A Fiesty Aussie Saint

Moorara Station on the Lower Darling, August 1896. It’s a moonless night. A dozen men, clothes turned inside out, faces and arms daubed with mud, oars muffled, row steadily across the river. Once on the opposite bank they wade silently towards the dark outline of a large riverboat moored in swampland.
 
At about 4 a.m in the morning, the boarders swiftly overwhelm the watchman. Someone reported that the forty scab shearers aboard “fell on their knees and begged for mercy.” An indignant Captain Dickson, plus the non-union labourers are hustled ashore into the hands of a waiting crowd of striking shearers.
 
On the spur of the moment, some of the exuberant boarding party pour kerosene on bags of chaff found in the hold and within minutes, flames are licking around the wheel house. Soon the 133-ton P.S Rodney - pride of Permewan Wright Company’s riverboat fleet, has burned to the waterline, drifts drunkenly, lurches and sinks with a hiss of steam.
 
And so, a rare casualty of inland piracy came to rest as a hulk on the bottom of the Darling River. The wreck came to encapsulate a tumultuous moment in the history of working class Australia. The central figure in this forgotten drama was a man of rare calibre – Scots immigrant William Guthrie Spence.

In the 1890’s a 2,500 km long Union battlefront stretched from Barcaldine in Central Queensland, South through Bourke, down the Darling to Wentworth and up the Murray to Echuca and Ballarat in Victoria. It’s remarkable that Spence, a Christian Socialist, was able to marshal squads of militant shearers along a line @that extended further than Emperor Napoleon’s army had marched from Paris to Moscow earlier in the century! And all with a very sketchy communication system.
 
It's true that some woolsheds were burned, machinery was destroyed and men were injured. Spence has been credited with extraordinary organising and negotiating skills that kept the sprawling new union movement largely moderate and conciliatory. The Methodist circuit preacher insisted he had given Union leaders strict instructions to do no violence and to refrain from extreme actions - the goal was the capture of the non-unionists. He was adamant there had been no plan to burn the Rodney. No-one was successfully charged with the crime.
 
The determined William Spence brought two sides to the struggle. He declared the strike is a fight. Pushing for justice often disturbs the peace. “It is not easy to say where moral suasion ends and coercion begins... It is warfare and must be judged by the ethics of war… The sheds had been mostly filled by ‘scabs’ and good staunch men had no chance whatever of work and were therefore penniless. They saw their work taken away from them by the scum of society in the cities.”
 
Throughout his long career both as a union leader and member of Federal Parliament he maintained that his deep concern for the down-trodden working people of Australia was an outworking of the Christian faith instilled into him by a mother who taught him to read and live by the Bible as he grew up in Jackass Gully on the goldfields near Creswick in Victoria. He wrote, “New Unionism was simply the teachings of that greatest of all social reformers … Jesus of Nazareth whom all must revere.”
 
He once urged a cheering crowd of several thousand labour supporters in Sydney to make the courageous Jesus their model leader. ‘In taking up the new unionism we must see if we cannot get back to the level of the founder of Christianity, imbibe some of His spirit and get rid of musty theology, for some of it is very musty!’
 
Nowadays, only the charred ribs of the P S Rodney remain poking from Darling River mud. I like to think they are a reminder that the hero who fired the strident voice that was a founder of the AWU and the Labor Party in Australia, was the towering figure of Jesus who threw himself selflessly into the task of rescuing the down-trodden peoples of the world.
 
And, whether they know it or not, Australians have adopted this Nazareth carpenter’s teachings as the basis for their shared values.