almost a year later, we went over the manuscript together again and made some further changes.
I was well aware that the manuscript represented only one person’s viewpoint. In fact, I had heard quite different viewpoints expressed by other participants to some of the events discussed in the story. For this reason, and for its own interest, we have added an interview with Stuart Clements who worked with Chris Heath in the union. Furthermore, my concluding essay, ’living and working in the Pilbara’, includes the views of other North-West residents, as well as some of the literature on the Pilbara.
Colleens story represents one person’s experience of life in the Pilbara. My main concern was to reproduce it as faithfully as I could while taking account of the transition from a verbal to a written form of presentation. For example, an inconsistency in Colleen’s representation of measurement has been retained because it seems of some interest that it is with the move to Newman that imperial gives way to metric. I believe that Colleen’s review and revision of my rendition of her story has protected the integrity of her experience.
We hope this book brings alive the story behind the millions of tons of Iron or that are wrenched from the land each year, and transported on a massive scale to far away markets. We hope that city-dwellers will achieve an increased understanding and sympathy we hope that Pilbara dwellers will successfully organise themselves for a better life in their isolation.
- Chilla Bulbeck
Chris’ Story
1: Living in the Country
I was fifteen when I first met Chris, he livefd next door to my cousin. I thought he was a bit of a snob. We used to talk. He was working at Mount Magnet then, on the goldmine and he was down for holidays, he used to come down quite often.
When he first came out here from England he got entry to the University to study medicine. He was only fifteen, but he was very clever.
However, almost as soon as his family got there from England his parents split up. He had to leave school, give up the idea of university and go out to work to help his mum. Chris was the eldest, that’s why he had to go out to work. He had three younger brothers, but his father took two of them over to the eastern states and left Chris and the youngest boy at home. It was just two months after they landed. Chris didn’t a very good life.
So chris went out and worked for his mum, and he used to go away to work and send her the money.
His first job was as a farmhand at Boyup Brook, on a fairy farm. That was for about a year. Then he went to the goldmines. He has been in mining ever since. He was still at the goldmine when I met him. Goldmining is underground mining it’s very dangerous. When chris and I started going together I said I didn’t like the idea of him going underground. I said ‘if you want to continue mining you get out of goldmining and find something above the ground’. He reckoned he’s had enough anyway. So he did another six months and then he finished. I was seventeen, and Chris was nineteen.
colleen and Chris Heath, wedding day April fifteenth, 1967
We were married on April fifteenth, 1967. Our life started together when Chris got a job as an overseer of a sheep station a hundred and ten miles east of Wiluna. We lived there for two years. We loved it there. I come from the country but Chris had only worked on the land as a dairy-hand. He studied for a Diploma of Agriculture and did other correspondence courses. It was a fantastic life on the station. I loved it because every day I was out with Chris. There was nothing to stay home for, so we both shared the work, it was really good. We baked all our own bread and rang up on an old pedal wireless set for shopping every two weeks. Once a month we went to town for farm supplies and for a check-up during my pregnancies.
That was the only problem, the isolation. I remember once when the landrover broke down I had to walk thirty-four miles home when I was six months pregnant with Mark! It was too far from medical help - Meekatharra was two hundred miles. Because our first baby died, I had to spend the last three months of my pregnancy with mark in Perth.
Chris and Mark Heath, Corna Glen Station, Wiluna. 1969
We were separated for three months and it was just too long. Once, when Mark was twelve months old, he drank kerosene. They had to send the flying doctor out and that was a real worry. Waiting for the doctor.
It was even harder to get to hospital from the station because I hate flying. I detest it. Oh, and the struggle getting me onto the flying doctor to bring me to Perth to have Mark. We were right in the middle of the desert but I wouldn’t fly to hospital. That is one reason why we decided to leave the station.
When I became pregnant for the third time, with jamie, they said, because of my difficulties with mark, that I had to go down to Perth again well before the birth. Well that was a big drama! I said, ‘No, if I go to Perth we’re both going. We’ll both stay there and then come back’. That’s what we did, but while we were waiting in Perth for three months, Chris got a job at Koolyanobbing. So we decided to go there. We took a flat in Perth for the three months while I waited for Jamie to be born. Chris got a temporary job in Perth.
When Jamie was about to be born, I called Chris home from work. He said he’d get me to the hospital, but I could feel Jamie coming in the car. I thought ‘Oh, blimey’. So I had to stop off at the Devenleigh Hospital. If Chris had kept going to King Edward, Jamie would have been born in the car for sure.
When Matron came and saw me, she said “you’re not going to have it for hours” and I said, “I am, you know don’t send him away”. But Chris had just walked out the door. They tried to call him back but he’d gone down the road, so he missed the second birth. I hate these Matrons that tell you, “You’re not going to have it for hours”, and you know yourself when you’re going to have it.
It was 1969 when we went to “Kooly”. Chris got a job as a driller first but after a while he went on the shovels. There were only about three hundred people at the mine, only two shovels. The shovels were small compared with the ones at Newman. They were twenty ton buckets at “Kooly” and sixty tons at Newman. Usually there was only one shift, although sometimes they would have day and afternoon shifts.
It was only a very small town, there were only about seven hundred people. You could walk around the whole town in about half and hour, but it was a lovely little town.
We were there five years and it was really good. We knew just about everybody in the town. There was a social club and Chris was involved in the kids’ sports. Actually it used to annoy me, because Chris took the kids in the youth group when ours weren’t old enough to go, because they were still only babies. He ran the youth group there for a few years. He loved going with the kids. We played badminton on Tuesday nights, a mixed badminton. I used to take him and drop him off because I never liked the game. In the end I could beat him and he gave it up. We loved the town, we had some really good times there.
A group of people came about the same time as we came, so we alol got to know each other. The short-stay people only stayed a couple of months and then they were gone. But there was a few that had been there for a few years before we came.
While we were living at Koolyanobbing I had the last two children. Danny and Rebecca. Chris was there for their births and it was absolutely fantastic, it was magnificent. Although, in one way I didn’tr eally want him there because I knew how much trouble I’d have. But he really wanted to see the births because we were really close and he idolised the kids. Of course when he saw Rebecca he couldn’t believe his eyes, having a girl - it was quite different. After three boys, a girl, I couldn’t believe it. Neither could Chris.
She was the biggest one of the lot. The boys were only small. The smallest one was only five pounds thirteen ounces and the others were six pound four ounces and Rebecca was seven pounds twelve ounces. Chris thought it was quite exciting because that was two births that he had seen.
There is no hospital at Koolyanobbing. The closest ones are at Southern Cross or Merredin. Its about thirty-four Miles from Southern Cross to “Kooly”. you can have babies at Southern Cross, its a very good hospital sometimes there were no doctors (full time) there so I went to merredin to have my last two. With Rebecca I had an accident in the car so I had to go into the hospital eight weeks before she was born because they had to keep checking her all the time. It was a long trip for medical treatment fro Koolyanobbing. It was a hundred miles to Merredin and if you didn’t make it you’d stop off at the Soutern Cross Hospital. Though, as i said before, you’d still get panicky with childrenb and their accidents.
Jamie, I think he was three, put a safety pin up his nose. If it goes in your lungs, you have to be operated on straight away because it can pierce your lungs. By the time I had got him to a doctor I was in a real panic because you have to travel that distance before you can get any medical attention. Anyway, I could just see the pin in his nose and the first-aid-nurse said, “Don’t sniff”. So Jamie sniffs! And it was gone. So they rushed him to Southern Cross Hospital and they took x-rays. They couldn’t find the pin because as they were x-raying it was going through the chest and then the stomach. They found it in the stomach but the doctor was really worried because he couldn’t find it.
Danny one time was playing with a key ring, the sort that has a hook on it. You open it up into a hook. Danny had it in his mouth and my nephew ran past him and pulled on the ring. It went through his lip, but had caught under the nerve endings, and we couldn’t get it out. We had to go all the way to Merredin, at about nin o’clock at night They operated to take it out next morning.
At another time I was dressing danny in front of the heater. He stepped back too far and sat down on the heater. He burnt his bottom and as he sad down he rolled back into the heater and burned his legs. He got rushed up to first-aid at the mine. He saw the first-aid attendant up there and then they took him to Southern Corss for treatment. Really wherever we’ve been we’ve had a long distance to travel for medical attention.
Jamie also put his fingers in the bike once and they had to bring the man down from the mine to saw the bike up to get his fingers out. He was in hospital for a few days. Another time, Jamie was bouncing up and down with a long flutein his mouth. It went through the roof of his mouth, narrowly missed the brain. There was nothing to merredin to do but rush him off to hospital again.
Koolyanobbing mine-site, c.1969
You don’t have the medical facilities you would like if you live in the country. But we didn’t let it worry us too much because we loved the bush. That’s one of the things you have to put up with. When Rebecca was born in Koolyanobbing, she was flooded with gifts. You could have started up a baby shop with all the clothes she got, it was incredible. It was a completely different town to Mount Nerwman, for example we lived next door to our mine manager in “Kooly” and got on very well with him. He was just like an ordinary person. You try and talk to the mine manager in Newman over the back fence or something. You just haven’t got a hope. It was a completely different town. Everybody felt they were no different to anybody else in “Kooly”. We found it different when we went to Newman, the bosses at one end of the town and the workers at the other end. The wives were in the same boat. At “Kooly” we all taloked to each other, but not at Newman.
2: Moving to Newman
We moved to Newman because we’d earn more money but also it was somewhere different.We’d been away for a holiday up around Port Hedland. Chris’ mother had married again and had two girls. Her husband, hans, was working in Perth. Chris talked him into going up north and he’s been there for about twelve years now. He loves it and won’t leave. He’s a fabulous guy. They’ve split up now, mind you. So we went up to see them at Port Hedland. We stayed for a couple of weeks. We didn’t want to go to Hedland where they wre because neither of us liked being too close to our family, so we thought we’d try for Newman. Chris went to see Mount Newman Mining Company in Hedland, just on the off-chance they might have a job, and they said yes straight away. We couldn’t believe it, because other times you seem to wait and wait to get a job and you’ve got to look for it. They said to go down through Newman and call in and they take us round the homes. We ent there and we were taken straight away by the town. It was a beautiful, clean town, it was really lovely. They showed us through the houses and I really liked them, some had four bedrooms. All of them were furnished, not that we wanted any furniture because we had most of our own. We’d already heard about the school, that the school went to fith year. That the high school had only just been built. The company used to give a subsidy to send the children away to school. Now with the high school there you pay yourself if you want to send your kids away. There was only one primary school, another one was built later. We looked around the schools and the town, had a look at everything and we really liked it. We thought it would be good, it would be somewhere different, and we both loved the bush. We were so excited we couldn’t wait to get home and pack. We only had until the end of august to go home and pack, not even that Just a week or so. We had to get all the furniture sorted out. For instance, we sold the fridge and washing machine, which we weren’t taking because they were already in the house up there. We arrived there in September 1974.
There was a big drama when we got there because the house wasn’t ready that we were supposed to be going into. They put us in another home they used as a store-house. I just sat there and cried. I was shocked because I waloked in and it was full of tabled and chairs and stores. It was a wreck. I was really idsappointed that I didn’t get this other house that h’d showed us. But we had to stay in this storeroom house until a four bedroom one became available.
Typical Newman house, c.1975
We had it painted while we were in there. They got us a stove and so on. I was disappointed because even though we had made it a nice home, it was not like the one we’d seen before on our visit. Anyway we were quite happy with it and we knew we were going to movbe into a four bedroom home when one came up. As it happened there was one next door, so we were quite lucky. That was about eight months later. This was in the old part of Newman because, of course, South Newman hadn’t been built then. When I went to see about the four bedroom house, one of the guys in charge of housing said, “you’ve already got a house, you don’t need a four bedroom house”. I told him that we’d come to Newman under the impression that we already had a four bedroom house waiting for us and we had four children. He was ranting and raving that if a person came up with two children they’d get a four bedroom house before me because i’d already got a house. I went home and told Chris, and that was it. He really got stuck into them, and the next day we had a house. We were surprised though, to get a house straight away, because some people had to wait about three months from start of work. There were quite a few shovel drivers who came up at the same time as us. They got houses practically straight away when they came into the town. Some people who had applied for jobs in Perth had to wait for a few weeks at least for a house. Some stayed at the caravan park. The newcomers stayed there until a house came up. Some of them were in tehre for quite a few months. As soon as we shifted out of our house someone moved in. There was a real shortage of houses until they got South Newman built. The caravan park was really crowded. I wouldn’t like to live there though. It was also about eight kilometres from Newman itself, right out on the main road. It was much further out than the present caravan park. You can see the town and the mine from the new park. I met a lot of people at Newman, but most I only knew by their faces, not by their names. I think I knew just about everybody in Newman by their faces. I met quite a few people playing sport, there’s so many different sports in Newman to do. I wasn’t really one for going out visiting in other people’s houses. Most people would come to my place for coffee. I didn’t speak much to the people next door when I first got there. I was on a corner so I only had the two next door neighbours. On one side was a woman who didn’t speak very much, so I never got to know her. She moved out, and we moved into her house - the four bedroom house. I became very friendly over the years with the lady who shifted into my old house, on the corner. We are still friends now - she moved to Perth too, because she and her husband had lots of problems. I became very friendly with my neighbours who lived on the other side Hilary and Kevin. Hilary was just like a sister. You could talk to her and she really wanted to understand. She spoke to me about her problems too. She was a really nice person. We were the same age. She only had two little girls and Rebecca and her daughter Lisa played together. It was odd because the whole time they wre together they never fgoughht and that was unusual. They really missed each other when she went back to England, because they were just like little sisters. Hilary belonged to a church, and she thought the lord had called her home to England. We still write to each other, we’re very good friends. She was a lovely person, and I really got on well with her. They were the greatest. She used to come across for coffee or I would go there but we never made a bnuisance of ourselves. We were never in each other’s places when either husband came home from work. Others don’t seem to worry about that, they’ll stay all day every day. Some people would make a real nuisance of themselves. They’d be there when Chris went to work and when he came home. I’m one for being on my own, I like to have my work done. I used to race around in the mornings to get my work done because I knew as sure as eggs somebody would be in there by nin o’clock sometimes it was half past seven. I don’t mind talking to people, but it gets a bit monotonous after a while. I just want to stay home in my own place. Sometimes you’d wonder how good your friends were though. We knew one couple, Stuart and Shane, and she was dying of cancer. When she was dyring, her friends would all go around there and make out that they were the ones that were looking after her. When she died they just cut Stuart off. They didn’t want to look after the two children, and he didn’t have an ybody to look after them. His friends didn’t want anything to do with him. After all that time they were hanging around Shane till she died. I thought “you rotten so-and-so’s”, I couldn’t believe it. They would only have had to look after the kids when they came home from school, ’till Stuart came home at night time. But they said no. So there’s some real ratbags in Newman as well. Stuart had to send his kids away to his parent’ place, he couldn’t keep them, because nobody would look after them. Chris said we’d have them but Stuart said. “No, you’ve got four of your own and another two is too many”.
