Donald Grant: A Tribute

Abstract

When Donald Grant died on 9 June 1970, the Australian Labor movement lost one of its most colourful figures of this century. Born in Inverness, Scotland, in 1888, he came to Australia as a young man soon to be caught up in Labor's memorable fight against conscription during World War I. As one of the best speakers for the Industrial Workers of the World (the I.W.W. or 'wobblies') he drew record crowds to that organisation's regular Sunday meetings in the Sydney Domain, and on Melbourne's Yarra Bank. With brilliant, rarely-equalled mob oratory, he inveighed against conscription and expounded the I.W.W's aggres sively militant policies of industrial action, including sabotage, by which it hoped to hasten the collapse of capitalism. At a Domain meeting, Grant was reported as saying that 'for every day that Barker is in gaol, it will cost the capitalists 10,000 pounds'. (Tom Barker, as editor of the I.W.W. journal 'Direct Action', was serving a sentence of six months.) These 'fifteen words' were a very important part of the Crown's case against him in 1916 when, following a number of serious Sydney fires, he was charged, along with eleven other I.W.W. members, with 'arson, conspiracy to prevent justice and incitement to sedition'. After a sensational trial, characterised by considerable circum stantial evidence, Grant was found guilty and sentenced to fifteen years? a sentence which stirred H. E. Boote, brilliant editor of the Australian Workers' Union weekly The Worker, to write his powerful critical analysis of the trial: 'The Case of Grant, Fifteen Years for Fifteen Words'.