Journalist James Maxwell Ramsay contributed much to the literature of the Australian Labor Party, the above collection , published in 1945, received a favourable review from the chancellor of the University of Western Australia , Professor Walter Murdoch , Rupert Murdoch's uncle:-
The vigorous militancy of the book is inspiriting, and should bring it wide popularity . Good strong verse , barbed to stick in the reader's mind, can be an effective political weapon .
Discovered at a Magnetic Island garage sale , the book is a presentation copy from the author and contains an undated newspaper cutting dealing with a Ramsay inscription on the headstone on the grave of West Indian boxer , Peter Jackson, in Toowong Cemetery , Brisbane .
Sleep, Peter,sleep,
brave champion
All hushed we gather
round the ring
While snow-white flowers,
mist-eyed ,we fling
Within the grave-the
fight is done .
Sleep,Peter,sleep,the
hero's rest
Be thine in Mother
Earth's broad breast .
Jackson arrived in Sydney in 1880 and became a champion Australian boxer . Billed as an Australian , he fought 28 epic fights , beating many of the world's top pugs in the USA and England, but was denied a world championship bout because of racial discrimination .
Well built , dubbed The Black Prince, he was an actor in an Uncle Tom's Cabin tour , taught boxing ; late in life, he returned to Australia, toured with a circus, tubercular , too ill to box , he died in Roma ,Queensland , on July 13 1901.
The newspaper item about Jackson's tombstone inscription was written by Queensland author , photographer and prolific archivist Alan Queale ,who described Ramsay as a former leader writer at the Daily Standard, sub-editor at The Worker and one of Australia's veteran Labor journalists .
Ramsay , he wrote , had informed him more than 30 years previously that there were two more verses to the Peter Jackson one on the gravestone , but he had forgotten them and the poem had not been included in Onward, Workers! Ramsay, he added, had been an admirer of the boxer.
Queale (1908-1982) had been in charge of the Army section which kept a photographic record of the Allied occupation of Japan from 1947-1949, shots of his now in the Australian War Memorial collection.
Ramsay, right, was born in 1870, and became an accountant . Encouraged by the great Henry Boote , longtime editor of The Worker , and other prominent Labor figures such as J. S. Collings,Minister for the Interior in the Curtin Government , and R.S. Ross, former editor of Labor and Socialist journals in Broken Hill, Melbourne and New Zealand , he took up fulltime journalism . An example of his powerful , often pungent poetry is displayed below .
In a stirring foreword to the book, Henry Boote , an Englishman , self educated and an artist , who on coming to Australia once edited a Queensland newspaper which strongly campaigned against bringing in Kanaka labour from the islands , said much original Labor writing , like Ramsay's, had not received the attention it deserved. Lays of a Labour Journalist should be warmly welcomed as it was instinctive and all-alive to the ideology of the Labor Movement ...
There's a lot of unobtrusive talent in the Labor Movement .It does its job from day to day, and is content to feel that the job is well done . Every now and again men and women of genius break out of the ranks of the masses , and by sheer force of their gifts compel the world to recognise them. But a vast deal of inherent capacity has been lost in the ceaseless welter of toil and poverty that has marred the social scene right down the ages .
In modern times we are altering all that .Today the workers refuse to be body-and-soul submerged by their servitude . Look where you may , we now see them participating in the cultural activities of our generation .
In literature , art, music, science, invention and philosophy they are taking an increasingly important part, and the viewpoints of the mass mind and their aspirations of the mass spirit are being put before the world by eloquent advocates the mass itself has produced. Boote went on to say:
Scathing satire, scorn-laden humor and burning indignation alternate with deep thoughtfulness and exalted exhortation in the rhyming commentary on the capitalist world which he (Ramsay ) presents to us in this volume . Labor journalism makes great and varied demands upon its propogandists , demands often eliciting creative efforts of a high order, and then , their immediate purpose fulfilled, leaves them behind, to be forgotten in the stress and excitement of new battles and new achievements .
The collection opens with the title poem , Onward, Workers! followed by one inspired by a statement by Abraham Lincoln about the faith to know that right makes might . Unity, Progress?, An Armistice Day Lesson , The Editor's Dream ,Tools of the Tories ? are just some of the headings on poems .
A number refer to Brisbane / Queensland subjects , such as the one above . Another was inspired by a Brisbane clergyman who deplored the deference by the church to wealthy worshippers ; the church, the cleric said , should welcome the man with a penny as cordially as the man with a big cheque. One poem , below , appears to be a tribute by Ramsay to his Scottish mother, although it is not certain.
Interestingly, the poet Ramsay was related to Sir James Maxwell Ramsay (1916-1986), naval officer and governor , born in Hobart , where his Brisbane born accountant father was manager of Tattersall's lotteries . His distinguished naval career included being the officer-of-the-watch aboard HMS King George V during the battle that sank the German battleship Bismarck , narrowly avoiding engagement with the Japanese fleet which sank HMAS Perth in the Sunda Strait and action as commander of the destroyer HMAS Warramunga in the Korean War.
After serving as Lieutenant- Governor of Western Australia , he was sworn in as Governor of Queensland in 1977. In May 1985 , he experienced an unexpected broadside when he was jostled and booed by a large crowd when he went to the University of Queensland to receive an honorary doctorate of laws . A concurrent award had been arranged for the state premier , Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen,who did not turn up , so the crowd , numbering thousands , took our their anger on the governor and the official party , disrupting the ceremony .