Shane, Stuart, Scott and Samantha Clements
A lot of people up there had marriage problems. It’s incredible. There were so many broken families, just about everybody seemed to be living with someone else. It’s quite sad really. Of course, if you’re a woman and you can’t work at the mine, the only way you can stay in Newman after your marriage breaks up is to move in with someone else, perhapse as a housekeeper. I used to think I was the only sane one in the whole place sometimes. I never told anyone my problems, partly because I didn’t have any drastic problems like others did. Also, I just didn’t want to tell anybody except Chris. My friends used to say I had a perfect marriage. One, especially, used to wish that her marriage was the same; because we were so happy. I couldn’t understand anybody having so many marriage problems, especially with ours so good. So many times I said to her, “see the welfare”. But of course there was no welfare in Newman. They only came once a week, but you’d want a welfare officer there at the time. Her husband tried to stab her and she came running over and I said, “look, there is nothing I can do for you or Chris can do for you. If you want to leave the town you’ll have to see the welfare.” So she had to ring the welfare in Perth for help, thirteen hundred kilometres away. It’s not much help. They have a full-time welfare worker there now. But there’s still trouble, arranging for people to get to Perth and so on. There’s not enough done for people in the North-West, especially in relation to medical services and welfare. For medical attention you often have to go away to Perth. You can apply to the government for fares but half the time they won’t give them to you. I don’t know why, but many times I’ve been down to Perth and never got anything for it. People think you’re up there and you’ve got plenty of money, you can pay for this and pay for that, but you can’t. You really pay for your living in the North. The freight costs up there are shocking. You might get higher wages, but go down to the shop and you only buy a couple of things and it costs you forty of fifty dollars. The prices are incredible, twice as much as Perth. Eighteen months ago, when I was up there, steak used to cost us fifteen dollars for the family. You can get it donw there for five dollars. Mostly when we came to Perth, we used it to go to Action (supermarket) or somewhere like that and take back a carload of goods with us. You still had to buy your perishibles in Newman, which cost a lot. If you took housing out, which was substantial, the cost of living could be three times more. If you settle for the company furniture its all the same, same beds, same chairs, same everything. When you want to buy furniture to make it homely, or have your own freighted up, its very expensive. Living in the metropolitan area, furniture is delivered free. We had to pay. To have a set of table and chairs freighted up it would cost around eighty dollars. Then, when you leave you have to sell your furniture for next to nothing because it costs so much to freight it down. The unions kept check on the prices and there wasn’t much they could do about it. Shops there could stick their own prices on goods, althought they were not allowed to go over a certain percentage mark-up. On the other hand, though, it was a frtee life, a lot freer than the city. The boys used to go out camping on weekends, they weren’t restricted to where they could go. We would go out and check on them and pick them up. They used to catch fish, freshwater fish. A while ago one of them went and pitched a tent in a market garden at the back of our house there. They thought they could light a fire, wondered why the market gardener sent them home! They haven’t adjusted to the city life. The kids really liked it living in the bush compared with down here. There is a lot more for them to do. You haven’t got so far to travel to play sport. It’s all in one place and you wouldn’t go more than half a kilometre to get to the place you play sport. We never thought of coming to the city to live. Never. We both hated it. We reckoned it was only good for shopping. We had even thought about moving further up north. There was nowhere else we liked, except the bush. It was quite funny because I remember when there was the Six Day War in Israel, they were asking people to go over there and man the farms. We applied for that and were unable to go, but Chris couldn’t bring himself to take us, in case something happened to the kids. It only lasted six days as it was, but it didn’t cost you anything to go over. You thought it would be quite interesting to do. Chris had been all over the place - to Iraq but not to Israel. But we decided he wouldn’t go, because of the war I suppose.
Chris was involved with sports and clubs too at Newman. He was involved in the judo club and he ran the chess club. All our kids played judo - Jamie’s got an orange belt Mark and Danny have blue belts and Rebecca is white. They come down a belt as they go up in age group. It’s quite complicated. They’re very good at judo, they really like it, although two of them have had to give it up at the moment because of medical problems. Mark’s got a kodakang Judo jacket from Japam. He’s the only one that has it, a guy from Japan gave it to him. We had judo twice a week at the Newman Hall. Once we went to carnarvon for a competition. It’s a thirty hour trip and they were so exhausted that even before they got on the mat they all collapsed. A guy walked past and he couldn’t resist taking a photo of them. Chris also kept birds, he had about three hundred birds worth about four thousand dollars finshes, parrots, love-birds, “budgies”. We had cages all over the backyard. You walked in and all the birds were friendly They’d sit on you all over the place. There were never any wild birds. Chris used to breed them himself. Chris was also in the showband there. He played trombone. They played at quite a few events, for instance, at the opening of the bitument road from Perth to Newman by the Premier, not that Chris was thrilled about that, but you know how it is. They played at the Fortescue Festival every year, around august. He also ran the chess club there. He loved chess, he would say, “come and have a game with us”. I’d say “Righto”. He would always put me in a checkmate in a couple of moves, so I’d upend the board, the pieces would fly all over the place. I could never sit there and work out the moves that he could. He’s been playing for a long time and I’d only just started. It used to frustrate me. The kids never really got into chess. They used to try and play too, but they never really asked to be taught, Even though he had to give up medical school Chris kept up his voluntary work with St.John’s Ambulance. He also did quite a bit of study. He did it all in his spare time. When we got to Newman he went to be tutored in Maths. His tutor said, “You are just too advanced for me”. The tutor was teaching kids at high school and Chris was too advanced for him! I couldn’t believe it. So Chris did it through correspondence, along with English. He liked Industrial Relations, I think that was his favourite; and Politics, he was really into that. He took some correspondence courses from W.A.I.T.
Chris was also a real family guy. He used to love his kid, he messefd around with them all the time. He gave them the contact they needed physical contact, especially the boys. He didn’t give it as much by actual kissing and cuddling, but more by romping and playing with them. He enjoyed being with the kids.
Chris underneath, wrestling with (from left) Mark, Patrick (a friend), Jamie, and Danny. 1980
Chris would always get up to see the kids off to school, it didn’t matter whether he got home late from afternoon shift, he’d still get up in the morning. He was a really gentle person, and he wouldn’t let the kids go odd to school without seeing them.
Most of the men up there were not like that, didn’t spent much time with their families. A lot got involved in sport or some sort of organisation up there. But often its the unions. I’ve got nothing against unions. I’m all for them, but they are homebreakers. Not the unions themselves, but because of the work they have to do.
For instance, stuart was the convener of Chris’ union. He didn’t have much time left for his family at all, only in the last twelve months while Shane was dying. Before that, he was never at home, always out or down at Perth. The union takes a lot of time. The union is a full-time job and you are also doing your own job and then trying to be involved with the family. You can’t do everything. Stuart used to have time to think only of the union. He says you couldn’t be a good family man and a convener on twenty-four hours call. It’s not possible. But now he’s sort of reversed his role, although he’s still with the union of course.
Chris and Rebecca, three years old. Newman 1977.
3: Union Activist
Chris always had his politics worked out. For instance when he was eighteen, he was working for British Paints and they trained him to be a manager. He gave it away because he didn’t like to be loocked up in an office.
Chris was a Labor man, and he was always a good unionist. In Koolyanobbing he was the convener, but it was quiet there. Chris was a well-liked person. He never caused any trouble, but everyone knew what he was on about with the union. He got stuck into them if he thought he was right. He never crawled to management. The manager and his wife were just a young couple and it was a small group of people. There were only about four peopole in Chris’ union and they worked well together, it was very quiet. I think there was one dispute, but it was sorted out in a couple of hours. Chris got onto Perth and solved it.
“kooly” was a completely different town to what we had heard about in Newman. We were really worried about going to Newman because all we’d hear was “strike this, strike that”. We wondered what we were letting outselves into, going to a town like Newman on a bigger scale and everyone on strike. We didn’t think we could handle it. It was so quiet in “Kooly”.
Sir Charles Court, Premier of Western Australia, meeting members of the childrens Newman show Band at the Debutant’s Ball, Newman, C.1978. Chris Heath is in the background acting as a door-man
We have let our boys grow up and speak their own way they’re against Fraser. It’s probably coming from Chris and me, though. For instance Chris was the doorman at a debutant’s ball we had once and he had to introduce Sir Charles Court. He was dead against Court, but at the function that night he thought it was okay. But he wasn’t really happy to find that Sir Charles was coming and that he was the doorman. Most of the time they tried to stop Sir Charles from coming! For instance, when the fouur-panel shift ca e out, they had Charlie Court come up. The men had big placards like king of the court As for the kids, Fraser was going to visit one time. Jamie was picked to play the clarinet at the school that Fraser was going to visit. The teacher said “Jame, you’ll have to play the clarinet”. Jamie said “I don’t want to play, its for Mr Fraser”. The teacher said, “don’t worry play the worst you’ve ever played in your life!” It was so funny. A day before Fraser was coming, Jamie said “I’m going to put a song over the radio for Fraser”. He started his name up, “Fraserblade” and that’s what everyone called him. He dedicated the song to Fraserblade, because he couldn’t really say it was for Malcolm Fraser. The song was Turning Japanese. Kids have got minds of their own even at that age. They know what’s going on. They come into contact with it more than kids that are living in cities. When their dad’s on strike they’llk find out why most kids find out what it’s all about. Even the littlest one, Rebecca, she knew what was going on. But down here you just wouldn’t have a clue. Kids don’t come in contact with strikes as much as they do up in mining towns.
At first Chris didn’t want to work for the union at Newman. They’d asked him for ages and after about ten months he agreed. It was a bigger scale than “Kooly”, he knew he could handle it, but wasn’t sure about the amount of work.
When all the officials changed, Stuart took over as convener and Chris became secretary, treasurer, everything else. They did it together for five or six years. They worked well together, they were good friends although they didn’t always see eye-to-eye on everything. They used to fight a bit on different things, but then they got it worked out.
Quite a few of them wanted Chris to be convener, but he kept refusing because it was just so much to handle. Even the job he was doing, he needed a full-time secretary to do it. People just don’t realise how much work there is.
THey come with their problems and they don’t realise that someone else has just knocked on the door five minutes before them. Or that Chris was up the mine until five minutes before. Sometimes he’d knock off early, but sometimes he didn’t get home until one in the morning. Then he’d be called out at half past seven the next morning again. So there goes your sleep. It was either someone coming around telling their problems to me or telling them to Chris. It was a four-panel shift so people would come around at all hours. Because of the kind of person he was, people would come with personal problems aas well as union troubles. Quite a few used to come around with personal problems, marriage problems; or through sickness it was not just a marriage problem. But probably it’s all associated with living in Newman or working in Newman. A lot of the time I tried not to hear what was going on, because it was non of my business to be sitting there eavesdropping on someone who wants to tell Chris something. A lot of it was personal.
Mt Newman mine site, c.1970
The union members think that they’re the only ones that have come around that day. They forget that he’s been out at the mine or at somebody’s place, and then he should come home to his family. They often turned to the union straight away, because there’s no one else in the town for them to see. There’s no social workers, welfare comes once a week, so who do you talk to. It’s not really the union members’ fault, because they don’t understand.
There was a “Grow” group started up here, but some people felt it was no good talking to them. Of course, you couldn’t go to the boss and say you had a problem, they’d laugh you out of the room for a start. You want your own kind of people. I myself couldn’t go to a white hat and discuss my problems, and I didn’t think anybody else could up there. The union was the safest place you could go to. So that’s why they used to come around. It was the same for all the unions up there.
A lot of families wanted to borrow money from the union. Chris couldn’t do it on his own, that had to go to their committee. Usually they paid it back, althbough there was no strict rule that you had to most people paid it back over a period of time. Generally, when strikes were on most people came around for money. They would either get twenty-five dollars a week during a strike or a food voucher. Anything more than that was a loan. I think that a lot of problems up there concerned money.
The trouble would always be at three o’clock in the afternoon, eleven o’clock at night or seven o’clock in the morning, because that’s when the shifts started/ The convener or Chris had to go up as each shift started and try to talk to them. Then you’d have all the guys from the other three shifts coming around to your house wanting to know what’s going on. Most of the time Chris would be up at the mine trying to work out the strike. So I’d be standing at the door trying to explain what was going on.
In the North-West too, the unionists have to make policy decisions; they don’t just pass the wishes of the executive.
Then there are meetings with the company. Stuart and Chris were at a meeting from four in the morning to seven the next morning. Right through the night and all day. Once when they were preparing the log of claims, they had a meeting that lasted two and ahalf days with the men, to thrash it out. Then there was the regular monthly meeting with all the members and a meeting with the stewards during the off fortnights. Then they would have to sort all the queries and problems out before the next meeting. There was also publishing a newsletter and pamphlets to tell the men what was happening. Chris and Stuart and a guy called Mick wrote all the union’s pamphlets.
Sometimes the company helped out a bit. They put Stuart on all day work so he could be in contact with his members. They also gave him shovel maintenance so he was down near the offices every day, close to the phone. With his wife sick, he wanted to be on call all the time for her. I don’t know whether the company put him on shovel maintenance for his wife or for him to be closer to the union members. It certainly made it easier on Chris because Stuart could be contacted at work, though when he got home he was still contacted there. In fact that’s why chris would not have the telephone ‘round at our place.
He knew he would be ringing every five minutes. If you can’t ring you think “Maybe I’ll go around later” and sometimes never get around to it. If you have the phone there, people just ring you up and you’d be sitting there for hours talking. In fact Stuart’s phone bill for a quarter was about two thousand dollars, and that would include about three hundred to five hundred dollars of local calls. Stuart was always trying to get chris to take the phone. Stuart was the convener though, so he probably needed it more.
The North-West organisers were not much help really. They’d get calledf up to say that this is happening at Port Hedland, this is happening at Karratha or Newman or whatever. They’d fly over and they’d sit with Stuart or Chris for about an hour before they could even go out to talk to the guys. You cannot bring a person from the outside to go to the men and say what they should do and what they shouldn’t do.
The conveners and others have to sit there for hours explaining it to the organiser before they can do anything. The organiser goes up and fronts the company, and he’s from out of town. Sometimes he hasn’t got a clue what he’s talking about and he wrecks it for the guys that are there. He wants this and he wants that, but he’s got no ideas of what’s been going on. Sometimes it turns out he’s been wrong and of course the guys don’t like that. It’s because of communication. To me it’s better to have a full time organiser in town. Of course unions are short of funds so you just wouldn’t get it. But that’s the only thing I can see as a solution to the problem. Even a secretary would be a help. Many times I’d do half the work because there wasn’t time or Chris wasn’t there. You could easily employ a secretary full-time.
You shouldn’t have voluntary union workers because it’s no good for families. I didn’t make Chris stop working for the union, because he loved it. He also lovedf his family. His family came first.
Even so it was very hard sometimes. I preferred people to come around home. I would get angry when he was called out, but of course he had to go. It was even worse for stuart because he used to be away all the time, leaving his family. In one six months he was only home two to four weeks. Sometimes he and Chris would take it in turns to go out, especially if one of them was having tea. But Stuart wasn’t really a family man in the way that Chris was. Chris would choose his family over the union, but for Stuart it would be the reverse, which is true of most of the guys. Yet once Chris and Stuart were both down in Perth together, because I was sick and Shane was dying some men said, “You shouldn’t have both gone away together”. They take no account of family commitments.
Chris and Colleen Heath, in the bush thirty kilometres east of Newman. 1980
We were never on our own. We never had privacy. If you went down to the club, the call would come over the radio, “Can the convener go up to the mine”. I used to get annoyed sometimes and so did Chris. That’s why we used to go off in the bush. We’d get the kids off to school and go off in the car. We would walk through the bush, sit among the trees, just to have some time on our own. Chris loved birds, so he looked around for birds. Most times we would cook our dinner out there and boil a billy. If you didn’t you’d get pestered all day.
