Louisa and Henry Lawson chronology 1890-1894

Copyright © Pip Wilson, 2007

Blue denotes Henry's addresses on mail (from Roderick, 1970) or from other sources.
Red denotes uncertainty, eg date or fact.  Pink denotes items placed for chronological context, etc.

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Lawsons chronology up to 1889 and Henry Lawson news

Lawsons chronology 1890-1894  Lawson chronology 1895-1899

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1890

1890 in literature

January-April: Sydney
May-September: Albany, WA
October-December: Sydney

University of Tasmania founded.

Heidelberg School of painters attained success.

The first Australian coin-operated public phones?   Source

"Establishment of Brisbane Worker. ASU conference: decision to enforce closed shop/blockade; affiliation with Trades Halls in New South Wales and Victoria. QSU affiliates with Australian Labour Federation. Maritime Strike (August-November)."   Source

"In the 1890s a meeting was held in Stratten's Hall, Bondi Junction to agitate the government for an extension of the tramway to Bondi Beach. Eventually a line to the Beach was installed including the famous loop at the Beach which gave rise to the expression "shoot through like a Bondi Tram"."   Source  [Electric tram to Bondi, 1894] "The Waverley [tram] Line was extended to Bondi Junction in 1884 and to Bondi Aquarium in 1887. The first cross-country (ie neither terminus was in the city) service opened in 1887, connecting the Coogee Line at Randwick to the Waverley Line at Waverley, with services from Randwick to Bondi Junction. This line was, from 1890 to 1892, the first experimental electrified line in Sydney. It reverted to steam operation when the electrical equipment was transferred to the North Shore."   Source

According to JA Andrews, writing in Tocsin, May 31, 1900, this year was the beginning of a period in which revolution in Australia was narrowly averted.

William Lane in the Boomerang attacked the Womanhood Suffrage League.

Robert Louis Stevenson in Sydney; stayed at Richmond Terrace in the Sydney Domain. Stevenson also stayed at the old Oxford Hotel, now either the Supreme Court building or more likely it was opposite St James Church, in King St.   Stevenson, Australia and Dr Hyde

"In the 1890s a tram went along William Street to Kings Cross. The steam tram from Leichhardt was a double-decker, which came along Broadway, and crossed Belmore Park, then more extensive than it is now. This tram swung into Elizabeth Street, terminating at Market Street, which ran along the side of the old George Street markets. There were no trams in Castlereagh or Pitt Streets ..."   Ollif

"By 1890, pastoral unionism was losing momentum and the bosses were becoming more aggressive. Union strength was also under threat from new shearing machines that made it easier to replace skilled shearers with novices. A concerned ASU leadership began looking to the maritime unions for assistance, as did the Queensland Shearers’ Union, an independent body competing with the ASU. During a conflict over the closed shop at Jondaryan station on the Darling Downs, the Queenslanders explored the possibility of a port blockade to stop the transport of non-union wool They also looked to the Australian Labor Federation (a force in Queensland, though virtually non-existent elsewhere) to organise solidarity.
  "The ASU likewise allied itself with the New South Wales maritime unions, ensuring that the Sydney Trades and Labor Council also fell into line, although some conservative elements would have preferred not to back the shearers. An ASU manifesto called on unionists ‘to draw such a cordon around the Australian continent as will effectively prevent a bale of wool leaving unless shorn by union shearers.’ (Quoted in Merritt: 161). Ultimately, however, these initiatives were swallowed up in the great 1891 strikes."   Source

"In 1890 the TLC established a general Organising committee, which moved to organise laundresses and to create a Female Employees’ Society. The laundresses struck in September, 1891 over the sacking of a fellow worker. During the dispute Miss Creo Stanley became the first female delegate to the TLC."   Source   [See July 20, 1891 on Creo Stanley]

"When the bicycling craze hit Australia it hit in a big way. During the 1890s cycle races were one of the hottest forms of entertainment on offer drawing crowds of many thousands ... Women embraced cycling as another area in which they could prove their equality with men. Denied the vote and the right to property they could at least demand the right to pedal about as they pleased. This right was challenged by conservative men in the medical industry as well as by conservative larrikins in the street. The pages of The Champion saw a debate break out in 1890 between those who saw cycling as "injurious to the fragile female form" and those who scoffed at such wacky medical ideas." Source, with letter

Henry's brother Peter (aka Birdie or Bert Lawson) moved to Perth and worked as a clerk, perhaps touring the country with Bland Holt, theatre identity.

Believing as he did that Australian colonial capitalism was moving towards crisis, Lane moved the General Council of the ALF to propose: "the nationalisation of all sources of wealth and all the means of producing and exchanging wealth".

Henry Lawson wrote 'The Third Murder', which was Poe-like.

William Lane sold his share in the Boomerang (barrister JG Drake was another shareholder) to Gresley Lukin, taking on the editorship of the Worker, the first union-supported co-operative newspaper in Australia, becoming possibly the most influential labour writer in Australia.

Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) became active for female suffrage. It had 300 members.

January: Mary Cameron, 24, began teaching at Neutral Bay Public School at her previous (Silverton School) salary of 114 pounds. She lived with her mother Mary Ann Cameron at a boarding house, run by Kate Dunn, Kieta House, 5 Bligh Street. At Kieta House she met George Black, sub-editor of the Bulletin in 1889, editor of Australian Workman c. 1892 (Black followed Brady so it must have been 1892). Through Black she met Louisa Lawson (she and Mary Ann became friends in 1889; in fact, Mary Ann called Louisa Lawson "the one perfect woman in the world"), and it was at this address that she met Henry Lawson. Louisa Lawson started to complain that Henry Lawson was spending too much time at 5 Bligh St; Mary says he came round almost every night. Later Mary said that Henry Lawson fell in love with her at first sight. As Bligh St house had no separate sitting room, they walked, her taking his arm as was customary. He took her to Lower George St and The Rocks where she had a "social education" as she was more middle class. She later wrote, he took her to see "the low wage workers, the Chinamen working at treadle-saws in underground cellars lit only by a grating in the street, the huddled houses in the old Argyle Cut".
  Later this year, Mary and her mother moved to 113 Phillip St, Mrs Solomon's boarding house. She described the street as having an oak tree that went into her balcony; a dirt footpath. "On the balcony opposite, ladies in full skirts sat under wide umbrellas in the summer and had afternoon tea."

January: Collapse of the Volunteer Artillery Hotel, Pitt St, Sydney. Two killed.   Photo

January 1: Sydney: the St Leonards to Hornsby railway line was opened, with stations Wahroonga, Eastern Road, Pymble, Gordon, Lindfield, Roseville and Chatswood. Four services each way on weekdays, no train on Sunday.

January 25: Pioneer woman Journalist Nellie Bly finished her round-the-world journey in 72 days, 6 hours and 11 minutes (commenced November 14, 1889).

February 6: In Melbourne, a Federation Conference of colonial delegates began their formulation of the Australian Constitution. A banquet was held for those meeting in the Queen's Hall of the Victorian Parliament.

February 7: Dr Constance Stone was registered as a medical practitioner in Melbourne, first woman in Australia.

