"Your Tool Box will be Raffled By and By":
Poetry and the People in the Railways Union Gazette and Railroad 1921-1935Peter Kirkpatrick
School of Communication and Media
University of Western Sydney, Nepean
On 10 March 1935 the Australian Railways Union (ARU) journal Railroad devoted a six-page memorial
spread to its Australian General President, E.A. Chapman, who had died at the age of forty-seven on February 20.
In its report on his funeral service at the Union’s headquarters, Transport House, it quoted the words of
the visiting Czech communist writer Egon Kisch, who thanked Chapman on behalf of "more than thirty millions
of Anti-Fascists [sic] fighters" around the world: "We will never forget you, Arthur Chapman; we will
honour your memory by carrying on your work."1
Despite Kisch’s words, Ernest Arthur Chapman is today one of the less well-known figures in
the history of Australian unionism, probably because his career within the local union movement was relatively
short, a little over a decade. Yet he already had excellent long-standing union credentials when he arrived in
Melbourne in 1923. Born in Lincoln, where he trained as an engineer and draughtsman, Chapman had worked in
various editorial roles on the Independent Labour Party’s Lincolnshire Democrat, the Shop Steward
Movement’s journal Solidarity, as well as the Metal Workers’ Record. He was a founder
and the first chairman of the West London Trades Hall, was involved with the Central Labour College and, before
the War, had been a delegate to Syndicalist conferences in Berlin and Paris. After the War, in 1929-21, he was
deputised to investigate labour conditions on the Continent, a mission that took him to the fledgling Soviet Union, which impressed him mightily. Given this international background, it’s hardly surprising that in 1924 Chapman was unanimously selected out of a field of fifty candidates to fill the role of Secretary of the NSW Branch of the ARU.2 In this capacity he also took over editorship of the Railways Union Gazette, which he remodelled into Railroad in 1927. Chapman’s career with the ARU provides a time-frame for the present article, but this is not intended
as a eulogy to his individual accomplishments. Much of his significance to the union lay in his talent for
drawing out the strengths of others; as Railroad put it, "although a leader, he did not believe in leadership.
He sought to educate and regiment the working class into an intelligent, organised army that would understand its own requirements and seek their achievement".3 This is reflected in the poetry that
he published in the ARU’s journal – arguably a very small part of his achievement, but one that sheds
a unique light on the variety and vitality of working class literary culture at this time. I’ll come back
to Chapman and the changes he brought about in Railroad, but a digression at once theoretical and elegaic
(befitting the mood with which I began) is needed in order to explain how I propose to examine aspects of this
culture. The following poem appeared in the March 1927 issue of Railroad. "Your Tool Box will be Raffled By and By" was written by Jo Evans, an otherwise unknown poet, and published "By request":
Chorus:
When I was but a ’prentice lad,
When I became a journeyman
You may often meet a sneak,
I must end my little song, How do we read a poem like this? From an older critical perspective such a text, verbally unadventurous and a little roughshod in technique, would be seen to lack high aesthetic value. Relegated to a low and unstudied place in the cultural hierarchy, it might even be regarded as "outside literature" (to use Tony Bennett’s term).5 Yet even assuming that one wanted to examine the poem as a purely verbal artefact, formalist approaches wouldn’t tell us much about the poem’s historical meaning(s) in the context of a trade union journal and its readership in 1927. "Your Tool Box will be Raffled By and By" is about physical labour — albeit skilled labour — and is written in the long-consecrated working-class poetic form of a ballad. Indeed, the chorus suggests it was written as a song (there are strong echoes of music hall about it as well). That it was published in the Railroad "By request" suggests that it may have already circulated by word of mouth, and that some union members had asked to see the words in print. An older-style Marxist critic might be inclined to celebrate these facts, and the hearty proletarian values they enshrine, and use them as evidence of a distinctly working-class aesthetic. John Frow, however, warns us about the too simple division of popular
versus high culture. Pushed to its reductive limits, this binarism serves to
distort and artificially merge what are often complex negotiations between
