Today marks the 135th Anniversary of the start of the great Australian Shearers Strike which was fought to preserve the wages and conditions of Australian workers, principally by ensuring the exclusion of Chinese scab labour from the shearing sheds.
It was this event in 1891, that led to the formation of the Australian Workers Union and Australian Labor Party who would both adopt and defend the White Australia Policy as the first plank in their platforms until 1973.
William G. Spence, the founder of the ALP & AWU writes in his 1909 book Australia’s Awakening: “The stand made by the shearers and shed employees in 1891 was not only against a reduction of wages and an attempt to introduce “freedom of contract,” but was principally against the introduction of Chinese labor.“
We make an eternal commemoration to the long-suffering efforts of these men, who, among many other workmen fought to the last penny to maintain the strike against the land-barons who wanted to break the union with cheap Chinese labour. This great shearer’s strike followed on the back of a number of other similar industrial disputes in which financial interests sought to drive out Australian workers with the use of foreign scabs, such as the great maritime strike of 1878 in which the Australiasian Steam Navigation Company sacked their entire Australian workforce with the view of replacing them with Chinese, or at the Clunes goldfields dispute in 1876 where the Lothair Gold mine had attempted to do the exact same thing.
W. G. Spence further writes on the great shearers’ strike: “Every effort at conciliation was made by the workers without avail. It has become clear since that the ruling authorities had never intended to give fair play. They laid their plans to crush the men, and it stands to the credit of the workers that in spite of all the powers of State, of suffering and imprisonment, they stood true to the cause they fought for, and proved themselves worthy sons of the great white race.”
We remember now, as did Spence and the visionary founders of Australian unionism, that the state and financial interests (along with their servants in the press) have an insatiable lust to maximise profits with no regard for working class Australian people. These enemies of our Commonwealth will stop at nothing to build their plantation economy, and will, as they did in the days old, use all mechanisms of force available to them, be the army, the police or the courts. It is only through solidarity, courage and strict self-disciplined strategy that we can overcome those same conditions which our forebears experienced, and which we now share in.
It has long been a desire of the Natives’ Association to advocate for the rights of Australian workers, and in this last year, the first step to that end has been made in the formation of our National Litigation Fund which we hope in the near future will deliver swift justice to our members that we might defend our constitutional birthright to advocate for our patriotic idealism without having to needlessly dive upon the spears of the enemy.
We hope the rank and file membership of the contemporary Australian Workers Union can too join us in contemplation of this history, and consider how their compromises to the international finance elite has in-effect tied the rope that will soon be the permanent death of Unionism in Australia – for who may strike when there is an unlimited pool of desperate alien labour just itching at the opportunity to take your job?
Let us not merely lament the current state of affairs; for the greater the challenge, the greater the share of glory in overcoming it! We know that in the future record of history, it will be our names among the host of men who fought when everyone else saw the battle lost, who persevered against all adversity and carved out a secure future for the young, thus-unborn Australian children of the future generations.
M. K. Grant
National Governor
January 5th 2026