February 25: In the foyer of the Union Club, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Father Damien: An Open Letter to the Reverend Dr. Hyde of Honolulu. He wrote it in defence of Belgian missionary Father Damien (Damien De Veuster) of Molokai Hawaii, whom Dr Charles M Hyde, a former missionary to Molokai, had accused of contracting leprosy from having sexual relations with women at the leper colony he worked in. Stevenson also stayed in Sydney at the Oxford Hotel, now the Supreme Court building, and at Richmond Terrace in the Sydney Domain (while on the seas his address was care of R. Towns & Co, Sydney). Around this time, he also wrote about the poverty he witnessed in the Domain. Stevenson arrived in Sydney in February on the German steamship Lubeck but suffered a relapse of his serious ill health in Sydney ("being a blooming prisoner here in the club, and indeed in my bedroom" he wrote in a letter to Charles Baxter*), and, since it seemed that only in the warmer climes of the South Pacific did he ever have respite from his illness, he and his wife Fanny set sail from Sydney on April 10, on board the Janet Nicoll ("had a cruel rough passage to Auckland, for the JANET is the worst roller I was ever aboard of. I was confined to my cabin, ports closed, self shied out of the berth, stomach [pampered till the day I left on a diet of perpetual egg-nogg] revolted at ship's food and ship eating, in a frowsy bunk, clinging with one hand to the plate, with the other to the glass, and using the knife and fork [except at intervals] with the eyelid," he wrote to Sidney Colvin), visiting dozens of islands and returning to Sydney in August, by which time the writer's health had returned. They stayed until September; during this short visit he wrote to Henry James from the Union Club, "Kipling** is too clever to live ... I must tell you plainly – I can't tell Colvin – I do not think I shall come to England more than once, and then it'll be to die. Health I enjoy in the tropics; even here, which they call sub- or semi-tropical, I come only to catch cold. I have not been out since my arrival; live here in a nice bedroom by the fireside, and read books and letters from Henry James, and send out to get his TRAGIC MUSE, only to be told they can't be had as yet in Sydney, and have altogether a placid time. But I can't go out! The thermometer was nearly down to 50 degrees the other day – no temperature for me, Mr. James: how should I do in England? ... The sea, islands, the islanders, the island life and climate, make and keep me truly happier. These last two years I have been much at sea, and I have NEVER WEARIED". From the Union Club in September he wrote to Mrs Charles Fairchild, "You are quite right; our civilisation is a hollow fraud, all the fun of life is lost by it; all it gains is that a larger number of persons can continue to be contemporaneously unhappy on the surface of the globe." On August 19 from the Union Club, Stevenson wrote to Marcel Schwob: "I am just now overloaded with work. I have two huge novels on hand - THE WRECKER and the PEARL FISHER, in collaboration with my stepson: the latter, the PEARL FISHER, I think highly of, for a black, ugly, trampling, violent story, full of strange scenes and striking characters. And then I am about waist-deep in my big book on the South Seas: THE big book on the South Seas it ought to be, and shall. And besides, I have some verses in the press, which, however, I hesitate to publish. For I am no judge of my own verse; self-deception is there so facile. All this and the cares of an impending settlement in Samoa keep me very busy, and a cold (as usual) keeps me in bed."

* "This visit to Sydney has smashed me handsomely; and yet I made myself a prisoner here in the club upon my first arrival. This is not encouraging for further ventures; Sydney winter – or, I might almost say, Sydney spring, for I came when the worst was over – is so small an affair, comparable to our June depression at home in Scotland." Why he wrote this when he arrived in February, the last month of Summer, 1890, is unknown to your almanackist.

** Sydney was getting some interesting visitors in the 1890s. Among these, Rudyard Kipling was in Sydney in mid-November, 1891, in the same week as Henry Morton Stanley. The American economist Henry George was in Sydney in May, 1890 between Stevenson's visits.

Letters before, during and after Sydney    More    RL Stevenson at Project Gutenberg

February 28: The British-India steamer RMS Quetta sank north of Cape York (British India Company; Captain Alfred Sanders) with the loss of 160 lives, 122 survivors. Henry Lawson wrote 'Stand by the Engines' about it.

March: Mary Cameron's mother went to Junee for six weeks. (She was changing her social column from Town and Country Journal to Daily Telegraph at this time). Mary Cameron went to board at 138 Phillip St with the Lawsons.

March 4: Charles Lawson was sentenced at Forbes to 3 years hard labour for larceny and receiving.

March 4: The longest bridge in Britain, the Forth Bridge (1,710 ft) in Scotland was opened.

April 11: RL Stevenson left Sydney, and had to be stretchered onto the Janet Nicoll.

April 26: Henry Lawson and Peter Jr (17) set sail for Albany, Western Australia on the Australien; Henry sold a couple of inconsequential items to the Freeman's Journal before leaving, which helped pay his fare. They disembarked May 5 (May 3: Note in Bulletin that "The talented Henry Lawson has left for Western Australia"). Immediately ("in the first hour") got work as housepainters because of boom. No record from them of why they went to Albany, WA. Bertha Lawson and Mary Gilmore say that Louisa Lawson packed Henry Lawson off to separate him from Gilmore (then Cameron), to whom he had proposed. Bertram Stevens concurs with this view. (Bertha Lawson refers to but does not name the woman.) Mary Cameron/Gilmore, after Henry's death, claimed that Gertrude had told her that Louisa Lawson intercepted Henry's letters to Mary. Gertrude had said to Mary, "There was a letter for you. It was in Henry's writing." To this, Louisa Lawson had interjected, "There was no letter", and sent Gertrude to her room. Ollif's (Ollif, Lorna, Louisa Lawson: Henry Lawson's Crusading Mother, Rigby, Sydney, 1978) interpretation differs from Mary's, in that Ollif believes Louisa Lawson merely thought Gertrude was being precocious. Hmmm.  She was almost certainly helping him with prosody around now. Mary wrote in 1924 that Henry Lawson asked her to marry him the day before he was to sail to Western Australia, suggesting a registry office. Mary didn't feel ready, and thought him immature, and she did not find him attractive; she thought he looked weak and effeminate, too young. Perhaps there was a scandal; Peter Lawson said that Louisa Lawson got Henry Lawson out of an ugly situation. At the time, Mary was staying with Louisa at 26 Jamieson St, and Louisa Lawson intercepted letters; Henry Lawson, getting no replies, broke it off before sailing. When Mary's mother returned to take her Daily Telegraph position, Mary moved back in with her.

May 22: HL's 'Who's Dot Pulleteen' published in the Albany Observer, editor Lancelot Lindley-Cowan, an American. Two days later, 'Straight Talk' appeared. He wrote as though he had lived there more than a few weeks: "our park-like streets". He wrote more articles for this paper, at a penny a line. See Roderick, 1991, pp 61-62.

May 29: Dr John McLeod was found guilty of bigamy, in Sydney.

June 25: Canon Saumarez Smith was consecrated C of E Bishop of Sydney and Primate of Australia, at St Paul's in London.

July 5: Albany Observer published HL's woolly-headed 'The New Religion': "It is true that unions are formed for protection against unprincipled labour as well as unprincipled capital ... Every workman should bear in mind that self-denial in the individual is quite as essential to social reformation and it is to individual reformation" ... went on with racist cant, and said to keep female labour "within proper limits".

At Kendennup, WA, he fell in with a French-speaking Aboriginal (King Billy) who had worked on a French whaler.

August: RL Stevenson had a short stay in Sydney, departure date unknown. Stayed at the Union Club.

August 5: Sir John Hall gave a speech in parliament on women's suffrage.

August 9: Saturday, the first recital of the Sydney Town Hall organ, the largest organ in the world; the City Organist from Liverpool, England WT Best performed for 4,000 guests. "It was reported that some of them kept up a discourse throughout much of the concert, while at times random whistling was even heard. Still, the concert was a resounding success ... The instrument is of international significance and is generally considered to be the finest nineteenth century Romantic concert organ in the world."   Source   Picture   Town Hall chronology

Mid-August: Two weeks before Maritime Strike, William Nicholas Willis launched Truth, with Adolphus George Taylor (nicknamed 'Giraffe', 'Mudgee' or 'the Mudgee Camel') and William Patrick Crick. John Norton (pictured at left) had a gossip column in first issue. By end of September he was listed as Associate Editor.

Left: John Napoleon Norton, inebriate editor of Truth and wild man of Sydney. 
Truth published a number of Henry Lawson's works.

August 15: Cardinal Moran opened St Vincent's Hospice, Sydney.

August 16: The Bulletin warned labor against a prolonged strike. By the end of the month the maritime strike had spread to almost all trade unionists in Australia (except WA) and New Zealand. It collapsed within two months for lack of funds.

August 17: By this date, Mary Cameron and her mother had moved from 113 Phillip St to Mrs Cruickshank's boarding house at 187 Macquarie St.

August 20: Thousands of wharf labourers walked off the job in Sydney, refusing to load wool shorn by non-union labbor. Gangs of strikers guarded the docks against blacklegs. The newly formed Labour Defence Committee released a statement.

August 22: A case of leprosy was reported in Balmain.

August 30: Australia's Great Maritime Strike: In Melbourne, one thousand military volunteers were addressed by Colonel Tom Price: "You will each be supplied with forty rounds of ammunition and leaden bullets and if the order is given to fire, don't let me see one rifle pointed up in the air. Fire low and lay them out." In 1930 Mary Gilmore wrote that Henry Lawson called on her in a high state of excitement: "All my life I shall hear his voice, 'They have served out ball cartridge and are going to fire on my countrymen!' I think he had run all the way into town to me from the mass meeting ..." (Lawson, Bertha Jr, and Brereton, John LeGay, Henry Lawson by His Mates, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1931). (Gilmore was mixed up. Henry Lawson was in Albany, WA.) That night, machine gun nests were mounted behind Parliament House. Regardless of the danger, 60,000 protesters attended the meeting the next day.   Maritime Strike 1890

In Melbourne, Chief Justice Higinbotham supported the strike from his own pocket. In Sydney, Cardinal Moran was a strong supporter.

