With the late Rod Giles on left. Circa 1977-78. Photo: DS
This is a story of mental health, mental breakdown, a few years of torment that ultimately became transformative. Arguably self-inflicted, albeit with extenuating factors. The subconscious crashes into the external world.
It had never been my intention to go to Wollongong, so this is a tale of a diverted journey. It would seem that many of life’s decisions and directions were not a consequence of preplanning but rather an accident of fate.
By my early 20’s I was living in a kombi van, selling dope to the leaders of student movement, and seeing myself as the epitome of youthful radicalism. I consumed a lot of LSD, often daily for weeks at a time, because it felt really good and made the world acceptable. There were no constraints.
The student movement was a hotbed of debate between various radical strands, often arousing fierce hostility. Learning about capitalism, feminism and racism I was quickly maturing, still naïve enough to think I knew it all while being daunted by the confident articulation of university graduates. In that competitive environment, it was easy to be drawn to Trotskyism as mentors were aligned. Trotskyism offered an explanatory alternative to brute failures of Stalinism and Maoism and the unacceptable compromises of social democracy and Eurocommunism.
The student leaders were moving on to establishing careers, so my career move logically appeared as a move into the industrial working class. The political party I joined, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), was conducting a ‘turn to industry’, planting members into blue collar factories. With hindsight – much of this tale carries retrospective wisdom – it was inane to take a bunch of young people, many from working class backgrounds, who had managed to achieve a university degree, and place them into a manufacturing sector entering decline.
An hour south of Sydney and with a population of 250,000, Wollongong was home to the Port Kembla steelworks, the largest industrial complex in the southern hemisphere. Part of the stunning Illawarra region where forested escarpment plunged into sand and surf. A further attraction was the love for a fine woman, a party leader, a musically creative liberated thinker.
Wollongong was a union town. There were twenty thousand steelworkers, plus downstream and associated industries such as the coal mines. This was the era of compulsory unionism, when Australia had the highest rate of unionisation in the Western world with over 50% of the country’s workforce unionised.
Steelworkers came from over 70 nations. Many had at best basic English. We had own version of sign language, essential given the noisy crashing of steel on steel. Work shifts rotated – day, night, afternoon, on a weekly basis – keeping the circadian rhythms in permanent flux. All of which put barriers in front of grassroots organising. There I was, fomenting revolution to a workforce in an environment they mostly despised yet sought to rationalise because they had families to raise and debts to pay.
On summer days the sprawling complex of corrugated iron walls and rooves would shimmer like the after burners on a rocket. On stormy nights the massive coke oven vats would push out cooked coal which in the rain exploded into starbursts. Dante’s imagery meets Marxist workplace alienation.
The primary steelworker’s union was the Federated Ironworkers Association (FIA), which since the 1950s had been controlled nationally by a right-wing group known as the Groupers. The Groupers were the union wing of the National Civic Council (NCC), and at its peak claimed over 200 union officials as members. The NCC in turn were an affiliate of the Democratic Labour Party, which were an anti-communist 1950s break away from the Australian Labor Party, successful in keeping Labour out of power until Gogh Whitlam’s election in 1972. Advocates for compulsory unionism, Groupers opposed industrial activity, focussing exclusively on negotiations with employers. They were masterful bureaucrats, especially organising their own success in elections.
Except in Wollongong. With a long history of union militancy, in 1972 a rank-and-file group, comprised of members from Labor, Communist, and Socialist Party’s along with independents, wrested control back from the NCC. While the rank-and-file successfully retained power they had been unable to broke through elsewhere, though there were nascent groups on Newcastle and Sydney.
In a few years, the SWP Wollongong cadre, of which I was now a leading member, had built credibility, being active in the rank-and-file committee, becoming union delegates and leading strikes. The Jobs for Women campaign, supported by the Port Kembla union leadership, had launched, and this became ground-breaking as a sex discrimination case causing upgrade of occupational health and safety laws. Plus, we had members in the other primary steel centre in Newcastle.
By the mid-1970s Bruce Springsteen was penning songs such as The River and Youngstown dealing with decline of the USA manufacturing and steel industries – ‘From the Monongahela Valley to the Mesabi iron range / To the coal mines of Appalachia, the story’s always the same / Seven-hundred tons of metal a day / Now sir, you tell me the world’s changed’. He was capturing a dual trend, one being introduction of new job shedding technology and the other, relocation to cheap ‘Third World’ countries with lax regulatory standards. This was precursor to the arrival of neoliberal anti-union legislation.
Wollongong, 1982
In 1982 the crisis in the international steel industry reached Australia. It was also the year of union elections. The combination of looming mass redundancies coinciding with electoral prospects provided opportunity for any organisation that claimed to support independent mass activity.
As union officials the rank-and-file leadership had become a bit moribund and approached the SWP members to be part of renewal, offering full-time positions, representation onto elected committees, and mutual support in other steel centres. Any decision on participation was beyond SWP branch authority, requiring direction from the national leadership. A meeting of members from the NSW steel centres was held.
At that meeting the Party Guru, a member of the bourgeoise who had most generously donated his time and resources to working class revolution on the proviso that he was the glorified leader, declared: “Comrades! Left-wing bureaucrats are no different to right-wing bureaucrats! The crisis in the steel industry is coming and the working class will revolutionise. They need our leadership. We will form our own election ticket – the Militant Action Campaign – and the workers will join us.”