Sometimes when a strike was on we went away to the bush for a few days. Otherwise if you stayed home, you’d have too many people coming around, or the company would be on to you. There was nothing you could do, everybody was on strike. Mostly, though, you couldn’t get away because you wouldn’t know when the strike would end. Or, if it was really important, we would stay back. But when we did get away, we used to have some fabulous times in the bush.
A lot of people up there didn’t really understand the union - unionists themselves as well as their wives, and their kids. Some people will tell their kids, “It’s daddy’s day off” rather than explain that he’s on strike and why. Some men are only on strike because the rest are.
Often the men who came from somewhere else, where the union was not so active, wouldn’t understand the role of the union or why there were so many strikes. The union gets blamed for quite a lot. In factm, when we were at Koolyanobbing my cousin came up to work as a boilermaker and he was dead against unions. Of course, he had to be in the union to get the job, so he joined, and now he is really militant. He could not believe what unions could do for you. He always thought badly of them, because all he read in the papers was bad comments about unions. He’s changed completely. He just didn’t realise that they were for working men and what they did for you.
Some of the guys were that thick they didn’t know what was going on. “why did you put your hand up and vote then?” some of them were like sheep. They’d vote at the meeting and come around later to find out exactly what was happening. A few of them acted as though they knew everything and then came around fgive minutes later, when nobody was looking, to find out what was going on,. Not many though, because it was a very militant union. Most of the time they just wanted to find out when they were going back to work; what was the latest on the strike. You had people there all the time trying to find out what was happening.
Chris (right) with Jamie on the motorcycle, and friends, jandakot, 1977
Nobody understands until they’re doing it themselves. Nobody understands until they’ve got to find time for everything they have to do. They just haven’t got the time. Chris used to make time for everything he wanted to do - to be invovledf in the judo with the kids and things like that. But sometimes he was called out and he couldn’t do anything about it, he had to go. Chris had hundreds of jobs. It wasn’t his only job to go and work at the mine. He did everything. A lot of people just didn’t know what’s involvedf and to me it should be a full-time employed person. You should never have voluntary workers for unions, because it’s no good for families, it’s no good for anything. It just doesn’t work. You find most times that the wife makes the guy give it up because it’s too much pressure. Or the guy suddenly thinks “What am I doing, bnreaking up the marriage? What have I got left? All I wanted to do was work for the union.” A lot of them don’t think until it actually happens, and the wife puts her food down. But I never said that to Chris. I didn’t makle him stop working for the union because he loved it.
4: Women and the Union
Quite a few wives would come around, because some of them didn’t understand what their husbands had said. Often the husbands got the story around the wrong way. Generally, I think the wives stuck by their husbands. If they went on strike, that was it. There was nothing the wives could do about it, I think they just accepted it. I haven’t heard of anyone saying, “Get back to work”.
To me you stand by your man and his principles. You might have different political views, but if you are married to him you ought to understand what is going on. You can’t just say, “Get back to work, you’re annoying me at home”. It’s stupid to say something like that because then the men are torn between two things. They get irratable and say, “I can’t go back to work they’re all on bloody strike.”
When it was a big issue they invited the wives to attend the meetings. They couldn’t vote because they weren’t union members. They allowed the women to come five or six times in six years for two meetings no women turned up. Once they had a meeting in the hall to explain to the whole town why they were on strike. People thought they were only putting on strikes for higher wagesw but it wasn’t just that. I think that’s the attitude of people coming from the city who go north. They don’t understand anything about the unions.
Chris mainly got all the new ones coming around to our house. We knew before we went to Newman, because we had heard about the high level of strikes in the North-West. We heard there were strikes all the time, but it seemed to me it couldn’t have been the unions that were causing all the strikes. It must have been the company because there was such a large turnover of people going in and out of the town; strikes wouldn’t last that many years if the unionists caused them. Most people that have been there for a while found out in the end that it wasn’t the workers that were doing it. Most times the union tries not to have strikes. They didn’t have strikes over anything and everything. It was mainly because of the company attitude that they’d have to strike.
The wives of the shovel-drivers did arrange their own action once. It was over women working on the mind. There was a lot of bitterness when one woman worked and another didn’t. The union was against it - two income families - because that’s not helping unemployment. It was cheaper for the company to have two incomes in one family because it saved on housing.
There were quite a few women employed around the town, but the men did not want women working in the mine. Some of the wives, and myself, did not want either because of the things that went on.
The company did try to employ one girl. There was so much strife over her. She ended up leaving. The first day she was on, she had an accident. Then she went to another job and had an accident in that one. She wasn’t really doing a guy’s job. The men were doing it for her. She was employed to drive haulpaks.
Most wives were against it because of the hours and it was a four-panel shift. They did not want women doing shiftwork because they thought it would break up marriages. The company tried to employ women as shovel-greasers. The men didn’t want that, mainly because you’ve usually got a driver and greaser together and they just didn’t want the close contact with the opposite sex, because of night-shift, which is fair enough. It’s all through the night and you don’t know what’s going on of a night time.
Electric Shovel. Newman
Then the husband would come home and it would be on for sure, so they just stopped that one. The wives of the shovel-drivers were unhappy, but the boys didn’t want to have anything to do with that side of it - women in the workforce. They said, “right, you women want to do something, you get together and do it”. So six of us did, including Stuart’s wife, and confronted the manager about it. First we called a meeting with all other shovel-drivers’ wives. They told us that they wanted us to say then we went up there to the manager and it was sorted out. He couldn’t believe what we found out. There were already so many problems with women working in the mine on day shift only. One marriage broke up over it, and that was only the start of it. It wasn’t any wonder then that the idea of working in the mine on shiftwork was soon squashed. Some people said that the men put their wives up to it to protect their jobs. But that wasn’t so, it was coming from the wives. I’d say FEDFU was pretty strong for the husband and wife. Most of them knew what was going on. I could never understand that time in South Australia, I suppose that it was about eight years ago, when women went on striek. You remember that one? They went on strike there, they reckoned they were not going to give sex to their husbands, no cooking, no washing ’til they went back to work. I felt like going over there and causing a storm over it. I could not understand it because what the men were going out for was right. But the wives got up in arms about it. It only takes one wife to get up in arms and the rest follow, a lot of times, because they do not understand what is going on.
5: Accidents and Illnesses
I hate flying, detest flying. If you went down to Perth in your own vehicle you were allowed to claim petrol and your stay in Perth. Then they chopped all that out so you could only fly. They didn’t like paying out the plane fare either. It was a real rigmarole. You have to pay for it first and then claim it back. Some people cannot afford to pay three hundred odd dollars just for a plane fare. Plus, it was usually for one of the children, so that’s five hundred dollars before you even leave Newman. It’s a real racket, they should pay it out straight away. If a doctor orders you to go to Perth, you’ve got to go.
My big problem was my back. I originally hurt my back when I was fifteen. Chris and I and a whole lot of us swam out to the barge in the middle of fisherman’s Harbour in Fremantle. On the barge was a hundred foot tower with a rope hanging from it. We were swinging out on the rope and jumping off into the water. I saw an anchor chain below, so instead of jumping I swung back and hit the barge very hard with my feet. I was paralysed from the waist down so I couldn’t swim or keep afloat. Chris thought it was a great joke, he didn’t realise what had happened. He was cackling and swinging another girl off the rope. One of the guys managed to pull me onto the barge. I had spinal concussion and both my feet were broken. After a few months in hospital I could walk again. I had trouble all the time with my back, especially when I was pregnant, but the doctor said you have back pain when you carry kids and it was nothing to worry about. About five years ago it got really bad. Sometimes I couldn’t move an inch. I was in Newman Hostpial for about three weeks. The doctor said, “Look you can’t stay here because we don’t know what’s wrong with you”. They flew me off with the flying doctor. I didn’t want to go. They had to drug me to get me onto the plane, because I wouldn’t go. They had to make sure I was well and truly asleep. We got down to Perth and I was left at the hospital at the casualty centre. from six ’til ten o’clock at night without anybody seeing me. All I had was a nightie and slippers. At ten o’clock a doctor came along and said, “Um we can’t find anything wrong with you, you might as well go home”. I couldn’t believe it. I had to walk from hospital down to the station in my nightie. Ten o’clock at night I didn’t have any money, except a couple of dollars. My sister lived in coolbellup so I caught a train up there. I was in my nightie, I felt so stupid. I didn’t know who to contact or what to do. The next day I rang the police. I wanted to contact Chris the night before but I couldn’t get hold of him. Eventually I got through to him and he got onto the hospital at Newman. The doctors there just couldn’t believe it because I had been in hospital for three weeks and couldn’t move. One of the doctors in Newman rang the hospital in Perth the next day and said, “look she hasn’t been out of bed, there must be something wrong with her”. So they sent an ambulance the next morning to take me back to hospital. At about eleven o’clock they told me there was nothing wrong, and I might as well go home again. This time my sister was with me. I was lucky because I had some of her clothes. Back I went to her place. Again I got onto the hospital in Newman and Chris. They couldn’t believe it. I could hardly walk at my sister’s place. I couldn’t do anything. I wanted to go home, I’d had enough. The doctor at Newman said, “No, stay there and the hospital will send an ambulance out for you again”. Nine o’clock at night they sent another ambulance out. Again at twelve o’clock that night a guy came in to see me. He said, “Can’t see anything wrong with you” - because he’d been the one I’d seen before, on Friday night when I was sent down. On the sunday morning he came in and said , “you can’t stay here, you have to be out by ten, this hospital is for acute patients only”. I thought, “Well that’s handy, I’ve got no money, my sister isn’t even coming up ’til this afternoon to see me”. At about ten o’clock my mum called in to see me. She had come down from Southern Cross when she heard I’d been sent down to Perth from Newman. She nearly died of shock when she found out I had to leave again. That was the end. I went into Mount Newman Mining’s office in Perth and they were absolutely fantastic. They said, “Look, leave your sister’s place. We’ll get you in to see our own doctor, he’s in St George’s Terrace. Or you can go back to the hospital and you cansee the top surgeon, the orthapaedic surgeon there, and we’ll fix it” They put me into a hotel in Forrest Place. But I said, “No, I just want to go home. I’m not seeing any more doctors”. I went back to go home. I was in tears. They said, “Righto, we’ll see if we can get you on tonights flight”. I couldn’t get on that night’s flight so I went the next morning. After that episode Chris wrote to the Minister for Health, on behalf of everybody, not just because of what happened to me. He asked why people should be treated like I was by the hospital. They’re sent there for treatment he said and should not be refused. Apparently it wasn’t the first time it hadnhappened; it had happened quite a few times, but that was because of another doctor. The hospital sent back an apology and wanted me to come back but there was no way. I wouldn’t go back to any more specialists. I had had enough. There were so many doctors who reckoned there was nothing wrong with me. I was like that for about two years. But it got worse. For the last nine weeks before they sent me back again I couldn’t move my back at all. The kids and Chris were dressing me and bathing me. All the time Chris was telling me to go to the doctor I couldn’t because they thought it was me that I was just making it up I just couldn’t go. Chris said, “I just can’t put up with it any more”. It was putting a lot of pressure on him, with all the work he had to do to come home and look after me as well. It wasn’t fair to the kids, bathing and dressing me. They put me in hospital and they couldn’t believe that I’d been suffering so long in bed. The doctor said to Chris. You’ve got to get her to Perth to see another doctor. It was Frank Bell in Fremantle they wanted me to see. So they took me down. They drugged me and put me on the Flying Doctor plane. I said, “Don’t send me to the same hospital”. They said, “No way”, and put me into Fremantle Hospital. I arrived at nine o’clock at night. Doctor Bell came up to me that night and said, “You’re a candidate for a maligram”.They inject dye into the spine to check the condition of the discs. He came back later and said, “I cannot understand why nothing’s been done for you before. Your back is in need of attention. We will have to do a discogram”, Which he did. He came back and said “I have never seen such a deteriorated back in all that time that I’ve been doing medical treatment”. I didn’t hear him at first. I made him repeat it. He said that I had seven damaged discs altogether. Four were bulging very badly and three had worn away completely so that it was just my spine rubbing on the bones, just on the vertibrae themselves. He said I desperately needed an operation. It just went straight through, in one ear and out the other, because I was expecting him to tell me there was nothing wrong. When he said all that I couldn’t believe it. I was so excited, I had to ask him to tell me again. I said, “Tell me again something is wrong with me, it wasn’t my imagination”. A week later they did the operation. I had to have another one and then I had to go back all the time for treatment. It was thirteen times in that last year at Newman. Every time I went back, it was three weeks I had to stay in Perth. I hardly saw Chris at all. chris was losing money all the time, because he was off work looking after the kids. Most times the company was good, giving him time off to look after the kids or come down to see me,
Chris had had an accident at work in 1974, a few months after we arrived I was really upset about it. Chris had lost his finder in the accident. He was going for his crane ticket. There was a guy there who had already taken his crane ticket and Chris was going to do the rigging for crane-driver. The rigger is the guy at the bottom who gives the instructions to the crane-driver. Chris was on the ground and the guy was in the crane. Chris gave the signal but the guy didn’t see him or he got the signals mixed up. Chris had his hand on the chain and the driver took the lift up and it took Chris’ finger right off the top came off his giner. There was a mine inspector there from Perth. The guy that did the training on shovels and cranes in Newman, he was there. There was another guy. They never saw that accident, the three of them were standing around talking. Chris fell on the ground looking for the top of his finger, he was in shock. They asked him what he was doing. Chris held his giner up, he was in shock, and he couldn’t get out what was wrong. They couldn’t believe it. He never got any compensation for that. Not a penny and I couldn’t believe it when he came hom. They had to take the finger off at the joint. It was his left hand., so he thought he would have to learn to write again. How can they judge whether the driver is going to pass his test or not if they don’t even look? He was home for two days after the operation and then went back to work .He wouldn’t stay home. He wasn’t that sort of person. One of the bystanders rang me and said, “We were at fault, but we didn’t see the accident happen”. I thought, “Jesus! Its unusual for someone to tell you that”. The company would not do anything because Chris did it on a saturday afternoon. It was out of work hours, even though it was on company property and on company machinery. Chris would not sue the guy who was driving the crane, because he was in the same position as Chris. He only just got to Newman and Chris didn’t want to put pressure on his family. I said “Look, it could have been you and he would have sued you. The inspector was supposed to be looking at you because you were taking your test.” I couldn’t believe it, just could not believe it. Anything could have happened. The job could have swung or the load dropped. I still get really wild about it. But there was nothing I could do unless he did it himself. But he wouldn’t do anything. He wouldn’t harm a fly.
