Even when the strike started, thoughts of the baby growing in her remained uppermost in Mary Skinnider’s mind. She dreaded the discomfort of the last three weeks of carrying and the confinement, but the glow of expectation, the dream of holding her baby in her arms, overshadowed every other consideration — except Bill’s stubborn suggestion that if the baby was another boy they should give it to Mick and Norma Gerran.

He had said in bed one night as calm as you like: “If it’s a boy we ought to give it to Mick and Norma. They love kids and can never have any. And we’ve got three boys …”

Mary hadn’t known what on earth to say. She knew Bill wouldn’t joke about a thing like that. She knew how upset Norma and Mike were since the Doctor said they could never have a child, but — give her baby away!

“But, Bill, I couldn’t. I just couldn’t … If you loved children … you …”

Sensing her deep concern, he felt for her hand and said: “Struth. Shorty. I love kids, you know that. You don’t understand.”

Yes, he loved his children, she knew that and, in his own undemonstrative way, was a good father to them.

“Mick and Norma,” he continued. “They love kids, too. You know what Mick said to me the other night? He said: ‘It’s breaking Norma’s heart. She’s pining away and our life has lost its spark.’”

She knew what lay behind his, to her, unreal and inhuman request: his mateship with Mick. Sometimes she wondered did Mick, in a different way, mean more to Bill than she did.

“I couldn’t do it, Bill. I couldn’t do it. You don’t know what you’re asking.”

Stubbornly he evaded the definite finality of her attitude. “If it’s a girl, I want to keep it, too, but I thought, like and all that, if it was another boy …” He chuckled uncomfortably.

“Maybe it will be a girl and then there’ll be no problem.”

Mary began to pray that the baby would be a girl, but deep in her heart she knew it would make no difference. Boy or girl, it was her baby, hers, and no one could have it, no one — not even Mick and Norma!

*

Sterling-Parker bookmakers in Wollongong and Port Kembla found business quiet last Melbourne Cup Day, for that morning the wharf strike began.

Many a wharfie in the district would normally invest a few shillings or a few pounds on Cup Day, but this year few did so, because a man didn’t know when his next pay might come. Workers in other industries and even some small business people began to count their savings, for this industrial district, dominated by the B.B.P., had seen many long and bitter strike struggles in its time.

News of the strike fell softly into the Skinnider household. There was no argument and little discussion about it. Yet Bill wouldn’t have been surprised had Mary complained, for a woman can be very nervy in the last weeks with a baby alive in her, and other kids to look after. Bill and Tim were a handful, goodness knows; not to mention “Tiger Kelly”, Pat, the youngest, aged two and a half. At least he had expected her to discuss the likely financial difficulties.

Yet she had made no comment. They had discussed the issues with Mick and Norma and decided the strike was just and unavoidable, so he presumed Mary accepted it because she was convinced it must be won. The argument about his idea of giving the baby to Mick and Norma had faded from his mind, or rather he had decided to let the matter rest until the baby was born and Mary home from hospital — then if it was a girl, no argument was necessary.

Bill Skinnider did not realise that Mary was brooding over his suggestion about the baby, that she was sullen and resentful about it.

“Don’t worry, Shorty,” he said to her on the afternoon the strike began. “I’ve got twenty-five quid in the bank. We’ll get by. I’m going down to the pub to see if Mick’s there and I won’t spend much.”

Mick was at the pub with a few of the boys when Bill got there.

“Have a drink,” Mick said. He was a lean, freckled man, in his thirties.

“Didn’t expect to get into a big school,” Bill replied. “The strike …”

“Ar, come on,” Mick said with a sudden chuckle entering his voice and a twinkle in his eye which was his main mannerism. “Might as well have a few each day early in the piece as have a pony a day for a month. It’s two bob in and I’m in the chair.”

“You’ve got my arm up me back,” Bill capitulated, passing over two shillings.

Bill Skinnider and Mick Gerran had been in Australia nine years now and had lost their Scotch accent except for that clipped suggestion of gutturalness that falls pleasantly on the Australian ear.

