in price, fat sheep as much or more; but holding to a modern doctrine that wages were not to be regulated by profits, and that Labour and not Capital provided the wage-fund, the same rate of payment per hundred sheep as was paid in more prosperous times had been exacted by the shearers' representatives. This was agreed to under protest, though considered inequitable by the proprietors of North Yalla-doora and other representative sheds as the lesser evil, compared with that of a delayed shearing and perhaps ruined wool clip. A truly serious matter.
For the same reason the Union Rules had been accepted by several proprietors, though much against the grain, and the woolshed ticketed for the first time as a 'Union Shed.' This was done under the impression that a feeling of loyalty to the principles which professed to guide the Shearers' Union would ensure steady and continuous work.
It was a concession to expediency, unwillingly made by Mr. Hunter and others at the last moment, in the hope of 'getting the shearing over quickly' – a matter involving great gain or loss. The latter, in this particular era of low prices of wool and stock of all kinds, cattle and horses, as well as sheep, approaching the margin of ruin, ominously close. 'If the fellows shear decently and behave themselves, I don't care what they stick up in the shed, or what they call their confounded Union. They shore well enough for me and Anderson last year, so I shall go on with them as long as they treat me well. You might as well do so, too.'
This had been the reasoning of Mr. M'Andrew, one of Mr. Hunter's neighbours, a shrewd, somewhat self-seeking man of the world. And it had a savour of argument about it. 'What did it matter,' he had said, 'how other squatters looked at the question? All they had to think of was to get their own work properly done, and let every man mind his own business. He was not sure that the Pastoral Association did much good. It only set the men and masters more at odds with each other. A great deal of this ill-feeling and strike had been brought on by such proprietors as old Jackson, M'Slaney, and Pigdon. Men notoriously hard and grasping in their dealings with their employés – cutting down wages, the price of shearing and contract bush work, in every way possible; feeding, housing, and paying their people badly, while charging exorbitant prices for necessaries – flour, meat, shears, tobacco – all things, in fact, which they could not carry with them and were bound to buy from the station store. These pastoralists were primarily responsible for the dissatisfaction which had led to the strikes and rioting. For his part, as he had always acted fairly and squarely with his men, as everybody knew, it was not to be expected that he should be compelled to pay up for a contest which he had no share in bringing on.'
This had seemed fair reasoning to that class of men who are glad of any excuse to avoid paying cash out of pocket and to the avowal of a decided policy. But there were other squatters equally averse to unnecessary outlay, who, possessing more forecast and logical acumen, refused on principle to make terms with the shearers' or any other Union. They had stated their grounds of dissent from the policy of opportunism, and, what was more important, acted upon them with courage and consistency.
'This station,' said Archibald Douglas Kinross, 'chiefly freehold land, with the sheep depasturing thereon, is my property, as the law stands at present. And I claim the right of every Briton to manage his own affairs in his own way. To employ persons to do my work —my work, you understand, not any one else's – as I shall choose, in my own way and after my own taste. If any section of workmen does not wish to work for me, they are at liberty not to do so. I leave them absolute freedom in that respect; but if they accept my pay and my employment, they must do my work as I choose– not as they choose – all socialistic sophistry notwithstanding.
'Australia still contains men willing to work for high wages and good food, and to do what they are told by a fair employer, and if I am threatened or my property injured by lawless ill-disposed persons, I shall appeal to that statute under which law and order have hitherto, in Australia, been vindicated. Moreover I, Archie Kinross, am not going to place myself under the heel of any body of men calling themselves by one name or another. Once concede Trade Unions their right to coerce the individual, and farewell to that freedom which has so long been the Briton's boast.
'Every man who had the misfortune to acquire or inherit property would, as the so-called Unions gained power by cowardly subservience or mistaken reasoning, be at the mercy of an irresponsible, ignorant, perhaps more or less unprincipled committee, anxious to blackmail those more fortunately placed than themselves.
'They would be told how many servants they were to employ, and what they were to pay them; feed, clothe, and otherwise provide for them. Not improbably, other concessions would be gradually exacted. The whole result being reached in a state of modified communism, certain to end in bloodshed and revolution. A social upheaval, which all history tells us is the invariable precursor of a military despotism.'
After ever so much trouble, worry and anxiety, arising from the offensively independent and even obstructive attitude of the shearers at all the sheds in the Lower Darling and elsewhere in New South Wales, a start was made at Tandara.
Jack Macdonald, bitterly aggrieved that his employers should have given in, was almost out of his mind with the irritating, puerile demands and objections which he had to meet.
'In old days he would have knocked down the ringleader, and told the sympathisers to "go to the devil" – that they need never show up at this shed or station again. Never should they get a pound of mutton or a pannikin of flour from the store, if they were dying of hunger; that they were ungrateful dogs, and here – at Tandara of all places, known for the most liberal station in the whole blooming district for pay and rations, where useless old hands were pensioned and kept on at make-believe work, when no one else would have had them on the place; where more expensive improvements – huts, fencing, tanks, wells, and stock-yards – had been made and put up, than on any station from the Queensland border to the sea. And now, what had come of it all?
'Where was the gratitude of the working-man, who, with his fellows, had been fed, lodged, and supported in good seasons and bad – when wool was down and money was scarce, and half the squatters on the verge of ruin? When the shed was down with influenza last year, didn't the wife and daughters of the "boss," who happened to be staying over shearing that year, make jelly, sago puddings and cakes, all sorts of blooming luxuries for the men that were going to die (by their own account), and couldn't hold their heads up?
'And now, because labour was scarce, owing to the Coolgardie goldfield having broken out, and the season coming on early, with the burr and grass seeds ripening every day, they must try and ruin their best friends, the squatters – threatening to strike for this and that – faulting the meat, the bread, the sugar, the tea, every mortal thing (far better than ever they'd been used to), and all at the bidding of a fellow like Stead, a man that had been educated at the expense of the State, people putting their hands in their pockets to pay for his schooling. And this is the first use he makes of it. It was enough to make a man feel ashamed of the colony he was born in, ashamed of being an Australian native, enough to make him clear out to South Africa, where the Boers and blackfellows were said to be no great things, but couldn't be such sneaks and dogs and thieves as his countrymen here.'
Jack Macdonald repeated this unreserved statement of opinion so often, for the benefit of all whom it might concern, that he began to know it by heart, and half thought of standing for the district, when the next election came round. However, the men liked him, and didn't mind his hard words, knowing that they held the key of the position, and that he was powerless if he wanted his sheep shorn. He couldn't afford to kick them out, however much he might wish so to do. All the sheds in the district were short of men, and if the shearers left in a body, the year's clip would suffer ruinous loss and injury. So they turned up their noses at the beautiful, fat, well-cooked mutton, – said 'they wanted more chops.' To which Macdonald sarcastically replied 'that he supposed they must grow a new breed of sheep, all chops.' In spite of their five meals a day, early breakfast, tea and 'brownie' at eleven o'clock, dinner at one, afternoon tea at four o'clock, and supper at half-past six, they were not satisfied, and, indeed, would not have gone without
