NB. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this article contains the names, photographs and stories of people who have passed away. All images are reproduced with the permission and support of the families involved.
In 1959 and 1961, anthropology students John and Katrin Wilson visited Aboriginal people living in mining camps across the Pilbara. These camps were set up in the wake of the 1946 Pilbara Strike, when around eight hundred Aboriginal stockmen and domestic workers walked off stations to protest having little to show for their labour. Conditions for Aboriginal workers on north-west stations were terrible, as pastoralists kept them and their families without adequate food and with little in the way of shelter. Even clean water was a problem on some stations. If Aboriginal people attempted to leave, police were assigned to bring them back. Refusing to work and demanding decent wages, Aboriginal people of the north-west went on strike and did not return to the stations when their demands were not met. Refused rations by the government, and harassed by pastoralists and police, the strikers decided to take up mining. They used pickaxes and shovels in diggings for tin, copper, wolfram, gold and manganese, loading them into barrels for sale to middlemen who shipped them elsewhere in the world.
It is fortunate that John was a keen photographer, and made a precious record of the strikers as he visited the camps for his anthropology thesis. He documented them as they worked, as they rested in bough shelters and held mass meetings. These meetings combined communist inspired, collective decision-making with tradition. Women and men sat on opposite sides of large circles, listening to strike leaders. John’s archive of photographs gives life to what had previously been an oral history, giving visual testament to the radicalism of the strike movement, to its autonomy and the hard labour of its workers. For fifty years, these photographs were stored in a Fremantle townhouse, accumulating dust and are only to be exhibited, sadly, after the passing of both John and Katrin at the Berndt Museum in Perth.
Unearthing this archive is timely, as the children of the strikers, many of whom grew up in the mining camps, can identify some of the people pictured in it. Nyamal Elders Ursula Wilson and Sharon Coppin can see their father, Captain Mudjawariny Wilson, in several. In one, he swings a pick at Gorge Creek and shifts an air compressor that was used to power pneumatic drills, lying on the rock beside him. In another, he lifts buckets of dirt from deep inside a trench. Others show women, many of whom are yet to be identified, sifting sand from harder mineral ores with tin yandies. Known elsewhere in the country as coolamons, yandies were made from wood to sift grain and cradle babies. In the mining camps they were made of tin, and Wilson’s photographs show women working with them across mining fields pockmarked by holes and trenches. There are also photographs of Aboriginal people working with conveyor belts, crushers, excavators and trucks, equipment used to extract and move piles of columbite and tin.
The families have also been able to identify where many of the pictures were taken. Many are from the mining camp at Pilgangoora, where four hundred Aboriginal people were camped and mined columbite and tantalite. Today, Pilgangoora is the site of one of the world’s largest hard-rock lithium mines, within which some of the old Aboriginal mining sites are preserved as part of a heritage agreement. During one of the heritage surveys, a rare metal yandy was recovered from an early mining field, its edge folded so that it is comfortable to hold with the thumb. Today it plays a role in the inductions held for new employees on the lithium operation, as Nyamal Elders illustrate the process of yandying to workers employed to operate industrial-scale crushers, drills and trucks.
Photography has a history of shedding light on little-known realities, of making them tangible. The photographs of the strike camps illuminate a little-known part of Australian and Aboriginal history, in which Aboriginal people ran their own companies and communities long before the government began to support Land Rights and legislate for Native Title. Their history is both commercial and political, as the movement took out leases in Aboriginal names, purchased and hired equipment, and contracted with other companies. Their first company, Nodom (Northern Development and Mining), had 700 members in the early 1950s. Money raised from mining operations was shared. Rations were purchased for the camps, and their distribution was organised by family, while the rest of the proceeds from mineral sales went towards securing new mining leases, purchasing equipment and funding legal battles with the WA government.
