Date and Time:
Monday, April 25, 2011 -
10:30am to 12:00pm
Location:
Melbourne, 8 Hour Monument opposite Trades Hall in Carlton.
Celebration of Induustrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) and its defeat of World War One conscription referendums in Australia, read some poetry of Melbourne IWW activist Lesbia Harford (1891-1927).
An informal flexible event, you might like to bring food to share (or not!) your own poetry or whatever.
Lesbia Harford has been published by Penguin and recorded by Redgum ("women in change" Virgin Ground album). And there has been a a play about her ("The Earthly Paradise"). Yet still, somehow she is virtually forgotten. As someone said, "The struggle against tyranny is the struggle of memory against forgetting".
Geography:
Comments
Fighting fools who fought to forge their wage slave chains anew
http://unionsong.com/u606.html
Anzac 1944
A Poem by Ernest Antony 1944
Yes, you'll remember Anzac and the men who died for you,
The fighting fools who fought to forge their wage slave chains anew.
How often have you told us that their glory shall not fade?
How often have you gloated o'er the sacrifice they made.
While you boasted loud of freedom and your famed democracy,
You schemed to cheat the orphans of far off Gallipoli.
You remember! You remember each year for just a day,
Sons of Anzac and the Anzacs - in a superficial way.
While we heard your voices choking with sentimental slime,
There were things that we remembered, we'll remind you of sometime.
We remember "the depression" and the aftermath of war,
The doles queues and starvation in the "world worth fighting for".
While you weave a wondrous future of a world grown good and wise,
We are not the least forgetting all the trickery and lies.
Nor shall we be forgetting who owes to whom the debt,
Oh, yes, we will remember - when you're trying to forget.