September 19: " ... in the climax of the maritime strike. Industrial unrest in the pastoral industry had prompted Sydney wharf labourers to refuse to handle wool shorn by non-unionists. The wool owners, tired of a dispute that had dragged on two months, led a procession of waggons loaded with bales of fleece to the Circular Quay wharfs, where mounted police charged an angry crowd of strikers, scattering them into the city streets. The strike was effectively broken, although McMillan, deputising for a convalescent Parkes, feared continuing 'disorder and anarchy'. To a rattled delegation from the stock exchange he rashly declared that the Government would 'take such steps to secure the liberty of the subjects of this country, that will be absolutely successful'. McMillan failed to specify — and probably did not know — what these 'steps' might involve, allowing speculation to run unchecked. Parkes quickly overruled him: 'the Government cannot defend the interests of one class to the neglect of another'. Presented with public humiliation in the press McMillan promptly offered his resignation, although Parkes soon talked him around.   ^"McMillan's intemperate remarks isolated him as a ritual villain in public discourse. A week after the Quay confrontation, the Bulletin repeated a rumour circulating around Sydney which became settled fact amongst Sydney's radicals. 'When Treasurer McMillan intimated to the Sydney Exchange deputation that his Government was determined to take drastic measures with regard to all strike disturbances, the wink passed around that there was an arrangement for the landing of blue-jackets from the British war-ships in harbour'. The Bulletin also claimed that recently erected barricades at the Quay were to facilitate their landing. Such a 'foreign invasion' would be an invitation to begin sewing 'the Australian Republican flag'.   ^"Thereafter McMillan's name was rarely mentioned in the labour press without the formula being repeated."   Source

Parkes was angry that his Treasurer W McMillan read the Riot Act at Circular Quay.

Mid-September: William Crick wrote in Truth:

CRICK ON PARKES
"Definition of a Scoundrel"
"Rifled Pursers and Ruined Reputations"
"Open and Underground Adultery"
"Cold-blooded Human Shark"
"Seventy Years of Sin"
"Attributes of Snakes and Monkeys"
"Crick Gets Show of Hands"

September 22: First edition of the Australian Workman, official organ of the TLC in Sydney. The first editor was Rev. Dr (Theodore) Oswald Keating, MA, DD, LLD had just stepped off a clipper ship in July and been published in Truth's earliest numbers. The proprietors of the Australian Workman were impressed with him and under the circumstances, pleased to have a clergyman's name on the masthead. By the end of October, he was suing the newspaper for 5 pounds for wrongful dismissal. Dr Keating was in fact Joseph James Crouch, a forger and conman who had impersonated clergy of various denominations for thirty years, been imprisoned a number of times, and robbed and abandoned a widow he had married for money in England. In the US in 1881 he had conned many, including Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, who lent him money as well as his pulpit. He could speak fluently in several languages, including Hebrew. He also plied his craft in Canada, and in Dublin, Ireland he had been known as a brilliant Protestant preacher. In Kilmainham Gaol, he was the "guest" of the Governor, who had had him for dinner as a guest of honour just a fortnight before.
  Australian Workman was first published from strike headquarters at the Australian Coffee Palace, Castlereagh St, it was pretty much controlled by the ASL until 1894. It ended in 1897. The early editions had ads like:

STRIKERS!!! The Place for Good Liquors is the Cardigan, Oxford Street. Support Your Friend.
UNION FOWLS lay more EGGS than any blackleg fowls. Brown Leghorns from Prize Stick, 12/6 settings. Eight guaranteed to hatch.

September 29: Queensland introduced triennial parliaments.

September 30: Henry Lawson set sail for Sydney on the MM steamer Salazie. He was depressed; he knew nothing of the industrial turmoil that was going on in Melbourne and Sydney during his absence. 

October: Knights of Labor was established in Sydney.

October 2: Worst fire ever in Australia burnt out the whole block of Sydney bounded by Pitt and Castlereagh Streets between Hosking and Martin Place. It began in the premises of Gibbs, Shallard and Co., Printers (Pitt St). Businesses destroyed: Southern Club, Athenaeum Club, Lark and Sons warehouses, Richardson and Wrench, City Bank, Jones and Lawson furniture. Pickpockets worked the crowds.

October 9: By now the maritime strife had subsided. Henry Lawson was at Aunt Emma's place. Emma wrote that he was poor and down at heel, depressed. He sold to the Bulletin 'The Fire at Ross's Farm' which he'd written on the boat, and returned to Emma's drunk. 

He was now unemployed, dossing in "a third-rate hash house" (HL) or on Aunt Emma's veranda, trying to live by the pen, and sold some pieces to Freeman's Journal, Town and Country Journal and Norton's Truth. Henry Lawson getting more political. Norton favoured formation of a Labor party, Archibald opposed it vehemently as it would dilute the movement. Henry Lawson was with Norton.

October 21: Constitution Act 1890 (UK) Western Australia's Constitution became law, proclaimed today.

October 25: Archibald in Bulletin derided Parkes's plan to not give "one person one vote" same to women as men.

October 31: Lord Carrington opened the School of Telegraphy in Sydney.

November: 'Oswald Keating' had been trying for weeks to collect monies owed to him by Truth for his novel. After having been found out, Crouch, still calling himself Rev. Dr Keating, went back to the owners of Truth, the politicians William Nicholas Willis and Adolphus George Taylor, and demanded monies (the residue of 50 pounds) they had promised him for a novel and some articles they had published. They refused, and the parties disputed for several weeks. One day in November, Crouch went to Taylor's Woollahra home to carry on the battle, but Taylor was not in, so Crouch was invited in by the servant, 12-year-old Mary Ann Brown, whom Crouch seduced on Taylor's drawing-room sofa. The matter ended up in court with John Norton giving information but not sworn evidence against Crouch, who defended himself and got five years, but did not live to serve out his sentence. He was found dead the next day in his Darlinghurst Gaol cell, possibly by a poisoned pill brought in at his request by his wife Polly. Taylor and Willis came out badly too, with the judge, Mr Justice William Windeyer roundly criticising them for hushing up the seduction of the girl for a long period of time, which they did because they were hoping Crouch would simply leave town and thus a scandal for them would be avoided.

November: Carbine won the Melbourne Cup setting a weight carrying record of 10st 5lbs (66kg) in beating a field of 39 starters and setting a new race record time.

November 9: First electric trams in Sydney, on the Bondi Junction-Waverley route.

November 11: Australian Socialist League commemorated the Chicago Anarchists. there was a solemn reading of 'On revolution', which had been recited by one of the martyrs before sentencing. The ASL also annually commemorated May Day from 1892, and the suppression of the Paris Commune (March).

November 13: Paddy Crick was expelled from Parliament (and in 1906 he resigned to avoid expulsion over a land swindle).

The Great Maritime Strike was defeated when the Marine Officers returned to work on the employers terms, with Illawarra coal miners being the last workers to return to work in January 1891.

November 21: Collision on Sydney Harbour between the steamer Alert and a Neutral Bay ferry.

November 22: Sydney: NSW Art Gallery burgled, many coins stolen.

November 28: Tasmania introduced payment for members of parliament.

Summer 1890-91: Henry Lawson found work painting in Sydney and Mt Victoria.

December: The blue-speckle cattle dog (blue heeler) established as a pure breed: bred by Jack and Harry Bagust of Sydney.

December 21: ASL hired the Royal Standard Theatre for a free Sunday-night concert. After this, Henry Parkes refused permits for Sunday night meetings. His sabbatarian explanations were disingenuous, as he was simultaneously enforcing Sunday employment on public works, against the wishes of the Amalgamated Navvies and General Labourer's Union. Thus the ASL had to go back to Leigh House for Sunday night meetings, which was crammed. Men would recite poetry, women sing and play piano, violin, etc, before the lectures. Billy Hughes regularly attended/performed from late-1892 until 1898 when he resigned.

December 22: The Garrick Theatre opened, Sydney.