interrelated yet distinct "regimes of value" within society. Note:
regimes of value, plural. It’s no longer valid to talk about a
single, unified popular — or, indeed, working-class — culture any more than it is to speak of a monolithic hegemonic one.6 In Cultural Studies
and Cultural Value Frow writes: The category of popular culture has a unitary form... only so long as it is derived from a singular entity, "the people"; otherwise it breaks down into a bundle of very heterogeneous forms and practices. Its appearance of unity is reinforced by the privileging of certain key examples: in the folkloric tradition it is the practices of song, dance, speech, and storytelling occurring outside commercial mediation that take this privilege...7 Instead of such organic or solidarist versions of popular culture, Frow
argues for the idea that communities are the products of cultural forms
rather than their originating producers. Rather than preceding their modes of
representation, communities are actually constructed by the representations they
come to identify with.8 Frow is describing late Twentieth
Century consumer culture, but his comments apply to the early Twentieth Century
context as well. Clearly, a poem like "Your Tool Box will be Raffled By and
By" has to be read in terms of its place in a trade union newspaper which
is actively promoting the goal of political solidarity among its working-class
readership. But the culture of the ARU was not isolated from other, more
mainstream cultural forms. Smith’s Weekly, for example, was
enormously successful during this period, and played an important role in
helping to define the values of the average white Australian male –
including those of Railroad's readership. Like the Railroad,
Smith’s championed the underdog and took an apparently
"oppositional" line to many of the Anglophilic high-cultural trappings
of upper middle-class society,9 but it did so with a view to
preserving another set of middle-class values which included an implicit faith
in free enterprise and the capitalist system. In describing the
discursive operations of a text such as "Your Tool Box will Be Raffled By
and By" we need to be aware of a broader set of popular contexts than that
of the union paper in which it appeared. In other words, we need to be aware of
overlapping discursive realms, representing potentially different regimes of
popular value. That it reworks the ancient topoi "all must die" and
timor mortis conturbat me, for example, connects it with a more elite,
universalising lyrical tradition. The use of such a commonplace metonymy as a
tool box, however, brings these traditionally "high" themes down to
earth within a "lower" class context.10 While the word
"rumper" — presumably the Australian term for a tail-less chicken
— seems to anchor the text within a local vernacular, the opening reference
to a banker’s card may imply British origins.11 The reference in
the chorus to "roam[ing] round the country" potentially links the
speaker with those itinerant bush workers celebrated by the previous generation
of literary nationalists associated with the Bulletin; yet there is
nothing that explicitly places him within any rural setting, let alone an
Australian one. Taking elements like these into account, then, makes it less
easy to claim an unproblematically singular context for the poem. In
their study of Australian reading practices in the period 1890-1930 Martyn Lyons
and Lucy Taksa comment on the surprising eclecticism of readers’ choices
and how this produces a "levelling effect": "Literary giants" are reduced to domestic scale, while forgotten authors of popular fiction are restored to the positions of celebrity they once enjoyed. This has led us to see Shakespeare, for instance, very much as the reader saw him on the bookshelf: in very mixed company, surrounded by Mrs Beeton, the novels of Marie Corelli, and copies of Truth.12 Working-class readers will not only read that which relates directly to their
social position or political struggle, but will naturally consume a range of
popular and even not so popular texts within a heteroglossic range. The scope of
such consumption will also affect their own cultural production and the forms
that it takes. To avoid an essentialism based on either class or
aesthetics, then, a poem such as "Your Tool Box will be Raffled By and
By" has to be read in terms of its relationships with adjacent discourses
and the genres which serve them. What follows is an attempt to read a sample of poetry from the
ARU’s journal in the 1920s and thirties in terms of its readership —
both as consumers and producers of verse — and in relation to journalistic
and political changes that brought with them shifting discursive contexts. When Chapman was appointed Secretary of the NSW Branch of the ARU in 1924 the