Talk was of the Melbourne Cup, then of the strike. A suggestion of an argument developed about whether Rising Fast was the best horse since Phar Lap. Bill didn’t gamble much, fishing was his game; but he had thought of backing the Cup favourite and now felt a slight pang of gambler’s regret. He sipped his beer on the fringe of the school, did not enter the conversation—he rarely had much to say except when alone with his wife or with Mick. The others talked about the ship owners and the Government, about the method of recruiting labor for the waterfront around which the strike nominally revolved, about the report given to the mass meeting that morning by Bill Harkness, Secretary of the Wollongong-Kembla Branch of the Union.

“It’s a plot to smash the Union like in New Zealand, but this is not New Zealand,” Stan Beeton, a short, stockily-built man said. “It’s like Billy Harkness said, the ship owners and the Menzies Government got their heads together to try to smash the Union.”

“They’re trying to bring back the ‘bull system’ and have men scramblin’ for a job, pleadin’ with the ‘bulls’ to earn a quid, linin’ up like cattle to be picked out for the slaughter,” Long Tommy Smith said, his adam’s apple bobbing up and down as it did when he talked excitedly.

“The A.C.T.U. have endorsed the strike,” someone else said. “We’re not alone this time.”

“Bloody near time they backed something,” Mick said. “Every other Union in the shipping industry, even the skippers and mates, have the right to recruit their own members, how can Menzies and Holt take it from us? The A.C.T.U. had to back us.”

“The boys seem solid,” Mick said. “There’ll be no scabs.”

“Scabs went out of fashion in this Union in 1928,” Long Tommy snapped, with a hint of resentment that a “foreigner” should suggest the remotest possibility of Australian wharfies scabbing.

“What about 1938 in the Pig Iron dispute?” Mick replied, grinning mischievously.

“They were the last four and we did a bit of sign-writing in their honor,” Long Tommy came back. He was referring to the fact that the names of the four scabs in the 1938 “Pig Iron” dispute are still written large on the Southern breakwater.

“How long do you reckon she’ll last, Bill?” Mick asked, changing the subject.

Bill pondered as he always did before speaking. “Might be a long one, I think. They’ve set up committees for propaganda, entertainment, relief, and so on. They wouldn’t do that for nothing. Might be a long strike, if you ask me.”

The closest of friends since childhood, in Australia they soon realised they were more than that; they were mates. They’d worked in the shipyards on the Clyde as had their fathers and grandfathers. Yet they were daring lads and so, when conscripted into the Army early in the war, they had savored the adventure of it. They’d got off Greece somehow with the remnants of their unit only to be sunk in the Mediterranean not far off shore. After a desperate time in the water Mick was rescued and taken back to Scotland, and Bill got ashore in Greece and fought with the guerillas till the end of the war.

The end of the war sent them back to the Clyde, but life there seemed tame and so they went to sea—as firemen on a coal burning freighter bound for Sydney town. Working conditions on the English ship were harsh, so they paid off and joined the Australian Seamen’s Union. For a year they wielded the banjo in more hospitable stokeholds with those gutsy matey men, the Australian coastal seamen. Romance found each of them and this meant leaving the sea. Both the girls were Wollongong locals and firm friends, so Wollongong, or rather Port Kembla, became the home town of the two roving lads from the Clyde.

There were two great jokes amongst them and their wives. The first concerned Mick’s nationality; he was actually an Irishman born in Scotland and for some perverse reason would, when a little tight at a small family Saturday night party, sing “Kevin Barry” and “The Irish Soldier Boy” to which Bill would respond with “Roaming in the Gloaming” and “A Man’s a Man for all that.” The other concerned children and this was really not a joke. Two years had passed since Mick and Norma had consulted the doctor. She could never have a child, he told them after a careful examination. They all treated it as a joke on the surface (“You’re gettin’ old, me son,” Bill used to say to Mick) and as a joke had begun Mick’s request that the fourth child of Bill’s and Mary’s should be adopted by him. But Bill couldn’t treat a thing like that as a joke so he had talked it over with Mary.

