John Wren: Machine Boss, Irish Chieftain or Meddling Millionaire?
1981; Liverpool University Press; Issue: 40 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/27508463
ISSN1839-3039
Autores Tópico(s)Australian History and Society
ResumoThe Melbourne suburb of Collingwood sits, cramped and grimy, in a bend of the river Yarra. Transformed during the Nineteenth Century from a fringe shanty town to an inner city 'twilight zone', Collingwood always housed the workers of the metropolis.1 And although its fac tories, swampy land, and small wooden cottages never attracted the wealthy or successful, Collingwood drew disapproving attention, for the larrikin pushes of 'Mud Island' (the Collingwood Flat), for inadequate public health measures, and not least, for disorderly politics. The collapse of the Melbourne land boom crushed any pretensions to gentility in Collingwood. Entrepreneurs who lived alongside their works fled across the Yarra, and found new homes away from the sharpest suffering of the 1890s depression. By 1906 a local newspaper was left to lament the passing of 'the olden times [when] only citizens of assured social and financial positions aspired to the honour of representing their fellow citizens in the municipal council'.2 Amidst these changes new institutions emerged. Off one of the main roads through the suburb, the Collingwood Football Club drew in local workers in their thousands, to spend their winter Saturdays on the muddy terraces of Victoria Park. Further along Johnston Street, another Collingwood institution crept quietly into public awareness. Behind William Cullen's Tea shop, a woodyard ran through to Sackville Street. Into this yard, so it was claimed, had only gone one load of wood, and that, having been carted in, had never come out.3 Here, between 1893 and 1907, John Wren worked his 'Marvellous and Mammoth Machine', the Collingwood Tote. Wren, the slum boy risen to salubrious Kew, appeared eventually to control Labour Party policy and pre-selection. Perhaps also, he united the interests of crime, the Catholic Church, and the inner city working class, to distort democracy and dictate policy to both State and Federal governments. Two recent Labour History contributors have remarked on the political role of John Wren. Smith, in his account of 'local-level' politics in Collingwood, noted the importance of the tottering remains of 'Irish working class political machines'.4 Hogan, seeking to identify a Sydney 'style' of Catholic politicking, found in Australian cities an 'Irish, ethnic style of politics ... a machine style which can best be observed in the history of ethnic politics in the U.S.A.'.5 The most 'notorious' of these machines, he pointed out, has been the 'political empire' of John Wren.6 Humphrey McQueen once commented that 'happy indeed would be the 1. For a detailed account of nineteenth-century Collingwood see Bernard Barrett, The
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