December 28: Two hundred houses were damaged at Deniliquin (Riverina) by a severe storm, accompanied by a tornado.

December 29: USA: Wounded Knee Massacre of Oglala Sioux, Pine Ridge, Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Three hundred mostly unarmed Indians were killed when the 7^th United States Cavalry (Custer's old command) discharged artillery amidst women, children and fleeing men. Twenty-nine soldiers died in this final major military battle in genocide against Native Americans. Eighteen soldiers received Congressional Medals of Honor for their 'bravery'.

December 30: WA's first parliament sworn in by Governor Sir William Robinson. First Premier John Forrest.

End of 1890: JA Andrews: "Around the end of 1890 [Jack Andrews] tramped overland to Sydney, probably leaving a trail of anarchist symbols and graffiti. He soon appeared at the Sydney ASL rooms and met up with German-born anarchist Joseph Schellenberg at whose farm he then lived. Schellenberg had been an early member of the ASL."   Source  "[Sam] Rosa arrived from Melbourne at about the same time but by train. It is Rosa, however, who quickly makes a name for himself as the ASL's 'foremost advocate of revolutionary socialism'."   Source

Henry Lawson poems in 1890

Middleton's Rouseabout
Skeleton Flat
To a Pair of Blucher Boots
A Word to Texas Jack
The Glass on the Bar
To "Doc" Wylie
Over the Ranges and Into the West
The Two Samaritans and the Tramp
The Squatter, Three Cornstalks, and the Well
The Song of Old Joe Swallow
The Black Tracker
Ireland Shall Rebel
Stand by the Engines
The Statue of Our Queen
John Cornstalk
Who's Dot Pulleteen?
"On the Summit of Mount Clarence"
An Australian Advertisement
"Possum"
The Australian Marseillaise
The Pavement Stones
The Fight at Eureka Stockade
Cherry-Tree Inn
The Fire at Ross's Farm
When the Children Come Home
Trouble on the Selection
He Mourned His Master
Lily
Sweethearts Wait on Every Shore
The Water Lily

1891

1891 in literature

Jan-March: Sydney
March-September: Brisbane
October-December: Sydney

Famine in Russia.

The labor movement officially spelt it thus from 1891.

First Federal Convention.

Justice Mr William Windeyer knighted.

1891 - 94 Sir William Patrick Manning (1845-1915) was Mayor of Sydney (Lord Mayors after 1902: list).

"Sir William Manning, an accountant and financial agent, was Mayor of Sydney from 1891 to 1894, and represented South Sydney for a period in the legislative assembly. He was knighted in 1894."   Source (not same as Sir William Montagu Manning, 1811-1895)

1891 - 93: Governor of NSW, Victor Albert George Child-Villiers, 7th Earl of Jersey (1845 - 1915).

"ASU organises General Labourers Union February on behalf of shed-hands; QSU and Queensland Workers Union (shed-hands) form AWUQ. Queensland pastoral strike. July: ASU Executive Council concedes freedom of contract. Wagga Branch publishes The Hummer."   Source

Population of Sydney 383,333.

Jessie Ackermann organised colonial branches of the international Woman's Christian Temperance Union, established in Australia since 1882, into a national organisation, lobbying for the suffrage, 'the symbol of freedom'.

First discovery of gold at Nannine in the Murchison district (WA).

NSW Royal Commission on Strikes. WG Higgs, editor of the Australian Workman, named Das Kapital as 'the socialist's Bible'. He also said that if employers continued to enforce freedom of contract, "they will be met with physical force, they will be confronted with revolution". WG Spence, a Christian preacher, a member of the Creswick militia, prominent in the temperance movement, leader of the Amalgamated Miners Association (AMA) and a justice of the peace, informed the Commission that "I do not believe in strikes at all". He thought unionists ‘must demand the respect of capitalists to such an extent that the latter would ultimately come to the former and say, "We will go mates on this or that concern". Spence along with David Temple set up a shearers’ union at Ballarat in Victoria.

"In the 1891 election, 35 members of the newly formed Labor Electoral League entered Parliament although they split almost immediately over the protection-free trade issue. Their numbers were significant but not sufficient for Labor to form a government until 1910."   Source

By this year, Louisa Lawson had discarded the pen-name Dora Falconer.

In Queensland, the Women's Union was established by May Jordan, Emma Miller et al.

Louisa Lawson took Gertude (b, 1877), aged about 14, to the School of Arts, Pitt Street, which had a debating club closed to women. She knew the secretary, Mr Haviland, from The Spiritualistic Lyceum. On a Friday night, Louisa Lawson arranged an interview with the president of the Junior Debating Club. She was told she could see him but not speak in the debating hall. The chairman announced the presence of a prominent member of the Womanhood Suffrage League and moved that she be allowed to speak. Till then she had only given three or four well rehearsed lectures (later became a good extemporaneous speaker). She flattered the men, that they would not be unjust to women, and they applauded, calling for her membership. This was castigated by the Senior Debating Club on the following Monday. The senior and junior clubs split; the latter engaged Dawn press for any of its printing, despite threats from the NSWTA. On June 23, 1892, Louisa Lawson was offered membership of the Senior Debating Club.

Date? The old George Street market was demolished and the Queen Victoria 'Market' Building begun (says one source; another says the QVB construction began in 1893).  (Opened July 21, 1898.)

Publication of 'Otherside'; seems to be anti-utopian (?): "And we’d trample one another on the way to Otherside/For I find among my brothers less Humanity than Pride." A response to New Australia (Roderick, 1991). Nor did he have faith in parliament.

Louisa Lawson and School of Arts Committee:

"In 1891 [Louisa Lawson] joined the Womanhood Suffrage League, allowing the League to use the Dawn office and print its literature there free of charge. She was a member of the League's deputation to NSW premier George Dibbs in 1892. In a Dawn editorial of October 1890 she wrote 'Men govern the world and the schemes upon which all our institutions are founded show men's thoughts only'. Her journalistic and political efforts did much to make the vote for women a precondition for a federated Australia."   Source

"By the late 1880s, Louisa Lawson, a leading Sydney feminist, had become 'a force in the deliberations' of the School of Arts Committee. In 1891, a coalition of feminists, socialists and single taxers mounted a challenge to the institute's conservative leadership, reducing women's fees to half the male rate. Female membership rocketed, from 500 to 2,800 in a six-month period.46 And with that the masculinist culture of reading seemed to crumble. Women, Lawson announced, had broken out of the Ladies Department: long skirts swept the floors of the Reading Room and mounted the rostrum of the Debating Club."   Source

Summer 1890-91: Henry Lawson found work painting in Sydney and Mt Victoria. 

January: "Sir Henry Parkes ... decreed in January 1891 that a special permit from him, the Chief Secretary, was necessary before Sunday-night lectures, a popular radical outing at the time, could be held. A deputation of McNamara, Blackwell, Healy and Higgs to Parkes was unsuccessful but it appears that lectures ultimately continued without permit under the disguise of the regular Sunday-night concerts at Mr. West's Leigh House Academy, a dancehall and theatre above which Castlereagh Street, meeting rooms eventually became known as just Leigh House. Parkes may also have realised that a specific danger represented by the ASL was its potential for coalescing anti-Parliamentary forces into a substantial power base outside the confines of the 'House' and its strictures."   Source: The ASL and the Struggle over Tactics

January: Henry Lawson briefly at Eurunderee (formerly New Pipeclay) where he had a brief love affair with Bridget Lambert. He wryly comments on it in 'The Selector's Daughter'.

January: RL Stevenson came to Sydney to meet his mother who was en route from Edinburgh to Vailima, RLS's home in Samoa. In Sydney, Stevenson fell very ill and was taken straight from his sick bed to the Lubeck where his mother attended him. While in Sydney he is said to have stayed at the old Oxford Hotel in King St opposite St James Church, rooms in Macquarie St and the Australian and Athenaeum Clubs. Departed in March.

January 1: Brisbane: Boomerang editions henceforth under Gresley Lukin's ownership ("... the courageous editor of the Queenslander newspaper, Gresley Lukin, who exposed many massacres [of Aborigines] in his newspaper in the 19th century"   Source). Founded by William Lane three years earlier, but he had to choose between journalism and his beliefs because of advertisers, so he sold it to Lukin in 1890 and in March, 1891 (Wikipedia says May), took a job editing the new labour paper, Queensland Worker at much less income (three pounds a week), throwing himself into politics. Wikipedia says "the tone became increasingly threatening towards the employers, the government, and the British Empire itself". Boomerang ran into trouble and after six months Henry Lawson was let go. He then divided his time between odd jobs, writing and carousing.