When on the following day he had told Mick about his conversation with Mary, Mick had exclaimed: “Hey, listen mate. I was only jokin’, fair dinkum, I was. We’d give anything to have a kid to call our own, but we don’t expect …”

He observed the intense glow of sincere feeling in Bill’s eyes. Embarrassed Mick said: “Get out, you silly old bastard.”

*

Less than a hundred yards off the headland is Stony Island — and there’s good fishing there. Just beyond it is Rabbit Island, bigger, perhaps fifty yards by twenty — and there’s good fishing there. Beyond Rabbit Island again lies a jagged rock jutting out of the treacherous sea called Gap Island — and there is the best fishing in the whole district. You can get a chaff bag full of bream in a couple of hours, but no one ever fishes there these days. It’s too dangerous; there have been tragedies at holiday times when visiting fishermen venture onto the rock.

Keen and all as he was on fishing, Bill Skinnider had never even contemplated fishing off Gap Island — until he was put in charge of fishing operations for the Strike Welfare Committee.

During the first week of the strike, the Government and employers were even more than usually busy in their efforts to break the men’s determination; the press and radio more than usually biased against the strikers — but to no avail.

Wharf laborers stood on street corners handing out leaflets; men, many of whom had never before made a speech, spoke daily at factory gates; car loads went bush to put the Union’s case to the farmers; large deputations waited on newspaper proprietors, politicians and radio commentators. The various committees met daily in all ports. Unity was reflected in forthright support in Parliament from Labor Party politicians. Eddie Ward produced at Canberra a letter which had fallen into the hands of the Union proving conclusively that the attack of the Government had been planned months before by the overseas shipping monopolies.

These matters interested Bill Skinnider — but above all he was interested in fish. He had volunteered his prawn net and services as a prawner at the meeting, but Bill Harkness had suggested he loan the net and take charge of the fishing. Harkness himself was an expert bream fisherman and knew Bill’s reputation as the best fisherman in the district. Mick Gerran was put in charge of the rabbiting team.

There were two hundred families to be fed in the Kembla area alone and there could be no strike to pay. There were something like twenty-five thousand members of the Waterside Workers’ Federation in Australia and even two pounds a week for each member would cost £50,000 — and where would a trade union get that kind of money?

So it meant “biting” shopkeepers, it meant collection lists and raffles, fishing and rabbiting.

“I’d rather be in the team of speakers for the Propaganda Committee going round the factories,” Bill had said to Mick as they walked home. “Fishing’s my hobby; it’s a pleasure for me, not a job. I’d rather …”

Mick chuckled that rather villainous chuckle of his. “What? You on the soap box? Turn it up!”

They had stood on the corner yarning then, as they drifted off, Mick turned as a mate will at time of parting to say some unneeded thing as though clinging to his friend’s nearness. “How’s the missus,” he shouted. He knew how she was; he’d seen her the night before.

“Oh, she’s OK.” Bill came back to Mick’s side. “Listen, about the baby …”

“Ah, forget it, mate …”

After the strike had been going eight days they met at the Strike Committee’s headquarters, a little hall on the outskirts of Port Kembla, instead of the pub.

“We only got three dozen rabbits,” Mick said disconsolately. “A lot of families went without. The strike is beginning to hit and nearly everyone is looking for relief …”

“Trust the bloody fish to be off the bite,” Bill replied. “We only got a few and they didn’t hit the deck. This relief work is very important to the strike. There must be fish for all tomorrow, as they say in the classics.”

After a pause, he concluded. “We’re going out on Gap Island in the morning.”

“Don’t be a bloody fool!” Mick protested.

“But we’ll get a chaff bag full of bream there in the morning — there’ll be fresh fish for all tomorrow!”

“What, do you want to commit suicide, yer dope.”