In the last two years we just had one thing after another. We bought a Gemiini and we did seventy thousand kilometres in less than twelve months. That was in the first year, so that gives you some idea of the miles we did backwards and forwards to Perth. That’s besides flying or going by the bus. I’d been thirteen times alone, about three weeks at a time. Danny burnt his face, Mark had an operationa dn Jamie went to Perth for an operation on his knee. The last two years we spent a lot of time in Perth, me and the kids. I had the children down with hepatitis, they were locked in the house for eight weeks. Mark was going backwards and forwards with his front teeth that he had broken off at the gums and then Danny had his tonsils out. It wasn’t just tonsils, he ended up getting very sick. You could just about write a book about those years, there was so much that happened. Chris had an operation on his elbow. Because we were getting short of money Chris went straight back to work the day after he was discharged from the hospital. In that last year he broke two ribs from judo and four weeks later he broke another three ribs from judo. Again he went straight back to work afterwards. All these operations had to be done in Perth. The other thing is, if you lived in the city, it wouldn’t seem as bad. You can get to the doctor in a few minutes. When you’re stuck up there, you have to wait for the plane to come or it’s the next day before you get there and then you’ve got to see a doctor and get booked into a hospital, you know. I’ve never known anybody who has had so much bad luck. I didn’t think it was fair. On top of that, there was a lot of union trouble. In one year they lost ninety-six days through strikes, many of them over the four-panel shift. If you have a week off with pay, you’ve got to wait three weeks before you get paid because they pay fortnightly and you’ve got to wait because of the way the pays work out. That makes it very hard. If you go on strike for four weeks and you go back to work in the fourth week, you’ve got to wait another three weeks. So really you wouldn’t get any money for eight weeks. No matter what day your strike finishes it’s usually three weeks before you get a full pay. I almost had a nervous breakdown when the kids were sick and Chris had had an operation on his elbow and I was also frustrated with everybody coming to the hous. I wanted someone to hang on to and it was Chris. I was getting frustrated with everyone coming around to the house. I couldn’t take it any more because I had no time with Chris. The only way we would escape was to send the kids off to school and go to the bush, because as sure as eggs someone would knock on the door. We very rarely had any time in the last twelve months, it was getting really bad. In the last year too Chris had to do extra work in the union because, stuart, who was the convener, had his problens. His wife, Shane was dying of cancer and Stuart had to spend a lot of time with her. So I couldn’t blame Stuart for being away all the tim either. Chris woul have given up the union if he could, what with all our illnesses and so on. But he couldn’t because of Stuart, and no one else wanted to take it on. He used to think about everybody else’s position and problems. He would have loved the time to hold me on my own. But we just didn’t get it, there was not time. Despite all he did for the union, when chris came away with me in November to see the doctors in Perth, a couple of the guys said he was shirking his union duties by going away. I couldn’t believe that.
6: An Ending
It all started on Friday the thirteenth. i don’t believe in superstition but from that day so many things happened it was awful, even on Friday the thirteenth it happened. We went away to Wittenoom for some friends and on the way up there we lost the trailer twice and we put a hole in the petrol tank and blew two tyres. We got the tent out and we’d left the tent poles home. We sat down and we all had a laugh about it. Everybody else had left things home, had things happen to them. We were going to cook tea so we lit the gas oven. It just blew up in flames and burned the arms of the guy lighting it. We all had to run because the gas bottle exploded - it was incredible. Then we couldn’t find one of the kids and thought he’d fallen in the water. It was dark by this time. All the kids were so frightened when the gas bottle exploded they ran and his everywhere. That’s where the kids picked up hepatitis, from swimming in the creek there. On the way home another thing happened. Petrol leaked out of the other guy’s car. They lost their trailer, we had flat tyres. It was incredible, in all the times we were travelling on dirt roads, we only had one puncture. After that, so many things happened. It was all too much for Chris and he took his own life. I always thought he was the strong one. He just obviously wasn’t. There were things worrying him, but he wouldn’t discuss them with anybody. Who could he talk to though? If you tell anyone your problem it’s liable to be around town the next day. That’s probably why Chris never spoke to anybody about his problems. He couldn’t tell me about his problems because I would probably have never believed it. I knew he was under a lot of pressure. We both did, we’d talk about that all the time. We’d often discuss how we had no time on our own, so I knew the sort of things he was thinking. But if he’d said to me that he’d been thinking about taking his own life for the last twelve months, I would have laughed and said it was a joke. That’s obviously what he didn’t want. He was dead set and he knew what he was going to do. He wanted to do it and that was why a friend said, “If you had tried to stop him or got there earlier and found him and revived him he would have tried again anyway”. Still there should be someone that they can talk to, or some organisation but there’s nothing. People still think suicide is a crime. It’s really sad. He seemed happy ’till the day he died. I was always leaning on chris. So was everyone else in the town. In the end he had no one to lean on himself. The last night before he died he was upset in the stomach. I said, “Look, you’ve got to go and see about it, if it’s making you sick. You can’t eat; you can’t do anything. You must go and have it checked.” He wouldn’t go. Now I know why. It was because he was working himself up to it. Finding the right time, it must have been just getting him down so much. The night he died he just about pushed me out the door to go and play badminton, which was something he’d never done. He wouldn’t let me play badminton because of my back. I thought, “that’s a bit unusual”. He was going down to the judo clube for a meeting. So we had a talk and I left for badminton about eight and he didn’t go to the meeting. It was the right time for him, becaquse I wasn’t home. I know why he pushed me out the door. I couldn’t believe it. I thought our marriage was great. I thought he was happy. The eldest boy knew that Chris had done something to himself. I called them in the next morning and told them that he’d died. Mark, the eldest, when the two little ones had gone, said “He killed himself didn’t he?” He said “He kissed up goodbye last night”. That was something that we never said to each other, we never said goodbye it was always , “See you later”. It was too final, to say goodbye was final, and the kids knew it. He left a letter
Darling
I have thought of this a few times in the last year or so but there has always seemed to be some light at the end of the tunnel. Now there is nothing. Any other way would hurt you and our lovely kids much more.
The life insurance and wages etc and superannuation will not amount to a great deal but it will pay off all the debts and keep you all comfortably for a couple of years until you meet someone who will be able to provide as I would have liked to.
I had thought of crashing the car but it is not insured so there would be a bigger cost than if you let it be repossessed.
Contact Laurie Watson at T & G building for the life insurance. My will if it is needed is with the W.A. Trustees in Perth. Stuart will be able to help you with the holiday, long service and superannuation pay due from MNM.
These last couple of days I have wanted so much to talk to you and hold you on our own, but as you know that wasn't possible and if I had said too much you might have guessed and tried to stop me. I have so much to say and don't know how to say it so all I'll say is I have loved you so very much and it hurts not being able to see our wonderful children grow up.
I have heard it said that this is the easy way out but believe me darling this is the hardest thing I have had to do.
Thank you so so much for fifteen wonderful years and our lovely children.
I've always loved you
Chris
Darling,
This is breaking my heart. I'm all torn up inside. I've been like this for so long I've tried not to let it show but the cracks are coming faster and faster. I love you so much. I wrote the first part this morning while you were at work. It doesn't say nearly what I wan't to say but I can't put it on paper.
I love you darling. I always have.
All my love,
Chris.
I didn’t know, that was the hardest thing, I I didn’t know. We were very close and yet he oviously couldn’t speak to me. All his friends up there said, “We’re all his friends, Why didn’t he speak to us?” He had talked to the local insurance rep, Kevin, quite often about his policies. Kevin was a really nice guy he said he had no idea at the time what was going to happen. He said, “I wish he had said something to me”. Everybody said that, all his friends: “I’m his friend, Why didn’t he say anything to me” I said, “I’m his wife and he didn’t say anything to me”. We were so close and he couldn’t tell me something that was really important. It breaks my heart when I think I could have stopped it from happening. We all think we could have stopped it. He thought he had financial problems, but he didn’t really. He always made sure that I would have no financial worries if he went. He had a life insurance policy and whenever we bought anything on hire purchase, like a car, he took out insurance to pay it off, if anything should happen to him. All debts had to be paid on the day, when they came up. He only had his car, but obviously he’d got himself into such a tizzy that everything seemed soi far out of reach for him. He said the car wasn’t insured but it was. It wasn’t due until the tenth and he died on the fifth. It was paid on the day after he died. Of course there was a lot of financial pressure. We didn’t really have enough money. He was always on strike, or he was lookingh after the kids. You just don’t get paid that time off. I needed money to go to Perth all the time. We never had spare money. But we always managed to pay our bills. There was our car, which was a lot. I suppose three hundred dollars a month, and our bankcard. To him it was just out of hand, I guess. He thought it was. Everything was just turning into a vicious circle. We’d often discuss money because we’d like some extra money to do this or that with. We never seemed to have any spare money, whereas before we did. On the back of his letter, he says he has let me down so badly. I thought, “What did he let me down over?” The money worries must have got him down but money wasn’t everything to him, it never has been. We used to have spare money before to fall back on but in the last few years we didn’t on account of all the sickness we’d had. So I suppose it got him down. It didn’t seem fair, after all the trouble we had been through. I was really bitter when he died. He was always trying to do the right thing. He was really well liked. Even with the guys on staff he was well liked. It just wasn’t fair, there were some real ratbags around, “why couldn’t it happen to one of them?” I thought. Not that I wanted them to die or anything like that; but I’d think “Why are we punished all the time?” All the things that had happened to us
Afterwards
Because Chris was so popular and we seemed so happy together, nobody could work out why he did it. So everybody blamed me because they reckoned I was carrying on with Stuart. They forget that Chris and Stuart and Shane and I had been friends for seven odd years, good friends; and that the whole group of us went out on barbeques and camped out on weekends together. Just one person said it and it soon swept the town. It was a really sad time for me. I couldn’t understand why these people had said it. They said, “He absolutely idolised you and the kids, now what was the reason, why he did it?” That was the last thing in my mind, that I could have been carrying on with Stuart. I was in love with Chris.
A group of guys came ‘round to the house and one said, “You deserve everything you get for killing a nice guy like that”. With that he punched me in the face and knocked me down. I was totally shattered. I raced inside, wanted to pack all my bags before he was buried and just go. I thought, “As if I weren’t going through enough without somebody doing something like that”. I just didn’t need it. The police were absolutely marvellous. My friends said, “Let thenm think what they like”.
I was afraid too, that the kids would find out what people had said about Stuart and me. It was really hard. That was why I cut myself off from everybody. It was really cruel and it was only a couple of people whgo said it. Who were jealous I suppose. As my dad said , “Why don’t they sweep the dirt from under their own floors before they start talking about other people’s?” That’s the only way they know of getting back at people, althought they probably don’t mean to hurt you.
That’s why I eventually left there. I would have stayed forever otherwise. I would have found a way I would have worked at the mine or something. The kids absolutely loved the place and didn’t want to leave, didn’t want to come to Perth. But I had to get away myself because I’d hate the kids to find out.
The minister that buried Chris said something that funeral. Just about everybody from Newman went. He said something about all the rumours that were going around and I never heard another one from that day. I thought that was good, not that I was taking much notice of what he was saying. All I wanted to do was jump in the hole with Chris.
I was really dead scarted the kids would hear something. Especially the older boys, because you know they’re not stupid. At high school things get around but there was not one thing said at the school either. Parents are worse than kids with things like that. You’d hear it more often from adults than from kids. It would have been hard for them to understand why. Both schools were absolutely marvellous. The headmaster spoke to all the kids at the assemblies. He told them to leave the kids alone, not to hassle them. One morning I found Rebecca in the wardrobe at about eleven o’clock. I thought she’d gone to school but she hadn’t. When I asked her why she was there she said, “Everybody keeps coming up and telling me my dad’s died; I tell them I know my dad’s died but they won’t leave me alone”. She hurt so much because she was so close to him. She didn’t want to go to school anymore. We just sat there and bawled together, it was really sad. Poor little bugger. I took her to school and they had a talk to her. Then the kids were really good.
Just the other day I found Rebecca crying and I asked her why. She said, “My dad’s died”. I said, “Yes, but that happened a long time ago”. She said, “I know but he’s still gone”.
Mark, Jamie, Danny and Rebecca, Newman Shopping Centre, 1981
The greatest amount of help I got was from Stuart. Mum was with me for about three months after Chris died, but I didn’t want to speak to Mum and I didn’t want to admit that he died; still wouldn’t accept it. I just went on my merry way as if nothing had happened. There was just so much to do after he died. I just kept sticking stuff in the drawer and leaving it. Mum eventually got on to Stuart and asked him to come and talk with me and get something sorted out. Kevin from the AMP1 came. He made me get all the paper work out and do it. After that, though, every time something came up I’d still stick it in the drawer. I just didn’t want to know about it. It was really horrible because I felt I had nobody. It’s different if you lose a child because you still have your mate there to talk things over with. All of a suddent your mate has gone and you’ve got nobody. It was especially hard because the way Chris and I were, we were really close. I didn’t have anybody. I was in tears all the time. I would thing, “I’ll go home and tell Chris”; of course he wasn’t there. It was really bad. My kids used to go to the Sunday School up there. Not that I go to church a lot, but the kids liked Sunday School. The minister was really good. He was great when Chris died, but was about the only person I could really go and talk to. It was no good going and talking to friends because they would go and talk to someone else. I didn’t want the business stuff to be known by anybody. It was private and I could only talk to people like Kevin, the AMP guy.
My mum and another lady who was visiting from Scotland stayed with us for about six weeks. Her name was Mrs Pritchard. Her son Michael worked in Newman and spent a lot of his time around at our place. He was like a brother. He used to do Judo with Chris and the kids. When Chris died, I wrote and said what had happened and did she still want to stay with us, because it was only about a week after he died that she was arriving. She said, no, it’s okay, she would come and stay. She’s a lovely person. My mum came to stay so I wouldnt be on my own. It was good because it took my mind off things. I took them up to Hedland for about a week. I was in a company home, and I had to leave it. I couldn’t put the move off any longer. I went down to welfare and I said, “What am I going to do? I’ve got nowhere to go and I’ve got to leave the house.” He said “You’re not the only one, there’s hundreds of women who’ve got kids, and want homes”. I said, “But I’ve got nowhere to go”. I’m not the sort of person to go back to mum’s place. I hadn’t been back there to live since I was fourteen. I said , “Isn’t there anywhere in Perth I can go?” He said, “You can go to a women’s refuge in Perth but they only take girls, not boys”. (if they’re over eight or ten or something, you can’t have them with you. They have to live somewhere else.) I thought, “That’s handy/ What am I going to do with the boys?” He said, “Go and pack up all your things and land yourselfd fown in front of the welfare in Perth”. I said, “What do you think I’m going to do, pitch a tent there or something?” I couldn’t believe it. No help whatsoever. They were supposed to be welfare workers. I came home and I was most upset; All I wanted to do was tell Chris. I wished I could tell him but I couldn’t. It was really horrible. There was no one I could go to, absolutely no one.
