Radical Melbourne

34. Greek Club Bombing
189 Lonsdale Street

On 1 December 1928, most members of the Lonsdale Street Greek Club were playing cards. A few years earlier, the building had been let to the Communist Party. Now it served as an apolitical social club. Uniformed waiters dispensed soft drinks, pies, cakes and cocoa. A competitor in the billiard tournament paused, his brow furrowed as he lined up his shot.

Then the bomb exploded.

Investigators later surmised that several sticks of gelignite had been placed in the floor above, in rooms empty since police raids on a Squizzy Taylor two-up school operating there. The explosion in the confined space sent a great sheet of flame shooting down from the ceiling above the card game. Shrapnel, bomb splinters and heavy wooden beams fell on the men, who staggered, dazed and bleeding, onto the street. When the dust settled, fifteen people had been injured (though none of the wounds proved fatal).

For the rest of the day, a large crowd surveying the damage blocked traffic between Swanston and Russell Streets. The noise from the bomb had woken all the patients convalescing in the hospital across the road. It even startled the audience in the Royal Theatre at a crucial juncture of the play Interference (the hero was poised to uncover a body). For the newspapers, the question of who was responsible for the outrage seemed as open and shut as any stage melodrama.
Earlier that year, eight blasts had rocked the city. The bombers had targeted the residences of shipping officials, strike breakers and others connected with the ongoing industrial tensions on the waterfront. Greek immigrants were said to be prominent among the volunteers used to break the wharfies’ strike. So – despite furious denials issued by the ACTU, Trades Hall and the Port Phillip Stevedores Association – Melbourne’s papers had no hesitation in blaming waterfront workers for the Greek Club blast.

The Sun – much the same kind of paper then as The Herald Sun is now – led the charge, proclaiming the existence of a ‘gang backed by Red money’ and a ‘plot to cause racial and industrial strife’. The police, it declared, were already in possession of a confession, including an admission that ‘large sums of money had been paid to the perpetrators’. Within a few hours, five men had been arrested – Timothy O’Connor, a dealer; Francis Delaney, a salesman; Stanley Williams, a bookmaker; and Norman and Sandy McIver, both stevedores.

Police uncovered no trace of The Sun’s ‘Red money’. They did produce a bomb, which they claimed had been found in a car belonging to one of the men. But in essence, the police case boiled down to the word of the officers against that of the accused.

In 1928, the Victoria Police was a highly politicised organisation. Chief Commissioner Blamey was known to be so hostile to organised labour that the middle class magazine Table Talk admiringly described him as a fascist – and illustrated its point with a caricature of the Commissioner against a backdrop of stylised policemen forming swastikas with their batons. This was not hyperbole – it was an open secret that Blamey moonlighted as the supreme leader of the fascistic paramilitary outfit known as the White Army.

The rank-and-file police weren’t much better. Five years earlier, the suppression of the police strike had seen unionised officers dismissed in favour of the volunteers who had scabbed on them. One Melbourne Club member described the police of the era as more or less a ‘licensed basher squad’.

So a neutral arbiter might have taken the unsubstantiated testimony of the arresting officers in a political case with more than a pinch of salt. But Justice Sir William Irvine was not a neutral arbiter. A former Premier of Victoria, he had earned the nickname ‘Iceberg’ when he introduced the draconian Railway Strikes Suppression Act to smash the rail union. When it came time to sum up the evidence, Irvine phrased the matter in the classic formulation of the frame-up trial. In order to find the accused not guilty, he told the jury:

You will, as reasonable men, have to believe that the three constables have deliberately fabricated this story, that the police put their heads together, determined to wrongly convict an innocent man, and that they maliciously and widely devised a plan to do it with long, false, perjured statements.

The only surprise in the outcome was that a couple of the men were not sent down. But three – O’Connor, Delaney and the union activist Sandy McIver – each received fifteen years’ hard labour.

In disarray after its catastrophic defeat, the Stevedores Association was not well placed to campaign for the men. Nonetheless, a movement in their defence eventually took shape and began to hold meetings, lobby politicians and circulate leaflets outlining the circumstances of the case.

In the hysteria of the time, even a flier in defence of the men was treated by the authorities as tantamount to sedition. On 20 November 1931, The Age reported that when the Leader of the Opposition received the circular, he ‘promptly sent his copy to the police for their information and consideration’. A month later, the police arrested the printer, and charged him with not registering his press.

Nonetheless, outrage at the sentences grew. In 1937, a petition by Dr Evatt (then a High Court judge), Brian Fitzpatrick, Maurice Blackburn and others succeeded in obtaining the release of O’Connor and Delaney.