Once he’d made up his mind Bill Skinnider was a difficult man to argue with. Mick Gerran knew that, but he began arguing this time until they were interrupted by the entry of Bill Harkness, who’d just returned from a strike conference in Sydney.

The men in the hall, including Bill and Mick, clustered around their leader. A trade union worker all his life, Harkness was a tall man. He’d been elected because he was, at one and the same time, a trained Communist and “one of the boys.” You might get a man to run a Union office better than Billy, but you wouldn’t get a better organiser or a more fair-dinkum fellow. Standing there, tie-less and coatless, he was one of them. He told them excitedly about news of united action coming in from all ports. There were serious matters to discuss and they discussed them gravely. The strike had emptied the pockets of every man present, including Harkness, for the wages of officials of the Waterside Workers’ Federation cease with those of the rank and file when a strike starts — but Australian workers find humor in any situation.

So Bill Harkness began telling a yarn. That morning, he told them, two thousand wharfies had marched through the streets of Sydney to the offices of the Daily Telegraph to demand the withdrawal of slanderous statements made against the Union in its columns.

“They occupied the whole building, held meetings in the officers and printery, explained their case quietly to everyone they met,” Harness concluded. “There were coppers everywhere, needless to say. The coppers didn’t know what to do so at last a few of them grabbed a big bloke and tried to throw him out. This bloke put up a terrific fight and kept saying: ‘You can’t throw me out of here!’ Of course, they threw him out, right enough. He got up, dusted his clothes and went to walk back into the building. ‘You can’t put me out of here!’ he said again. ‘Why can’t we?’ a big detective asked him. ‘Because I’ve been workin’ here for twenty years!’”

At the corner near Bill Skinnider’s house, Mick Gerran tried to produce some new arguments that might convince his mate not to fish off Gap Island, but he felt helpless in the face of his mate’s stubbornness.

As they parted, Bill felt the need to shout to his mate. “Hey Mick,” he called. “Save me the tenderest pair of rabbits you get tomorrow.”

“I will if you’ll save me the biggest bream you catch off the Gap.”

“That’s a deal. See you at the strike centre, tomorrow afternoon.”

Then Mick called Bill back, “Listen mate,” he said urgently. “Forget about Gap Island. You …”

But Bill was adamant. “There’s more fish off Gap Island than anywhere else. The men who marched on the Telegraph took the risk of arrest and a kicking off the police, didn’t they? Well, it’s up to me to take risks too.”

Mick shrugged. How could you argue against such a man? But he was no sooner home than he told Norma about it. “Do you think it would do any good if you saw Mary?”

Before the evening meal, Bill Skinnider went to the inlet where his boat was moored to make a last-minute check-up. He and Mary had done some scrimping and saving to get the boat and now it was his proudest possession.

Mick’s arguments had shaken Bill more than he admitted. There was a risk involved, more risk than a married man with three young kids had a right to take perhaps. But he thought of the men and women at the strike centre seeking relief.

It had been difficult to get three men to go to the Gap with him, he mused. Stan Beeton had agreed readily enough, but Long Tommy had laughed and said: “I’ll fish in the boat near the Island. I’m no hero,” and Des had exclaimed: “To Gap Island, you’re crazy.”

“Get a chaff bag full of bream there. There’s two hundred families to be fed.”

“Jees, I’d be in it, Bill, but Gap Island …”

“Well, I’ll tell you what. You’re a handy man with a boat. You know how hard it is to land a man there. You land me and Stan on the Island and you and Long Tommy can fish from the boat in the gap near Rabbit Island.”

“Good, I’ll be in it, Bill.”

“We meet at the boat at four o’clock in the morning.”

Norma had been and gone before Bill got back to the house and, preoccupied with his thoughts, he didn’t notice Mary’s tension during their meal.

After tea, he sat in the living room and read the strike news in the Maritime Worker and the Tribune. When he had finished he passed the papers to Mary who sat at the other side of the table knitting for the baby.

“There’s strike news in those papers,” he said pointing out the articles. “Would you like to read it?”

