The People's Train by Thomas Keneally Read Free Book Online

wife at the left side of the line. Near the vanguard, in the second or third row, was a battalion of young women led by the magnificent Mrs Amelia Pethick in a straw hat. Wives and children of workers had decorated their family mongrels with bands of red ribbon, and owners of small shops dependent on the earnings of workers cheered us on our way. There were red ribbons tied to telegraph poles and even some of the drays waiting for us to pass through intersections were decorated with red bunting. The office girls from the company of lawyers who did the Trades Hall work waved to us from their upstairs windows. Walter O’Sullivan began to sing in a raw tenor, and others joined in, ragged singing in this ragged nation:
    Arise, ye starvelings from your slumbers,
    Arise, ye prisoners of want,
    For reason in revolt now thunders
    And at last ends the age of cant.
    So, comrades
    Come rally
    And the last fight let us face...
    Soon the procession passed occasional detachments of police, to whom the strikers called to join the march, some of our red-sashed marshals waving to this policeman or that.
    On open ground at Fortitude Valley the thousands came to a stop and Kelly came forward and made a speech through a megaphone, announcing the strike and applauding the good order with which the march had taken place. He told us again about the causes and provocations that created the strike. Then, becoming practical, he explained that the committee would issue coupons that would be honoured by certain stores, a list of which had been printed and would be prominently displayed and distributed. There would be a daily bulletin. The bulletin would inform men and women of marches, for, said Kelly, repeating my own thought, we have become an army. Indeed, railway men and miners at Ipswich, and fourteen thousand cane-cutters, rail workers and miners in the far north of the huge province, had stopped work in support of us.
    Tommy Ryan formally declared the support of the Labor Party for the strike. He and the other Labor men of course used the general discontent to urge everyone to vote for their party, as if doing that would bring about the promised age. It must have been politeness on the part of Kelly and other Queenslanders not to ask why the Labor prime minister of Australia, Andrew Fisher down in Melbourne, had failed to produce a working man’s paradise in either of his two prime ministerships, even though he made much of the fact that he had started at the coalface in Scotland at the age of ten. Tom Ryan pointed to Fisher’s recent law to create a people’s bank, the Commonwealth Bank, as if it were yet another step on the path to heaven. Fisher himself was a Queenslander by immigration, had been a miner at Gympie, and Kelly hoped for practical favours from him. If the workers were attacked by the police, surely Fisher would offer Australian troops to keep the peace.
    From my position behind the vanguard of our men I noticed that Commissioner Urquhart’s police cavalry, the Queensland Cossacks, had gathered up ahead of us and on our flanks and were looking on. To me, they didn’t seem too troubled by the thought of federal troops.
    But that first march was allowed to go off well. Even the daily press praised the good order of the marchers, though it understated the numbers involved. Police permission was sought for smaller processions on the following days. It was interesting, this business of seeking permission, and Urquhart’s lieutenant, Deputy Commissioner Geoffrey Cahill, gave permission – perhaps because the press had suggested it was better to have us marching than looting like some gang of Russian revolutionaries!

6
    It was at the end of the second day of the strike that the strike committee met at Trades Hall, and I saw Hope and Amelia once more. The weather was torrid and Amelia looked exhausted. I thought that in the wake of our successful march I could take the Samarkand option again. I made my way to her after the meeting