CLICK GO THE SHEARS AND THE 1891 SHEARERS STRIKE - Mark Gregory

CLICK GO THE SHEARS AND THE 1891 SHEARERS STRIKE

Mark Gregory (2014)

When I discovered that Click go the Shears was first published in 1891, I felt sure this was more than a coincidence that this was no coincidence. The 1891 strike has long been described as the defeat that led to the formation of the Australian Labor Party. Shearers and their union were huge news around Australia that year.

Every weapon at the command of the Queensland Government, including the army, the police and large numbers of special constables were drafted to protect and transport “free labour” to help beat the strike. The wealthy squatters had amassed millions of pounds to defeat the union and the arrest and imprisonment with hard labour of 13 leaders in the old convict prison of St Helens in Moreton Bay was a glaring example of what Doc Evatt called “injustice within the law.”

Evatt was analysing the case of the Tolpuddle Martyrs and their transportation to Australia. In that case the magistrates used a law hastily passed to stop a strike for pay and conditions by sailors in the navy. In Queensland it was the same as the prosecution used a law by then defunct in Britain to stop the shearers strike. As Helen Palmer put it in her 1950s ballad: “the squatters owned the court”.

The song is political in the way that Tom Roberts 1890 painting “Shearing the Rams” is political. In many details the song follows the story that Roberts paints of the work in the shearing shed. The shearers with perhaps the ringer in the foreground, the tar boy – sweeper up “awaiting in demand”, the “boss of the board … with his eyes everywhere” are all present in the work. The painting was first shown publicly it met with a mixed reaction, one critic writing in the Melbourne Argus that the depiction of workers at work, the subject matter of the painting, prevented him from considering it as great art.

Roberts reply was that had he been a poet he might have described the process of shearing from the gathering of the sheep together to the many jobs entailed in the shearing shed and the importance of the best shearer (the ringer) but being a painter he shortened the story somewhat. The painting of course became one of the most admired and important Australian paintings of that era and I think what it depicts in the shed tallies very close to what is in the verses of the song. The most important people in both painting and song are the shearers, the boss of the board is looking on “with his eyes everywhere”, the painting could have been affected by hearing the song or the song could have been composed by someone who’d seen the painting – they are related in sentiment and time one on show prior to the 1891 Queensland shearers’ strike and the other appearing in print in the last month of that year, after the strike had collapsed. Both are iconic Australian cultural works, both have appeared on stamps! That they depict workers at work say allow us to claim the importance of workers to the way much of Australia saw itself at a time when economic depression was making life difficult for workers and their unions.

The song published towards the end of the 1891 in the Bacchus Marsh Express is not titled Click go the Shears, even though seven of the eleven verses are clearly recognizable as the song that was first recorded in 1952 and thought to have been first published in 1946. This iconic shearers song is a graphic description of labour and rank in the shearing shed, a comment on the political economy in a colonial epoch where “colonial experience” is a given and is accorded a resigned mockery. “The colonial experience is there of course / with his silver buckled leggings he’s just off his horse”. Unlike later published versions he whistles a tune ‘I am a perfect cure” at tune that is traceable in the newspapers of the time. Apart from the boss of board and the colonial experience the shed is peopled with workers just as in Roberts’ painting. The song too, like Roberts’ painting, was commemorated in a series of stamps.

Between 1891 and 1946 the song was transmitted orally versions were published in at lease three newspapers. After Burl Ives’ 1952 recording of it for broadcast by ABC and distribution in record shops on bakelite 78s, the song was also collected and recorded by folklorists. The original publication specified the tune as “Ring the bell, Watchman” a song that had been popular in Australia since the 1860s.

In 1946 Percy Jones also specifies that American Civil War song as the tune. The 11 verses of the original had been winnowed down to 7 by the time Jones came across it and began teaching it to school children. Among the incomplete versions recorded in the field were 2 verses of the original that are missing in Jones version. The singers knew the song as Click Go the Shears, and recognised the second verse of the original as the chorus. The song was also published in two newspapers under the title The Shearer’s Song in the late 1939.