January 1: Electric lighting officially installed in Newcastle, NSW.

January 2: Lawrence Hargrave flew in a kite for a period of 14 seconds, for a distance of eight metres.

January 5: The Shearers' Strike began when Logan Downs Shearing Station in Queensland (encouraged by the collapse of the maritime strike) employed non-union men to do the work. After seven months the Shearers' Union money was exhausted and they agreed with pastoralists on a dispute settlement procedure.

"Shearers established a number of camps, the best-known of which was at Barcaldine [a town in central western Queensland], where about one thousand shearers, said to be armed and advocating incendiarism, were camped. They flew the Eureka flag. A number of union leaders were sentenced to terms of imprisonment following their arrests at Barcaldine." ['The Oxford Illustrated Dictionary of Australian History', Jan Bassett, 1993, 1996.] 

"Commemorated in ... 'The Ballad of 1891' by Helen G Palmer and Doreen Jacobs Bridges."   Source

January 11: The Australian Labour Federation resolved to resist the pastoralists' claims to freedom of contract.

January 15: The Earl of Jersey became Governor of NSW.

January 20: The fourth session of the Federal Council opened in Hobart.

February 1: Glebe Town Hall riot: 

"The ASL in Sydney took up the issue of the unemployed and this and the question of 'sweating' practices were major campaigns in early 1891 around which numerous rallies and marches were organised. Red flags, burning effigies and torch-lit oratory abounded. Glebe Town Hall was the location of one of the rowdiest indoor meetings, as one might expect when Bruce Smith, appears to have recognised the threat posed by the also unpopular with labor supporters appeared, on the 1st February, with McMillan. 
  "ASL members, Rosa, Higgs, Brady, Lindsay and Horkins, tried to get McMillan a hearing from the jeering, hooting crowd, in order to answer him 'in a socialist way' but the crowd persisted. One wordsmith reported: 

Healy ... captain of the Gipps Street push, one of the most desperate larrikin bands in Sydney persistently roused the crowd. He told the reporter "This affairs all organised ... we won't let him be heard. See what he's made us suffer. We've got plenty of blue-metal with us. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." ... Lashing himself to the full height of his revolutionary mission and pointing to Mr Smith (he) screeched out in frenzied tones. "There he s ... Ecce Homo!" a classic effort which seemed to threaten him with an apoplectic stroke. 
At this point the reporter tells of Smith offering Healy a glass of water, the crowd began to rush the platform and the Smith-McMillan group fled. 

"Brady's account tells of would-be ejectors rushing the ASL group 'as a scared little linen-draper on stage advocated machine-guns' against the Queensland strikers. The crowd erupted, fighting became general and Brady says he was forced towards the stage by the forward charge, that he was saved from a broken skull by a comrade preventing the impact of a table-leg being wielded by someone on the other side and that momentum carried him over the stage into unconsciousness."   Source

February 2: NSW Government took possession of all unoccupied islands in Port Jackson as public reserves.

March: Henry Lawson got a telegram, Gresley Lukin of Boomerang in Brisbane offered him two pounds a week on staff. Lukin knew Louisa Lawson as he had an office in Sydney four doors from LL's 26 Jamieson St rooms. Henry Lawson left for Brisbane late March. Stephens was working as sub-editor on Boomerang at five pounds a week, W Lane was editing the Worker for three.

March: The trade unions established The Worker as a monthly newspaper and summoned Lane to the editorship. "The unions subscribed to the Worker on behalf of their members; whereas Lane's Boomerang had been boycotted by potential advertisers, this new publication was financially secure. The Worker lived for over 80 years."   Source  (This source says 1890 but I think it must be 1891 as Lane was running Boomerang until Jan, 1891.) The Boomerang office was in the Broadway Arcade, Adelaide St, Brisbane, and William Lane’s house, which was also a hotbed of radical activity, was at 42 Quay St.

March 2: Federation banquet for 900 diners and many more spectators in Sydney's Centennial Hall to mark the start of the National Australasian Convention. Parkes gave his "One people, one destiny" speech.

"South Australian politician Charles Cameron Kingston proposed to the first Convention that the Federal Parliament should be given legislative power for 'the establishment of courts of conciliation and arbitration, having jurisdiction throughout the commonwealth, for the settlement of industrial disputes ... The motion was solidly opposed by conservatives like Sir Samuel Griffith, Premier of Queensland ... The matter was raised again at the Adelaide Convention in 1897, by which time things had changed radically. There was by now an active conciliation and arbitration system in New Zealand, one which by most accounts was operating successfully." Source  "The parliaments of Victoria and NSW in 1891 and 1892 introduced voluntary arbitration. It was introduced in South Australia in 1894. In 1901 NSW went on to legislate for compulsory arbitration."   Source

"In March, 1891, 46 delegates from all the Australian colonies and New Zealand, met in the Legislative Assembly Chamber of the Parliament of NSW and, in the course of the meeting, the first draft constitution for Australia was drawn up. The proposed constitution was partly inspired by the Canadian federal example, but adopted key elements of the American federal model, the Swiss referendum process for changing it, and retained the essential elements of the British Westminster model of parliament and government.
  However, after the return of the delegates to their respective colonial Parliaments, little progress took place. The Federation momentum was revived by a conference of people's federal leagues in Corowa in 1893 and the leaders who now emerged were NSW's Edmund Barton and Victoria's Alfred Deakin, along with Dr John Quick who suggested the way forward. At a meeting in Hobart in 1895, the Premiers generally adopted Quick's proposals and further Constitutional Conventions were held in Adelaide and Sydney (in 1897) and Melbourne (1898), finalising the form of the constitution and agreeing on the referendum process that was to follow. Popular support was now being demonstrated. Another people's convention had been held at Bathurst in1896 and smaller scale public meetings were widely held."   Source

"National Australasian Convention, Sydney; parliamentary delegates agree to adopt the name 'Commonwealth of Australia' and a draft constitution is written aboard the steamboat, Lucinda. Progress towards Federation is stalled by the colonies' concerns about their own status within a Federation. Popular support for Federation leads to the formation of the Australasian Federation League."   Source

March 17: The British steamship SS Utopia sank off the coast of Gibraltar, killing 574.

March 25: Shearers' Strike of 1891, eleven men, including three leaders, arrested at Clermont Railway Station, Queensland. The strikers were trying to prevent scabs working at Peak Downs. (The strikers were sentenced to three years hard labour, released in November, 1893).

March 26: Another seven shearers arrested at Barcaldine, Qld, by two divisions of mounted infantry. Strikers' funds running low, with provisions being raised in the cities. A thousand armed strikers camped outside Barcaldine.

March 28: 'The Selector's Daughter' published in Boomerang.

April 10: Conclusion of the National Australasian Convention in Sydney. George Dibbs had been defeated in his proposal to make Sydney the capital. One army was decided upon.

April 17: Cartoonist David Low was born in Dunedin, New Zealand.

May: Mary Cameron was transferred from Neutral Bay PS to Stanmore Superior Public School. One pupil recalls her as a strict teacher, who loved gardening. Soon, she and her mother moved yet again, to 70 Newtown Rd, Darlington. She was by now becoming more involved with the Sydney radical milieu. Her pupils found her close-cropped hair fascinating as it was not in fashion. Her voice was full and deep, friendly and optimistic. She had the children write short stories, not a usual thing in those days.