Another View
Chris Clements, 1985
Stuart Clements
I also interviewed Stuart Clements, the man that Chris had run the Federated Engine Drivers and Firemens Union with while at Newman. Stuart is a forthright, intelligent man with a few good stories to tell about the town and the company. Stuart was once described in the Age as being responsible for more loss of royalties to the Western Australian government and the greater loss of wages to workers in the North-West than any man in Australia
What sort of things did you do in an average day as a convener? Well, you do just about everything. From people coming around saying they’ve got problems with their animals - cats on the roof and that sort of thing. Everything that happens while the husband is at work. For some reason their husbands usually say, “If you’ve got any problems, go and see the convener”. And that’s how it works. If one of the kids are hurt and they can’t get on to their husband, or they don’t know how to get on to their husband, they will ring you or come and see you. During times of strike, people came around all the time. They’ve got no money and you have to organise it so they can get food. We usually gave them a food voucher. If we knew who they were and they’d been there a fair while, and we knew that they were going to spend the money on food, we’d give them cash. We used to give twenty-five dollars a week, anything above the twenty-five a week use to be on load. In a big long drawn out dispute - and in one year we lost something like ninety-six days on strike - in that sort of dispute situation, we used to arrange trucks to come from all over the place to bring food. We used to kill cattle, we used to do all sorts of things like that to try to keep the people going. During a dispute you could cut the air with a knife. Our state union said that I made a rot for my own back. But I tell you, I reckong we were the best serviced union in the place. Chris and I were available day and night, twenty-four hours a day and in fact we were used regularly. Our phone bill was sometimes two thousand dollars a quarter and between three hundred and four hundred of that would be local calls. For that sort of money our guys got top service. They were never denied time tot alk. The time they were thrown out was if they came around drunk. If they came around drunk I set the bloody dog on them. Then they’d come aroun d the next day and apologise, you know. It’s really bad because one shift is on and the other shifts are off. The other two shifts don’t know what’s going on so you have all of those guys coming round to your house. Most of the time Chris or I are not around. We’d be up the mine doing something, working out the current strike. The wife would be standing at the door trying to tell them and explain to them what is going on. She’s not even in the union and she’d be trying to explain to these guys why the bloody hell these things are happening. The worst times were three-thirty in the afternoon, eleven-thirty at night, and seven in the morning. That’s when it used to hit the fan. A guy would go in. The foreman would say something to him, there’d be an argument. The shift would say, “We’re not going to work ’til we see our convener” I used to wake up at the exact time every night. This is how silly it is. Once upon a time, I was in the dentist having two teeth pulled, and they went on strike after the first tooth was pulled, and I had to leave because they wouldn’t go back to work. I had to go away with only one tooth pulled out and I had stuffing in my mouth. I had to go and see them, and I could hardly talk. Another time, the pressure and the strain got so much I nearly had a nervous breakdown. I’d sit in there talking to the company and my mind would wander. I’d start talking about something else and in fact I’ve never stopped it. It still happens now. *How long were you a convener? Six Years That’s a long time for somebody to be a convener? That’s the longest they’ve had a convener in our union there. And I’ll admit I enjoyed it; I enjoyed the cut and thrust of it. But I didn’t enjoy going on strike one bit. because I was exactly the same as everybody else when I was on strike. I earned no money. People used to come to see us for all sorts of bloody things. Family problems; you were a marriage guidance councellor, because there’s none in the town. If somebody in the union had a problem then who do you go to? Go to the convener right? “Look, my husband’s just thrown me out. Can I sleep on your floor?” Or, “My husband’s locked himself in the car and he’s been in there for ten hours and won’t come out, and it’s a hundred and forty degrees in the water bag. Can you come round?” All these sorts of things. You get no time to do anything you want with your family, with your friends, you can’t go away. If you want to go out for the night, you can bet your pants, you go down the club and a call will come over the P.A. - “Can the convener please go to the front desk”. There’ll be the shop steward saying, “Listen my men have just had a heart attack and gone home and we don’t want any other shifts to go to work ’till we get it sorted out”. You’ve got to go in at the next shift. Talk to the chaps, try to convince them that the right thing to do is go home, because the other shift’s left and they don’t want an ybody else on the job. It’s really hard. You get guys that have been sleeping all day so that they can go to work at eleven o’clock at night and work through the night and you say to them. “Afternoon shift’s gone home boys, there’s no work”. They don’t want to go home, what are they going to do when they get home? They’ve been asleep all day, they can’t go back to sleep. If they stay awake all night, the next day they’re going to have meetings all day. If they decide to go back to work they’ve got to go back to work the following night with no sleep. You also had union meetings? Yeah, regular union meetings, and a few public meetings. I never knew what I was going to say at a meeting until I got there. You get there about ten or fifteen minutes before the meeting’s due to start. The guys drift in and you take their names. You say, “Hello, how’re you going, what are youi doing at work?” They answer, This happened and that happened; “I haven’t recieved my card for this year’s union dues”, and so on. Just by doing that you get a feeling of exactly how the meeting is. Chris and I used to say to each other, “Look, I reckon there’s no way these guys are going to go back to work”. He might say, “Oh well, I’m not too sure”, and I’d say, “they’re definnitely not going back to work”. Sometimes he’d be right and sometimes I’d be right. So you get a feeling for the meeting. You can see the meeting go through stages. People in other unions used to say, “Look, you two guys are dictators. You go in there and you tell these guys what to do? Now, the books are up there. We used to have monthly meetings there was an average of about eighty percent of the membership there, which is very high for a union meeting. A union meeting usually operates on about thirty percent. So everybody is interested because we always had interesting things to say and everybody got their say. At the end of the meeting we had general business where people could tell us what was happening on their shifts. On the off fortnight we used to have shop steward meetings and the shop stewards could bring to us any problems their guys had: Like this guy reckons he was a dollar short in his pay this week. Chris and I used to go in and sort that out with the company so that fortnight we could say this is what we’ve done this fortnight. Our meetings were always interesting, even though they used to drag. One of them lasted two and a half days, would you believe, two and a half days. We had to break for lunch, break for tea, break for sleep, start again. Was it a particular issue it was over? Yeah, it was over the award talks. Something near and dear, close to everybody’s heart. The members were actually involved in working our your log of claims? Oh, every single time. Every log of claims which came from us, came from the shop floor. In fact, every demand that was put on the company came from the floor. Well, I’ll tell you one example. We were talking to the conveners from Cliffs2 and they said that when their men were on compo and had to go to Perth to see a specialist, they got their hotel bills paid. We only got fourteen dollars - the company paid seven dollars and the government paid seven dollars. So we went to the guys. We said, “Look, those guys over there are getting paid their expenses while they’re in Perth on compo. When you go down, you guys are only getting seven dollars from the company. Now we think that it’s in our interest to approach the company to get this extra money made up! they said, “Yeah, tremendous idea, go ahead and approach them”. We never made approaches without first going to the workers. So we went along and said, “Look, we’ve had a meeting and our guys have decided that you should up the ante on this seven dollars”. The company wouldn’t have a bar of it because it was all the government would pay. We said “Cliff’s are doing it”. “Oh, we don’t care what Cliffs are doing, they give them ice cream for lunch too, but we’re not doing that.” We argued over it for about two weeks and we just didn’t want to know about it any more. Eventually we went back to the meeting. We said “Look, we talked to the company about this seven dollars and in fact they won’t have a bar of it”. So they said “Okay, look tell them, if they don’t start giving us the bread we don’t give them any more iron ore. Take it or leave it, no playing around.” Chris and I said, “That’s not the way to do it. What we think we should do is get on to the state union: tell them to start talks from the other end while we push them from up here. Because Cliffs are already getting it and we should be able to get it from up here.” They said, “No, we don’t want you fiddlingh around. No need to involve the state office, we can sort it out ourselves; call a meeting with the loco drivers and everybody.” So sure enough, we went into the company and we said, “Look, if you don’t give us the bread, we want all the loco drivers in and want to have a talk”. To bring the loco drivers in is a real drama because if you are going to have a meeting tomorrow morning at nine o’clock, the last train leaves at midnight tonightl after that there’s no more trains, that way it gives everybody time to get home because you’ve got half of Port Hedland guys down your end and vice versa, and that gives everybody time to get home and then they can all get to the meeting. And they got quite upset about this. The company yahooed and said it was industrial blackmail, the usual drama, all the usual stories. We had the meeting and it was going very well. We said “look, you know we really think we should get in the state office” and they said, “Forget it, out the gate, no return to work ’til we get the bread”. I mean, your hands are tied. You must have had trouble explaining what you were doing to people not in your union? Yeah. The company’s got untold facilities at their disposal. When they start printing matters up, saying that Mr Clements or Mr Heath have said this is how it will be, people who are not actively involved in the trade union movement will look at that. Especially a lot of women, a lot of housewives who are by no means uneducated, but in fact are industrially naive. Not that they’re thick, they just don’t understand their husbands haven’t got time to sit down and explain how a union operates. Also, you can have a strike; we’ve had a situation where we’ve had a hundred percent of the members say, “Bang, we’re out the gate”. They’ll go home to their wives and say, “No, UI don’t know what happened here, you know those bunch of yobbos want to go on strike, so we’re on strike”. They won’t admit it even to their own family and yet they’re the ones that stick their hands up. There’s only a few like that. We used to try to run education programmes. What, for both the husbands and the wives? For anybody. In fact in quite a few meetings when it was a big strike the women were invited to attend.They weren’t allowed to participate in the vote because, not being members, it was against the constitution of the union. It was only on major disputes which looked like lasting for a long period of time. We used to say to the husbands, “If you want to bring your wives down, the committee will put themselves at their disposal to explain to them any questions they’ve got”. I suppose we must have done it about five, maybe six, times and that’s over a period of six years. I suppose on two of those occasions no women even bothered to come. But it was open. We in fact, at one stage, had a public meeting in the hall and invited the whole town to come to listen to why our union was on strike. We were getting a lot of flack from the company saying this mob of five hundred are keeping all you people from being allowed to work. So we had a public meeting. Did lots of people come to that? Lots of people came, lots of women came. I wasn’t too sure how it was going to go because obviously at a union meeting it’s like a political party, you all start off on the same side, even though they may not agree with what you’re putting forward. It’s only a matter of sorting out the matters f policy, not trying to convince them that what the union is doing it right. Of course at this public meeting there were all sorts of people. There were rights and lefts and there were some people that were so far to the right they were almost to the left.
title: Shadow on the Hill p2 tags: [transcript]
Another View
Chris Clements, 1985
Stuart Clements
I also interviewed Stuart Clements, the man that Chris had run the Federated Engine Drivers and Firemens Union with while at Newman. Stuart is a forthright, intelligent man with a few good stories to tell about the town and the company. Stuart was once described in the Age as being responsible for more loss of royalties to the Western Australian government and the greater loss of wages to workers in the North-West than any man in Australia
What sort of things did you do in an average day as a convener? Well, you do just about everything. From people coming around saying they’ve got problems with their animals - cats on the roof and that sort of thing. Everything that happens while the husband is at work. For some reason their husbands usually say, “If you’ve got any problems, go and see the convener”. And that’s how it works. If one of the kids are hurt and they can’t get on to their husband, or they don’t know how to get on to their husband, they will ring you or come and see you. During times of strike, people came around all the time. They’ve got no money and you have to organise it so they can get food. We usually gave them a food voucher. If we knew who they were and they’d been there a fair while, and we knew that they were going to spend the money on food, we’d give them cash. We used to give twenty-five dollars a week, anything above the twenty-five a week use to be on load. In a big long drawn out dispute - and in one year we lost something like ninety-six days on strike - in that sort of dispute situation, we used to arrange trucks to come from all over the place to bring food. We used to kill cattle, we used to do all sorts of things like that to try to keep the people going. During a dispute you could cut the air with a knife. Our state union said that I made a rot for my own back. But I tell you, I reckong we were the best serviced union in the place. Chris and I were available day and night, twenty-four hours a day and in fact we were used regularly. Our phone bill was sometimes two thousand dollars a quarter and between three hundred and four hundred of that would be local calls. For that sort of money our guys got top service. They were never denied time tot alk. The time they were thrown out was if they came around drunk. If they came around drunk I set the bloody dog on them. Then they’d come aroun d the next day and apologise, you know. It’s really bad because one shift is on and the other shifts are off. The other two shifts don’t know what’s going on so you have all of those guys coming round to your house. Most of the time Chris or I are not around. We’d be up the mine doing something, working out the current strike. The wife would be standing at the door trying to tell them and explain to them what is going on. She’s not even in the union and she’d be trying to explain to these guys why the bloody hell these things are happening. The worst times were three-thirty in the afternoon, eleven-thirty at night, and seven in the morning. That’s when it used to hit the fan. A guy would go in. The foreman would say something to him, there’d be an argument. The shift would say, “We’re not going to work ’til we see our convener” I used to wake up at the exact time every night. This is how silly it is. Once upon a time, I was in the dentist having two teeth pulled, and they went on strike after the first tooth was pulled, and I had to leave because they wouldn’t go back to work. I had to go away with only one tooth pulled out and I had stuffing in my mouth. I had to go and see them, and I could hardly talk. Another time, the pressure and the strain got so much I nearly had a nervous breakdown. I’d sit in there talking to the company and my mind would wander. I’d start talking about something else and in fact I’ve never stopped it. It still happens now. *How long were you a convener? Six Years That’s a long time for somebody to be a convener? That’s the longest they’ve had a convener in our union there. And I’ll admit I enjoyed it; I enjoyed the cut and thrust of it. But I didn’t enjoy going on strike one bit. because I was exactly the same as everybody else when I was on strike. I earned no money. People used to come to see us for all sorts of bloody things. Family problems; you were a marriage guidance councellor, because there’s none in the town. If somebody in the union had a problem then who do you go to? Go to the convener right? “Look, my husband’s just thrown me out. Can I sleep on your floor?” Or, “My husband’s locked himself in the car and he’s been in there for ten hours and won’t come out, and it’s a hundred and forty degrees in the water bag. Can you come round?” All these sorts of things. You get no time to do anything you want with your family, with your friends, you can’t go away. If you want to go out for the night, you can bet your pants, you go down the club and a call will come over the P.A. - “Can the convener please go to the front desk”. There’ll be the shop steward saying, “Listen my men have just had a heart attack and gone home and we don’t want any other shifts to go to work ’till we get it sorted out”. You’ve got to go in at the next shift. Talk to the chaps, try to convince them that the right thing to do is go home, because the other shift’s left and they don’t want an ybody else on the job. It’s really hard. You get guys that have been sleeping all day so that they can go to work at eleven o’clock at night and work through the night and you say to them. “Afternoon shift’s gone home boys, there’s no work”. They don’t want to go home, what are they going to do when they get home? They’ve been asleep all day, they can’t go back to sleep. If they stay awake all night, the next day they’re going to have meetings all day. If they decide to go back to work they’ve got to go back to work the following night with no sleep. You also had union meetings? Yeah, regular union meetings, and a few public meetings. I never knew what I was going to say at a meeting until I got there. You get there about ten or fifteen minutes before the meeting’s due to