In 1945 the Melbourne newspaper the Australasian published a request for the words of the song:

What this request indicates is “Old Timer” knew some of the words of the chorus and we read the variant line “Click go the shears, click, click, click; short are the blows and the hand works quick …” a year before Percy Jones published his version. By the way Jones didn’t give the song a title, until it was published in his Burl Ives Folio of Australian Songs in 1953.

Exonerated by the discovery of the earliest published of the song between is the accuracy of the memories of the bush singers who carried fragments of the song in their repertory. They all sang it to the tune “Ring the bell, watchman”, a tune popular with early dance bands, published in Australia a few years after it was composed in America.

The singers who knew the song and were collected in the field – John White, Mr Sanday of Charters Towers, Tiger O’Shane of Cairns, B. Miles of East Gippsland, Jack Parveez of Charters Towers and Bill Reddington of Gulargambone – had varying recollections of when they first heard the song. In his great index of Australian songs Edwards writes:

At present I am a little inclined to think that it may date from the period 1910-20 if only for the negative reason that none of my informants can recall hearing it before that time.

How the collectors of fragments would have loved to have discovered the 1891 version of the song!

We are left to wonder what conclusion they would have come to. Hugh Anderson tells me that he considers that the find reinforces for him something he has been arguing regarding the provenance of bush ballads since the early years of the Folk Song revival – since the mid 1950s – that what we regard as Australian folk songs may have entered an oral phase but that most of them began their journey as published songs and poetry.

This trajectory is now regarded as quite normal by most folklorists, indeed it is hard to see that it could be otherwise in a community where literacy has been much more common than observers and commentators have previously allowed. The class system is still with us and we still hear the terms “uneducated” and “working class” used as if they were somehow synonymous. One feature of Australian composed vernacular lyrical material is that it has been from the convict times largely about working ways and working conditions. It is because of the workaday character of the songs that they remain important to pay attention and keep alive. Otherwise our culture is a one sided affair where our history is only to be sought in the other vast archive we have in spades, that of dusty and often dry archive of Australian officialdom.

The importance of the National of Australia Library Trove Project is hard to over estimate. Over 300 million pages of Australian newspapers that can be searched and corrected online is a technological marvel. And this huge archive grows every day. The word Troving has now entered the Australian vocabulary of lay persons and scholars alike.

Because of Trove we now have three more versions of “Click go the Shears”, a song that also now has three different titles “The Bare Belled Ewe” published in Victoria in 1891 in the Bacchus Marsh Express, “The Shearers Song” published twice in NSW in 1939 in the World’s News and in the Wellington Express. The next publication of the song was by Jones in 1946 in his article about Australian Folk Songs in short lived Catholic magazine the New Century. Percy Jones had differing memories of his collection of the song.

My view is that the most likely source of Jones’ version of the song came from a clipping of one of the versions published in the NSW newspapers in 1939. However there are other possibilities like this one published in the Melbourne newspaper the Argus on 26 June 1953:

Dr. Jones obtained the words of “Click Go the Shears” from an aged shearer-poet in New South Wales about eight years ago, and set them to the old traditional tune of “Ring the Bell, Watchman.”

“Eight years ago” would have been 1945 – one year before he fist published the song.

Possibly the “aged shearer-poet” referred to Jack Moses the Gundagai journalist and poet most famous for his popular song “On the Road to Gundagai. Jones apparently told the folklorist and collector Chris Sullivan that Moses had given him the song in Sydney in the middle of World War 2. Perhaps Moses had a clipping from the 1939 newspapers. He certainly didn’t claim it his own while his work and as a journalist and popular poet would have quite likely to been interested in any published version of the song.

Another aspect of the existence of 1891 published version of the song is that it would have long been out of copyright by the time the 1939 newspapers published their versions one of which had been requested by a reader, and remembered by another. Perhaps the copyright of the song should be revisited and those who benefited from the copyright be required to return any monies they have been paid over the past sixty years or so. A suitable riposte to the notorious Men At Work judgement over a three note riff!