Without prior warning the unexpected announcement stunned people into silence. Well, almost … It is not wise to question the Party Guru, so I guess I’m a bit dumb because I was the only one to openly dissent. My opening words were along the lines of, ‘um … er …. If I perhaps could be the devil’s advocate …’ and I proposed joining the union ticket. Lead the working class from positions of leadership in organisations they had formed. A futile suggestion of course because the Guru’s wishes must be obeyed.
The announcement of the Militant Action Campaign (MAC) surprised and rocked the Port Kembla union leadership, generating bitter hostility. The BHP announcement of retrenchments and the subsequent campaign to prevent them overlapped with the union elections. Steelworkers and coal miners came together in a historical first, running guerrilla campaigns of sudden walkout strikes, go slows, underground sit ins, and a massive march on parliament house in Canberra.
Having passed on the opportunity to be inside building the campaign, the SWP became alienated sideline critics. Memory, possibly false, suggests MAC received about 20% of the vote in the elections; the true figure is scarcely relevant, being artificially inflated from NCC right-wing support. Eventually other party members did openly express dissatisfaction with the course taken and ultimately the SWP lost everything, all its branches and members in every steel centre.
The decision to split from the rank-and-file group wasn’t just flawed ultra-left rhetoric, or a false assessment of state of working class consciousness and alignment of political forces. The Party Guru couldn’t permit formation of a power bloc outside of his control, which is what would occur if party members became union officials, so therefore he had to undermine it.
At the subsequent Party conference, I argued my case. Unsurprisingly I was trashed as a ‘petit-bourgeoise careerist dilettante’ (these days I wear the badge with pride) who sought the undermine the great and glorious victory of the Militant Action Campaign. I resigned.
Walking away from the Party meant losing all my friends as Party orthodoxy prohibited those type of relations. Loneliness. With the end of my third decade looming, with all the myths about that being a pivotal point in a person’s existence on this planet, I reflected on what I was doing with my life, where I was going, and what had got me to this point.
Throwing myself into union activism and being ta shop steward, I also became secretary of a Labor Party branch. Working with the state parliamentary member, the late George Petersen, together we formed a branch of the Palestinian Human Rights Committee. As seems to be standard practice within Labor, branch stacking occurred as an ego sought a federal seat, ultimately unsuccessful. My branch was one of those stacked out, adding to my growing sense of despair at the state of things.
Friends in Melbourne were part of a Marxist discussion group debating the science of dialects in the physical world having an opposite, therefore partner, in the internal world and this was psychoanalysis. They sent me discussion papers and based upon the readings I began self-analysis.
When cracks appear in a person’s philosophical framework, or world view, the whole easily shatters. That happened with me and Trotskyism. What began as a tactical difference ended up in challenging the full-blown edifice. Once the edifice collapses then a person no longer knows what they believe.
The next stage is questioning one’s own capacity. Having been cynical of religious cults – ‘who gives a fuck who Guru Maharaji is?’ – I concluded I had been part of a sect with religious overtones (idealisation of deceased leaders, infallible Guru, dogmatic pronouncements, controlling regulations applicable to all except the Guru). What did that say about my decision-making capacity? Self-doubt grows.
Then comes the spark, or rather the flame. A former lover, we had a short and pleasant relationship, who had been overseas and was preparing for permanent relocation. Her experience had been transformative both in mentality and appearance. The opposite of where I had gone and disparaging reflection, despite her delight in seeing me, of what I had become. She shared a story of discovery, which I misinterpreted and took on guilt.
Living alone in a small apartment with thin walls, neighbourly manners meant using headphones when playing music. Supplemented by dope and alcohol I was turning in on myself until I cracked: a mental breakdown that raged for months. What was a growing depression snapped into full on psychosis mixed with manic depression.
You have all seen those hyper wrecks bouncing down the street waving arms nonsensically and gibberish to themselves. That was me.
Sitting on a mountain top possessing infinite wisdom, the world laid out neatly beneath with omnipresent comprehension of all. The next spreadeagled beneath the bed, crucifying in the head, tears flowing curled up in a ball.
Now a super being with confidence overflowing, I will be the greatest union leader the world has ever known. Then a nonsensical discordant freak, a walking mistake, a fake, emitting an endless agonising groan.
Then came the dead acid surge. Like a swarm of adrenaline addicted wasps exploding from the base of the brain. I stripped myself psychologically bare, dissecting every piece of my personality, dissatisfied with everything I found. Confronting perennial mother /family / what am I doing here issues.
Having decided it was time to die but without having means or capacity to perform the task, I decided to just lie there until I ceased to exist, and then dismayed that I couldn’t even achieve that. With recognition of failure to achieve the biggest failure, death, I exited the psychosis.
Eventually I got back to Melbourne, drove taxis seven nights a week on 12-hour shifts, till I reached the point of ‘no more, it’s time to go’. Marx’s theory of alienation times 10. Carrying nothing but a backpack I left the country, telling people I wanted to see if the grass really was cleaner over there. In reality I was running from myself. I had a personality to rebuild, and that required fresh inputs.
It is self-defeating to deal in ‘what ifs’. What if I had never … blah, blah, blah? Would I never have had the incredible the adventures I have been fortunate to experience, and wouldn’t have known what I had missed, and maybe or not ended up in a similar happy place to where I am now? I can now reflect and say, ‘hey, that was character building.’
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August 2023
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