Lessons in song from down under

Music and, to a much lesser extent, poetry has played a small but important role in working-class action in Britain. One thinks immediately of Centre 42, which took its name from the resolution of that number passed by the Trades Union Congress in 1960 calling for greater participation by the trade union movement in the arts.

A British tour was organised under its auspices, which brought Pete Seeger over from the US and provided the first platform for the astonishing Anne Briggs, though she never went on to forge any links with the labour movement, retiring into seclusion from which she has but rarely emerged.

Ewan MacColl produced a songbook and LP of industrial songs and AL Lloyd the valuable Come All Ye Bold Miners songbook.

Before that date, individual folk performers sang at a few trade union conferences and branches. Sing magazine published a parody of Bless 'Em All by the veteran communist and prewar unemployed workers' leader Wal Hannington, while a group of songwriters gathered around that magazine helped organise the music for the first Aldermaston march.

But, in comparison with the narrative revealed by Mark Gregory in his Sixty Years of Australian Union Songs, these rather individualistic efforts pale into insignificance.

Gregory tells the stories of unions which regarded songs not as something entertaining away from the union meeting and the picket line but as direct agitational tools.

Dialectically, of course, this produced the songwriters and the singers who have participated in struggles right up to the present day. Though the book's subtitle is "the Australian Folk Revival and the Australian Labour Movement since the Second World War," it includes a song about the 1937 boycott of ships taking pig-iron to Japan to be made into munitions to attack the Chinese people.

Its chorus goes: "We wouldn't load pig-iron for the fascists in Japan/Despite intimidation, we refused to lift the ban/With democracy at stake, the struggle must be won/We had to beat the menace of the fascist Rising Sun."

A similar sense of history is in another song, which details active opposition to imperialist wars in Indonesia, Korea and Vietnam, with the rousing chorus: "They've been right ev'ry time and they're right again now/But the strength of one isn't much of a power/So united they stand against all odds/Fighting for us all against the little tin gods."

There's an associated CD of 22 of the songs referred to in the text and a website - www.unionsong.com - which includes the texts of literally hundreds more. Rich pickings indeed and the whole project has been enthusiastically funded by the Maritime Union of Australia.

But the other side of the story is the equal enthusiasm of the songwriters, some from the Australian folk scene, others actual participants in struggle. If someone were to do a similar documentary job in Britain, it might spark off a resurgence over here of songs to fan the flames of discontent.

The book is available priced AUS$20 from Mark Gregory, PO box 298, Katoomba, NSW 2780, Australia. Email: mark.gregory@gmail.com

KARL DALLAS