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20 April 2009

Queenslanders are being invited to mark 150th anniversary of our formal separation from New South Wales this year by voting for home grown icons.

By Bill Ludwig, AWU National Presient and Queensland Secretary

Among the short list of 300 they can choose from is Barcaldine's Tree of Knowledge. This year the Tree of Knowledge Memorial will be officially opened during Queensland's Labour Day celebrations in May.

Queenslanders can vote for their favourite Queensland icon from a shortlist of 300. Voting closes 30 April. Click here and vote now for the Tree of Knowledge as an icon in the Locations category for icons that have "put our State on the map"

As voting starts to wind up, The Courier-Mail has published claims doubting the historical relevance of the Tree in the pivotal Shearers' Strike of 1891 and thereafter to the labour movement and the formation of the Australian Labor Party.

Under the branches of the tree the labour movement was formed

The Tree is dead.  It was poisoned. Its killers remain at large.

Yet the Tree, and in turn Barcaldine, remains the rallying point for a movement that has transformed Australia industrially, politically and socially. 

The unionists who gathered under its branches and elsewhere in western Queensland during the prolonged Shearers' Strike 118 years ago made the critical decision that the industrial gains of workers needed to be consolidated in law; they needed to be enshrined and protected in legislation from future attacks on their hard won conditions by pastoralists.

The right to bargain with the employer won through a parliamentary voice

They needed to change the law so that they had the right to bargain as a group, as a countervailing force to the power of the employer.

They knew they had to do this through  parliamentary representation and recognise - in the words of future Queensland Premier William Kidston -  "the ballot is the thing".

The industrial gains have been protected against  conservative governments and others seeking to unwind them for their own ideological or self-serving ends. 

The wisdom of decisions made under the Tree cannot be denied

The defeat of John Howard and his repulsive Work Choices legislation in 2007 honours the wisdom of the decision and the hard work by trade unions since.

According to the three full pages devoted to the claims about the Tree in The Courier-Mail (11 April), Northern Territory-based historians spent nine months and $30,000 of Barcaldine Regional Council funds yet could find no evidence of the Tree bearing witness to these pivotal events.

These claims fail to recognise the necessarily clandestine nature of the unionists' activities. 

Strike leaders put on trial in Rockhampton for conspiracy, and sentenced to hard labour

They were combating the co-ordinated attempts of the squatters and the Government to break them. 

As the so-called "free labourers" arrived in Barcaldine, the unionists waited near the railway station in a bid to persuade new arrivals to join, not undermine their cause.

Letters and telegrams between unionists were confiscated and used against them in the press, such as The Brisbane Courier, and ultimately in the court room.

According to Labor in Queensland: From 1880s to 1988, by Ross Fitzgerald and Harold Thornton, "in April 1891, at Rockhampton, fourteen strike leaders were tried for conspiracy and twelve were sentenced to three years in prison, their intercepted mail was being used as evidence against them".

To promote their activities widely, unionists risked facing charges of conspiracy and being sentenced to hard labour at St Helena Island. 

Therefore, the modern day expectation of "evidence" akin to transcripts of press conferences convened around the trunk of the Tree fail to recognise the plight of the unionists amid the draconian approach of the Government aided and abetted by the pastoralists.

The precise arrival of the Australian Labor Party is keenly debated, particularly among members of the Party. 

The role of the Tree of Knowledge and Barcaldine beyond debate

In stark contrast, the members of the squatters' party, the Country Party come National Party, know exactly when their Party was founded and when it died - in July last year - with the takeover by the Liberals.

Nevertheless, the role of Tree of Knowledge and Barcaldine in its eventual formation should be beyond debate. 

The area was subject to an archaeological study in the 1980s prior to the Centenary celebrations in 1991. Many scholarly articles and books have been written about the events in Barcaldine and its legacy.

Even John Howard recognised the historical role of the Shearers' Strike

Ironically, it was Howard,  who legislated to undermine the right of workers to collectively bargain in WorkChoices, that honoured the historical record of the Shearers' Strike a century beforehand. 

The Howard Government gazetted the Tree on the National Heritage List following the assessment of the Australian Heritage Council in 2006.

Specifically, the gazette cites the Tree as "important to the nation as the scene of actions and decisions, which had a profound effect on the future of labour and politics in Australia".

The ballot is the thing - online voting for the icon closes 30 April

Does this qualify the Tree of Knowledge to be a Queensland icon? The ballot is the thing and on-line voting closes on 30 April.