The crowd at Harry Black’s funeral, on May 23, filled the South Chapel in Rookwood Garden Cemetery, the overflow room and the upstairs gallery. Family, comrades, wharfies, seafarers and even a few old fellow soldiers from World War II were there to say goodbye.
It was a fitting reflection on the life of a treasured comrade.
Harry was born in Rylstone, NSW, the son of a butcher in a small rural town, said Jim Donovan, the president of the Retired Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) Members, in his eulogy at the funeral.
Harry’s childhood spanned the Great Depression and he left school to work at the age of 14.
He signed up with the army and served in the Middle East, where he was injured. After he recovered from his injuries he was sent to fight in the jungles of New Guinea.
Russell Gow, who fought alongside Harry in the 7th division of the Australian army in World War II, told those at the funeral that Harry personified the definition of a real “mate”.
In 1951, Harry became a wharfie and joined the militant Waterside Workers Federation (WWF) in its political heyday. He was a leading participant in the 1954 and 1956 national waterfront strikes and in the fight for permanent employment on the wharves. He joined the Communist Party of Australia, despite the Cold War political persecution of its members.
When Harry became a wharfie life was very tough on the waterfront. Wharfies lined up day after day on Sydney’s “Hungry Mile” hoping to be picked by the employers for a shift at miserable pay rates under the notorious “Bull system”.
In Harry’s words, workers “were pitted against each other because this was the kind of environment that employers like to develop, with one against the other, dog-eat-dog and so forth, and yet they survived and they survived by coming together in defence of working conditions, to improve working conditions, to have a period when they were led by people who were determined that we should work under decent conditions, proper conditions and humane conditions, because many of the times in the Hungry Mile they were not humane conditions.”
A member of the most militant wharf crew in Sydney, Gang 505, Harry led many struggles, including winning back conditions temporarily lost in the fight for permanency and, in 1967, stopping the loading of the ship Jeparit with war supplies to Australian armed forces fighting alongside US troops in the Vietnam War.
Harry was elected vice president of the WWF in 1970 and national councillor in 1971, holding these positions until his retirement in 1981. After that he served for several years as secretary of the Retired MUA Members.
Harry is widely respected in the broad left as a staunch class fighter and builder of unity. I got to know and respect Harry in the late 1980s in a left unity negotiation between the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP — since merged into the Socialist Alliance) and the Socialist Party of Australia (later renamed the Communist Party of Australia).
While this unity move did not succeed, myself and other members of the DSP remained very fond of Harry. Indeed the many comrades across the still to be united organisations of the left in Australia should reflect that every further step for unity we take will honour the political legacy of comrades like Harry Black.
Every May Day march since then — until this year’s May Day (when Harry was too ill in hospital to attend) — I bought a red rosette from Harry or his close comrade and friend Ina Heidtman. I’ll be thinking fondly of Harry in May Days to come, as I buy a red rosette from Ina or another comrade.