Mick Laracy: Shearer and Unionist, in Australia and New Zealand
1980; Liverpool University Press; Issue: 38 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/27508403
ISSN1839-3039
AutoresEugénie Laracy, Eugénie Laracy, Hugh Laracy,
Tópico(s)Australian History and Society
ResumoThis essay, it must be confessed, had its genesis in the virtue of pietas. It is no coincidence that the authors and their subject share the same name. But it is hoped that its significance is rather more than that of an exercise in ancestor worship. For the career and writings of Mick Laracy illuminate several important facets of New Zealand's industrial history. These include the bearing of Australian contacts on trade union organi sation, the nature and growth of rural unionism and its relations with the more aggressive urban unionism of the miners, and the literature of the industrial labour movement. Central to this last topic was Mick's involvement in the founding of The Maoriland Worker newspaper in 1910, although it also includes a small body of memoirs and of verse, some might say doggerel. Some of the poems are political; for example, two published in 1910 and 1911 criticise Sir Joseph Ward, the Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Party, for lacking the common touch of 'King Dick' Seddon, and one published in 1938 honours the Labour Party as the heir of the Liberals under Seddon. But for its most part his writings celebrate the warm comradeship, the mateship, he felt towards those with whom he sheared and with whom he was engaged in the cause of unionism. They thus illustrate the emotional and fraternal bond that linked many members of the early labour movement more profoundly than ideological and organisational ones. Mick's writings and career pro vide substance and illustration for W. G. Spence's characterisation of the shearer unionists:
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