The strike began two decades before the more famous Wave Hill Walk-Off in 1966, in which two hundred pastoral workers refused to keep working after hearing about the equal wage legislation then being rolled out slowly through the country. The Wave Hill Walk-Off is better known than the Pilbara Strike partly because of Mervyn Bishop’s famous photograph of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam pouring sand into Gurindji Elder Vincent Lingari’s hand, and because of the song by Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly, From Little Things Big Things Grow. While the Gurindji were successful in being awarded Land Rights, the strikers received no government help and had to purchase their own pastoral leases. Strelley and Warralong Stations were purchased from the sale of mining leases, and remain communities where some of the strikers’ descendants live today. Elders including Barbara Hale and Bruce Thomas remain committed to keeping the memory of the strike alive. They teach Nyangumarta to the children in Strelley School, and tell them stories of growing up in the strike movement.
Crucial to understanding the strike’s history is the itinerant miner and settler activist Don McLeod, who during a 1942 meeting with Elders from across the north-west suggested that Aboriginal workers walk off the stations. McLeod spent the strike travelling between strike camps, and the remains of his stone hut still stand amidst great piles of waste rock at Pilgangoora. He was persecuted along with the strikers by pastoralists and the state government who saw him as a communist instigator. They refused to issue the meagre rations that were then a staple food for remote Aboriginal people, and launched both commercial and legal attacks against them. McLeod was sometimes not the best representative for the strikers, as he spent money the group could ill afford on legal battles and expensive mining equipment. A series of Wilson’s photographs captures a crucial meeting that took place among the strikers in 1959, when one group decided to split with McLeod and go their own way. The pressures on the group at this time were enormous and brought about the split amidst dissatisfaction with the communist organisation of the group. The split was, at one level, ideological. Clancy McKenna believed paying strike co-operative members directly rather than distributing the proceeds equitably would reward hard workers and deprive lazy ones. As one descendant of these strikers told me recently, the splitters were ‘preparing for the future, for the way whitefellas lived’. There were other issues at play too, including the differences between desert and freshwater people. Through the time of the split, however, the two factions remained tied by both family and tradition, and would gather together to share ceremonies. Today, the memory of the strike also unites Aboriginal people across the Pilbara, who see in the actions of their parents and grandparents the beginnings of a struggle for independence amidst the transformation of traditional Country by mining.
When John returned to Perth, he completed a thesis on the strike movement under the supervision of anthropologist power couple Ronald Berndt and Catherine Berndt. It remains one of the seminal texts on the strike and the split that he witnessed between its factions. John went on to teach anthropology at the University of Western Australia, and in subsequent years he would take his young family on road trips through the Pilbara to meet the people he had photographed.
Wilson’s photographs offer a way of bringing Aboriginal history into this transformed landscape. The labour of Aboriginal strikers lies at the beginnings of the mining boom that has become such a substantial part of Australia’s economy and identity. The strikers kept themselves financially afloat for two and a half decades without government support, while today governments, both state and federal, do everything they can to encourage investment in new mines and expand old ones. The strikers also operated as a mining company, expanding operations and purchasing pastoral stations as they profited, and selling mining and pastoral leases as they struggled to keep their operations afloat. The costs of litigation from the state government, rapidly changing mineral prices, and being ripped off by operators who saw a vulnerable group trying to survive left the group broke at different times. Their history is not so different to the ongoing struggle of Aboriginal organisations today, who fight to maintain cultural integrity and do the right thing in a ruthless commercial environment. For the families, these pictures evoke pride. No family is prouder than Ursula and Sharon, who are bringing their father from an aged care centre in the Pilbara to the exhibition opening in Perth. From using picks, shovels and buckets in the hard earth, Mudjawariny has come full circle to celebrate his part in the strike movement alongside his daughters. Since the strike days, Aboriginal people have seen incredible changes in the Pilbara, which has become Australia’s industrial heart. Through it all, they remember the old times, the ancestral time of the Dreaming, of working on pastoral stations and the Pilbara Strike. Through it all, the country has remained, reminding them.
Comments
Marvellous story and exhibition. Thank you for sharing, Darren.
My biography of Don McLeod, central to your story, is being published by Australian Scholarly Press, and should be available by Christmas this year, Jan Richardson.