The Maritime Strikes in South Australia, 1887 and 1890

Abstract

One reason for the distinctiveness of South Australian labour history was that its economic history differed sharply from that of other colonies. The boom in South Australia, unlike that of other eastern colonies, had not outlived the year 1882, and from 1885 onwards emigration from South Australia had exceeded immigration into it, an unfortunate and unique distinction among the Australian colonies.6 Depression or at least stagnation had set in much earlier than elsewhere, while in 1890 there was a temporary uplift owing to a good harvest in 1889 and the rapid develop ment of the Broken Hill mines.7 Thus in Adelaide labour had long been schooled in hard times but there was none of the unemployment which badly affected Melbourne from June 1890.8 In another way the South Australian experience was peculiar: in 1887 there had been a local prototype of the later general dispute. Both the cause, affiliation of a union of ships' officers with a labour body, and the result, disaffiliation, were to repeat themselves in 1890 on a wider and more disastrous scale. Let us first look at the maritime strike which threw Port Adelaide into near complete idleness from Tuesday 11 October to Friday 15 October 1887.