start. The guys drift in and you take their names. You say, “Hello, how’re you going, what are youi doing at work?” They answer, This happened and that happened; “I haven’t recieved my card for this year’s union dues”, and so on. Just by doing that you get a feeling of exactly how the meeting is. Chris and I used to say to each other, “Look, I reckon there’s no way these guys are going to go back to work”. He might say, “Oh well, I’m not too sure”, and I’d say, “they’re definnitely not going back to work”. Sometimes he’d be right and sometimes I’d be right. So you get a feeling for the meeting. You can see the meeting go through stages. People in other unions used to say, “Look, you two guys are dictators. You go in there and you tell these guys what to do? Now, the books are up there. We used to have monthly meetings there was an average of about eighty percent of the membership there, which is very high for a union meeting. A union meeting usually operates on about thirty percent. So everybody is interested because we always had interesting things to say and everybody got their say. At the end of the meeting we had general business where people could tell us what was happening on their shifts. On the off fortnight we used to have shop steward meetings and the shop stewards could bring to us any problems their guys had: Like this guy reckons he was a dollar short in his pay this week. Chris and I used to go in and sort that out with the company so that fortnight we could say this is what we’ve done this fortnight. Our meetings were always interesting, even though they used to drag. One of them lasted two and a half days, would you believe, two and a half days. We had to break for lunch, break for tea, break for sleep, start again. Was it a particular issue it was over? Yeah, it was over the award talks. Something near and dear, close to everybody’s heart. The members were actually involved in working our your log of claims? Oh, every single time. Every log of claims which came from us, came from the shop floor. In fact, every demand that was put on the company came from the floor. Well, I’ll tell you one example. We were talking to the conveners from Cliffs2 and they said that when their men were on compo and had to go to Perth to see a specialist, they got their hotel bills paid. We only got fourteen dollars - the company paid seven dollars and the government paid seven dollars. So we went to the guys. We said, “Look, those guys over there are getting paid their expenses while they’re in Perth on compo. When you go down, you guys are only getting seven dollars from the company. Now we think that it’s in our interest to approach the company to get this extra money made up! they said, “Yeah, tremendous idea, go ahead and approach them”. We never made approaches without first going to the workers. So we went along and said, “Look, we’ve had a meeting and our guys have decided that you should up the ante on this seven dollars”. The company wouldn’t have a bar of it because it was all the government would pay. We said “Cliff’s are doing it”. “Oh, we don’t care what Cliffs are doing, they give them ice cream for lunch too, but we’re not doing that.” We argued over it for about two weeks and we just didn’t want to know about it any more. Eventually we went back to the meeting. We said “Look, we talked to the company about this seven dollars and in fact they won’t have a bar of it”. So they said “Okay, look tell them, if they don’t start giving us the bread we don’t give them any more iron ore. Take it or leave it, no playing around.” Chris and I said, “That’s not the way to do it. What we think we should do is get on to the state union: tell them to start talks from the other end while we push them from up here. Because Cliffs are already getting it and we should be able to get it from up here.” They said, “No, we don’t want you fiddlingh around. No need to involve the state office, we can sort it out ourselves; call a meeting with the loco drivers and everybody.” So sure enough, we went into the company and we said, “Look, if you don’t give us the bread, we want all the loco drivers in and want to have a talk”. To bring the loco drivers in is a real drama because if you are going to have a meeting tomorrow morning at nine o’clock, the last train leaves at midnight tonightl after that there’s no more trains, that way it gives everybody time to get home because you’ve got half of Port Hedland guys down your end and vice versa, and that gives everybody time to get home and then they can all get to the meeting. And they got quite upset about this. The company yahooed and said it was industrial blackmail, the usual drama, all the usual stories. We had the meeting and it was going very well. We said “look, you know we really think we should get in the state office” and they said, “Forget it, out the gate, no return to work ’til we get the bread”. I mean, your hands are tied. You must have had trouble explaining what you were doing to people not in your union? Yeah. The company’s got untold facilities at their disposal. When they start printing matters up, saying that Mr Clements or Mr Heath have said this is how it will be, people who are not actively involved in the trade union movement will look at that. Especially a lot of women, a lot of housewives who are by no means uneducated, but in fact are industrially naive. Not that they’re thick, they just don’t understand their husbands haven’t got time to sit down and explain how a union operates. Also, you can have a strike; we’ve had a situation where we’ve had a hundred percent of the members say, “Bang, we’re out the gate”. They’ll go home to their wives and say, “No, UI don’t know what happened here, you know those bunch of yobbos want to go on strike, so we’re on strike”. They won’t admit it even to their own family and yet they’re the ones that stick their hands up. There’s only a few like that. We used to try to run education programmes. What, for both the husbands and the wives? For anybody. In fact in quite a few meetings when it was a big strike the women were invited to attend.They weren’t allowed to participate in the vote because, not being members, it was against the constitution of the union. It was only on major disputes which looked like lasting for a long period of time. We used to say to the husbands, “If you want to bring your wives down, the committee will put themselves at their disposal to explain to them any questions they’ve got”. I suppose we must have done it about five, maybe six, times and that’s over a period of six years. I suppose on two of those occasions no women even bothered to come. But it was open. We in fact, at one stage, had a public meeting in the hall and invited the whole town to come to listen to why our union was on strike. We were getting a lot of flack from the company saying this mob of five hundred are keeping all you people from being allowed to work. So we had a public meeting. Did lots of people come to that? Lots of people came, lots of women came. I wasn’t too sure how it was going to go because obviously at a union meeting it’s like a political party, you all start off on the same side, even though they may not agree with what you’re putting forward. It’s only a matter of sorting out the matters f policy, not trying to convince them that what the union is doing it right. Of course at this public meeting there were all sorts of people. There were rights and lefts and there were some people that were so far to the right they were almost to the left. We sat down at the head of the table there and the first woman that got up wanted to know what right we had to sit in the front of the meeting. That’s when I thought, “Oh no, we’re off, this is going to be a good meeting, there’s no question about that”. But once we got into the swing of things a couple of guys got up and yelled and screamed and we really did think they were company plants, but we didn’t bother. Then people were howling them down, saying, “Let’s hear what’s got to be said before we make a judgement”. We made it quite clear to the people that no matter what they decided to do before or after they’d heard us, it would make no difference whatsoever to our dispute. Our dispute was going ahead. The only reason we were there was not to justify to them what we’d done, but to explain our point of view. We had a secret press too. We used to run off hundreds of pamphlets, I think in fact seventeen hundred, explaining disputes. It was hard for us because it was a lot of hard work. Chris and I used to be up ’till all house of the night, sometimes two days and a night without any sleep whatsoever producing these papers. We had to deliver to every single household, Chris and I and a chap called Mick Farey, who was a tremendous help. He was a mamber of the socialist party. A lot of the things that Chris and I would quander over, because of his socialist party affiliation, he had the way of putting it down on paper, to make it look more professional, you know. And then there was a chap from the AWU called Phil Rowe. Phil used to have the gestetner at his place. The Trades and Labour Council gave us a supply of papers to start us off. Each union who was partner in this gestetner went to their own union and said “Look, we want a couple of reams of paper, a bottle of ink”, a few bits and pieces like that. We used to give them to Phil and he used to store them, not in a union, but just in store. For a long time we printed a paper called Whaleback Worker. It was a worker’s paper, there was no questions about that, it was only usually two foolscrap pages and it had little jokes, it used to have a little cartoon. What sort of relationship did you have with the company? The company wanted you to play the game but they wouldn’t tell you what the rules were. If you said you were going to strike, they would say, “You’re not playing the game, mate”. So we would say, “What are the rules?” And they would say, “We can’t go into company policy!” How did you and Chris get on? Very well, we were a good team. The guys reckoned the only time we worked was when we were on strike. But we had long negotiation meetings too. We would say we weren’t leaving ’til we got it sorted out. It gets reqally dramatic, threatening to punch each other up. That’s when you can tell whether you’ve got a good guy to work with. Chris would play the nice guy and I’d play the bad guy. I’d say, “That’s enough, the guys are gointg out on strike”. Chris would say, “No, no… let’s talk about this more”. Or sometimes we would switch around. Was there a lot of pressure in the job? You are consistently under some sort of pressure. You just can’t go away and relax. I worked forty hours a week for the company and forty hours a week for the union. The only difference was the company time was paid and the union was free. Did this have anything to do with Chris taking his life? Without any doubt. I honestly believe that. It was during a strike. He was never left alone, never left alone. He was continually concerned for the welfare of our union members. It really got to him. Constantly fighting in his own mind all the time as to whether or not he was doing the right thing… for all the workers. He had huis own problems, and on top of those the problems of everyone else as well.
Living and Working in the Pilbara
![ShadowHill019]](https://hackmd.io/_uploads/HJqrGHjGJe.png) Newman Town-site and Mt.Whaleback mine-site, c1976
Background
The picture is always perfect, but you can never hear the sound because of the iron-ore trains across the road and the salt trucks rumbling by.[^14]
This quotation points to the out-of-jointness of life in the Pilnbara. The money is good (but not as good as it popularly supposed), but at the cost of difficult working conditions, long hours, isolation, and family tensions. Life is dominated by one industry - iron ore mining - and in each town one company. The words “Newman”, “Cliffs”, “Hammersley Iron”, - The names of the iron ore companies - recur constantly in people’s conversations. Until the recent “Normalisation” (Private and local government, rather than company, ownership and control) of the inland towns, the companies controlled not only workin conditions but also the community facilities and the residents’ housing. The inland towns were built solely for the purpose of iron ore mining. They are single-industry towns where employment is insecure and prone to the boom and bust cycles of the iron ore commodity market. The coastal towns are more diverse, with a greater mixture of occupations and more facilities. They operate as ports for the various companies. Until recently at least, iron ore demand required long hours of overtime which meant that husbands rarely saw their families. Rather than go home after a shift, many men went to the pub to “unwind”. A number of sites operate on a shift system which means night work and consequent disruption of family life. Children are told to “be quiet because Daddy’s sleeping”, and therefore not participating in family activities. The effects of isolation are that many services we take for granted are a thousand kilometres or a very expensive airfare away. Most of the towns have resident welfare officers and doctors, but more specialist services such as psychiatric counselling, pediatric services, marriage guidance, are either provided on a visiting basis or not at all. Small towns mean that most people know each other. This encroaches on one’s privacy, a situation that struck colleen forcefully after Chris died. All of a person’s roles are collapsed together, so that one’s friends are also one’s workmates, sports team members, and neighbours. The climate is unpleasant much of the year. During the “wet”, temperatures can be over forty degrees celsius, while there are occasional monsoons and constant humidity. During the winter months, temperatures are more pleasant, around twenty degrees celsius. The Pilbara region extends over one hundred and eighty square kilometres of largely pastoral country. Iron Ore mining began in 1968 and forty-seven thousand people lived in the Pilbara statistical division at the time of the 1981 census. The Two largest Iron-Ore companies are Mount Newman Mining Company in Newman and Port Hedland and Hammersley Iron Pty Ltd in Tom Price, Paraburdoo and Dampier. Two smaller companies, Cliffs Robe River Iron Associates and Goldsworthy Mining Company Operate in Pannawonica, Wickham, and Cape Lambert, and Shay Gap and Finucane Island respectively (see map on page 11.) Iron Ore is the single most important non-fuel mineral in the world. The Pilbara region accounts for about ninety percent of Australia’s reserves and about a third of Western Australia’s total exports. 3 Although the age of steel is about one hundred years, it seems much more recent in Australia - dominated by transational mining and trading cvompanies and massive machinery. The mining process is relatively simple but the quantities mined are enormous. Basically, hills of high grafe iron ore are systematically blasted, schooped up and charted away from the mine-site by rail and sea to Japam. Shovels schoop up the iron ore and load it into house-sized trucks (called haulpacks). These are driven down the hill to the crisher and then to the screening plant where ores of different sizes are separated. The ore is loaded by conveyor-belt into one and a half kilometre long trains, for transportation to the ports. At the ports the iron ore joins the stockpile, from which it is loaded into Japanese ships for the long jouney to Japan.4 Relations between the Japanese companies, which take ninety percent of the Iron Ore, and Australian companies are often strained. each year a contract is negotiated for the price, which is fixed, and the amount which appears to be flexible. of iron ore exported to Japan, in recent years, both the amount taken and the negotiated price have fallen.5 Sir Charles Court’s dream of one hundred thousand people populating the North-West by 1980 stands behind his government’s generous infrastructure support and taxation concessions to companies establishing themselves in the Pilbara.6 It was also because of this dream that the government rejected a “Fly-in scheme” for workers living in Perth and commuting to the Pilbara, calculated as cheaper and favoured by the companies.7 The government was adamant that a visible product of its development projects should be created. The mining towns became a living showcase that the government was “doing something” about development. Little thought was given to the isolation and emotional misery of people exiled to those towns. The enormous expenditure by both companies and the government on the North-West has reaped much lower rewards for the residents of either the Pilbara or Western Australia than one would expect. In 1979/80, Western Australian households had the second lowest disposable income of the Australian states (after Tasmania). F.J. Harman argues that because the companies are headquartered inter-state or overseas, prfits are exported out of Western Australia.8 Furthermore, F.J.Harman suggests that many contracts for infrastructure and construction go to eastern states companies.9 It is a common assumption that wages in the Pilbara are astronomical. Basic wages are similar to those elsewhere.10 The workers in the Pilbara only earn considerable incomes because of the large amount of overtime worked, at least until the last few years. Additionally, the cost of living i smuch higher in the Pilbara.11 Much of the higher income is absorbed in the higher prices for commodities. Work “on the hill” (at the mine-face) is hot and dustry, often boring, while nevertheless requiring constant attention. Accidents are frequent - in 1977 more than eighty-three hours per employee were lost due to accidents.12 In the story you have just read, Chris Heath was involved in an accident, the circumstances of which reveal less than adequate attention to the training of the big machinery operators. Work is deskilled and routinised, adding to worker dissatisfaction. It does not take much imagination to see that driving a truck continuously up and down a hill is likely to engender kapses in concentration. Additionally, it appears that the skilled tradesmen use less of their skills than they would in smaller work-sites. A panel beater at Tom Price suggested that electrical fitters were doing the work of second year apprentices. Dissatisfaction with the work often has repercussions on home life. Williams’13 Study of the Queensland coal-mining towns revealed strong status distinctions between the “white hats” of management and the production workers. Similar distinctions operate in the Pilbara, as you discovered from Chris’ story. Stuart Clements, ex-convener of the Federated Engine-Drivers and Firemens Union at Newman, summed up the hostility between staff and line workers:
we used to say that if they were any good they wouldn't have nbeem put on staff because the company makes money selling iron ore, not having deadwood walking around the hill
A Man’s World
Northern Australia has always been a place where men went to escape from wives and maintenance payments.[^26]
Husbands usually migrate to the Pilnara for the chance of higher wages and possibly a better job. Their wivesw often give up jobs - as nurses, librarians, bank workers - to go with them. Sometimes the move is made so the wife can stay home with their small children. Very soon, however, some wives want to leave the Pilbara and resume their careers. Almost always the husbands want to stay. The experience of the Pilbara is very different for the husbands and wives as the following couple’s comments reveal:
Husband: I felt proud being involved in the iron ore industry like I felt I was pioneering the future.
