The True Story of the Clunes Industrial Dispute, 1873

The Australian historian Professor Manning Clark claims in Volume Four of his massive A History of Australia (published 1978) that gold mining employees in the quiet town of Clunes, Victoria (roughly 30 kilometres north of Ballarat), were fire-breathing anti-Chinese racists – a blot on Australian history and a blight on civilisation and good behaviour. Nothing could be further from the truth, and the nutty professor has smeared the reputation and memory of hard-working Victorian unionists and the families that supported them.

Most of us are familiar with the 1854 Eureka Stockade and the struggle of individual gold miners, sometimes operating together in small groups. This early phase of gold mining only lasted a few years. As early as 1858, gold mining companies were being set up, some with hundreds of employee miners. The Mining Registrar in 1873 reports that there were 37,000 European miners in Victoria and a further 13,500 Chinese, almost all company employees.

The town of Clunes and the nearby mine

In September 1873, the Lothair Gold Mining company in Clunes announced new contracts for its employees, with no negotiations to be entertained. The chairman of the Lothair board happened to be the current Premier of Victoria, James Francis MLA, and another director was Peter Lalor MLC, the former hero of the Eureka gold miners.

The previous practice had been to cease work at 1.00pm Saturday, and resume at 7.00am Monday morning. The company imposed a new Saturday shift working to 11.00pm, and a new night shift to resume at 10.00pm Sunday. A protest meeting was held on 13 September, and the Mayor of Clunes (an ex-miner William Blanchard) was invited to become president of a new Clunes Miners Association, and he accepted the role. 110 miners then voted to strike at Lothair Gold from 15 September. By October, the Lothair board of directors had authorised the use of strike breakers to crush the local union.

On 23 October, two Clunes miners visited Ballarat to talk to the local Chinese community about not being exploited as strike-breakers. As it happened, the blacklegs came from Creswick, but word of their recruitment leaked and came through to Clunes on 8 December. The Clunes Brass Band paraded around town and called the community together to protest together – another eight local mines stopped work in solidarity. Early on the morning of 9 December, 45 Chinese strike-breakers from Creswick, protected by 12 Victoria Police, twice tried to break through the community pickets set up on the road into town, and were twice repelled. The police later blamed Clunes women for “leading the riot”. In late December after a 14-week strike, Lothair Gold settled the dispute, recognised the Union and the miners came up with a workable compromise.

Every historian other than Manning Clark does the Clunes miners a credit by mentioning the industrial dispute which triggered a whole country town to strike and picket, including the equally famous Professor Geoffrey Blainey. A labor historian David Baker has identified Clunes 1873 as the first use of armed police to intervene in a Victorian industrial dispute.

The Clunes Dispute 1873

Certainly at the time, political comment focused on the financial interests of the Victorian Premier, and the strange coincidence that armed Victoria Police were being used to help Premier Francis and his politician friends break a strike.

Indirectly, this successful picket is a turning point in the history of our union, the AWU. Six months later, meeting in Bendigo in June 1874, local miners’ associations came together to form the Amalgamated Miners Association of Victoria. The Victorian union later joined with Tasmanian miners.

A delegation of Creswick miners to the Bendigo meeting was led by William Guthrie Spence. Spence became a full-time union official in 1878, and general secretary of the AMA in 1882. Because of the high respect held for him as an organiser, he was invited in 1886 to become the foundation president of the Amalgamated Shearers Union at its first meeting at Ferns Hotel in Ballarat on 14 June 1886, and later he served as foundation president of the Australian Workers Union in 1894. The Federated Mining Employees Association of Australia (FMEAA) maintained its independence for a few decades, and only voted to join the AWU in 1918. But the 1874 gold miners’ union is still an old and honoured part of today’s AWU – and the fight against strike breakers is as tough today as it was in 1873.