Tales from working life
Stolen Wages, Stolen Generations, Stolen Lives (Part III)

The following is the third in a series of articles describing 
the eventful early years and working life of Des Donley. He is 
now retired and has kindly made his written recollections 
available to The Guardian and has been interviewed by our 
staff on several occasions. Part I of Des's story appeared in The 
Guardian on November 5, 2003 and Part II on November 12, 
2003. This week we take up the story when, at age eighteen, Des 
finally shakes free of the "care" of the Queensland State 
Department.

Just after his eighteenth birthday and for the first time in his 
life, Des was about to hit a lucky streak. This was already the 
era of the swagman — Des had seen them on the dusty tracks and 
noticed their telltale stones left on the gateposts of farms. A 
stone meant that the owners were generous and that it might be 
worthwhile asking for some bread or vegetables. The young farm 
hand could also have ended up on the road.

Fortunately for Des, even though he had told dairy farmer Thomas 
Bell what he could do with his farm-labouring job, he volunteered 
to drive him to his brother's pineapple farm on the other side of 
Ipswich. Here, Des was shown to his quarters — a shed he would 
share with another hand. They each had a metal bed, a fibre-
filled mattress, a dark blanket and a hurricane lamp atop a 
kerosene box.

He was finally receiving wages of 15 shillings ($1.50) a week 
plus keep. He no longer had to milk cows at 3.30 in the morning. 
On weekdays, the farmer's son would call Des and his mate to work 
in the fields at 7.30 in the morning. Knock off time was 5 in the 
afternoon. They also worked a half-day on Saturday. Typical tasks 
were cutting out and burning great mounds of lantana and planting 
suckers to get new crops of bananas and pineapples to grow on the 
cleared land. All the while, Des' knowledge of farm work was 
expanding:

"There were two types of pineapple and the juiciest one had a 
smooth leaf which had no prickles on it and the rough leaf was a 
small pineapple with prickles on it. The prickles would stick 
into your skin, like rose thorns, and tear hell out of your hands 
and make them bleed."

Des started going to the local dances, meeting girls and gaining 
confidence.

"I felt freedom was coming my way — to be able to handle my own 
wages and do as I liked with them. After feeling like a caged 
bird for over 18 years, someone opened the cage and set me free."

Temptations

"There were many temptations put in my way like all teenagers, 
drinking and smoking and I ended up in a brawl or two, where I 
had to defend myself.

"I had a lot of problems to overcome. Being a country lad, I 
didn't know a bar of music and I'd never heard a wireless or read 
a newspaper. However, I liked music and I went to dances.

"I was shy and not being able to dance I was afraid to approach 
the opposite sex for a dance. Night after night I would sit and 
listen to the music and watch people dance.

"There was a big woman who must have been watching me sitting 
down while the others were enjoying themselves. She came over, 
grabbed me by the arms and pulled me up on the dance floor. It 
was slippery and I was like a duck out of water. I was slipping 
and sliding; I felt ashamed of myself.

"I persevered with this lady, learnt to dance and had many a good 
night and enjoyed myself. Though I was still unable to 
communicate with women — when I saw them coming towards me in 
town I would cross the road to avoid them."

On Sunday afternoons Des played cricket. He thought he would test 
the limits of his newfound freedom by asking the cocky for a pay 
rise. "He said 'I will give you an increase alright, right out 
the gate'".

From then, until the outbreak of World War II, Des worked at a 
series of backbreaking, outdoor jobs — felling trees with the 
driver of a team of bullocks, digging loam to be put on the side 
of the road for the main roads department and various building 
jobs.

Of course, Des got his taste of bitter dole bread. At this stage 
he lived with his dog Pete in a rudimentary timber shack he built 
for himself.

"Being a single fellow, I only got a day's work a week and the 
amount of money the Government paid was shocking. We had to work 
on the road, with a ganger in charge, cleaning out the water 
tables and wheeling it out and filling the potholes in the road.

"And for me to collect the dole, I had to walk ten miles into 
town. They used to dish it out at the police station and wouldn't 
start until about eleven in the morning. You had to be early to 
get in the queue to get paid early because there was a hell of a 
queue. You would receive six shillings in cash and your ration 
card. On the card it would tell you what you could purchase — no 
butter or cheese — you could get the cheapest cut of lamb and 
that was the flaps (from the side of a lamb), a couple of loaves 
of bread and the cheapest jam (which was plum jam)."

One of Des' building jobs involved the construction of a bush 
dance hall. The days spent on the hall job were getting longer 
and longer. One afternoon, on one of the days when the boss went 
off to the races, somebody approached Des and asked him about his 
hours of work and pay. He was the secretary of the Carpenters and 
Joiners Union and his subsequent intervention brought about a 
dramatic improvement in Des' conditions. He was also a Communist.

"He was the only person in my life who was prepared to look after 
my interests, so I finished up joining the Communist Party and 
became active in it and what the Party stood for."

I learnt a lot

"I learnt a lot from that job and having a union ticket meant a 
lot to me. I had to be accepted on any job because the union was 
strong. We finished the job, weather-board outside and painted 
with a brown stain of linseed oil. I was proud to be on the job 
and when it was finished I was ready for dances."

Des eventually got work on the building of a dam on the Brisbane 
River about 160 kilometres from the Queensland capital. It was a 
Works Board project where the workers had good pay, accommodation 
and facilities by the standards of the time.

Once, on one of his round-trips to Ipswich to go to a dance he 
met the girl he was to marry. They moved into a cottage at the 
workers' settlement near the dam and were counting on a secure, 
comfortable life together when global events intervened.

Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, Des was signed up 
to the Civil Construction Corps (the CCC) or "Curtin's Cunning 
C.s", so named after the wartime Australian Prime Minister John 
Curtin. He was set to work alongside other conscripts on a dry 
dock on the Brisbane River to replace the one lost when the 
British lost Singapore.

"I wanted to join the armed forces and go away with my mates, 
many of whom never returned. When they found out I was a 
tradesman, I was put into the Essential Services (which was the 
Allied Works Council).

"My grey matter was starting work and I began mixing with members 
of the Communist Party. I gained a lot of knowledge.

Des joined men from all over Australia who were packed aboard 
rattly trains and covered trucks for the long trek to Darwin. The 
bombed-out town was the site of massive warehouses storing the 
mountains of tinned and frozen food for American forces all over 
the Pacific. The journey was an ordeal and conditions on the job 
were harsh.

Unions weren't allowed

"We had a lot of trouble and being strictly military, we weren't 
allowed to have unions come into the area. They weren't allowed 
to come any further than Alice Springs, so the only way we could 
contact the unions was by writing to them. The Allied Works 
Council and the Army didn't believe in unions and some of the 
mail was censored.

"We wanted an award that would cover us while in the Territory. 
The union officials had to negotiate with a tribunal for a new 
award. The judge was Justice O'Mara and to represent the trade 
unions was Albert Monk, a typical right-winger who became 
president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions.

"It was one of the worst awards and it put a lot of restrictions 
on us. We couldn't hold open meetings with our members."

This was not the last of Des' unsatisfactory experiences with 
right-wing forces in the trade union movement or the Allied Works 
Council. Set up by a joint decision of the Australian and US 
governments, the Council oversaw many infrastructure projects 
needed for the war effort. It was, however, top-heavy with bosses 
(like media baron, the future Sir Frank Packer) and their 
representatives who took advantage of the opportunity to beat 
down unions and fill their pockets.

Friends and enemies

"What I did learn while in Darwin, was that your friends can be 
your enemies and your enemies can become your friends. While 
watching the news on a big open-air screen in Darwin, they would 
show Churchill and Roosevelt but not Joe Stalin. The men would 
sing out, 'What about Joe?'. Russia was fighting on a huge front 
against Hitler's troops. The men were persistent and they put Joe 
on and the men went wild. Russia lost 27 million lives in the 
war.

"Today our enemies in World War II have become our friends and 
fighting alongside of our soldiers, that is how silly capitalism 
is. Lives mean nothing, but money and territorial gains mean a 
lot to the rich".

"After being in Darwin and living under Army conditions I decided 
when I came back to civilisation to be an active unionist.

"My first experience of being a job delegate was on a big 
warehouse being built for the Navy. I was elected to replace a 
bosses' man, and so I immediately became an enemy of the boss. 
Who was it? None other than the Lord Mayor of Brisbane, a 
builder. He had a couple of dozen men working on it where 
normally he would have a third of that amount working on the 
job."

The taxpayer met the cost of wasted materials and even wages for 
absentee or non-existent workers. Soon after his election, as 
well as dealing with the men's many legitimate complaints, Des 
tried to restore some legitimacy to the job:

"I had a number of encounters with builders who were flouting the 
award and conditions on the jobs, especially the safety of our 
members. The Mayor was in the racket also".

"I was showing the labourers where to lay the flooring to make as 
little wastage as possible. The Lord Mayor came over to me and 
said, 'what role are you playing here?' I told him I was elected 
as the men's delegate and that if he wanted any orders given to 
me, they had to be given through his foreman".

Luckily, Des' union was led by Communist officials that backed up 
their reps on the job. They even prevailed on the Mayor to hand 
Des his wages personally, i.e. in the same manner that he gave 
them to the other workers.

The young militant's next assignment was on a naval camp at 
Warwick Farm. The workers' own camp was at the racecourse. 
Stewart Bros, Hutchinson Bros and Kennedy and Bird had the 
contract for the project. Des represented the men on the Kennedy 
and Bird job. It wasn't long before trouble struck.

"One of my members came to me and showed me the toilet set-up. It 
was a three-foot square hole dug in the ground. A pole was belted 
into the ground in each corner with a bit of hessian wrapped 
around them, with two pieces of timber sitting on a cross piece. 
The firm expected the men to sit on it like a bird and crap over 
the side."

Down the hole

Des pulled the flimsy structure down and threw it down the hole. 
He then contacted the union and the threat of court action soon 
brought on the construction of proper toilet and washroom 
facilities. While that was being done, Des instructed workers to 
use the toilets at the naval base.

On another occasion, Des had to stand his ground against two 
right-wing officials from the Plumbers' Union and the Builders' 
Labourers' Union. They had come to the site to speak at a meeting 
of the workers about the very unsatisfactory situation with the 
food prepared for the men. These officials wanted to put their 
speakers first, get a feeble resolution passed and then report 
their good work to the bosses.

However, at the meeting Des beat them to the punch and put two 
good speakers first.

"Anderson from the Plumbers' Union took off his coat and said to 
me, 'you're the cause of it you bastard'.

"The men en-masse started to move to the front and the two sell-
out union officials didn't get their way. We soon had an 
improvement in our food".

Des' time on the job was limited. His activity in his union and 
his outspokenness about theft and rorting saw to that. He was 
discharged from service with the Allied War Council.

As the war drew to a close, so did this turbulent chapter of Des' 
life. He had become estranged from his wife and lost contact with 
his baby boy. Now peacetime was to bring new challenges for the 
battle-proven union and Communist Party activist.