Wife: I hated every little spinifex bush.[^27]
As williams14 suggests, strip-mining is a masculine frontier - dominsated by heavy machinery, engineering, the production and conquest of raw materials. For instance sixty0three percent of the population at Newman over fifteen years old were male in 1981.15 This sexual imbalance breeds a whole series of jealousies - between married women and working single women bnetween married men and other married men or the single men. In Chris Heath’s story, you read about an episode concerning single women becoming greasers for the shovel-drivers on the night shifts. The married women were concerned abnout the possible sexual relations. The single women, for their part, often feel they are treated as whores (‘if they do’) or lesbians (‘if they don’t), and spend much free time with each other.16 However they do have the shared work experience from which housebound wives sometimes feel excluded. As one resident of Shay Gap summed up the situation:
Shay Gap - It's a man's environment. A women don't fit in. The women are dominated, the men aggressive and full of jhealousies. As I see it the women have a role to play and are expected to play it and do as they are told.[^31]
However, the sexual imbalance can be hard on the men too:
They lose the art of conversation with women because they spend a hell of a lot of time in an all male environment and they just don't know how to communicate with a female on an ordinary basis apart from racing her into bed and ducking off as quickly as possible. Particularly if they've been there a few years. They can't function in Perth any more.[^32]
Young, single, migrant men in the single men’s quaters can be particularly isolated and lonely. Backache, chest paint, headaches and dizziness are mild consequential neuroses. Some become almost psychotic in their isolation, retrating to alcohol, video movies or violence.17
A Sense of Community
One would think that a small settlement, isolated from the rest of the world, sharing common experiences, would prove the ideal basis for forming a community. However the transience of the populoation, segregation by “hat colour” and continual gossip about and knowledge of others’ lives militates against positive social bonds, especially in the smaller towns. Additionally, the demographic imbalance denies Pilbara dwellers many social contacts city people take for granted. The sexual imbalance has just been discussed, but the population is also young, concentrated in a few occupational categories and has a high proportion of migrants. The dominant household type is head, spouse, and dependents (forty-seven percent compared with twenty-nine percent for Australia as a whole). There are few single parent families, fewer people on low incomes, fewer older people. A story is told of tourist buses of pensioners visiting the Pilbara, and young children gathering around, incredulous at seeing people with grey hair and wrinkles. The occupational structure, as one would expect, is also very homogenous with considerable sex segregation of the workforce. A higher proportion of men are miners, than for Australia as a whole. Women, while having higher representation in mining in the Pilbara, are under-represented compared with the Pilbara men. Rather, they cluster in the clericle, sales and professional categories as is the case throughout Australia. It is almost impossible to say what makes a viable community, but it does seem that the mining towns are too homogenous and transient. It is further suggested that the nature of company towns represses community solidarity and creates a paternalist environment.
The Company Town
Where you have paternalism... you bare juvinile behaviour... you also have ambivalence. People will want the sort of assistance that an industry can give but not like the way it is given.[^34]
In the inland mining towns before normalisation, the company built the roads, footpaths, houses, parks, sports facilities. The company fixed your fuses, air-conditionioners and broken flyscreens. The company gave you a house and took it away from you. The company still hires you or refuses to hire you. As Stuart Clements said, “If you want to bury someone, you’ve got to see the company”. This, as Kriegler suggests,18 creates an ambbivalent situation - intense criticism of the company coupled with dependence. Partly in response to this, from the late seventies a number of companies chose to “normalise” their towns. This involved shifting the decision-making and administrative cost to the local council and selling the house to the residents. Newman was the first town to be normalised. Ray Williams, the Community Liaison Officer of Mount Newman Mining, spoke glowingly of the projects the residents had since completed. including the construction of the best race course in rural Western Australia. In 1983 and 1984. Tom Price, Paraburdoo and Wickham were normalised. Negotiations are continuing for the town of Dampier.19 In company towns much industrial unrest revolves around non-work related issues. For instance the Combined Union Committee at Tom Price and Paraburdoo in 1981 considered a range of issues such as street-lighting, bicycle paths, facilities at the sports oval, the quality of relevision programmes, the size of electricity bills. Thompson and McKiernan20 suggests that town amenities were a significant cause of strikes between 1970 and 1974. Additionally, normalisation means that Pilbara residents purchase their homes from the compmany. The price these houses can fetch on the open market will depend on the demand for iron ore and its continuing supply near that town. Mortgage repayments mean that workers have less discretion over their incomes, and a reduced capacity to endure a long strike. Industrial relaqtions officers at Tom Price were well aware of this aspect of normalisation, and endorsed the policy for that reason. This backghround to life in the North-West suggests that isolation, homogeneity, a deviant demographic profile, dependence on company and the iron ore markets are constant problems. The human cost of royalties and exports can be measured in blood, valium and tears.
Family Life
This would have to be one of the best environments for a woman.
They are close to the shopping centre and the swimming pool, there's no traffic so no worries about children, there's nowhere to go and spend money.
No need to keep up with fashions, free movies three times a week - No problems. For single women, there's plenty of blokes to choose from - and they can be choosy. [^37]
This sounds idyllic - the life of the Pilbara wife as seen through a man’s eyes. The reality, as experienced by many Pilbara wives, is quite different. A wife, husband, and two small children arrive at Pannawonica or Newman or Tom Price in the mid-seventies. There are not enough houses, so they stay in the caravan park, for up to six or seven months. This puts strains on family relations. Finally, the company allocates a house to them. They do not choose a house they are allocated one. (you read in colleen’s story her dismay whenb she saw the house she was allocated. Fortunately her husband was able and willing to approach the company for a more suitable house.) The house, much the same as the other houses, is full of company furniture - The same as the furniture in other houses. If the wife wishes to buy her own furniture, it will have to be purchased in Perth or ordered through a mail catelogue. She will pay high transport costs and the family may have to enter a hire purchase agreement. Shopping is simple, boring and often frustrating. There is only one supermarket, the goods are expensive and often the perishables are no longer fresh by the time they arrive from Perth. As one company representative said:
Even the housewife can get bored going to the same supermarket every day.[^38]
If she lives in Pannawonica, the empty nest syndrome, or children leaving home, will occur when her children go to Perth to attend high school. This was also true of the larger towns in the early years, before the high schools were built. Women in the cities who do not engage in paid work often do voluntary and charity work, However, there is little call for that in a town of breadwinners - no sick, aged, unemployed. What does a wife do all day? She has several choices. She can join one of the many sports or craft clubs. Indeed, some wives throw themselves into a round of squash, netball, macrame.21 However, such pursuits are not easy with small children, nor to everyone’s taste. As Heather Davies, an ex-Australian Workers Union Steward at Newman said. “The company looks after your arms and legs, but not your mind”. There is little intellectual stimulation - no tertiary institutions for night courses or discussion groups in the insland towns. In some towns only ABC television is recieved. Residents rely extensively on video for entertainment. She can make friends with her neighbours. This, she will discover, is a double-edged sword. Firstly, she is likely to lose any close friends she makes - between 1966 and 1971, only two percent of the Pilbara population made no residence move.22 Colleen discovered during her last weeks at Newman. Some women are suspicious that friendship is merely a mask for fuelling the gossip grapevine:
Personal problems can become magnified in isolation because one has no 'listening ear' or as Pat Grimoldy of Port Hedland put it, 'the listening ear may become a party line'.[^41]
Women often feel in a totally contradictory position - everyone is friendly but they feel totally isolated. The intense round of morning and afternoon gossip can become quite tyrannical and invasive of privacy.23 Colleen, too, often felt her privacy or time with Chris was invaded by some of her friends. Some women react to the situation by becoming isolated and lonely. The heat and humidity of the outside world contrasts with the air-conditioned house. In Canada, where the Alberta snow keeps people indoors, this psychological problem is called “cabin fever”. Women become fearful of going out alone
It's like agoraphobia (the fear of going out and coming into contact with other people). I didn't want to go out and be near anybody. I just wanted to be by myself. I have spoken to a lot of other women who have felt this way too.[^43]
Without mother, or indeed any other kin, what does the young wife do? She often turns increasingly to her husband for social support. Do Pilbara marriages sustain that kind of relationship?
Elizabeth Bott’s24 study of working class families in the 1950s suggested that they tend to be segregated, husband and wife having clearly separated roles, and sharing few tasks. Many of the husbands in Williams’ study saw their major familial role to resist their wives’ demands for companionship.25 Thus Chris felt that he had failed Colleen as a breadwinner and this caused him considerable anxiety. Colleen could not really understand this because she felt Chris was an excellent husband and father in other, more important, ways. However, it must be remembered that the major reason people migrate to the Pilbara is because they believe they can earn a high income, to ‘do time’ and ‘get out’ to a more rewarding life. Consumerism dominates many people’s lives and economism is a major part of the unions’ award negoiations. Men are brought up to judge themselves by their earning capacity and Chris no doubt felt these pressures.
Williams26 discovered that many men did not discuss the work situation with their wives. This both gave them greater control at home and was felt unnecessary after long discussions with mates at work and the pub. Stuart Clements said that some men did not even tell teir wives when they were on a single shift strike. As a result:
Men were staying at the pub until eight o'clock at night. They are very unfair to their wives. I think some of them tend to go home and say, "well, you've got a bonus and you've got everything, what more do you want?".. You feel you're drifting away from your wife. She's got nothing to say about her day and your day she can't understand. The guys tend to say "well. you wouldn't understand anyway".[^47]
Overtime and shift work exacerbate family tensions. Both are prevalent in the Pilbara. Three times as many workers in the Pilbara than Australia as a whole worked more than a forty hour week in 197627
At Newman, Stuart Clements and Chris Heath were involved in a long union struggle to resist the introduction of the four-panel shift, a struggle they lost at arbitration. Before the introduction of the four-panel shift, the mine closed Saturday afternoon and did not open again until Sunday afternoon, allowing everyone to share in sports events and social evenings each week. With the four-panel shift, a worker worked twenty-one days in every twenty-eight, with four days on one shift, perhapse two days off and then four days on another shift and so on. This is more physiologically and emotionally disruptive than working a constant night shift for instance, because the body is constantly readjusting its sleeping and working times. As Stuart said:
A guy told me once that ninety percent of people who work nights have got ulcers and i'd believe that because a lot of people at Newman have got ulcers.
Stuart also felt that half the strikes occurred because the men wanted to get time off from the four-panel shift. If a man is out of step with his family’s daily cycle, he loses time with the kids and perhapse sexual and companionship interaction with his wife.
Because I have little kids, I have to get drunk after night shift so I am able to sleep during the day. The wife doesn't like it much... of course things haven't been too good between us lately.[^49]
There is considerable extra-marital activity, colloquially called the “swing shift” or “over the back fence”. This is both caused and allowed by the shift system. Some husbands become so fearful of their wives’ infidelity that they won’t let them leave the house or have single men over for a meal. Ultimately, if the couple separate, unless she can get a job, the wife will have to become someone else’s “housekeeper” if she wants to stay in town, while he might take a Filipino bride.
Support for Troubled Marriages
Stress symptoms in Pilbara residents include depression, alcoholism, extreme loneliness, insecurity, overeating, obesity, injury, and violence. In a population of seven thousand at Tom Price, during one fortnight in the wet season, five women attempted suicide, several of them first attacking husband of children with a knife. Over a five week period, ten women left town after being bashed by husbands.28 When things get tough in Perth, a woman can go to the marriage guidance counsellow, the welfare worker from the Department of Community Welfare (DCW); she can leave home for a refuge an ultimately a housing comission flat. Many of these support services are not available in the Pilbara.
Some towns (Paraburdoo, Pannawonic, Shay Gap) still do not have a permanent DCW officer: “If there is a crisis in your life you have to put it off”, Said one woman.29 The company at Tom Price would not allow the DCW offices to talk at the orientation session for new recruits about the problems their wives may have. The company, along with many husbands, adopts an ostrich response, claiming that everyone is “one big happy family”. The Marriage Guidance Council of Western Australia can no longer afford to send counsellors to the Pilbara since funds for airfares were withdrawn by the government.
If the marriage breaks down totally, and perhapse as a result of the husbands violence, there is neither a refuge (except Karratha, and one is planned for Tom Price) nor alternative accommodation (except at Hedland where some community members will shelter distressed women). If he leaves home, she can stay in the company house for three months in case he changes his mind; if she leaves him she must go, at once, to Perth. As further evidence of patriarchal relations, at one stage, DCW circulated a directive that woman were not to be assisted to leave town until their husbands were told. This was later found to be illegal and rescinded. A woman will be confused, unstable, unhappy, to say the least. Colleen revealed vividly her feelings of helplessness and fear that surrounded leaving the Pilbara in the wake of a disrupted marriage.
There are “regular visits by specialists” to the Pilbara towns, according to the Departnment of Industrial development30 but some residents complain about the inaccessibility of pediatricians, dermatologists, and gynaecologists. Some complaints require treatment in Perth. The isolated Patients Travel and Accomodation Assistance Scheme (IPTASS) Pays all but twenty dollars of the patient’s airfares in such cases. Nevertheless, the continual strain on Colleen and Cris during a period of lengthy and multiple illnesses in the family. The treatment Colleen recieved in Perth testified to the difficulty of “fronting up” to welfare agencies without support of husband or kin.
Finally, the line between physical and emotional disturbances can become blurred. In Pannawonica, women often went to the medical centre and were prescribed valium. When all they needed was “Mum down the road”. Three women told the following stories:
I went in for a sore throat and she (the nurse) said its just nerves and the doctor said I had tonsilitis. I had headaches and she said "it's just nerves", turned out I had impaired wisdom teeth.Denise was tired and washed out and kept going back and in the end she bursed out crying and they said. "it is nerves", so she turned out to have malnutrition because of her eating patterns.[^53]
‘Strike-proneness’ in the Pilbara
There are nine unions operating in the Pilbara. The largest is the Australian Workers Union (AWU), Accounting for about half the workforce, followed by the Amalgamated Metal Workers and Shipwrites Union (AMWSU), twenty-four percent of workforce, with its comrade union, the Australian Society of Engineers (ASE). The Federated Engine Drivers and Firemens Union (FEDFU) and Electrical Trades Union (ETU) each account for about eleven percent of the workforce. There are four building trades unions. 31
Relations between the unions are sometimes good - for some years a combined union committee operated at Tom Price and Paraburdoo. More often relations are tense, disputes over demarcation or relativities, often provoked by companies, set the unions against each other.
The Pilbara iron ore industry is well known in Western Australia as strike-prone. In 1981 the industry, accounting for less than two percent of the workforce, accounted for seventy-one percent of disputes and fifty seven percent of working days lost.32 There are three approaches to explaining this phenomenon - the management view, the union view, and the situation viewpoint.
Management’s view, the social consensus view, assumes that as workers and managers benefit from high company output, social and industrial harmony is natural within this new industrial unrest is seen as unnecessary and perverse. It is explained as due to workers being led astray, often by aggressive conveners and shop stewards. Thus industrial relations officers in the Pilbara attribute strikers to the “ego needs” of conveners or discuss the way they use their position for personal self-aggrandisement (a real “Clint Eastwood act” as one ex-personnel officer at Newman described it).
An alternative view of industrial relations, in fact endorsed by only the most militant and aware (if you like) unionists, assumes that conflict, not consensus, is endgame to the system. This postition assumes the interests of workers and management are in opposition. What one side gaines - in terms of control or economic returns - the other must lose. Their interests are incompatible - wages versus profit, workplace control versus executive perogatives, good working conditions versus lower costs. Militant unionists thus attribute the industrial distruption in the Pilbara to the activities of the company:
The company asked me, How can everybody that comes to the FED all be communist? I said, Look, you've got men from all over the world here, you've got Yugoslavs and Czechs, and Indians and Poles. There's only one common denominator, Mt Newman Mining Company. Our best weapon against the company was itself. It was the company that made everybody militant. There's no way a union can make people militant.[^56]
Of course, there is some truth in both views. Put simply, one can focus on the size of the cake and how to keep it growing (the consensus view) or one can focus on how the cake is cut (the conflict view). However, neither view explains the great variability in strike activity in different industries or worksites, except in terms of personalities or the perceptions of those involved. The situational viewpoint attempts to account for this variability in terms of the structure of the industry, the workforce and so on.