union was struggling to assert its claim to represent all grades of both rail
and tramway workers — permanent-way, traffic and workshops — against
the sectional claims of craft and so-called loyalist unions. The national Australian Railways
Union was therefore formed in Melbourne in September 1920. In December the same
year its NSW Branch was registered under the Arbitration Act, and in the
following year, 1921, it launched its newsletter, the Railways Union
Gazette. In its first four years, however, the ARU leadership in NSW was
riven by factionalism, in part fuelled by the lingering effects of 1917, and
then by a scandal over ALP branch stacking. Three Secretaries preceded Chapman,
who was appointed in 1924 because he had no factional affiliations, nor indeed
any history within Australian unionism.15 Chapman’s
impact on the ARU can, in part, be measured by the changes he wrought in its
newsletter, where his experience as a journalist and his understanding of the
evolving role of the press transformed a fairly stolid record of union affairs
into a genuine working-class paper which, as well as reporting industrial and
political developments that affected railway employees, also catered for some of
the "lifestyle" interests of its readers. The Railways
Union Gazette was the name used by the union’s journal until the end of
1926. A notice appeared in the December issue advising that, from January 1927,
it would be called the Railroad, commenting that "this matter has
been given serious thought, and it is hoped that the new move will prove to be
advantageous": "The Railroad" will endeavour to voice the aspirations of
railway and tramway workers generally, it will expose tyranny on the part of
departmental officers, and will be used as the medium for conveying information
as to union activities to the members. There is room for vast improvement, but members themselves can render
assistance in this connection by sending along items of interest, humorous or
otherwise.16 From 1926, the paper increased from the mostly sixteen-page page format (plus
wrap-around cover) it had developed since 1921 to twenty pages in September,
twenty-eight in May 1927, and finally thirty-two in June that year. The
expansion in size signalled an expansion in scope, so that by 1930
Railroad had the look of a mainstream tabloid. Commencing in September
1926 was a gardening section and a do-it-yourself radio column called
"Radio Ripples". October saw the introduction of a poulty section, and
November a sport section and a women’s page "Conducted by
Caroline" (a women’s page had been trialed inside the back cover in
late 1923 and 1924, but the change in the name of its editor from
"Angelique" to "Altruist" implies the spirit in which it had
been maintained). Further improvements took place in 1927 with the addition of
"Children’s Corner" in April and a "Footlights and
Flicks" section in June. Chapman’s call for members to "[send] along items of interest,
humorous or otherwise" recalls J.F. Archibald’s practice in the
Bulletin of asking readers to become contributors,17 but it
also represents the desperation of an editor with no journalistic staff.
The
same request was voiced by the Gazette’s founding editor, A.C.
Wallace, who noted in the very first issue that "Interesting short sketches
and pars. relative to the Railway or Tramway service will be
welcome".18 Nevertheless, in July 1928 Chapman complained
that The paper is produced under considerable difficulty, as it is a spare-time effort. Nevertheless, if all members played their part, its influence would be much more effective than what it is today.19 – which suggests that Chapman produced Railroad on top of his
normal workload as ARU Branch Secretary. Despite this burden, the very same issue
marked the introduction of bigger pages together with the dropping of the
journal’s Bulletin -like pink cover. Chapman used this fact to assert
the principles under which it operated: The pink cover which has been used for many years is now discarded. Some have accused us of being "pink" in outlook, whilst others state we are bloody red. We steer no middle course, but endeavour to present working-class problems in clear and simple language. We also try to teach railway workers that they have equal responsibilities to their class, in common with other workers.20 The various lifestyle sections arguably assisted this aim, engendering
the sense of a broadly-based working-class culture that embraced not only the
needs of the (mostly) male breadwinners, but of their wives and children as
