Historical Events of the Revolutionary World Movement

"Rothbury Battle" New South Wales AUSTRALIA December 16, 1929

A bloody chapter in the history of the social fascist (social democratic) government of Australia at locked out miners

The police are a lot of murderers.

You know what the murderers did at Rothbury.

Norman Brown did not die in vain:

he died in a good cause.

He was shot down by a lot of parasites,

the tool of the master class – the police.

The workers of the coalfields lived in a Police State, where the

brutal 'bashers' could do, and get away with anything.

Scullin took the reins on October 22, 1929.

Two days later the US stock market lost 11 per cent of its value in "black Thursday".

The Great Depression had begun.

January, 1930, a lively meeting of miners, address by William Laidlaw, a member of the communist party.

Conrade Laidlaw pulled no punches in his emotional address. Constable Barber took careful note of the language used by the speaker, and as soon as comrade Laidlaw had finished his address, he arrested him for using 'insulting words' against the police.

In 1929, industrial conflict erupted in the Hunter Valley coal industry.

The economic pressures of the Great Depression hit the industry hard, pitting miners against mine owners, causing widespread community hardship and culminating in fatal violence on 16 December that year.

Up to 6000 miners had marched on the Rothbury colliery, near Cessnock, where mine owners were attempting to re-open the closed pit with scab labour.

The miners arrived at dawn, trying to gain entry to the mine knowing a tent city with about 350 "volunteer" workers had been hastily erected inside.

Violence erupted by the police. Police were instructed to fire shots "into the air and ground only". The mass assault was soon repulsed.

The official toll was one innocent miner - Norman Brown - shot dead by a policeman's bullet, apparently from a ricochet. Nine others were hit by bullets and dozens injured.

This police crime occurred during the Great Depression. Earlier, miners had been locked out of work illegally with their families now living in poverty, living on charity. Almost 10,000 miners went without work for 15 months before they finally returned with a 12.5 per cent pay cut and the loss of other industrial rights.

Then came a six-months reign of state terror up to June 1930, according to former northern mining leader, the late Jim Comerford. It was the era of the 'Basher Gang'.

They rode in motor lorries patrolling the main road between Maitland and Cessnock 24 hours a day. If they found three people gathered together in the street, it was an offence under the Unlawful Assembies Act. Little matter if the men on the street were merely talking about the cricket or the weather, they were clubbed into submission not to gather like that again.

Jim Comerford was a young 15 year old pit boy at the Rothbury Riot.

Jim had a long and eventful, sometimes controversial life. He was a long time official in the Miners' Federation: one of the strongest most militant unions. He was best known to the public for his writing of book reviews and stories of life on the coalfields over several decades for the Newcastle Herald.

Comerford, who had been a terrified 15-year-old witness to the Rothbury colliery violence, said "imagine the uproar if the same sort of thing happened at (Sydney's) Vaucluse or on the North Shore".