BOOK REVIEW
TRUE BLUE
A
n Australian seafarer is abandoned in Bombay in the days of the Raj. He experiences firsthand the brutality of the British colonialists in India – the dark side of global shipping, racism and slavery. His name is Harry Bridges. So begins Maritime Men of the South Pacific: True Blue Internationals Navigating Labour Rights, by historian Diane Kirkby. The book, in the words of the writer, describes “the campaigns to establish and maintain fair labour standards, driven by that sense of connection with workers across the world and their belief that ‘capital knows no country”’. Union internationalism was key to achieving rights for seafarers in what was the first global industry. But commitment to internationalism was challenged from the outset by racial differences and beliefs about white racial superiority. True Blue does not shy away from racism rampant among workers and unions in Australia in the 19th
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Maritime Men of the South Pacific: True-blue Internationals Navigating Labour Rights 1906-2006 by Diane Kirkby with Lee-Ann Monk and Dmytro Ostapenko
and early 20th centuries. Nor their support for the White Australia Policy. But it also highlights how socialism and solidarity, especially among wharfies and seafarers, helped overcome years of divide and rule under colonialism. “Too few have explored the struggle of especially maritime workers to reach across these divides,” Kirkby writes, citing a contemporary US Journal: Socialism and internationalism were embodied in maritime unions. Seafarers were ‘by the nature of the(ir) calling,’ prime candidates to become ‘true-blue workingclass internationals’… their lived experience and workplace was international. Their shipmates come from all nations. “There is no colour bar in the Seamen’s Union,” the Seamen’s Journal proclaimed in 1920s. The SUA went on to help form a Chinese Seamen’s Union as a branch of the Chinese union in the 1930s under the leadership of EV Elliott. It helped Malay, Indonesian and Indian
seafarers establish their unions and get them released from prison after walking off ships over intolerable conditions. Yet True Blue is far from a purely Anglo Centric perspective of labour history in the region. Kirkby writes of the rise of unionism in Asia as an independent development, not the outcome of western union missionaries. She pays tribute to the early stand taken by Indian, Chinese and Japanese seafarers and dock workers fighting for their rights. Many of their strikes are recounted in detail. Chinese and Japanese dockworkers reached across the Pacific to Australian and US unionists in common struggles. Indian delegates were later to become strong activists in the International Labor Organisation’s work to establish a seafarers’ bill of rights.
COLONIALISM
British imperialism was built on racism and exploitation. Kirkby notes how the very perpetrators of
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