well. Besides the struggle for better industrial conditions, One difference between Railroad and the mainstream popular press in the twenties is in the level of homespun practical advice that’s offered: men are instructed on how to build a better henhouse, children are encouraged to make their own toys, while women on a tight budget are encouraged to cook "mutton duck" for Christmas when real poultry is unaffordable.23 Another distinction is in the explicitly political nature of its commentary. "Uncle Toby" in Children’s Corner doesn’t hesitate to inculcate socialist values by including such original verse as "Lucky Dorgs" by "Ida Nough", which shows the influence of C.J. Dennis’s The Sentimental Bloke and its sequels:
Yer see my pop ain’t got no car:
An’ I ain’t never had no ride
She sez, some day perhaps
Nursery rhymes are also given a new twist; for example, "Song of the Miners":
Sing a song of sixpence,
Coming up at night
Though mainstream newspapers such as the Sydney Morning Herald might only publish one poem a week, the Railroad and its predecessor usually printed at least a couple of poems per issue, although some months might be leaner than others. In the days of the Railways Union Gazette most of the poetry was taken from outside sources, either from other journals — including Smith’s Weekly and the Rhodesian Railway Workers Journal — or from collections of verse. Works by well-known writers such as Bernard O’Dowd, Robert Service and Siegfried Sassoon appear, as well as those by forgotten figures such as the Irish "Navvy Poet" Patrick MacGill. After Chapman took over the editorship, and particularly after the Gazette expanded into Railroad, however, the amount of original verse increased. Much of this was produced by the paper’s readership themselves and, as the twenties progressed, the hymns to the revolution that were a standard of union journals at this time gave way to topical poems emerging more directly from the experience of rail workers. This is marked by a change in linguistic register. Compare a piece like "Lucky Dorgs" with the opening of "Bolchevism" by W.H. Levey, which appeared in the Railways Union Gazette for October 1924:
A sun’s aflame in the eastern sky
The clank of a million chains awakes
Though written in proletarian ballad form, the images are abstract clichés that reach towards a "high" Shelleyan style; only one word, "bushland", marks the poem’s Australian context. While the presence of pieces such as this suggests that the appreciation of a "higher" poetical register was not unavailable to Chapman’s readership27 (not any less than a liking for opera was), the fact that they became less common also suggests that they were less favoured compared to other, more vernacular modes. Parodies of privileged texts, though infrequent and hardly respectful, also imply a range of cultural literacy, as in this unionist rewriting of Kipling’s "If":
If you can stand your ground and not go scabbing,
Compare the language of "Bolchevism" to the melodrama of "The Scab’s Dream" by "H.J.L." from 1927:
I saw the drivers and firemen
So I came out on strike with them,
And when I saw my old mates,
And when I look at my little boy,
Then in my dreams I wander to 1937.
For a moment I was dumbfounded,
Not another word was spoken,
Then I woke with the consolation,
It has a wtr. frtge.,
I have a gdn. & an orch.
There’s new d. knbs. on every d.
I must shortly leave the banker,
For my card is long exempt.
The fire of youth has vanished from my eye,
And the saddest thought to-day
Is when I have passed away
That my tool box will be raffled by and by.
I have roamed around the country,
But am getting stiff and old;
And now I am travelling home again to die.
Though you’re young and strong to-day,
Yet the years pass away,
And your tool box will be raffled by and by.
Just starting at the trade,
Some chump would make me mad enough to cry,
But I heeded not his chaff,
For this saying made me laugh,
That his tool box would be raffled by and by.
And started on the road,
With pockets light, but spirits always high,
I was never known to shirk
From the hardest kind of work,
But my tool box may be raffled by and by.
Sometimes I thought it hard
When I struck a stranger’s yard,
And a rumper worked with malice in his eye,
But I merely used to grin,
As I said, "My boy, go in,"
But your tool box will be raffled by and by.
Who with manner soft and meek,
Will do his best to do you on the sly.
Keep your eye on the lad,
Let this saying make you glad,
That his tool box will be raffled by and by.
And be jogging right along,
My journey’s end is drawing very nigh;
Take my advice, be fair,
Act the man, upon the square,
For your tool box may be raffled by and by.4
Loyalist unions
were management-sanctioned scab unions that had been formed in the wake of the
disastrous eighty-two day strike of 1917,13 which saw the
deregistration of the ARU’s predecessor, the state-based Amalgamated
Railway and Tramway Service Association (ARTSA), and the arrest of its leaders.