Mary read the articles distractedly. But the strike had been banished from her mind by the news Norma had brought; even her resentment against Bill about the baby was forgotten.

“We’re going fishing again in the morning for the strike,” he said. “I’ll set the alarm.”

“You wouldn’t go off Gap Island, would you, Bill?”

He had decided not to tell her. “Gap Island?” he evaded. “How do you mean?”

“You know what I mean, Bill. Don’t do it, Bill.”

“But, Shorty, there’s people short of money. There’s kids to be fed. You should have seen the people at the strike centre. People you know.”

“People I know,” she repeated, close to hysteria. “What about me? What about the kids. What about the baby in me you want to give away?”

She flinched at her own words. He came around the table to her. He put his left arm gently round her shoulder and his right hand right round her left breast. “Don’t make it any harder for me, Shorty. I’m scared, but I can’t go back on my word now.”

She clung to him weeping. Knowing his stubborn nature, she sought desperately for an argument to shatter it for once.

“Bill, if you don’t go to the Gap, Norma and Mick can have the baby if it’s a boy. There you are! They can have it, if you promise not to go on Gap Island tomorrow!”

“Don’t put it that way to me, Shorty, for God’s sake,” he said. And they kissed, her tears salty on his lips.

When the alarm clock rang stridently, Mary stirred; she slept lightly now with the baby active in her. As she came slowly to wakefulness, she thought: somehow I must stop him.

She heard him get up in the darkness, dress and prepare a light breakfast.

“Daddy,” she heard little Pat call.

“Yes, son.”

“Pat wants liddlest fish …”

“Yes, young Tiger Kelly, you can have the littlest, all for yourself. But you must go back to sleep. It’s still nighttime.”

“And I want the second littlest fish,” Mary heard Tim say.

“Yes, Tim you can have the second littlest.”

“And I want the third littlest,” Bill junior called to his father.

“All right son, but I’m fishing for the strike; everyone must get some fish.”

“Yes, Dad, we know,” she heard Tim reply. “But we only want the very little ones.”

Before Bill left the house, he came to Mary’s bedside. She switched on the bed lamp and blinked at its beam, pertly snubbing her nose. She saw him there dressed in rubber thigh boots, a big-collared leather jacket with lambswool lining and his old green fishing hat, tall and strong, and she felt the need of him then more than ever before.

Impetuously she reached out, grasped his hand and said urgently: “Don’t fish off Gap Island! Please Bill, for me, say you won’t fish off the Gap!”

“Don’t worry, Shorty,” he said, self-possession strong in him again. “We’ll be right. See you for tea tonight.”

All the fishermen arrived at four o’clock sharp and soon the boat was pushed out in the darkness.

They went out through the gap past Stony Island and, skirting Rabbit Island, came alongside Gap Island.

“There’s a strong undertow,” Long Tommy Smith said. “I still think no one should go onto the Gap.”

Bill Skinnider snapped in stubbornly, shouting: “There’s a strike on, yer know. Listen, Des, I’ll take her in and drop Stan. Then you take her in and drop me. Right?”

He took Tom Smith’s oar and manoeuvred the boat into the tides that hit the island in a kind of pincer movement, came alongside and Stan Beeton jumped clear.

Then Des took the oar from Bill and brought her in again. First time the tide took him off side so he swung her again and Bill jumped clear onto the rock island, carrying his own and Stan’s rod and gear, plus the chaff bag. With difficulty, Des cleared her and he and Tommy rowed away out of sight to fish from the boat in the gap.

“Watch those sudden waves from the swell,” Des shouted as they went.

While Bill Skinnider and Stan Beeton fished from Gap Island the sea revealed treachery; occasionally it threw up a savage wave swamping them with foaming water. Stan climbed higher onto the craggy, slimy rocks after the second wave and shouted above the roar of the sea: “Come up here. You’ll get washed off.”

But Bill was landing big bream as quick as he could bait the line and his fisherman’s soul was stirred.

