Hunger Town by Wendy Scarfe

‘RIP JOE PULHAM, KILLED BY INDUSTRY, OCTOBER 1926’ and above the gravestone I sketched a weeping angel offering a laurel wreath.
    It was my first attempt at drawing a cartoon. Previously I had sketched in a haphazard manner anything that took my interest. But for some months now I had found myself searching out and studying the cartoons in newspapers. Their power to convey an insight in a few sharp lines fascinated me and I knew that, if I could create work like this, it might give purpose and meaning to my drawing. So, feeling brave but presumptuous, I sent my cartoon to the Sun News Pictorial . They regularly published cartoons. Maybe they would take it.
    Despite the Board of Governors of the Botanic Gardens swearing that no IWW would ever speak there, the demonstration had gone ahead. Harry had been jubilant. ‘It was a triumph,’ he said. He had heard all about it when he had gone to see Nathan and Jock about volunteering to help with propaganda for the Free Speech campaign.
    Nathan and Jock were elated by the size of the crowd. Even though Donald Grant had called the communists ‘tin-pot Lenins of the Comical Party’, Nathan was forbearing. After all, they had staged an enormously successful event. ‘However,’ Harry chuckled, ‘Jock was livid. He fumed that “Donald Grant was a base double-crossing stab-in-the-back bastard”. Hadn’t he stuck his neck out to support a bloody IWW and now Grant rewarded him with treacherous comments behind his back. The IWWs were always determined to undermine the Communist Party. You couldn’t trust any of them.’
    Nathan, Harry told me, had responded quietly. ‘Not quite behind your back, Jock. Six thousand people heard it. We must ignore these pettifogging differences and work together. We all have a common goal.’
    â€˜Do we?’ Jock snarled.
    Harry smirked. ‘I don’t think Jock liked being dismissed as pettifogging but he seldom argues with Nathan. Nathan was very forgiving, Judith. After all, it was quite a public slur. A bit mean.’
    â€˜Forgiving?’ I snorted. ‘Pious, you mean.’
    My father had been both amused and exasperated by Harry’s story. ‘Fat chance we have of those two lots working together. You should see them in the union.’
    The temperature continued to rise. Fires exploded in the Dandenong Ranges behind Melbourne. People fled for their lives. A call went out for all able-bodied men to volunteer for fire-fighting. Harry went.
    A thick pall of smoke hung over Adelaide from fires in the Adelaide Hills. We breathed its grey heaviness; the sky a vermilion haze through which a fierce sun struggled. The smoky sunlight did strange things to the light and the day looked as if it were lit by an opalescent moon rather than a bright sun.
    My father couldn’t go fire-fighting. Trading ships couldn’t hang around the harbour for days waiting for fuel. In the midst of the heat wave we chugged to the Outer Harbor to fuel a coastal trader. Our hulk had an iron hull and this increased the heat on board.
    Coaling was an exhausting job. A team of men worked with my father and were dependent for their lives on his skill at the winch. The coal lumpers brought their own tools—shovels, baskets, boots, ropes and their own physical strength. The gear on the collier—winch, rope and baskets—had to be rigged so the coal could be shifted from down below up to the deck before moving it into the ship that was being coaled. The baskets were attached to the rope that ran through a pulley and a winch on the deck above the hold. The shovellers worked in the hold filling the baskets with coal, but if the winchman brought the basket up too quickly the heavy load could fall on the men below.
    Fear of killing the men in the hold made my father’s life at the winch enormously stressful. At times he had to stand at the winch for up to forty hours and not make a mistake.