Defending Internationalism in Interwar Broken Hill

By Sarah Gregson

In the 1920s and early 1930s, Broken Hill workers were divided about the presence of southern European migrants on the mines.

Nevertheless, strong anti-racist opposition from within the miners' union towards a returned soldier racist, Richard Gully, stood in stark contrast to the role of mine managers, conservative local newspapers and other Returned Soldiers' Association activists who employed racism as a classic 'divide-and-rule' industrial strategy. As a companion piece to my work on the 1934 Kalgoorlie race riots, this study provides further confirmation that internationalist responses to migrant workers were not unknown in the Australian labour movement in this period.

(Labour History. No 86, May 2004)