By sunrise they had a quarter of a chaff bag of bream, all good size.

“There’ll be fish for all today,” Bill shouted gleefully.

Then it happened.

Stan Beeton said afterwards the wave got Bill as it rebounded off the rocks above his head. He disappeared quicker than the eye could see and silently, without crying out. Stan Beeton dropped his rod which was whisked away like a feather into the sea. He ran to the edge shouting like a man berserk. His eyes searched the seething, foaming waters but he could not see Bill. He climbed, the jagged rocks cutting him. He could not see the boat, nor did Des and Tommy hear his distraught shouting.

Des and Long Tommy found a frenzied man on Gap Island an hour later when they came into view looking for a better fishing spot. In answer to Stan’s cries they came alongside.

“Bill’s gone,” he kept shouting. “Bill’s gone, I tell yer! Washed off!”

They got Stan off with the chaff bag, all of them in a daze of unbelief.

For three hours they searched like starving men rummaging for food; then they carried the news ashore to Billy Harkness. Well-equipped divers were summoned and they searched for the body until exhausted, but in vain.

When they told Mary she stared at them from the threshold then rushed to Long Tommy screaming. “Go back. Bill’s a strong swimmer. Go back, I tell you.” Long Tommy Smith put his arm round her shoulders. “It’s five hours ago, Mary. No man could survive in those waters.”

*

At four o’clock that afternoon, Mick Gerran entered the strike centre. “Where’s Bill Skinnider?” he asked. “I’ve got a pair of rabbits for the old bastard and he’d better have some fish for me.”

When they told him he placed the rabbits on a table and walked slowly out, shoulders hunched. Three weeks later, two fishermen found the mutilated body washed up on the beach.

They buried Bill Skinnider like that, and the Union buried its dead with dignity and piety. A pipe band played old Scottish tunes. Hundreds of wharfies marched up the main street of Wollongong and the Returned Soldiers’ League, of which Bill had been a respected member, also marched. And the local people lined the streets in mourning for a quiet man whom everyone knew had brought nothing but kindness and goodness across the seas with him.

After the priest had read the funeral service, Mary broke down, weeping without restraint. Mick and Norma thought that was a good thing — you cannot bottle up a grief as deep as hers.

From the very day of the tragedy the Union and its members, led by Bill Harkness and Mick, started a fund for Mary and the kids, and they ran raffles and a levy was placed on all members of the Union throughout Australia.

A fortnight after the funeral Mary went into hospital to have her fourth baby. Mick and Norma came to her bedside next day with flowers and friendship.

Mary was weak and pale with that beautiful pallor of a new mother. As they were ready to depart, she grasped Norma’s hand and said in a voice little above a whisper, “I want you to take the baby. Adopt it as your own. ‘If it’s a boy, it’s yours,’ that’s what Bill said. Well, it’s a boy and it’s yours, Norma, yours and Mick’s. I haven’t seen it. Take it as soon as they’ll let you, for Bill’s sake.”

Impetuous tears came to Norma’s eyes. She took out her handkerchief and began to bite a corner of it, but she could think of nothing to say.

Mick’s jaws showed rigid in the dull light. “But Mary,” he began. “It was a joke, like …”

“Mick,” Mary interrupted him. “I want you to have him. More than anything else in the world, I want you to have my baby!”

When they had gone, Mary Skinnider returned her face hard into the pillow and great sobs convulsed her body. “I love you, Bill,” she said aloud. “Mick was your mate, and I’ve given him my baby.”

When the adoption was legally arranged, Mick said to Norma: “We’ll call him Bill. And when he’s old enough we’ll tell him about his father. We’ll tell him his father lived and died for the Union and the working class.”

There are many things the wharfies of the South Coast will remember about this struggle; and one of them will be the death of Bill Skinnider.

And when they think of this, echoing in their ears will be the angry words of Bill Harkness to the shipowners, after the strike had been won: “Your plot murdered Bill Skinnider.”

First published in Overland issue 4—1955