Those strikers who were allowed to return to their jobs automatically lost
seniority to loyalists, thus creating divisions within the industry that lasted
for many years. As the ARU’s historian, Mark Hearn writes, "If any
good came out of the 1917 strike for the ‘lilywhite’ [ie, striking
ARTSA] rail worker, it was the realisation that, if all-grades unionism was to
survive on the railways, it would need to be more broadly based than a single
state union".14
the
Railroad's "imagined community" (in Benedict
Anderson’s terms)21 is also interested in football, cricket,
boxing, racing – and even, by 1928, wrestling. In all likelihood it keeps
chooks in the backyard to supplement the family’s diet. Mum does all the
cooking and housework, dad looks after the garden (and the chooks), at least one
family member is building a radio, and everyone goes to the movies or live
shows. Interestingly, opera is reviewed alongside musical comedy and vaudeville,
demonstrating that high culture was not necessarily — or not inextricably
— linked with class enemies. On one level, this is not such a different
community from that imagined by the Railroad's conservative
mainstream contemporary, Smith’s Weekly. Many elements of this kind
of lifestyle were shared by a large section of the middle class. By March 1929,
bundles of the Railroad began to be delivered to railway bookstalls, and
were sold out within hours, indicating that the paper could attract wider public
interest.22
Like lots o’ dorgs I’ve seen.
Them dorgs what has a shoffer,
An’ a great big lemerzeen.
It’s all that he can do
To keep us kids in grub an’ clo’s –
Now I’m a-tellin’ you.
In any kind of car,
Becos yer see I ain’t a dorg,
I’m just a kid, but Ma –
That pop may have a car. An’ gee!
Yer bet I won’t take dorgs to ride
An’ let kids walk – not me!24
Capitalism’s fine –
Four-and-forty hours
Working down a mine.
Like goslings in a cage –
What an occupation
For this enlightened age.25
With promise of wond’rous day,
A song’s athrill in the bushland nigh
With note of a wond’rous lay.
The echoes of rock-scarred Time,
As the gathered might of an aeon breaks
The fetters that bound in grime.26
Although you know you badly want a feed;
If you can tell the boss where he gets off at,
And scorn the dirty business he wants done;
You’ll win your fight, and all you’re sticking out for,
And you’ll be called a Union man, my son.28
Last night I lie [sic] asleeping,
I had an awful dream;
I dreamt that I was back again in 1917.
And thought it the greatest sight
To see such a body of workmen
Staying out for their rights.
But the boss came to me next day
And appointed me a driver,
With a rise of four bob a day.
Men that always lent me a bob,
They turned their heads and whispered,
"He took an old man’s job."
So happy, young and gay,
he doesn’t care if I scabbed it,
But I wonder will he some day.
My boy has grown to manhood,
He is the pick of an Australian XI.
He came to me one evening,
With a look I had never seen,
And said, "Dad, what did you do in 1917?"
He had taken my breath away.
Then I answered,
"I stuck to the Government and worked 16 hours a day."
He left me with down-bowed head.
Next morning when I went to his room,
I found him lying dead,
And there a note was written:
"I love you deary [sic] Dad;
I could not live to be happy
To think I am a son of a Scab."
It was only a silly dream,
I would give all I possess in the wide, wide world
To live again through 17.29
With wtr. h. & c.
Right through the place I have e.l.
The cooking’s done with g.
It’s right beside the sea:
With v. all r., and mble. stps.
Lead up to my front d.
Also a grvld. pth.
Leads to the bung. A whte. tld. rm.
Contns. the shr. & bth.
And also n. Yle. lks.
On my frnt. ln. a fntn. squirts
O’er ormntl. rks.30
In October 1928, a month after Lower’s piece, there appeared the first of several full-page self-illustrated ballads by "Johnson", a ticket collector on the Illawarra line platform at Central station. His second appearance, "The Gates of 23" from November, is typical of his style, combining social observation with a wry account of railway working conditions:
|
Have you ever stood for hours On a cold, wet concrete floor Clipping tickets as they pass you Till your hands are stiff & sore And when you roar out "Show em" All the flappers murmur "Gee" That’s the way we put our time in Underneath on 23.
