A Tough Place to Have a Picket Line

Abstract

One morning in 1993, just on sunrise, I was sitting in the back of a Toyota four wheel-drive on the way from Jabir? to Twin Falls in Kakadu National Park. I was one of nine tourists listening to an informative lecture from a friendly young tour guide about the park. Just out of Jabir? we passed the entrance to the Kakadu Highway, which heads north towards Mudginberri, Ubir Rock and Oenpelli. As we passed by, our young guide told us how eight years earlier the powerful meatworkers' union from 'down south' had tried to destroy the local 'battler', Jay Pendarvis, but had lost. Having been an activist in the labour movement at the time of the Mudginberri dispute, I was familiar with the rhetoric. I only wondered if he told every tourist group the same story. A year later, I moved to the Northern Territory and began looking for a research topic for an honours thesis and the Mudginberri dispute seemed an ideal choice. When I finally got down to writing the thesis, I admitted that, from the moment I heard the tour guide's comments, 'I wanted to tell the union's side of the story'1 a legitimate aim for any labour historian as long as one is honest with their findings. In retrospect, I think it was quite courageous of me, an apprentice historian, to be so open about my motivation. I was less courageous when it came to transforming my thesis into a journal article and I think this is the source of the debate between Dr Kitay and myself.2 The union 'side of the story7 is still the basis of my Labour History article, but it is more implicit than explicit. Hence, Dr Kitay could be justified in thinking that much of my work duplicates his and Mr Powe's commendable article published in 1987.3 When my article was refereed, the anonymous scholars who read it commented that they welcomed my work, knew I had a good story to tell but were not sure of the overall purpose of my work. Taking their advice, I eventually chose to contextualise Mudginberri within the rise of the militant managerialism of the New Right. What I really wanted to do, however, was tell the story of how a group of meatworkers in the Northern Territory made sense of and interacted with a local dispute that became a cause celebre in industrial relations. I have very few differences with Kitay and Powe and the comments I made about their work were mainly motivated by the academic convention of differentiating my work from other scholars. From both articles, it is clear that the Mudginberri dispute was very complex and multi-faceted, involving the interplay of a host of local and national factors. While both articles tried to cover all these