To begin with, Roberts’ Australia in the early 1890s was a place of severe economic hardship based on problems with the country’s heavy dependence on its shearing industry. Although a period of long economic prosperity originating with the gold rushes of the 1850s caused manufacturing and land speculation to increase, following a Victorian state property collapse and a British banking crisis, both the overseas and national markets quickly diminished, resulting in a dramatic fall in the price of wool. The county was forced into an economic standstill as unemployment and poverty swept the land and Australia’s fundamental rural industries began to fail (“Turbulent Times”). The people most directly and drastically affected by this sudden shift in economic stability were those working on the sheep stations, namely the shearers. However, their lives even before the depression were a far cry from the glorified public image typically associated with rural Australia. Most were itinerant laborers, working eleven- to twelve-hour days, who could not count on finding work for more than four or five months out of the year (Smith 115). Ninety percent of these men were unmarried, and according to an account of 1891, “they may die hungry, thirsty, and homeless in the bush without greatly affecting any other human lives” (Smith 115). In reaction to the brutal conditions to which the shearers were subjected, a shearer’s union was formed in 1886, the Amalgamated Workers Union, and by 1890 claimed tens of thousands of members (“Shear History”). In reaction to a new rule prohibiting union members from working with non-union members, a violent series of strikes soon spread throughout Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria. It included raids and acts of sabotage and pushed several parts of the country to the brink of civil war (“The Great Shearer’s Strike of 1891”).
Although Roberts was an active artist of the shearing industry during this time of rampant social and economic instability, why did he concern himself with including references of the tension in his paintings? Historian Leigh Astbury asserts that Roberts was, in fact, politically sympathetic with the labor movement and points to his interests’ origins in the early 1880s when Roberts became friends with Dr William Maloney, a future Labor politician (City Bushmen 111). But even more important than this friendship was Roberts’ association with the shearing industry itself. In 1888, he traveled to the Brocklesby station in the New South Wales Riverina, where he spent that year and much of the next observing the shearers. The location of this station is particularly important as Brocklesby is only fifty kilometers from the very large Brookong station (see image) where in August of 1888, nine shearers known as the “Brookong Rioters” were famously arrested and imprisoned for going on strike (City Bushmen 112). With such a close proximity, Roberts could hardly have helped but be influenced by typical shearing station complaints and gossip of revolt.
Images:
Strike Meeting at Queens Square in Macquarie Street, Sydney, 1890s. Parliament of New South Wales. Brookong Stations union shearers at the time of the riots, Lockhart Shire. 189-?. National Library of Australia, Canberra.