May: " ... one May meeting in particular nearly 'turned into a fiasco' when the announced ASL speakers, Healy, Rosa and others, who had been 'so loud in their advocacy of physical force', began to funk over the matter. Andrews and Schellenberg (see below) who were visiting Sydney that day and had come along 'to see the fun' had to start proceedings for the 5,000 or so present: 

'As no-one else seemed inclined Comrade Andrews mounted the stump and addressed the crowd from an Anarchist standpoint, at the conclusion of his speech calling for three cheers for the Social Revolution, which were given with a surprising energy considering it was the first time any meeting in Sydney had ever been addressed by an Anarchist. [He must mean the first outdoor meeting.] The 'Alleged Socialists' present seeing that things went along smoothly now came forward evidently being afraid of losing their hold upon the people, the latter [seeming] to enjoy the anarchist sentiments ... S.A.Rosa and J.D.Fitzgerald deeming it expedient to disavow any connection with the Anarchists and the latter, after declining just before to fill the breach, [now tried] to deny the right of Anarchists to speak upon any Socialist platform and even went so far as to tell the people they must respect law and order .... At the conclusion, having called for Andrews to lead them in his translation of the Marseillaise the majority of the crowd marched in procession through the principal streets led by the red banner and singing the Marseillaise and other revolutionary songs.'
Schellenberg, 'News from Australia', in Commonweal [UK], 12 December 1891; see also Truth, 17 May 1891

"The next week 2000 people moved towards the House defying a police warning that the ASL speakers, Healy, Brady and Cummings (from the Moree shearers) would be arrested. On its return the crowd again dispersed quietly despite military provocation. The troops' commanders were especially concerned because Parliament was being re-opened for a new session. A 'Detachment of the Permanent Artillery' had accompanied the procession as did a large number of police, detectives and soldiers, mounted and foot, with more at Parliament House. An officer, Captain Savage, 'scuffed' a man calmly surveying a cannon, 'the crowd rushed', police intervened but nothing came of it.50 During the ceremony a strong body of police was concealed in the Mint Building."   Source

May 1: Shearers' union leaders went on trial in Rockhampton. Billy Lane was in the courtroom reporting, and wrote Working-man's Paradise in aid of the Prisoners' Defence Fund. It sold for 2s 6d.

May 1: “The first May Day processions and demonstrations were held in Australia during the 1891 Shearers strike in Barcaldine and Ipswich in Queensland. Over 1,000 people took part in Barcaldine demonstrations, over 600 were mounted on horseback. The May Day procession was led by four of the leaders of the Shearers strike, they were followed by the Odd Fellows Band. Behind the band, the shearers and their supporters marched behind the Australian Labor Federation banner. Eureka flags were flown, possibly the first time since 1856, by participants in the first May Day march. The end of the demonstration was brought up by a wagon driven by a shearer, in which a young woman vigorously waved a Young Australia flag.”   Source

Wikipedia says: One of the first Mayday marches in the world took place during the strike on May 1, 1891 in Barcaldine. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that 1340 men took part of whom 618 were mounted on horse. Banners carried included those of the Australian Labor Federation, the Shearers' and Carriers' Unions, and one inscribed 'Young Australia'. The leaders wore blue sashes and the Eureka Flag was carried. The "Labor Bulletin" reported that cheers were given for "the Union", "the Eight-hour day", "the Strike Committee" and "the boys in gaol". It reported the march:

"In the procession every civilised country was represented doing duty for the Russian, Swede, French, Dane etc, who are germane to him in other climes, showing that Labor's cause is one the world over, foreshadowing the time when the swords shall be turned into ploughshares and Liberty, Peace and Friendship will knit together the nations of the earth."

This is Eight-hours day in Queensland, and the unionists in the district took advantage of the occasion to make a demonstration ...
  The feature of to-day has been the great demonstration by the unionists, in which 1340 took part. Of this number 618 were mounted. Not included in the count was the Oddfellows' band, which headed the procession. Then came the banner of the Australian Labour Federation and the men carrying samples of the trades in which they were employed ...
Sydney Morning Herald, May 2, 1891

An open air meeting was held yesterday on the south bank of the Yarra to formally celebrate for the first time in this colony what is known in European countries as "Labor Day". It has been arranged that sympathisers with the movement should meet at the Burke and Wills statue at two o'clock. About half an hour after that time there were some 250 men at the rendezvous, and about twice as many apparently careless onlookers. A little later a move was made to the Yarra bank. The Knights of Labor, members of the Single Tax League, Melbourne Democratic Club and the unemployed fell into a straggling procession, which wended its way down Burke Street and over Princes Bridge. The behaviour of those forming the procession was quite orderly. When the men defiled on to the river tow path two red flags were unfurled to the accompaniment of a feeble cheer ...
The Age, May 1, 1893   Source

May 1: Nine killed and thirty wounded when troops fired on workers' May Day demonstration in support of an eight-hour workday in Fourmies, France.

May 2: The Worker reported that the 'New Australian [sic] Settlement Association' had appointed William Lane's former associate on the Boomerang, Alfred Walker, to visit South America to investigate possibilities for a commune (with Argentine Gov't).

May 2: The murder by Aborigines of a man named Murskiewiczat at Dora Dora, NSW, sparked a manhunt.

May 6: Louisa Lawson met at the Economics Association Rooms in Pitt Street with Rose Scott, Dora Montefiore (Brian Mathews calls her Pattie), Miss M Windeyer and Hon. WM Sutter. LL, Rose and others addressed a large crowd. She voluntarily disbanded The Dawn Club for the greater good and the Womanhood Suffrage League of NSW was formed. This meeting had come out of an ad Louisa Lawson placed in Sydney Morning Herald asking for anyone to discuss or debate suffrage issues. Out of this she met Joseph Simpson who became a friend. They conspire to write a letter to the Herald as 'Viola.

"Womanhood Suffrage League of New South Wales took place at [Dora Montefiore's] home, 77 Darlinghurst Road, on 6 May 1891."   Source

Louisa helped launch (with Maybanke Anderson, Rose Scott, and Dora Montefiore) the Womanhood Suffrage League of NSW. She also founded the Dawn Club, which met in various locations in Sydney, including Quong Tart's tea rooms at 137 King St and 777 George St, and one at the George St markets (aka Paddy's Markets, near Chinatown). One of the meeting places was 43 Royal Arcade (possibly another Quong Tart establishment), and Louisa ran an agency for the club at 114 Hunter St.

"The Dawn Club was one such endeavour. For a subscription of 6d a week, women could attend its reading room, borrow its books and join in the 'animated discussion' of literature. As a purely literary society, the Dawn Club had its limitations: time and time again Lawson complained of 'a poor stock of literature on the woman question'. The real function of the club was social and political. Women 'exchanged ideas' and experiences, debating the Divorce Act, temperance and suffrage, strengthening the friendships which sustained first-wave feminism. And here young women were encouraged 'to exercise whatever talents they may have in speaking or writing', gaining the apprenticeship male literary networks had long denied them.
  "The Dawn Club is the most celebrated of all the literary networks established by and for women, but it was hardly unique or unprecedented. As Birks' experience in Adelaide suggests, reading groups of varying degrees of formality emerged out of the suffrage leagues, temperance unions and anti-vivisection societies, indeed, all the women-centred institutions of first-wave feminism."   Source

May 16: Henry Lawson still with Boomerang but William Lane's Brisbane Worker published 'Freedom on the Wallaby' (which fortified the resolve of striking shearers), the last two verses of which read:

Our parents toil'd to make a home –
Hard grubbin 'twas an' clearin' –
They wasn't crowded much with lords
When they was pioneering.
But now that we have made the land
A garden full of promise,
Old Greed must crook 'is dirty hand
And come ter take it from us.

So we must fly a rebel flag,
As others did before us,
And we must sing a rebel song
And join in rebel chorus.
We'll make the tyrants feel the sting
O' those that they would throttle;
They needn't say the fault is ours
If blood should stain the wattle!

More

Six weeks later, in the Queensland Legislative Council during a 'Vote of Thanks' to the armed police who broke up a Barcaldine labor meeting, MP Frederick Brentnall recited the last two stanzas as evidence of the danger of the radicals. Lawson wrote a bitter rejoinder to Brentnall, 'The Vote of Thanks Debate'. Henry Lawson at this time was editing the 'Country Crumbs' column in the Boomerang, which at first he did in prose, then verse, then prose again.

May 20: Four days after publication of 'Freedom on the Wallaby' (about the Shearers' Strike of 1891), the twelve unionists arrested on March 25 were sentenced in Rockhampton to three years' hard labour on island of St Helena off Brisbane. Unionists were enraged but the Conspiracy Trial defeated the strike.

June 1: The Government of Queensland declined the invitation to send a representative to an Australasian conference on coloured labour.

June 4: First meeting of the WSLNSW. Executive positions held by Lady Windeyer, Hon WM Sutter, Mrs Westenholme, Miss May Manning, Mrs Montefiore, Miss Rose Scott.