The stools are just to look at
The lights seem placed to trick you
Of cranks there’s always plenty
But the trains will still be roaring
|
|
The influence of Henry Lawson is apparent, but Johnson has taken his main textual cue from the light verses about Sydney life that Kenneth Slessor was writing for Smith’s Weekly at this time, with their vivid illustrations by Virgil Reilly. These first began appearing in February 1928, though they were constituted as a series in August under the title "Darlinghurst Nights".32
Johnson therefore didn’t take long in adapting the style of Darlinghurst Nights to ARU purposes. Although he never attempted the pyrotechnics of Slessor’s more flashy feats of rhyme and rhythm, sticking to variations of a plainer ballad metre, he had complete control over the visual design. During 1929-30 he wrote mostly humorous pieces on a number of railway-related themes: for example, the cramped conditions of "The ‘Seven Thirty Two’" from Strathfield (January 1929), "The Passing Show" of the country trains concourse at Central (April 1929), navvying in the bush in "The Song of the Fettler" (November 1929), and the romantic trials of a relief porter in "A Tale of the ‘Relief’" (February 1930). A mark of the popularity of these poems is the fact that, like Lawson before him, by March 1929 he was giving paid testimonials for Heenzo cough medicine.
Publication of verse in the Railroad had declined by the end of that year, and continued to do so the following year – a trend that can be observed in a number of union journals. By mid 1930 Johnson was drawing cartoons rather than writing verse. A few poems in the early thirties refer to the Depression, such as "This Year, ’31" by Francis Utting (January 1931), "The Men on the Road" by A. Ernest Chancellor (March 1933, which compares unemployed men tramping the countryside in search of work to the spurned Christ, "the Lone Pal of the Trail"), and "The Wail of the Workless" (December 1933) by "G.B.". In contrast, "A Guard’s Nightmare" by "Englert" describes the tedious gentility of stations on the North Shore line, which are marked off in order:
The train rolls on to Wollstonecraft
Where the S.M.’s in possession,
And the suits and frocks of people here
Show no signs of depression.33
Militarism and unemployment became constant themes, along with a more stridently internationalist tone. Lloyd Ross, who became NSW State Secretary and Railroad editor in 1935, published his own agitprop text for chorus on the front page of the October 1935 issue. "Release Thaelmann" calls for justice for the imprisoned German communist leader:
Members of Chorus: 1. Send a greeting to Thaelmann. 2. A message to Thaelmann. 3. Courage Thaelmann. 4. We think of you. 5 We call and agitate for Thaelmann. 6. Our demand will pierce his lonely cell. 7. Our demand will reach terrified Hitler. 8 Our call will gather strength from all corners of the earth.
Chorus: Free Thaelmann! Free Thaelmann!37
This takes us some distance from the homespun poetry of the late 1920s and early thirties. It’s as though the union’s need to respond to the decade’s escalating global crises simply overrode those local expressions of class-consciouness rooted in the everyday literary cultures of workplace and parlour. The struggle against fascism, in particular, was now a major focus of class solidarity (Chapman himself had been General President of the Australian Council Against War). Perhaps, too, the enhanced professionalism of Railroad, with its high production values brought about by Chapman’s innovations, tended to exclude the amateur versifiers, or at least dissuade them from contributing. Whatever the case, as Railroad became increasingly interested in the big picture, poems on a small scale such as "Your Tool Box will be Raffled By and By" — from less than a decade before — begin to seem like the products of a bygone age.
