‘Is that wise? You want to be careful what you think, now, Marcus. It’s work that’s been done.’
It did not matter to Tim, who did not work for the Railways, but surely it mattered to Marcus that the Railways’ Commissioner, Fraser, was on a hunt for Wobblies on the Railways’ payroll.
Any man under least suspicion of being a Wobbly was fingered. You could hate Wobblies, as Marcus and Tim did, but it was easy now, if you were some sort of streak of workers’ political enthusiast, as Marcus and Tim were, to be seen as dangerous, if not a Wobbly yourself as few actually were, then stained with a spread of outrageous idealism.
For this was an era with madness thrust into every man’s heart and hearth, while the country sang battle hymns and marched to troopships in parades. It was a time when boys and men fell over themselves to wear the khaki until just lately there were not enough volunteering to satisfy the need. Voters were asked to send more in the next conscription referendum. They would be made to go. The answer in October had been ‘No’.
The question was to be put again in another referendum in the New Year. Peacemakers were turned warmongers in pulpits and parliaments. Matters of principle held over from before the war were derided as lacking in general truth. Morality was set aside except by white-anters of the public good.
These two men sitting on a park bench, Marcus Friendly and Tim Atkinson, were white-anters of the public good one minute, fine citizens the next.
Did all men feel this as they grew older, changed from youth to deciders and getting their say pushed through? In their consciences Tim and Marcus made daily decisions about where they stood in relation to forces of iniquity, just as Maguire and Herbert had done. They had not paid any great price for it, but if a government would not take ‘No’ for an answer, what might a government do? It had a reach coming down to the workingman, who put them where they were, via their union membership, their party factions and their vote. Government was the workingman himself in its incarnation of the workingman’s strength under the banner of democratic socialism in state parliament.
Socialism as a creed was on a sliding scale, that was the trouble. At one end, Marcus’s and Tim’s end, it created opportunities for free men to better themselves in their own way – socialism with a vote. At the other end it became violent, where socialism told men what to do and be – men to be killed just for the idea of what they weren’t, plug a copper, do it.
Nobody predicted the body of the state getting hateful itself. The New South Wales government, new in this world, was invented by the workingman’s own imagination, argued under their gum trees, on their clay-gold creekbanks and in their co-operative clubs, railway barracks and underground miners’ crib rooms, in engine drivers’ change rooms and by resolutions during party conferences at Trades Hall, and given connection to history at the School of Arts.
They seemed to have had it all, but when the vote went against their leaders, their leaders changed parties. It was like that dream where you were strangled by your own hand. Everybody had that dream now.
That there was a strangler – a public strangler – in their midst, acting on their behalf to make the law whole, was just to bring it down to democratic daylight.
Each week now there was a meeting in the anteroom of the newspaper offices. The plan of a big strike was underway. A striker and a Wobbly might meet themselves in the one person turning the corner of a street.
Marcus was getting this lesson in his love life, too – how you could be seen one way, yet be another, and not be able to escape what had not yet actually been acted out. For he’d heard Miss Harris had them as good as engaged.
‘Don’t get me wrong, Timmy,’ said Marcus. ‘You don’t stand in a public street and raise a weapon against the law, screaming abuse to
It did not matter to Tim, who did not work for the Railways, but surely it mattered to Marcus that the Railways’ Commissioner, Fraser, was on a hunt for Wobblies on the Railways’ payroll.
Any man under least suspicion of being a Wobbly was fingered. You could hate Wobblies, as Marcus and Tim did, but it was easy now, if you were some sort of streak of workers’ political enthusiast, as Marcus and Tim were, to be seen as dangerous, if not a Wobbly yourself as few actually were, then stained with a spread of outrageous idealism.
For this was an era with madness thrust into every man’s heart and hearth, while the country sang battle hymns and marched to troopships in parades. It was a time when boys and men fell over themselves to wear the khaki until just lately there were not enough volunteering to satisfy the need. Voters were asked to send more in the next conscription referendum. They would be made to go. The answer in October had been ‘No’.
The question was to be put again in another referendum in the New Year. Peacemakers were turned warmongers in pulpits and parliaments. Matters of principle held over from before the war were derided as lacking in general truth. Morality was set aside except by white-anters of the public good.
These two men sitting on a park bench, Marcus Friendly and Tim Atkinson, were white-anters of the public good one minute, fine citizens the next.
Did all men feel this as they grew older, changed from youth to deciders and getting their say pushed through? In their consciences Tim and Marcus made daily decisions about where they stood in relation to forces of iniquity, just as Maguire and Herbert had done. They had not paid any great price for it, but if a government would not take ‘No’ for an answer, what might a government do? It had a reach coming down to the workingman, who put them where they were, via their union membership, their party factions and their vote. Government was the workingman himself in its incarnation of the workingman’s strength under the banner of democratic socialism in state parliament.
Socialism as a creed was on a sliding scale, that was the trouble. At one end, Marcus’s and Tim’s end, it created opportunities for free men to better themselves in their own way – socialism with a vote. At the other end it became violent, where socialism told men what to do and be – men to be killed just for the idea of what they weren’t, plug a copper, do it.
Nobody predicted the body of the state getting hateful itself. The New South Wales government, new in this world, was invented by the workingman’s own imagination, argued under their gum trees, on their clay-gold creekbanks and in their co-operative clubs, railway barracks and underground miners’ crib rooms, in engine drivers’ change rooms and by resolutions during party conferences at Trades Hall, and given connection to history at the School of Arts.
They seemed to have had it all, but when the vote went against their leaders, their leaders changed parties. It was like that dream where you were strangled by your own hand. Everybody had that dream now.
That there was a strangler – a public strangler – in their midst, acting on their behalf to make the law whole, was just to bring it down to democratic daylight.
Each week now there was a meeting in the anteroom of the newspaper offices. The plan of a big strike was underway. A striker and a Wobbly might meet themselves in the one person turning the corner of a street.
Marcus was getting this lesson in his love life, too – how you could be seen one way, yet be another, and not be able to escape what had not yet actually been acted out. For he’d heard Miss Harris had them as good as engaged.
‘Don’t get me wrong, Timmy,’ said Marcus. ‘You don’t stand in a public street and raise a weapon against the law, screaming abuse to
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