Ambientes de Aprendizaje para la Investigación Formativa

Tocsin 'salleged 'libel on the King' For discussion of that issue see chapter 4 below

5? He gave a somewhat different version of this story in his memoir of A life on the ocean wave’ There, he claimed that he was left on the ship at Auckland with only the second mate, a brutal man who bashed him unconscious However, somebody caught the mate when he was ashore and avenged Anstey He claimed that years later the same man became the public

hangman in Melbourne, a supposed connection which formed the basis of another entertaining story See Labor Call 23 November 1913, p 3

In describing Mitchell's avaricious disregard for the safety of his crews, Anstey was certainly making a point about freebooting capitalists, but his parable addressed a more general issue. He said that he met the captain again in later years and discovered that he was no longer a port or perish' man, He had left the sea for a safer job where he could nurse a growing bank balance in comfort and security. That, said Anstey, was one of the troubles with the labour movement. There were too many men who had got into Parliament or the leadership of unions and then lost the will to fight for those who put them there. They preferred the comfortable role of statesmen' to that of class warriors. What was needed were younger, more vigorous port or perish' men to lead the movement. Finally, lest anyone should take his story too literally, Anstey recalled McLeod s warning and remarked, This cannot be libel. It is a dream.'

This was another of the many uses which Anstey made of his life at sea. The ability to combine a racy narrative with political comment became one of his hallmarks as a labour publicist. That skill can be seen in one of the many accounts he gave of his experiences in the Pacific island labour tra d e d The tale concerned a voyage from Noumea via the Carolines to Japan, from where they entered the coolie carrier trade between Amoy and Singapore'. He began with a description of the ship, followed by an account of the sadistic behaviour of the skipper and mate, from which he was protected by the boatswain. However,

one day when a sailor was working aloft a lanyard of a marling spike he was using broke, and the spike plunged to the deck through the heart of the boatswain. He was buried at sea and, after that, I was everyone's kick.

He then went on to enumerate the ship's store of cannon, guns, bayonets and cutlasses; its cargo of 800 to 1,000 'coolies'; and his job of tossing the dead overboard. All this took place on a ship where the skipper strictly enforced attendance at Sunday prayers and the mate indulged a penchant for wanton violence.

2: An Imaginative Seaman ₄₃

When the mate was not flogging or slapping, he was kicking, One day he was kicking me through the alleyway and on a block near the galley was a pie, ready for the oven. I threw it into his face and the pie broke, the paste clung to his beard, red fruit ran down his white suit and hundreds of coolies roared with glee, He swung me over his head and dashed me into the scuppers, When I came to life again I was in one of the bridge boats and the ship was running out of Hong Kong. I was bruised and matted with blood - nobody was troubled, or dared to wash it off. He came to look at me and said, You little bastard, I'll throw you overboard.’ I said something rude so he squeezed my throat and I again went to sleep.

After an interlude in which he gave another version of how he came to land in Singapore, and compared the life of derelicts there with those in Paris, he turned his attention to the trade in Kanaka labour.

Anstey said that Bobbie Towns, owner of ships and wharves and plantations, director of the Bank of NSW and financial rock of the Methodist Church', had originated the trade. He gave his chief recruiter, Ross Lewin, letters to missionaries asking if they would assist Lewin in his truly Christian mission' of taking islanders to work on plantations owned by Towns, where they might enjoy the blessings of Christian civilization.^9 Anstey went on to detail stories of rape, deceit, cruel treachery and cold blooded murders’, and concluded with the ironic observation:

The Kanaka trade of girls and boys, with its Christian impetus and civilizing tendencies, was an easy and pleasant life as sailor s life went in those days.

This had all the major elements of a typical Anstey sea story: a melodramatic death; slapstick humour; the brutality of a sailor's life; and Christianity serving avarice, cruelty, rape and murder. Stories such as this were standard fare in the Anstey theatre that sustained his reputation as a man of action and adventure.60

59 The detailed research notes for this and his pamphlet, In th e Good Old Days Melbourne,