Inside the Big Picture mind of humble Spanish labourer Salvador Torrents ,with an insatiable thirst for knowledge, who came to Australia in 1915 and tilted against numerous injustices and oppression in many forms.
Proudly declaring the above product is manufactured in Queensland by Queenslanders , this Queensland Exercise Book , one of a number kept by Torrents , is crammed with cuttings dealing with religion and politics .There are other similar ones containing cuttings , items from overseas and local newspapers , in three languages , dealing with a diverse range of subjects such as global atrocities , injustices , racial discrimination in Australia , the first eight hour day in Victoria,Japanese aggression against China,war debts, disarmament and the Tolpuddle Martys who were transported from England to Australia in 1834 for unlawfully administering oaths of loyalty to a union which they had formed .
An unexpected snippet is about a former ALP Queensland Premier and Federal Treasurer, "Red Ted " Theodore , his reputation sullied by the Mungana Copper Mine Affair , catching a record sized marlin off Sydney .
Theodore, founder of the Australian Workers' Association , later the AWU , was involved in goldmining ventures in Fiji with Frank Packer , became chairman of directors of Packer's Australian Consolidated Press ; his son , John, also worked for Packer , became the first managing director of Channel 9.
An unexpected snippet is about a former ALP Queensland Premier and Federal Treasurer, "Red Ted " Theodore , his reputation sullied by the Mungana Copper Mine Affair , catching a record sized marlin off Sydney .
Theodore, founder of the Australian Workers' Association , later the AWU , was involved in goldmining ventures in Fiji with Frank Packer , became chairman of directors of Packer's Australian Consolidated Press ; his son , John, also worked for Packer , became the first managing director of Channel 9.
In Spanish , there is a handwritten book of poems by Torrents , an account of his trip to Australia, romantic short stories. His scorn of religion is a striking feature .
His many books in Special Collections at the James Cook University Eddie Koiki Mabo Library ,Townsville, include an account of the failed 1890s utopian settlement set up by followers of Brisbane journalist William Lane in Paraguay . There are several novels by crusading American socialist Upton Sinclair who exposed the excesses and injustices of the capitalist system , the plight of the poor , the muckracking of American yellow journalism and limitations of the press .
Titles include four bound in volumes of the 1925-l934 Encyclopedie Anarchiste, edited by Sebastien Faure ,dedicated to all those who, braving privations, slander and persecution ,work wherever they might be in order to ensure and hasten the coming of an anarchistic society : Neither gods nor masters ; Spain in Revolt , The American Testament. A flick through a scrapbook reveals a 1950 advertisement featuring a worker under the heading THE AUSTRALIA I KNEW , which appeared in The Worker .
For something entirely different , there is the early eye catching photograph below of men with huge snakes from the North Queensland rainforest.
A letter from a person in Coolangatta , Queensland , is full of fascinating personal information about strikes in North Queensland's sugar and timber industries during the period from the 1920s to 1930s.
The fierce 1932 "riot" of unemployed at Parramatta Park , Cairns , is mentioned along with the crusading communist lawyer Fred Paterson , later elected to the Queensland parliament , who defended men charged over the affair . Years later , the writer of the letter gave communist author Frank Hardy "some material " relating to the Parramatta Park episode for a book and arranged to meet Hardy in Cairns . ( See Hardy's The Loser Now Will Be Later To Win and chapter headed They Eat Their Babies in Russia...a key figure in the Cairns battle , beaten up by police , went to Darwin , was involved in fiery union matters there and author Xavier Herbert worked with him .)
There is criticism in the letter of the AWU ,with the claim that the Colonial Sugar Refinery and the union recruited 200 men from the Northern Rivers to crush and victimise canecutters involved in a strike.
The 1934 strike by canecutters in Ingham over the threat of wiel's disease from rats is covered . During construction of a road from Innisfail to the Atherton Tablelands in 1933, some unemployed who had been carrying swags for years, were engaged and there was a strike when the foreman sacked a man whose horse, used to drag logs away , had broken into his tent . The foreman agreed to reinstate the men , but not the horse . The men refused to accept the ruling and , according to the letter , the job was closed down .
Torrents, undoubtedly, was aware of many of these events and in all probability knew many of the men involved . His newspaper cuttings cover strikes, disparaging references to men as "Dagoes" and communist troublemakers . Delve further into the Torrents archive and another of his apparent early Northern Territory photographs , below, surfaces .
NEXT : Involvement with the family who built the Spanish castle at Paronella Park, a prominent Chinese family in Innisfail and a cyclone .