June 11: The Salvation Army's Limelight Department was officially established.   More

June 13: "Class governance is a usurpation, a tyranny which has its roots in the ages when military castes, ground the peaceful tillers of the soil into slavery. Our parliamentary system, of which the very opponents of one-man-one-vote profess to be so proud, is only a degenerated survival of the assembly at which in primitive times our Teutonic forefathers gathered, free and equal, to make for themselves laws for their common governance."
William Lane; Brisbane Worker, June 13, 1891   Source

June 17: Wednesday, NSW election. Henry Parkes returned. During the campaign, free traders were jeered by hecklers. George Black was elected Member of the NSW Legislative Assembly, held it for over 25 years. 

"Immediately after the June election which resulted in wins for approximately 36 'labor' candidates, a 'J. Coll' put a motion to the ASL that all professed anarchists withdraw. This was one part of the Rosa/Fitzgerald moves to take over a radical organisation as Rosa had done in Melbourne in 1889. The other parts of the package introduced were: To discontinue the unemployed agitation, to prevent anyone having any criminal record from speaking on an ASL Platform, and to exclude all 'revolutionary' language from ASL platforms. 

Early in July 1891, possibly the same day Coll produced his motion, Andrews had publicly denounced union opposition to strikes or to direct action which he called 'the only means of securing, for the mass of the people who do not seek to oppress each other, liberty, equality and fraternity'.

"Consequently I agree ... in condemning many labor leaders as [seek] to bamboozle the people into further yielding to 'law and order' and to reliance on legislative means the very negation of the principle of liberty. 
  "At the first discussion of the 'anarchist motion' there was a large attendance of ASL members and each speaker spoke for approximately half an hour.58 A split appeared inevitable. On the second occasion 'the motion which has caused a good deal of interest in Labor circles' was carried. Andrews, Whitthread, Schellenberg and others 'declared their intention of forming an Anarchist Group in Sydney'. Rosa, who spoke for exclusion, became ASL Secretary. 
  "In Parliament, Premier Parkes, free trader, had found among the 1891 newcomers laborite free traders prepared to support him in order to keep those policies pre-eminent. The viability of such a 'coalition' required minimal intervention by the forces of law and order in the shearing troubles then petering out in western NSW but still emotive enough to provide the Dibbs-Opposition with a strong weapon if a flareup, say at Bourke, occurred.60 Thus in the ASL (and elsewhere), for those LEL members who sought influence in the legislature, suppression of the rowdier ASL elements was vital. The quid pro quo for their support of Parkes was his jettisoning of the extreme anti-labor units in his 'party'. On the heels of the ASL vote came a vote for Parkes in parliament by some of the newly-elected labor MPs, a vote which Rosa applauded61 even though it split the labor 'party', while almost immediately hard-liner McMillan resigned62 from the Parkes Cabinet."   Source

June 23: With 36 seats, the newly formed Labour Electoral League held the balance of power in the NSW Parliament following elections the previous week. Demands included 8-hour working day, a Workshop and Factories Act to stop sweat labour, election of magistrates, Federation, abolition of non-voluntary defence force.

Mid-1891: JA Andrews: "By mid-1891 [JA] Andrews had helped establish some sort of 'operations centre' at the Smithfield (just out Sydney) Schellenberg farm. From this base the members of the Communist-Anarchist Group of Central Cumberland influenced the agitational scene in Sydney, and throughout Australia ... 
  "The Sydney ASL was the battleground where the first major defeat for the direct-action/non-parliamentary activists was achieved by the moderates and opportunists posing as labor politicians and rushing the chance to get paid parliamentary billets. Rosa, erstwhile revolutionist in other situations, joined forces with the centralisers to stop the ASL engaging in campaigns around unemployment, prohibited anyone with a criminal record from speaking from an ASL platform, demanded that all 'self-professed' anarchists withdraw from the League, and barred 'revolutionary' language. This series of measures in July 1891, had the desired effect of driving pro-anarchist expressions further underground and anarchist supporters into more widely flung locations. Ironically some well-known 'mainstream propagandists like William Lane stood their ground, and, while not claiming to be anarchist, wrote that anarchism was the epitome of the bush ethos, 'going mates' or 'voluntary co-operation', and 'the highest possible social ideal'.

"'The ex-editor of a North Queensland paper, the Master-Workman of a southern Knights of labor Assembly, one of the most popular of Australian Lecturers and other prominent persons in and out of the Australian Labour movement are known to their friends as ... enthusiastic Anarchists'.

"These people can all fairly accurately be identified. About a year later Lane provided some of the names:

"'WW Head, the Wagga ASU Secretary, Jim Mooney, ASU Sydney agent during the Queensland strike, Harry S. Taylor, best known of South Australian single-taxers, Peter McNaught, the Knights of Labour Master Workman, and others are all ready to give their lives and energies to that voluntary communism which is the highest individualism.'"   Source

July 8: Sarah Bernhardt began her season at Her Majesty's Theatre, Sydney. Seats sold for up to 2 pounds. She stayed on the 2nd floor of the Australia Hotel with a menagerie.  More

July 20: Creo Stanley was elected secretary of the Female Employees Society and was appointed the first female delegate of the NSW TLC on the August 1.

"During the dispute Miss Creo Stanley became the first female delegate to the TLC, winning applause when she declared that she was ‘not afraid of any man in the council; no, nor any press representative at the table yonder.’ (Nicol: 21-25)
  "The Sydney unions also had many failings. Stanley was to resign her seat five months later, protesting at the ‘unmanly and insulting conduct of brother unionists’. (Quoted in Scates: p. 81) The Typographers declared women’s membership unconstitutional, and even female-dominated industries were generally represented by male delegates on the Trades and Labor Council. In 1899 the TLC settled a dispute at Hirschman’s factory in Redfern on terms that excluded women from the union. However this decision was only approved by a small majority, and it quickly provoked criticism in the pages of The Worker."   Source

July 30: Population of Australia 3,100,000.

August 3: Bank of Van Diemen's Land crashed and closed its doors at 10:00 am.

August 7: Amalgamated Shearers' Union signed 'freedom of contract' agreement with Pastoralists' Federal Council.

August 8: Amalgamated Shearers' Union and Pastoralists' Union drew up an agreement. WG Spence now branded strikes as "barbarous".

August 21: A speech on women's suffrage in NSW parliament.

August 28: The Gambier sank in Sydney harbour after a collision that claimed 21 lives.

August 29: 'On the Wallaby' published in Boomerang. In Lane's Worker Henry Lawson thumped the tub as Jack Cornstalk (eg, 'The Patriotic League'; 'Spread the Truth').

September: William Booth in Australia.

c. September 19: Lukin wrote to Louisa Lawson that business depression forced him to let Henry Lawson go, and if things improved Henry Lawson could come back. Henry Lawson left behind 'The Cambaroora Star' ("specially written for the Christmas Boomerang" by Henry Lawson; the last Lukin could afford to take) and the sketch, 'Big Jack Dale' which he expanded in verse for the poem 'Ben Duggan' which was reworked into prose 20 years later as “Roll Up at Talbragar” and 8 yrs after that as the poem 'Talbragar'. Boomerang managed to struggle on for just another six months and ceased abruptly on April 9, 1892.

September 28: Death of Herman Melville (b. 1819).

September 29: A telephone experiment was made between Sydney and Melbourne.

October: The Trades and Labour Council was formed in Perth.

October 6: Death of Charles Parnell, Irish nationalist leader (b. 1846).

October 9: Thieves stole the mace from Victoria's Parliament House.

"Some members of Melbourne’s establishment were alleged to be clients of Madame Brussels. Superintendent F.A.Winch, second in charge of the police, and parliamentarian Sir Samuel Gillott, were two men whose careers were finished when they were found in com promising circumstances. It was alleged that magistrates also patronised the ‘high-class’ brothels.

"Annie Wilson was one of Madam Brussels' main rivals and operated brothels in the study area. In 1889 Constables Benussi and Mansfield were found hiding in a water closet in Annie's yard; Benussi was dismissed from the force and Mansfield was fined one pound. (VPRS 937:329.) Wilson was most famous for the rumour that the parliamentary mace was taken to her Boccaccio House in 1891 by a Member of Parliament; the girls were alleged to have conducted a mock parliament there. Continuing embarrassment inspired the government in 1893 to appoint a Board to enquire into the loss. The Board concluded that the mace had been stolen on 9 October 1891 for melting down by persons unknown. (Argus, 28 March 1893.) During the archeological dig, it was hoped that traces of the mace might be found; but this did not happen."   Source

October 10: 'The Shame of Going Back' published in Bulletin:

WHEN you’ve come to make a fortune and you haven’t made your salt,
And the reason of your failure isn’t anybody’s fault —
When you haven’t got a billet, and the times are very slack,
There is nothing that can spur you like the shame of going back;
    Crawling home with empty pockets,
    Going back hard-up;
Oh! it’s then you learn the meaning of humiliation’s cup.

