The author reveals her own gentility when she attempts to reproduce the copulative adjective in the context of its use in shearing sheds. She reminds me of Gough Whitlam’s frequent and awkward use of profane language. ‘You fucking buggers’ is for learners; not for shearers; their use of the four-letter word would roll off the tongue more smoothly than that.

Her chapter on ‘The Scab’ is first class; but Jack London’s description of the scab was the one most used in later years; although I don’t know why it was considered more apt than:

A scabby form lay rotting
Upon a filthy bed,
It smelt a damned sight nicer
For the weeks it had been dead.

There’s no maggots on his carcase
There’s no worms to crawl and feast –
The blowflies turn their noses up,
They will not blow the beast.

So what’s the use of scabbing,
He cannot go to hell –
The maggots and the blowflies
Have blackened him as well.

The author’s spelling is careless. Donald Macdonell never spelt his name ‘McDonell’ as so many other historians have mistakenly spelt it. This is not nit-picking; it is too easy for historians to embrace their predecessors’ errors, and one should never allow a mistake to pass unchallenged. Coondambo, Cordillo Downs, Calperum, Yardea, Buckalow and Arcoona Stations are misspelt, and so is the name of Peter Manoel.

The Pittaways didn’t come from Gawler; but from Tarlee and the Burra. Shearers’ accommodation in New South Wales was not governed by the ‘award’, but by the Rural Workers’ Accommodation Act.

I did the ‘Long Lead’ in the mid-1930s, and bicycles had already been phased out in favour of motor cars travelling with the luggage stacked on the running boards. The ‘Lead’ consisted of Cordillo Downs, Arrabury and Jnnaminka (Nappamerie shed); but soon afterwards, dingoes made it impossible to run sheep on Innaminka.

Mount Erba is nothing like 750 miles from Adelaide as stated in The Shearers.

It was not a ‘left-handed pizzle guard’ that the new chums were asked to get; but a left-handed screwdriver, and sometimes a tin of striped paint.

A shearer would laugh his head off if asked to believe that any shearer in any shed in any state in any kind of sheep, no matter how sandy, would have to use twenty-six combs in a two-hour run. This underscores the risk one takes in setting out to write about a foreign subject.

Spence’s description of the burning of the Rodney is not correct. The strikers did not wade through the mud to the steamer! My father was in the strike camp at Tolarno and told the story to me scores of times. What happened was this: Lots were drawn for those who would constitute the party to intercept the Rodney. Those who drew the ‘crow’ were to assemble at a given point after nightfall and proceed to the spot chosen to carry out the plan agreed upon at the meeting that afternoon. They were forbidden to speak to each other and were to return to their tents without telling a soul of their mission.

The steamer was not moored; but was mobile until its bow hit the cable that had been tied at a sixty-degree angle across the Darling just below the surface. Immediately this occurred, the steamer slewed· into the riverbank and the strikers doused it with kerosene and set it alight. I still have a piece of the hull from below the waterline.

Several were arrested for boasting of their part in the affair – most of them were nowhere near Tolarno. The one exception was W. Threadgold, one of the scabs on board the Rodnev, who sought to prove his purity in a Broken Hill pub by giving such an authentic account of what happened that he was questioned for hours by police until he convinced them he was one of the scabs. He never shore in a shed again.

The word is ‘shore’ not ‘sheared’ as wrongly used in one version I heard of Reedy River. And, the author is also correct in using the term ‘Smoke O’ rather than ‘Tea O’ as used in some films purporting to be authentic accounts of life in the shearing sheds. But there was no such thing as a ‘sheep grower’, a ‘cutter sharpener’, or a ‘bladesman’. A sheep grower would be known as a grazier, squatter or station owner; a cutter sharpener, as an expert or grinder; and bladesman, ‘blademan’.

To ‘pink’ a sheep is not to cut it as the author-suggests (page 58), but to shear it so close to the skin (without cutting it) as to cause the sheep to look pink for a few days until the wool begins to grow. Squatters loved to have a shearer who pinked his sheep and detested one who cut them.

It is not true to suggest that Aboriginals were debarred from membership in the A.W.U. Indeed, ‘an Australian aboriginal, or Maori, or negro citizen of the United States of America’ were specifically included among those eligible for union membership. In fact, the union once employed an American Negro as a full-time organiser. Shearers of European descent got on extremely well with their Aboriginal comrades. Alf Cameron, an Aboriginal shearer I first met during the shearing at Ashmore in 1928, was my natural uncle, and was the most respected shearer in the team.

The anecdote attributed to ‘The Hon. Mick Young, M.P.’ (not yet a minister) about Charlie Gibbs asking for the names of the sheep owned by a small grazier, is the best anecdote in the book. It is a pity the author didn’t interview Mick at first hand; she could have filled her book with stories like that. It is a pity too, that she did not include Mick Young’s name in the index.

