The first article in the first issue ,September 2005, was an obituary by Greg Mallory for waterside worker Phil O'Brien (1920-2004) , active in the Waterfront Peace Committee , whose autobiography was entitled , Towards Peace : A Worker's Journey.
The preface to the book stated his life had consisted of three "wents": I went to school, I went to the war and I went into the Waterside Workers' Federation .
In 1962 he had been a member of an Australian and New Zealand delegation to the World Peace Council in Moscow. While there he spent a memorable day with Australian author Frank Hardy during which they visited a church in the morning, went to the horse races in the afternoon, and the Bolshoi in the evening .
" He drank Russian beer with Hardy in the afternoon during Frank's mad betting spasms and subsequently fell asleep in the ballet ."
( Hardy admitted his gambling obsession in his book The Unlucky Australians, about the Gurindji walk off from the Vestey owned Wave Hill station in the Northern Territory . Commenting on the Darwin betting shops , he wrote that if only a small fraction of the effort of picking winners went into science and culture, Australia would have bred a race of geniuses instead of idiots.)
NEXT : The union owned Darwin newspaper , Xavier Herbert and the novel Capricornia , militant housewives , the Red Dean and Stayput Malays.
