Show Notes
Welcome to People's History of Australia! We're a new podcast focusing on the history of ordinary people in Australia coming together to collectively fight for a better life. In this episode, we cover the brilliant story of 300 migrant women who went on strike against brutal sweatshop conditions in their textile factory in Brunswick, Melbourne, in 1981. None of the women had ever been on strike before, and few spoke English fluently. And yet over the next eight days, they defied violence and intimidation from their employer, the police, private security guards and the right-wing officials of their own union to win their strike and gain large pay increases and respect at work. Today we chat with Sandra Bloodworth, who was on the Kortex strike picket lines every day and has written about the strike. Find full show notes and links for this episode at our website - www.peopleshistory.com.au Support us on Patreon here - www.patreon.com/peopleshistoryofaustralia
More from People's History of Australia
In April 1998, Australia suddenly erupted into industrial war. Security guards with dogs and balaclavas swarmed docks across the country, threw out all 1,400 unionised workers at Patrick Stevedores, and then replaced them with a non-union workforce. Blockades sprang up at major ports, thousands of workers walked off the job to support the sacked wharfies, and the country seemed poised on the brink of a general strike.
The idea that Australia was invaded in 1788 is strangely controversial. A Google search for the phrase ‘Was Australia invaded’ provides an AI-generated answer claiming that ‘Australia has not experienced a full-scale foreign military invasion of its mainland’. The Wikipedia history of Australia makes no mention of invasion or indeed any warfare between between Aboriginal nations and the colonisers at all, and large numbers of articles ask ‘Was Australia invaded in 1788?’ as if the issue is somehow not obvious.
In contemporary Australian mass culture, it’s hard if not impossible to find any representation of life as it’s lived by the majority of the population. Few movies, plays, TV shows or documentaries reflect what it’s like spending most of your waking life working to make a boss rich, struggling to keep up with bills, or dealing with sexism, homophobia, racism, and other oppressions – and practically none depict things like going on strike or opposing fascism. With all major media and cultural production owned either by the government or huge corporations, this situation has prevailed throughout virtually the entire post-invasion history of Australia.
From the 1880s until the 1980s, telephone operators were at the centre of the communications industry in Australia. Before the invention of the internet or mobile phones, virtually all telecommunication across the country and internationally took place through landline telephones. And operators, who connected calls to their intended destination, were completely essential to that process.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, a powerful and radical new movement arose in Australia challenging the widespread oppression that women faced across the country – the women’s liberation movement.