October 10: In Botany, NSW, 67 Chinese were arrested for gambling.

October 19: The Hummer newspaper was published from Wagga Wagga, NSW, by the local branch of the Shearer's Union, until April, 1893, under editorship of Arthur Rae, at that stage an ASL member. Rose Summerfield wrote as 'Hummer Rose'. After that some time, it became the Worker, and official journal of the AWU, published from Sydney and not as enamoured of the ASL.

October 23: George Dibbs succeeded Henry Parkes again as Premier of NSW (threw out the Parkes Ministry on the Coal Mines Regulation Bill), with a majority of one, and was succeeded by George Reid (Free Trade) on  August 3, 1894. Around now, George Black and John Norton fell out. Most of the laborites became Free Traders and the movement split. Norton and the 'wildcat' mob supported protectionist Dibbs. Norton's group hoped Black could be forced to resign so a protection candidate would win a by-election. So they opened fire on Black's beating of Mrs Duggan. Black had left her about a year before and was now seen with the beautiful blonde wife of a NSW station-manager, who Black presented as his sister-in-law, even to Lord and Lady Jersey after he entered Parliament.

Beginning of Active Service Brigade, by JA Andrews (published a decade later in Tocsin, May, 1900)
"The Dibbs Ministry came in by the action of the Labour Party, and would, it was thought, at least administer the affairs of the country with some consideration for labour. The Parkes Ministry had ordered out the troops in the great strike; worse, acting Premier McMillan had actually given orders for Gatling guns to be used to mow down the crowd on Circular Quay - although old Parkes, laid up with a broken leg, sent from his sick room a cancelling order which arrived in time to spare the Ministry that blood-guiltiness.
  "But the Dibbs Ministry speedily brought in a Reign of Terror compared with which the candid toryism and frank brutality of the former administration were liberty, equality, and fraternity. ... it is notorious that there was an alliance between McMillan and Dibbs, notwithstanding their apparent rivalry for Premiership. In furtherance of this nefarious scheme, they convened so-called public meetings of electors, at which their own previously appointed agents presided; these chairmen, pursuant to a determined policy, refused to allow any questions or amendments indicating the real state of public opinion. Gangs of professional pugilists were hired to attend in the halls and "stoush" anyone who uttered a word of dissent, or who even, not being in the swim, attempted to ask a question. The daily papers reported these packed and gagged meetings as invariably passing the most enthusiastic and unanimous votes of confidence. The situation was serious on that account, as many people were likely to be deluded into the belief that Machinegun McMillan was the Messiah whom a repentant people yearned for to deliver them from the tyranny of Dynamite Dibbs.
  "It was then that ARTHUR DESMOND - poet, actuary, and revolutionist took counsel with a few kindred spirits, and they set to work to organise an efficient force, of which the first object was the breaking up of the McMillan tactics.
  "One night McMillan was to address a meeting. That evening there appeared an advertisement convening the "Active Service Brigade" to assemble at a place just over the way from the Protestant Hall. It was the first time that the name had ever appeared before the public ..."
 Source

"To play the villain at such meetings there was no actor better suited for the role than that north of Ireland Jew, William McMillan. In September 1893 Hard Cash warned readers that 'the Sydney robbers of the people, headed by McMillan', intended to enforce an 'acquiescent silence' at election meetings by the use of 'hired bullies'. Hard Cash urged Sydney workers to defy this control, to speak out at McMillan's meetings 'determined to cheer or to hiss or to move amendments ... just as they feel inclined'. If necessary workers should come armed, 'as your forefathers did in the clearing of the Danubian forests'. The workers did not bring weapons to the meetings, but they did bring their voices. "
More on McMillan's political machinations, mainly about the banks

On his return, to Sydney from Brisbane, disillusioned by getting the sack and the failure of the shearers' strike, Henry Lawson wrote for papers including Bulletin, Freeman's Journal and John Norton's Truth (some of it under pen-name 'Cervus Wright', mostly between February-May, 1892). He drank at William McNamara's shop at 221 Castlereagh St. Crashed at Aunt Emma's or Castlereagh St dosshouses. Couldn't live withLouisa Lawson.

November: "In November 1891 Lindsay brought charges in the ASL against Rosa, alleging his complicity in the betrayal of the Chicago anarchists '; and for using the SDF in Melbourne to get money. Lindsay was expelled, however, when he was unable to produce any evidence during the hearing on which Brady and Norton were both asked to speak. Rosa, who claimed Brady feared he was after the editorship of the Workman, that he 'was never an anarchist and never belonged to any anarchist organisation', went on: 

'In the next place Mr Brady was the paid Secretary of the Socialist League until domestic matters caused him to resign. He still retained his membership and became the champion and protagonist of the Anarchists in whose favor he writes doggerel, and on the night of their expulsion he made a special rhetorical effort on their behalf, but was defeated owing to the speeches of J.D. Fitzgerald and myself. Mr Edwin J. Brady and the other anarchists attribute the expulsion mainly to what I said against the wild, visionary and impracticable tactics of the Anarchists ...'

"Rosa said he was in Chicago for only half a day in 1886, that he 'was never in any police force, public or private', that he was 'never at any time openly or secretly in relations with the anarchists in Chicago or elsewhere', but that he 'took a prominent part in attempting to organise the forcible release of the anarchists'. Believing in their innocence he, with others, attempted to organise an armed expedition to Chicago of 10,000 men in detachments of 500, moving to surround the jail on a specific date and freeing the prisoners. The scheme was not carried out because of its impracticality, the antipathy of native Americans and English-speaking immigrants to the condemned men, and lack of funds. He denied that he had changed his name since his English Social Democratic days, claimed that he made speeches in California defending the anarchists and he showed membership cards for the Knights of Labor and the Socialist Labor Party of America. 
  "In a speech to the ASL, he said that if he 'favoured any anarchism it was the communist kind. But the whole theory was unscientific and absolutely impracticable, as long as men were constituted and moulded as at present'. He said he was against physical force unless it was going to succeed! In the United States in 1886, he said, the anarchists, except for Parsons, only talked revolution."   Source

November 2: Dawn published 'The Helpless Mothers' but Louisa Lawson would not print any of his 'barricade' poems. His mentor now was Fred J Broomfield but for the moment he resented his criticism, referring to him in 'My Literary Friend'.

November 7: Henry Morton Stanley, having  arrived in Australia by the Brindisi, gave a lecture at the Opera House (Sydney or Melbourne?). He's in Sydney Nov 11 - 13.

November 11: "The first issue of 'Anarchy', printed with the rough type that was [JA] Andrews' own cut-out wooden fount and tobacco-tin press, appeared to commemorate the Haymarket travesty."   Source

November 14: Rudyard Kipling in Sydney. "If you want to hurry up Federation, you ought to make a syndicate to hire a few German cruisers to bombard Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane for 20 minutes." See JB Primrose, 'Kipling's Visit to Australia and New Zealand', Kipling Journal, March 1963, pp. 12-14.   Source

Late 1891: Creo Stanley (later wife of Edwin Brady) established a co-operative laundry at Pyrmont Sydney in late 1891. She described the workings of the laundry in the following terms.
  "'The girls provide their meals on the premises, living and labouring in harmony without the intervention of unnecessary authority and dividing equally among themselves the net profits resulting from their labours'.
  "She went to Melbourne to set up another co-operative laundry but failed when the Victorian Trade and Labour Council refused to help her. Creo lived together with Edwin Brady an anarchist who was the editor of the radical publication, the Workman and later on he became editor of the radical publication, Truth. Creo Stanley identified herself as an anarchist, she is one of a small number of women who were involved in the anarchist movement in Australia on the late 1880's and early 1890's."   Source

Late 1891: Parkes introduced an Electoral Bill in the Legislative Assembly, conferring the franchise on women. Louisa was strongly for it. Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, Thomas Joseph Carr, opposed it, and the Bulletin ridiculed it.

December: Melba performed at Royal Opera, St Petersburg, Russia.