Proud To Be Union by John Tognolini

On May 11^th next month. I will be bestowed Life Membership of New South Wales Teachers Federation by Federation's Senior President Angelo Gavrielatos. It’s a great honour to achieve. I have in been a active teacher unionist for more than twenty-two years.

However, I’ve been a unionist since December 1975 when I was a nursing assistant in Melbourne’s Mount Royal nursing home and became a member of the Hospital Employees Union. Then I went to work in the old Melbourne Railway Yards as Labourer in the Australian Railways Union. After that I worked as a labourer on the production lines for two years in General Motors Holden’s two Melbourne car plants at Fisherman’s Bend and Dandenong as a member of the Vehicle Builders Union. A railway fettler (track worker) on Sydney's railways in the Australian Railways Union. I've also been a scaffolder, rigger, dogman, as a member of the Builders Laborers Federation, Australian Workers Union, and Building Workers Industrial Union and an Organiser with the BLF, and a Ship's Painter and Docker at Sydney's Cockatoo Island Dockyard with my Life Membership signed by the General Secretary of the Painters and Dockers Bob Galleghan.

There are a few jobs and unions I’ve missed but my unionism can be defined as twenty-five years blue collar & twenty two years of teacher unionism. It has always had these general themes running through it of; touch one, touch all, solidarity, united we win, divided we beg, dare to struggle, dare to win! 

We stand on the gains won by unionists, going back generations before us that have civilised the workplaces and industries I and many others have worked in. 

In Penrith, campaigning against the Liberals in the lead up to the March 25^th State Election, Unions played a major role across the state in the defeat of the Liberal National Government.

An image of teachers from the US during COVID that summed up teachers here in Australia during the pandemic too. Except we had the 2019 & 2020 Bush Fires and the Big Record Rains before COVID hit.

NSWTF Teachers Federation members at Katoomba High school with the Blue Mountains Teachers Association Banner just after we watched an online broadcast frim NSWTF Senior President Angelo Gavrielatos.  

Teachers on strike and rallying outside the New South Wales Parliament in our thousands. I was one of many NSW Teacher Federation Marshals at all of the Strike Rallies.

Katoomba High School Teachers with the Blue Mountains Teachers Association Banner at one of the Strike Rallies.

With NSW Teachers Federation Organiser Pat Donohoe leaving Katoomba at 4.30am to be Marshals for the first Strike Rally.

Blue Mountains Unions & Community gathering for Australian Council of Trade Unions Secretary Sally McManus at Leura’s Alexandra Hotel in 2017.

With NSW Teachers Federation Organisers Pat Donohoe and Marty Carter Wheatley at Sydney May Day 2018. 2018 was the Centenary of NSW Teachers Federation founded in 1918, to celebrate this Unions NSW had Federation lead the May Day March that year.   

During the 1989 Three Month Strike/Occupation of Sydney’s Cockatoo Island Dockyard. Up to 1,500 workers lost their jobs with Bob Hawke’s closure of Australia oldest workplace. I’m in the top third from the right. Photo The Australian

My Life Membership Book of the Painters and Dockers signed by the union's last General Secretary Bob Galleghan. Bob died in 2013, his face is inserted on the image of the union’s banner. The union became part of Maritime Union of Australia. I made the film The Occupation of Cockatoo Island 1989 with France Kelly and is here on Youtube. Click on the Link. 

I also did my ABC RN/Radio National documentary The Last Ship about the last ship built at Cockatoo the HMAS Success. The Navy gave me a ride on it from Hobart to Sydney. It served the Navy for thirty three years and ended up being cut up for scrap in Whyalla  The were 21 trades involved in its construction. There would not be 21 trades in Australia now.

Cockatoo Dockyard in 1982 with the Success being built in the slipway before it hit the water. An Oberon Class Submarine, these subs had their refits and repairs done at Cockatoo and the floating crane the Titan that could do a hundred tonne lift.

HMAS Success

ABC press release

John Tognolini ventures onto the high seas for the third in a series of radio features about working life in Australia.

After painting vivid aural portraits of volunteer firefighters and scaffolder/riggers, John returns to his former workplace, the Cockatoo Island dockyard in Sydney Harbour.

It was at Cockatoo that the last big ship was built in Sydney -- the navy supply ship HMAS Success. Cockatoo Island has a history stretching from the days of convict labour to the intense industrial disputes over its closure by the Hawke Labor government in the late 1980s.

Contrasting stories of the lives of workers at Cockatoo with moments from the working life of the Success as it steams from Hobart to Sydney, John narrates a social history that was once a staple of Australia's port cities.

But don't expect a completely sombre account of shipbuilding or life aboard a navy ship. Togs uncovers plenty of funny stories, some great characters and one especially terrifying encounter with sea-sickness.

I got my scaffolding and rigging tickets at Cockatoo. It's a dangerous job and I still have a scar above my right eye from a scaffolding accident in Sydney in 1996. I also did my ABC RN/Radio National documentary The Ups and Downs of the scaffolding and rigging in Sydney, Melbourne and Mount Piper Power Station near Lithgow. The great union leader John 'Cummo' Cummins put me in contact with 1970 Westgate Bridge Disaster Survivor Paddy Hanopy. John features in my film my film The Deregistration of the Builders Labourers Federation, the Victorian Story John died of a brain tumour on 29 August, 2006. He was was 58. Over 3,000 people attended his funeral, John Cummins, was the final BLF secretary and the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) Victorian president "Cummo", as he was known. Three thousand people from all around the country and all walks of life packed Melbourne’s Regent Theatre, a building saved by the Builders Labourers Federation's (BLF) green bans in the 1970s. 

ABC press release.

Over the last few months, scaffolder and rigger John Tognolini and ABC Radio National's Radio-eye show have made what is probably the first radio documentary about scaffolding.

In The Up and Downs of the Scaff Game, Tognolini, Brent Clough and John Jacobs recreate the sound of 2000 tonnes of concrete and steel going down 180 feet. “Why did we do that?”, says Tognolini. “So that people nearly 30 years later would know about the Westgate Bridge disaster which killed 35 construction workers on October 1970.”

Tognolini interviews two survivors of that tragedy, Pat Preston and Paddy Hanopy, and uses ABC Radio archives to describe what happened.

The show is also about the present day lives of scaffolders and riggers: working in chemical plants during shutdowns and putting up new buildings in central business districts during the booms and busts of the Australian economy.

In 2018 I attended 48th West Gate Memorial and heard Sally McManus address it. I also attended the the the 49th Memorial in 2019 and would have attended the first since COVID last year but my train to Melbourne was cancelled because of the floods. This is Mark Seymour’s song Westgate with footage of the fall of the bridge.  West Gate Bridge Survivor Tommy Watson gives candid account of the horror.

The above pictures from the Melbourne Age of Jeff Kennett and Unionists were taken outside Melbourne radio station 3AW in 1998. Kennett had just butchered Workers Compensation in favour of the insurance companies. The police had barged through our peaceful barbeque protest. Macca the Tasmanian Sparkie/Electrician was knocked to the ground, the second photo shows me helping him up. As someone who grew up in Melbourne, (Brunswick long before the Yuppies moved in), I'm amazed by the level of privatisation that Kennett carried out.

My time on the  railways in 1987 in the Australian Railways Union on the dangers facing railway track workers with ARU President Andrew Baker and John Rhineflesch from the National Union of Railway Workers at the radio station I was involved in Radio Skid Row. Photo Sydney Morning Herald