The isolation, the heat, the dust - in short the effects of living in the tropics (and going “troppo”) - are often blamed for the high strike activity in the Pilbara. However, if this were the case, there would be more strikes and days lost in the summer months of December and February, the monsoon months of rain and temperatures in excess of forty degrees celsus, than the winter months which are dry and temperate. In fact, data for 1979 to 1981 do not support this contention.33 Three of the longest strikes over the period occurred in the winter months - 1979 at Hamersley Iron, 1980 at Mount Newman and 1981 at Hamersley Iron. Nonetheless, it is true that the weather adds to the level of tension and at times provokes sudden walk-outs.
A more promising thesis is Kerr and Siegel’s34 “Isolated Mass” hypothesis. This thesis suggests that where workers share a common employer and occuptation, they are more likely to engage in collective action. This is enhanced when individual solutions, such as moving to another company, are not possible because there is no other employer in the locality. Because the workers share the same situation, a feeling of collective solidarity is encouraged, while their chance of meeting with others and discussing work problems is also enhanced.
Kerr and Siegel developed this hypothesis to explain industrial intransigence in coal-mining towns, where geographical nobility, an individualistic solution, is very low. As discussed abovem there is much workforce turnover in the Pilbara. However, many men who move find it difficult to operate outside the protective environment of the company towns. They become “institutionalised” in the way prisoners or mental patients do.35 and often return to the North-West.
The “isolated mass” hypothesis goes some way to explaining particular features of the Pilbara. Discussions - at the pub, the sports field, or barbecue - centre around the company and the industry. People percieve a collective fate linked to the iron ore markets and (often dimly understood and threatening) actions of the company. This is a fertile environment for union activity - often initiated at shop-floor level. Turnout to union meetings is high - from around sixty percent for the large diversified Australian Workers Union to eighty to ninety percent for the Federated Engine Drivers and Firemens Union. Despite this, workers do not always understand the issues on which they vote, according to Suart Clements, ex convener of the FEDFU at Newman.
History has also played a part in shaping the industrial relations profile of the North-West. When mining began in the late sixties, labour markets were tight and the Japanese anxious for as much ore as could be mined in the environment, workers gained considerable on site power - to determine their own work rosters, job allocations, overtime strategies, and considerable countervailing power over disciplinary measures. This power was whittled away in succeeding years but has left a legacy.
A futher reason for strike activity is the strategic power of the workforce. In the Pilbara enormous and costly machinery is operated by a few workers. Stoppages render all the machinery idle, wile wages are not a large part of the total operating costs. However, it is also true that the companies, with the exception of Cliffs, negotiate long term contracts which do not have to be filled on a tight schedule. The existence of stockpiles also buffers companies from the effects of strikes.
In conclusion, dispute activity is considerable in the Pilbara. It is due to the special work and living environment of isolated company towns, a history of union strength and the strategic power of unions and the company. Such a situation means that the union convener is a very busy man (or, rarely, woman).
The Role of the Convener
Between 1978 and 1981, there were one thousand seven hundred and forty-five stoppages in the Pilbara. Chris Heath was the secretary of the FEDFU at Newman. On that site there were seven hundred and sixty stoppages, more than one every fortnight. Not all of these involved the FEDFU, but many of them would have affected other workers, other unions, in the form of stand-downs or sympathy action. Between 1979 and 1981, the FEDFU was involved in a quarter of the Newman disputes. Thus the secretary and convener were coping with a stoppage on average every two months. Given that some disputes last days and even weeks, union organisers are continuously busy. As industrial relations theory stresses, strikes and stoppages are only the visible tip of the industrial relations iceberg. Conveners also deal with issues that may never erupt into disputation. They pass on information to meetings, newsletters, letter drops; provide loans and a welfare service to members; prepare the log of claims for the industrial relations agreement negotiated with each company; appeaer before the Industrial Comission. For a number of reasons, these pressures are greater on a North West convener than a comparable union representative in Perth. Pilbara union representatives are more accustomed to establishing local precedent (e.g: custom and practice) and more likely to take initiatives without first consulting management, other stewards or the rank and file, than their Perth counterparts.36 This greater responsibility and activity on the part of Pilbara stewards is enhanced by the distance from Perth and the specific and particular local issues and power struggles on each site. The almost total responsibility for all but the larger strikes was revealed in Chris’ story. This may add to the level of disputation. Local officials possibly respond more immeditately to the demands of the men or worksite emotional stresses, than executives comfortable in their Perth offices. While some conveners may well derive considerable satisfaction from battling with the company and excercising the power of taking workers out on strike, on the whole it is an unenviable job. It is a difficult and delicate job to balance the demands of men, frustrated by many things besidesthe issue at hand, against a sensible industrial response to the situation. Stuart Clement’ story of an industrial battle over compensation payments for medical treatment in Perth revealed that union conveners feel they must carry out the wishes of their members, even when the conveners feel such action is tactically unwise. The constant pressures facing a union convener were brought home to me when I spent some time with Chris Hamilton who was convener of the AMWSU at Tom Price. Late one afternoon we met Chris at his home and chatted to him for about half an hour. Two people dropped by with queries about “compo” and sick leave. Out interview was curtailed by the arrival of a third person with news of a potential dispute. A fitter had been asked to use boilermaker’s tools and this was definitely not “custom and practice”. There was a site agreement that fitters and boilermakers could not be asked to do each others work. Chris left to organise a stop work meeting at eight the next morning. We were invited to attend. Thirty or forty men, mostly in their late twenties, stood around. Chris said that one of the fitters had been asked to “cut to destruction”, to use boilermaker’s tools. He refused and was stood down by the company. The men were convinced that the company was “trying the union on trying to create a strike by this provocative action.” Chris then pointed out that the Perth office had signed an agreement that allowed fitters to “cut to destruction”. Anger from several of the men: “Who would sign an agreement that could cost boilermakers a job?”. Then Chris asked about practice around the plant. One fitter replied: “Our forman’s got a heap of oxy gear in the cupboard, just waiting to bung it on us” A bit of chivvying erupted between the boilermakers and fitters - signs of the difficulty of keeping a union of diverse trades together. On man said, “I’d do fitter’s work”. Another replied. “And you’d do a better job” but when they voted on whether to strike or not: “One down all out”. Most voted for the strike and the meeting disbaneded. We walked across the oval to the Combined Union Committee hut. We chuckled to see that all the doors had each Union’s name stencilled on in black, except the AMWSU which is red (the painters’ prank, they see the AMWSU as a “communist outfit”). Chris talked to the convener of the Australian Society of Engineers (ASE) which convener had to decide whether the ASE would follow the AMWSU out “into the grass”. Next delegation of shift workers came to discuss an issue with Chris. They did minor maintenance work and wanted a black ban to get reclassification from shift fitters to breakdown crew. They felt that they were always stood down when workers in the main shifts were on strike, but got nothing in return. Chris didn’t want a reciprocal black ban for these men because he felt other workers would not support it. A delicate situation, the resolution of which he could only postpone. This is a sample of Chris’ work - balancing the demands of diverse groups who measure the union in the scales of their own interests. It is all voluntary labour, squeezed in between the demands of his own working time. Chris is lucky he does not have to respond to the needs of a wife and children. Meanwhile, Chris Hamilton was also working on the log of claims for the new industrial relations agreement. In 1966, the Pilbara workers were covered by the state-wide Metal and Trades Award, but from 1972 each company negotiated its own agreement, sometimes with each union on site. The union’s log of claims is formulated through a long process of compromise and discussion with union members. Between 1977 and 1981, three agreements were negotiated at Newman. Some unionists feel that the company withdraws from an industrial relations agreement merely to tie the conveners up with the process of renegotiating the long catalogue of wages, conditions, disability allowances, work procedures and industrial relations processes. The company has full-time officials, sometimes trained at tertiary institutions, to produce their industrial relations strategy. They have legal officers to argue their case at the Industrial Commission. Pilbara conveners undertake this increasingly complex and time-consuming process in the parts of the day left over after work, local and immediate unrest, welfare matters. “Greater love hath no man” as they say. Indeed, the strains of being convener take their toll in the supposed domain of love, the family. Divource is not an uncommon price for a convener to pay. Chris Heath would not relinquish his family obligations - which he saw as pleasures. But this added to his strains, especially as few of his members understood his need for some space and time with his family.
Women and the Unions
Women are unaware of the normative expectations in the industrial environment. Sometimes they worked so hard they showed up the men.[^61] Goldsworthy went completely overboard and put women on the trucks. They couldn't cope with night driving. (why not?) It's their makeup. Funny cattle, women.[^62] But the 24 year old long-haired blonde really is a young lady working in a man's world.[63] The wives are said to have become "slightly hysterical" when the singles went on to shift work and night duty, working in the shovel cabins alongside the men.[^64]
Depending on whether they work or not, Pilbara women have quite a different relationship with the union. Over the years, more women have joined the blue0collar workforce in the Pilbara, despite the opposition of company, union, wives and men at different times.
Colleen tells the story of her response at Newman to women working as “greasers”, or cable-crew for the shovel drivers. Her husband and Stuart kept out of the issue, possibly aware that they would lose support whichever side they took.
Shay Gap was the first community of its kind in Australia to employ women alongside men, after an industrial relations expert in 1977 suggested in may stabilise the workforce and reduce the violence. Nevertheless, there are four hundred men and only thirty single women in the workforce.37
It is to the company’s advantage to employ the wives of husbands, give that the cost of establishing a married worker is up to one hundred thousand dollars and a single worker half of that. The wives are already on site. However, it seems impossible that husbands could work the onerous shifts they do without a wife at home to clean, cook, and childcare. Many men oppose two income families and this principle was used in 1983 to have married women, not their husbands, made redundant. The unions, more so than the company representatives, endorse this policy.
Some men complain that women do not pull their weight in the union. Many women have found it hard to understand union procedures and feel excluded by the predominantly male environment. This is changing, as women are increasingly elected as stewards, safety representatives and so on. However, only one woman has been elected convener - the most responsible on-site position. She was elected by the Australian Worker’s Union at Shay Gap in 1980.
Relations betwee unions and non-working wives are probably more problemative. Some wives see the unions as a mere tool for masculine aggrandisement. It is possible that this response reflects a feeling of exclusion from just about the only tool available to the workers and their families to change their living conditions.Women can only “like it or lump it” (or leave). Men, at least to some extent, may experience the potential to change it.
There are instances of women joining men in their union activities - eg: the women’s auxiliary formed for the ten-week strike at Hamersley Iron. Interestingly, hoever, the auxiliary eschewed politics and focussed on feeding the men, fundraising and morale-boosting tasks not too different from a wife’s perceived role in ordinary circumstances.
As the women who had organised the auxiliary told their story, I imagined a strengthened union movement as husbands and wives faced and outlasted adversity together. The reality was very different. The women’s auxiliary felt that they had been taken over by the men and resented that. The men felt emasculated and useless and got underfoot all day. Jealousies and gossip erupted as people watched each other closely and suspiciously. Children went hungry, furniture was repossessed, savings evaporated. The women were vehement that they would not go through the experience again.
There are moves in the Pilbara to open union meetings to wives. During the ten-week strike women were invited to attend the meeting but not to vote: “Will women and children clear the area so we can vote”. Similarly the FEDFU at Newman held open meetings, but again the role of women was restricted:
Obviously we couldn't have them standing up at the meeting, yelling and screaming and throwing their weight around.[^66]
Women often have no conception of what a strike is over. They usually rely totally on their husbands for information. Some husbands withhold information to increase their domestic power; others are seldom at home to pass it on; some do not understand the issues themselves.
Chris did discuss union matters with colleen. She sometimes passed information on to the men who were incessantly at her door. Even so, she did not share the culture of work and union life that stuart and Chris lived in. She did not have their intimate grasp of detail. How much more arcane and unnecessary the union must seem to the wife who did not have the companionate marriage Colleen and Chris shared. How much more stress such husbands and wives must put on the work of the convener.
Conclusion
You couldn't be a good family man and a convener on twenty-four hours' call. It's just not possible[^67]
Chris and colleen shared a love and respect for each other that is rare among couples anywhere in Australia. Chris wanted to spend time with his wife and children. Many of the men he worked with, including Stuart Clements at the time, did not put family life in the same category as union demands. As a result, they pressured Chris to deal with the work and welfare issues and faily plague a union organiser. Through ignorance of these pressures they had scant regard for Chris’ need to give some time to his family.
A run of illnesses plagued the heath family. The trouble they caused was exacerbated by the isolation and inadequacy of local facilities. Despite the royalties and export earnings in the Pilbara has given to the rest of Australia, not a great deal has been given back to ease the life of workers and their wives in the harsh physical and emotional environment. Child-care facilities, pre-school centres, community support groups, a more responsive attitude by welfare workers and their central offices, alternative living arrangements to the household of the breadwinner, wife and children, would all reduce the tensions on family life in the Pilbara. Conveners too, need some additional research and organisational support. Wives, freed to some extent from child0care, could perhapse become more involved in union work. Hoever, this will only occur if unions are responsive to the special needs of wives, eg: the cost of living 38 and child-care support.
The West Australian Government is presently proposing an iron ore tribunal to settle regional disputes made up of two representatives each from the unions and employers and an “independent” chairman.39 This can only be effective if it supports rather than diminishes the role of on-site conveners. Neither the regional North-West organisers (usually locaed at Karratha) nor the state executives have the local knowledge or time to deal with industrial matters in the inland towns. Of more help, possibly, would be funds to pay a part-time secretary, research assistance or publicity officer to help the conveners on each site.
Colleen and I have collaborated on this book in the hope that some of these initiatives can be taken by Pilbara residents.
FOOTNOTES
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AMP Society - a life insurance company. ↩︎
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In 1974-75, the Pilbara accounted for thirty-five and a half percent of Western Australia’s exports and ten percent of Australia’s exports in 1976-7. Royalties paid by companies to the State Government amounted to one hundred and two million dollars between 1966 and 1976. Stephen J. Frenkel, “Industrial Conflict. Workplace Characteristics and Accomodation Structure in the Pilbara Iron Ore Industry”. Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol. 20, 1978, p.389. ↩︎
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At one time, pelletising plants further refined the ore but thee have now been closed. Japanese steel companies stopped buying pellets to protect employment levels in the Japanese steel industry. It is possible that the pelletising plants may re-open in the future. ↩︎
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King Edward Memorial Hospital for Women. ↩︎
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The State built roads, a gas pipeline and an energy grid and established the North West Planning authority to provide research and organisational support. Additionally, houses were built for government support workers - eg. teachers - particularly in the coastal towns. In 1962-3 a quarter of government houses were constructed outside of Perth; by 1972-3 it had risen to eighty percent. Major iron ore producers failed to honour a commitment to pay for some state facilities, according to a spokesman for the Department of Industrial Development: Annette Mary Holden, “Work and Marriage in the Pilbara”, Honours Thesis presented for Bachelor of Arts, Murdoch University, 1981, p.5-6. ↩︎
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Holden, op.cit.,p.100. ↩︎
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F.J Harman, “Resource Development and Personal Income Levels” in Elizabeth J. Harman and Brian W. Head (eds.) State, Capital and Resources in the North and West of Australia, University of Western Australia Press, Nedlands, 1982, p.370, p.375. ↩︎
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For instance, one of the twenty-seven contracts of over one million dollars let for the North-West Shelf project, twenty-three went to out-of-state firms or their subsidiaries and only five involved fabrication in the West (E.J. Harman, “Mining and Manufacturing Sector in Western Australia” in Elizabeth J. Harman and Brian W. Head (eds.) *State, Capital, and Resourc) ↩︎
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