Published: 17 Jun 2010
Wharfies and seafarers feature in Radical Sydney: Places, Portraits and Unruly Episodes a new book by Terry Irving and union historian Rowan Cahill launched this week in Sydney, Melbourne and Port Kembla
Sydney: a beautiful international city with impressive buildings, harbour-side walkways, public gardens, cafes, restaurants, theatres and hotels. This is the way Sydney is represented to its citizens and to the rest of the world. But there has always been another Sydney not viewed so fondly by the city's rulers, a radical part of Sydney. The working-class suburbs to the south and west of the city were large and explosive places of marginalised ideas, bohemian neighbourhoods, dissident politics and contentious action. Through a series of snapshots, Radical Sydney traces its development from The Rocks in the 1830s to the inner suburbs of the 1980s. It includes a range of incidents, people and places, from freeing protestors in the anti-conscription movement, resident action movements in Kings Cross, anarchists in Glebe, to Gay Rights marches on Oxford Street and Black Power in Redfern
The book features 3 chapters on maritime union history - the film unit, the bans on Dutch cargo to Indonesia in the fifties and the Hungry Mile
Rowan Cahill was the co-author of the first history of the Seamen's Union
Read Emerald City's immortal subversives book review by Ross Fitzgerald, emeritus professor of history and politics at Griffith University in The Australian