McIver – the most political of the three – remained in Pentridge until 1939, a constant target of harassment by warders. Remission of sentence was refused him after he was caught with a matchbox crystal wireless he’d knocked together to listen to races, football and boxing.

After his release, McIver refused to speak about the bombing case, even when he became active in the union. Within labour circles, it was commonly accepted that he chose not to clear his own name for fear of compromising a family man. Furthermore, it was said that he had been denied an alibi by a well-known radio broadcaster, who had been with him on the night of the bombing but kept silent for fear of associating himself with the controversial case.

Years later, McIver still refused to discuss the issue:

Too many people still alive. It would hurt too many people.

Still, he would never drink in the hotel operated by the broadcaster. When asked why, he said simply:

He didn’t shape up too well when I had my trouble.

Over seventy years later, the truth of the matter will probably never be known.

Today, the Greek Club’s building is remarkably unchanged since the 1920s (the bombing did no structural damage). It’s still a central part of the Greek precinct. And, though there’s neither billiards nor cards, it’s still operated as a club. Its name – the Apokalypsi – serves as an unintended reminder of the events of December 1928.

38. Public Library
328 Swanston Street

In 1883, The Argus published an article condemning the presence of the poor in the Public Library on Swanston Street:

A visitor to the library may test the matter first by his nose. He can smell vagrancy the moment he crosses the threshold. Using his eyes, he can see it right up and down the long hall; peering curiously about, he can find it in any of the alcoves, nicely sheltered and walled about with books. If he chooses to particularise, he may see an unmistakable specimen enter, shuffle up to a bookcase, select a volume of light literature, choose a seat, set up his elbows as supports to his head, and bend his eyes on the print. In a little while he spits. In an hour he will sleep; if he snores an attendant may disturb him; then he will read and spit again.

The Argus proposed two solutions – regulations forcing potential entrants to show a letter of introduction from a ‘respectable’ household or, failing that, the division of the building into distinct areas for different classes. By name, the library might have been ‘Public’ (or ‘Free’), but there was more than a suggestion from Melbourne’s elite that the building and its collection remained rather too good for the populace, since ‘the books . . . are handled, and soiled, and spoiled, and frequently mutilated, by creatures who would be better bestowed within Her Majesty’s gaols’.
In reality, The Argus needn’t have worried. After all, the Library remained closed on Sundays – the only day most people had free – thus effectively limiting its use to those with leisure enough to visit during the working week.

Indeed, the strict enforcement of the Presbyterian Sabbath rendered most of Melbourne notorious for wowserism during the 1880s and 1890s. On the seventh day, official regulations closed theatres, barred newspapers and allowed trains to run only on the condition that they carried worshippers to church – thus ensuring that working people could find almost no entertainment on their single free day.

And, as a speaker at a public meeting on the topic declared:
all these irritating and annoying restrictions [are] solely due to an outside lot of self-elected, impertinent, meddlesome busybodies, who being in themselves a combination of meanness and misery, [are] endeavouring to render other people as miserable as themselves on Sundays, and [have] succeeded, to a great extent, in doing so.

But the ban on the library particularly galled Melbourne’s left-wing activists. The Melbourne radical tradition had largely developed from the secular and free-thought organisations, where activists took books and their contents very seriously. The anarchist Chummy Fleming, for instance, described his own discovery of the delights of reading as coming ‘like a flash of light one Summer’s morning’. So the idea of a religious superstition barring the mass of working people from the knowledge contained in a library paid for with public taxes seemed utterly outrageous.
Almost as soon as the Library began operations in 1853, the issue of Sunday closing caused controversy. In 1883, the Museum and Gallery relented for two months, opening their doors on the Sabbath – and the turnstiles recorded nearly six thousand Sunday visits.

The conservatives struck back by forming the Sunday Observance League, an organisation dedicated to maintaining the ban on any public activity during the Sabbath. Though progressives countered with the Sunday Liberation Society, and a series of public meetings defending the Library (one of which culminated in a riot), the forces of reaction temporarily triumphed – Parliament bowed to pressure and legislated to force the Library’s closure.

In 1889, a large mass meeting convened at Queens Wharf, with different organisations and individuals merging their separate ‘stumps’ to allow for a joint discussion of the Public Library issue. Before long, Chummy Fleming took to the platform, and declared:

After the meeting is over, I shall be going up to that Library to look at it from the outside, and think about how much I should like to be inside reading, instead of loafing about in the street.

Several other speeches followed, but at the close of the meeting:
It seemed that the whole crowd as one man was seized with an impulse to go and do what Fleming had said he was going to do; instead of as usual scattering in all directions, the whole mass went surging up solidly to view the Library and devoutly wish to be inside.