Chapman had drawn from his readers a surprising range of poetic responses to both the culture of their own workplace and the rapidly changing modern world that its trams and trains serviced, as well as to the broader international struggle for workers’ rights and social equality. The variety and humour of the poetry in Railroad in fact argues against a unitary, folkloric view of working-class culture. Instead, it represents the effects of its readers’ engagement with a heterogeneous range of distinctly modern discourses, a heterogeneity embodied in the diversification of Railroad’s own contents in the late 1920s. As John Hartley has written, "Journalism may be taken as the sense-making practice of modernity (the condition) and popularizer of modernism (the ideology)".38 In their attempt to describe modern life, ticket collector Johnson’s poems — as much as Kenneth Slessor’s light verses — also celebrate the world that has been delivered by technological change. While Slessor takes jazzy Kings Cross as his metonymy of the modern, for Johnson it’s the "The Gates of 23" and the mass commuter culture that passes through them.
"The poetry generation" is how Lyons and Taksa refer to those brought up in the shadow of the First World War: "This was not just a generation of poetry readers: they recited it, they quoted it, and they wrote it. This was a golden age for the amateur poet."39 With this in mind, the last word should go to a Railroad reader. In 1931 Mrs R. Evans of 158 Carrington Avenue, Hurstville, won a "Special Prize of £1" for her poem about the paper and its features. "A Sum Up" suggests just how much she and others like her came to understand their union community through the pages its journal – as well as the role that poetry itself could play in that understanding:
1. Anon. 1935, "Union Service in Transport House", Railroad, 10 March, p. 4.
2. Anon. 1935, "In Memoriam: Ernest Arthur Chapman", Railroad, 10 March, p.2.
3. Anon. 1935, "In Memoriam: Ernest Arthur Chapman", p. 2.
4. Evans, J. 1927, "Your Tool Box Will be Raffled By and By", Railroad, 10 March 1927, p. 20.
5. Bennett, T. 1990, Outside Literature, London: Routledge. Bennett argues that, while the category of the aesthetic is no longer tenable, "literature" remains the indispensable descriptor for a particular set of cultural practices: "Whatever its difficulties, the concept of literature cannot simply be dispensed with. While its conventional understanding as a uniquely privileged kind of writing cannot be sustained, the term does cogently designate a specific, but non-unitary, field of institutionally organised practices – of writing, reading, commentary and pedagogy. ‘Outsiderism’, when literature is defined in this way, is simply not an option" (p. 273). The use of the term "literary" in this article assumes a similar definition.
6. To take a pertinent example, in an article on the writer Henry Boote, long-time editor of the Australian Worker (1914-43), Ian Syson shows how Boote’s work often crosses "rigid discursive boundaries" (p. 88) between the literary and the non-literary, and between "high" and "low" poetic forms, and that it sometimes draws upon dominant racist and sexist discourses in its arguments for socialism. "The working class culture being reconstructed here as a context in which we can place Boote has several facets" (p. 89), he writes. As this quote indicates, however, and in spite of his sensitivity to such complex negotiations between the various cultural registers involved, Syson still speaks of Australian working class culture as a single organic entity. Syson, I. 1996, "Henry Ernest Boote: Putting the Boote into the Australian Literary Archive", Labour History, 70, pp. 71-91.
7. Frow, J. 1995, Cultural Studies and Cultural Value, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 82.
8. Frow 1995, p. 84.
9. For an uncritical popular account of Smith’s Weekly, see Blaikie, G. 1966, Remember Smith’s Weekly?: A Biography of an Uninhibited National Australian Newspaper, Adelaide: Rigby.
10. Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on carnivalesque inversion and the relational, parodic meaning of certain "low" literary discourses may be relevant in this regard, but there is no space to take it further here. It has, in any case, been rather overplayed in recent studies of popular culture: see, for example, Docker, J. 1994, "Part 3: Carnival", Postmodernism and Popular Culture: A Cultural History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
11. Delbridge, A. et al. 1997, "banker’s card" and "rumper" ("a domestic fowl with peculiar feather growth due to lack of a tail bone"), The Macquarie Dictionary, 3rd edn, Macquarie University: Macquarie Library, pp. 162, 1861.
12. Lyons, M., and Taksa, L. 1992, Australian Readers Remember: An Oral History of Reading 1890-1930, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, p. 188.
13. Hearn, M. 1990, Working Lives: A History of the Australian Railways Union (NSW Branch), Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, p. 29.
