     |
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||
|
           Shipping Stevedoring Port Services Hydrocarbons Diving  Jul-Aug 2008        |
|
Humour at the front: How Australia's top cartoonists see it
War on the Wharves: A Cartoon History of the great docks disputeFeatures Australia's great political cartoonists: Moir, Nicholson, Petty, Rowe, Tandberg, Leak, Leunig, O'Neill, Pryor, Coopes, Leahy, Spooner, Emmerson, Clement and many more. It has 150 pages, 184 illustrations and 9 chapters, each with an introduction that places the drawings in their context. All proceeds due to the Evatt Foundation are being donated to the MUA. Foreword by Bob EllisUnlike almost anyone else, a cartoonist is licensed to insult. He can dress his target in drag, or clown's red nose, or medieval armour or imperial togas or a beggar's rags. He can show him uttering stupidities, or lies, or dirty limericks, or schoolboy obscenities. He can cause him such damage as will last him lifelong, and go with him to his unhonoured grave. So great, in fact, is a cartoonist's license that he can chart, as here, a savage attack on democracy itself, with complete impunity and freedom of speech. A cartoonist's freedoms will survive long after ours are gone. He is the last lighthouse in the dark when the sea is mountainous and our small craft leaking. The wharf dispute was as big an event as we have seen. What was at stake were the sorely tested gains of 200 years. And what was momentously threatened was an employer's unfettered power, through deft shuffling of company structures, to halve everybody's wages at will. Had it ended otherwise it would have meant that David Jones (say) could now sack its staff on Saturday and re-hire them on Monday on half their precious wages unpunished. It showed, and showed potently, not least to the scabs that laboured so briefly and thanklessly for the National Farmers Federation, what unions are for, and solidarity, and all the old battle songs of a working class not yet in abject slavery. I visited the docks on a few of the days and nights of the long punishing war for their decent rights, and found them crowded with young and older men of disturbing innocence like those in The Full Monty and Brassed Off, bewildered, angry, buffeted and righteous, and felt myself part of their tribal saga (sharing the sausages, shouting the slogans, grumbling round the burning braziers in the dark and cold and rain) in ways I hadn't expected. I marched with John Coombs and Jennie George to the Botany gates on the day the ambiguous ruling of the High Court came down, and sang the anthems and shared the tears of momentary triumph, and knew that day in depth the shape of the struggle we are all in, and the armed might of the barbarian, smooth in his speech and beguiling in his cannibalising hypocrisy, who is coming for us all in this millennial years. This book is a fine reminder of those days of hope and wonder and anger and hate and threat and grief and betrayal, days whose images of squealing children and roving dogs on chains and puffs of gas through wire gates and burly masked men in bus shelters and politicians yelping with delight at the sacking of family breadwinners showed clearly and coldly at last the reckless cruelty of Howard and Reith and Corrigan and the profundity of their contempt for ordinary people, people they saw as expendable and barely human, pawns in a game of greed and billions. We need to be reminded of these things, and these great illustrations, like tatoos on the brain, will keep us vigilant, and careful of our rights, and mindful of our enemies, in the interesting days and nights ahead. Bob Ellis War on the Waterfront articles
|
||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
  |
    |
This page: http://mua.org.au/war/humour.html Site proudly designed and engineered by Social Change Online |
© 2001 Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) |