A pattern for the next months had been established. Each Sunday, people assembled at the Wharf to listen to speeches, before a crowd (sometimes numbering as many as four or five thousand people) strolled through the streets cheering: For a Free Sunday, for a Social Revolution, the opening of the library etc. on Sundays . . . When they reached Swanston Street, the throng gave ‘three hearty cheers for the opening of it’.

Meetings concluded at the Working Men’s College (today’s RMIT), where each week they resolved to continue the agitation.

When Parliament met to consider the matter, the assembly outside the Working Men’s College elected a delegation to present its views to the legislators. The chosen five promptly set out to Bourke Street, with the rest of the meeting following.

However: When they arrived at Bourke Street the crowd there, seeing a small crowd come along with well-known agitators in it, became excited and rushed to see what was going on. In a few moments some six thousand people, at a moderate estimate, were surging towards Parliament House.

The unexpected arrival of such a throng – with troublemakers like Chummy at the head – naturally alarmed the police, who prepared for battle. Just when a riot seemed imminent, ‘a sudden downpour of rain occasioned a precipitate retreat to the shelter of the Bourke Street verandahs, while the deputation went quietly in’.

After a month or so of the Sunday processions, police arrested Fleming and two other prominent agitators, Sam Rosa and John White. Chummy and Rosa faced charges of ‘insulting behaviour’ and ‘loitering’; White, ‘insulting behaviour’ and ‘taking part in a procession’. Rosa’s account in The Liberator (the newspaper of the Australian Secular Association) details their court appearance the next day:

The policemen retailed certain interesting little fictions of their own invention, to the effect that we said the Prince of Wales was no good, and that the queen ought to take in washing (the magistrates were struck with horror at the idea of the queen turning laundry-woman) and that the poor were plundered by the rich. ‘They don’t confine themselves to the Public Library at all, your worship,’ said one sapient bobby, ‘but they denounce capitalists and even magistrates, your worship.’

Despite their obvious outrage, the police lost the ‘insulting behaviour’ charges. The activists, however, copped a guilty verdict on the other charges and were duly sentenced to pay a fine of three pounds or face gaol for one month. Declaring that they had done nothing wrong, the three chose gaol.

In gaol, they continued to do what they could to keep the campaign alive. White reminded readers of The Liberator: I have been a constant agitator for Reform for 40 years, and am the same now as when I stood along side of my dear father in the old country during the Chartist troubles in ’48, in the cause of Freedom. I do all I do calmly and deliberately, and regret nothing I do. Though I am ill in body, I am strong in mind.

For his part, Chummy bemoaned that the ‘reading matter supplied me [in prison] consisted of the bible, Sunday at Home, and a hymn book, which disappointed me, as I thought I should have a month’s enjoyment, rest and reading’. But he found scope for political work by campaigning to improve conditions for prisoners. He also continued to express his commitment to the Sunday campaign, waxing philosophical on the issue:

What is life? – tomorrow it may have passed. So, after all, to do courageous and noble deeds – helping the dawning of the universal Brotherhood of Humanity, is worthy of us all.
His letter ended, however, on a somewhat plaintive note. ‘If any of my friends could visit me,’ he wrote, ‘I should be delighted to see them . . .’

After the three were released, other issues moved to the fore, and the campaign gradually died away. Public opinion, however, continued to swing against Sunday closing.

On 22 September 1904, Parliament relented – making Melbourne the last city throughout the length and breadth of the British Empire to throw open the doors of its public institutions on Sundays.

39. Sir Redmond Barry Statue
State Library Steps

The statue of Sir Redmond Barry – the man who hanged Ned Kelly – on the steps of the State Library does more than immortalise a particularly nasty specimen of establishment Melbourne. It also captures some sense of an age when power delighted in display, when authority depended more or less overtly on physical repression and when portly, middle-aged gentlemen thought they cut fine figures in skin-tight ceremonial stockings.

Sir Redmond Barry descended from a wealthy family of Anglo-Irish aristocrats. He arrived in Sydney in 1839 and then quickly moved to Melbourne. Despite the relatively small number of people in the new colony with legal training, it took Barry some time to fully integrate himself into Melbourne society (the contemporary historian Garryowen suggests that he was ‘never a favourite with the Attorneys [since] his solemn starchness and profuse punctiliousness overpowered them’).
Barry first came to prominence providing legal representation for Aborigines, a task which (perhaps surprisingly) he performed with some diligence (although his clients were almost always found guilty). He soon climbed up the ladder, becoming the first Solicitor General of Victoria in 1851 and joining the bench of the Supreme Court in 1852.

Once entrenched in power, he rapidly won a reputation as a ‘hanging judge’. He presided over the farce of the Eureka trials, at which the government proved unable to convince any jury to convict the rebels, leading The Age to remark, ‘the heart of the people is sound; it is only the heart of the Government that is rotten’.

