As in Berlin

A one-legged Communist named Idris Williams sat last week in a tall office building with his back to the winter view of beautiful Sydney Harbor. Two hundred seagoing ships were tied up there for lack of freight or bunker coal. Australians were shivering in heatless houses. Electricity for cooking, lighting and hot baths was rationed, and 650,000 had been thrown out of work because their factories had no coal. Comrade Williams, president of the Miners Federation, had called a coal strike.

The issue was one of the most peculiar in Australia's turbulent labor history. Miners' demands for shorter hours and a three-month long-service vacation after seven years' employment had been pending before the Coal Tribunal. The tribunal's sole member is Francis Heath Gallagher, a lawyer who now spends much of his time in the coal mines and is sympathetic with the miners' grievances.

Union leaders heard that Gallagher was about to render a rather favorable decision. That would never do. The union's Communist leadership had been losing ground with the non-Communist rank & file. A peaceful settlement might undermine the militancy of the miners--and their leaders' position. They threatened to strike unless Gallagher granted all their demands. Considering this threat to be blackmail, Gallagher refused to hand down any decision until the strike threat was withdrawn.

On orders from Comrade Williams, the miners struck June 27. Australia's Laborite Prime Minister Joseph B. Chifley, veteran of many a railway walkout, was jolted out of Australia's usual tolerance of communism. For the first time, Chifley denounced the Communists, and his government hurriedly drafted an emergency bill that would prevent unions from using their funds to support strikes called during arbitration proceedings. Most of Australian labor supported the bill. It passed without dissent. Cried Labor M.P. Leslie Haylen: "Reds act here as in Berlin. They choose the depth of a hard winter to try and suborn a great community by privation and attrition."

Sullenly the strikers realized the hatred that they had stirred up. A newsman who visited the colliery towns wrote: "Miners spot a stranger as soon as he comes into town. As you go to the bar the talk quiets and eyes follow you--intelligent, suspicious eyes--summing you up. Nowhere in the world have I felt more like a foreigner." In Newcastle a striking miner working in his garden saw three air force Vampires zooming over, cried to his wife: "Look, they're going to bomb Federation House."

The strikers showed no signs of going back to work and Comrade Williams, smug in his office beside Sydney's harbor, seemed satisfied that everything was going along just fine. Australians set themselves for a long, cold winter.

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