14. Hearn, M. 1990, p. 32.
15. Hearn, M. 1990, pp. 36-40.
16. Chapman, E.A. 1926, "Change of Title", Railroad, 10 December, p. 19.
17. See Lawson, S. 1987, The Archibald Paradox: A Strange Case of Authorship, Ringwood: Penguin, p. 154ff.
18. Wallace, A.C. 1921, "The Railway [sic] Union Gazette", Railways Union Gazette, 28 July, p. 6.
19. Chapman, E.A. 1928, "In New Garb", Railroad, 10 July, p. 3.
20. Chapman, E.A. 1928, "In New Garb", p. 3
21. Anderson, B. 1983, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London, Verso. Anderson argues that the rise of the print media in the nineteenth century "made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways" (p. 40). Newspapers — the Bulletin is a prime example in the Australian context — thus had a key role in creating a sense of national consciousness.
22. Anon. 1929, "Sold Out in Five hours: last Issue of 'Railroad'", Railroad, 10 March, p. 5. The advetisment noted that, apart from the deivery of a copy to every member, a bundle of "Railroads was placed on forty bookstalls and sold out in a few hours."
23. "Caroline", 1926, "Menu for a Very Inexpensive Dinner", Railroad, 10 December, p. iii.
24. "Ida Nough", 1927, "Lucky Dorgs", Railroad, 10 October, p. 25.
25. Anon. 1927, "Song of the Miners", Railroad, 10 December, p. 23.
26. Levey, W.H. 1924, "Bolchevism", Railways Union Gazette, 15 October, p. iii.
27. Poets of the left in this period such as Bartlett Adamson and Henry Boote (see footnote 6), who were both involved in popular journalism, often favoured anachronistic high Romantic poetic styles in their more "serious" work. See, for example, Adamson, B. 1945, Bringer of Light: An Allegorical Fantasy, Melbourne: Hawthorne: "the influence of Keats will assumably be apparent to anyone reading the story, and Keats, more than any other great English poet, was a product of the common people of England" (Foreword, n.p.).
28. Anon. 1928, "If", Railroad, 10 May, p. 17.
29. "H.J.L." 1927, "The Scab’s Dream", Railroad, 10 January, p. 7.
30. "L.W. Lr." 1928, "It’s the Kts. Wskrs.", Railroad, 10 September, p. 8. Lower wrote humorous columns for the Labor Daily at this time: see Hornage, B. 1993, Lennie Lower: He Made a Nation Laugh, Pymble: Angus & Robertson, pp. 68-70.
31. "Johnson" 1928, "The Gates of 23", Railroad, 10 November, p. 11.
32. Two collections of these have been published: see "Virgil" and Slessor, K. 1981, Darlinghurst Nights, London: Angus & Robertson (facsimile of 1933 edn, Sydney: Frank Johnson); and Slessor, K. Backless Betty from Bondi, ed. J. Croft, London: Angus & Robertson, 1983.
33. "Englert" 1932, "A Guard’s Nightmare", Railroad, 10 January, p. 8.
34. Reproduced in Kirkpatrick, P. 1992, The Sea Coast of Bohemia: Literary Life in Sydney’s Roaring Twenties, St Lucia: UQP, pp. 250-52.
35. Lyons and Traska 1992, note that modernist poetry was unknown among their interviewees: "None mentioned Eliot or Pound, or even Yeats or Hopkins" (p. 65). The free verse poems in Railroad mostly appear to be written by more professional writers or journalists, rather than by the journal’s readers.
36. "Harvey" 1935, "Jubilee", Railroad, 10 June, p. 7. Harvey illustrated a number of full-page poems around this time, sometimes adding his own text, as in this example.
37. Ross, L. 1935, "Release Thaelmann", Railroad, 10 October, p. 1.
38. Hartley, J. 1996, Popular Reality: Journalism, Modernity, Popular Culture, New York: Arnold, p. 33.
39. Lyons and Taska 1992, p. 59.
40. Evans, R. 1931, "A Sum Up", Railroad, 10 August, p. 11.