Barry also tried the fifteen prisoners accused of murdering the brutal Inspector-General of Convicts, John Price. He refused any legal counsel for the accused who then, according to the law of the day, were not permitted to give sworn evidence in their own defence. Not surprisingly, most were found guilty. Barry ignored the jury’s recommendation for clemency, and sentenced all the men to die.

Indeed, Barry – as an owner of large tracts of Irish land – possessed an especial antipathy towards transported convicts, many of whom came from that class of rebellious peasants whom his family had traditionally oppressed. The Argus commented in February 1853:

So convinced is [Barry] of the hideousness of having the land overridden with fugitive convicts, that he doles out to every bondman that comes under his lash nearly one half more punishment than he awards to those who, having come to the country free, have deserted the path of virtue.
Most official histories lavish praise on Barry’s efforts to improve the tone of Melbourne society. He was a Chancellor and early patron of Melbourne University, he helped establish the Public Library, and lent his support to the Horticultural Society. Yet his aim seems to have been not so much to foster knowledge in the population at large as refinement among the well-to-do. As Manning Clark notes, ‘for [Barry], civilization meant the Melbourne Club, the best seats at the theatre, the bowing and scrapings of the law courts, all the “Yes Your Honour” and “If Your Honour Pleases”, and brass bands on Sunday to give the people pleasure’.

So, for instance, when asked to speak at the Mechanics Institute on ‘The Art of Agriculture’, Barry’s idea of an appropriate presentation involved lengthy speculations on the agriculture carried on in the garden of Eden – a dissertation, which, as a contemporary noted, threw ‘very little light on the conversion of gum tree forests into cornfields’.

Similarly, when the Public Library reached completion, Barry took it on himself to address the workmen on the site with ‘a strange compound of classic history, obscure philology and mediaeval gleanings . . . surely not the matter to lay before an assemblage of hard-working mechanics as a sort of festivity on the completion of their labours’.

As a judge, the harshness of Barry’s sentencing was resented all the more for his tendency to leaven his judgements with this kind of aristocratic pomposity. In one instance, he advised an unfortunate woman, weeping in the dock, ‘Dry your tears, madam, and proceed to gaol for eighteen months with hard labour’.

Barry’s partiality for post-sentence moralising came most famously to the fore during the trial of Ned Kelly. As soon as Kelly had been captured, Barry lent his assistance to the prosecution, allowing, for instance, the authorities to move the trial from Beechworth (the jurisdiction in which Kelly’s crimes had been committed) to Melbourne, purely on the basis that sitting in a region where people knew the truth behind Kelly’s outlawry rendered the prospect of a conviction more remote.

When the hearing began, Barry made public his desire to wrap the trial up in a single session, a prospect that even the prosecution found difficult to take seriously. Then, in his summing up, Barry told the jury to discount the applicability of Kelly’s claims of self-defence – an extraordinary piece of misdirection which, many years later, led the former Chief Justice of Victoria to declare that ‘Edward Kelly was not offered a trial according to the law’.

Once the jury reached its predictable guilty verdict, Barry took it upon himself to deliver Kelly a lecture: ‘You appear’, he said, ‘to revel in the idea of having put men to death’. The outlaw shot back: ‘More men than I have put men to death’, an apparent reference to Sir Redmond’s partiality for capital sentencing. Then, with singular dignity, Kelly continued: ‘The day will come when we shall all have to go to a bigger court than this. Then we will see who is right and who is wrong.’

Barry – no doubt taken aback – cut the dialogue short and intoned a sentence of death that concluded with the usual formula, ‘May the Lord have mercy on your soul’. Kelly again intervened: ‘I will go further than that, and say I will see you there where I go’. Ned Kelly met the executioner on 11 November 1880. Barry subsequently took ill, and died – surviving Kelly by only twelve days. Medical records put his death down to diabetes, a condition worsened by obesity (Manning Clark later wrote: ‘He was a man of huge appetites, swallowing oysters and champagne in such quantities that not even the ample robes of a judge could conceal the effects of such gluttony on his figure’). But the notion of a Kelly curse has passed down into folklore.

The Barry statue was completed – at a cost of £1000 – some seven years later. The Age described it on its unveiling as ‘an exquisite representation of the late judge . . . posed in a dignified attitude’ – a curious assessment of a monument that fixes the rotund Sir Redmond standing with knees turned slightly outward, like a flasher preparing to open his coat.

In any case, it’s doubtful whether any of the kids performing skateboard stunts know the name of the corpulent gentleman standing (in a bizarre juxtaposition) alongside statues of Joan of Arc and St George and his dragon. Most of them, however, could tell you the story of Ned Kelly.

Extract published courtesy of The Vulgar Press
© Jeff and Jill Sparrow