She writes about a Clive Cameron, a politician, who had been a shearer and who had walked twenty miles to Kalgoorlie with Divil Ryan. I know of no ‘Clive’ Cameron who became a politician, and I know of no Clyde Cameron who walked twenty miles to Kalgoorlie with Divil Ryan.

I take issue with Ms Adam-Smith when she says that shearers are among the least militant of all union groups when she takes her tense back to 1890, and that there have been only two serious strikes in history –1890 and 1956.

Shearers were, until very recently when most of the large sheds gave way to smaller holdings and ‘suburban shearing’, the most militant unionists in Australia. Their union officials did not faithfully reflect the feelings of their rank and file; but that doesn’t entitle anyone to judge shearers by the standards of their union officials.

The shearing strikes of 1891 and 1894 had been costly affairs. There had been serious trouble in the industry over the introduction of machines culminating in the formation of a break-away union, the Machine Shearers’ and Shed Employees’ Union in 1900. Machine shearing, as the author correctly points out, led to the advent of shearing contractors and ‘runs’ of sheds giving shearers continuity of employment, more sheep per man, and the industry less men per year; which to the chagrin of paid officials, meant a reduction in union membership.

There were further strikes in 1916 and 1922. A long and bitter struggle occurred in 1930 when Judge Dethridge ordered a staggering reduction of about twenty per cent in the rate fixed by the 1927 Award and before the award expired. Again, as in the previous struggles, paid officials sided with the system; and again, the rank and file were forced to form their own strike organisation. This time, they called the body the Pastoral Workers’ Industrial Union of Australia. The PWIU brought AWU officials to their knees and some of the most reactionary of them were removed from office. In 1945–46, another Australia-wide strike broke out over shearers’ demands for a forty-hour week with the paid officials again taking the side of the graziers. That strike ended in victory for the rank and file in spite of officialdom’s treachery. In fact, I was called upon to show cause why I should not be dismissed from my position as Secretary of the union’s South Australian Branch, for having supported my members’ demand for reduced working hours. Then came the 1956 strike, which was supported by the officials; but more for the knee-jerk reaction to their political ‘blue’ with the Right and for the additional reason that the Boilermakers’ case had temporarily placed them above the law.

But these were ‘general strikes’; there were countless thousands of individual ‘shed strikes’ over the years – over 1,000 in one year in New South Wales. So, it is no exaggeration to say that the shearers of Australia were the nation’s most militant unionists. They were intelligent, well-read and articulate; and were without peers in the fields of philosophy and politics.

An interesting sidelight to the 1956 shearers’ strike was the support given to the strikers by a rich young squatter in the western district of Victoria. His name was J.M. Fraser M.H.R., who said the shearers had every right ·to retain the rate fixed by the 1955 award and that the dispute ‘has degenerated into a fight between the AWU and a rusty and inefficient arbitration system’. It is interesting for another reason; namely, that it was Malcolm Fraser’s grandfather, Simon Fraser, owner of Nyang Station, who gave the newly formed Australasian Shearers’ Union its first break by virtually directing his team to become unionised.

David Temple, who was the really great man in the ASU, not the phoney Spence, in a letter published in The Tocsin on 7 October 1901, wrote: ‘But the first shed visited (Nyang in the Moulamen (sic) district every man-Jack joined. The result in each succeeding shed I visited, with a rare exception, was a repetition of the Nyang success’. And, some ten years later, in a letter to Labor Call, Temple virtually credited ‘Senator Simon Fraser’s’ encourage­ment as being the catalyst that triggered off the chain reaction that made the ASU possible. Indeed, the prime minister has proudly supplied me with newspaper clippings, etc., to prove that his grandfather did have this uncharacteristic streak in his make-up.

Ms Adam-Smith’s opening chapter gives the best exposure of how our back country was raped by the early squatters; and it is sad that one who can write so well should have used so much space quoting the dreary and far-fetched comments of some of those whom she interviewed. She should have had her manuscript edited by an authority on the pastoral industry and by someone able to abbreviate the text while at the same time retaining the substance. The chapter on Master and Servant is also excellent.

I don’t criticise the author for paraphrasing so much of Spence’s writings or for using so much of Julian Stuart’s Part of the Glory. Spence was a lightweight; but Stuart’s work, now out of print, is too good to be forgotten. In one sense, large slabs of The Shearers is a splendid anthology that enables the reader to disregard much of the bibliography on the shearing industry.

The book is printed on high class paper and handsomely presented. It includes a ·useful glossary of shearing shed terminology with the word ‘pink’ given its correct meaning. But I repeat: It’s a pity the manuscript wasn’t handed to a good editor with some knowledge of the pastoral industry.