Interview with Jane Morgan

We were in a war zone, but a happy war zone in many respects, because we were united.

My name is Jane Morgan. I live in Northcote and I am fifty two years old. I want to talk a little about my involvement in our political world and the development of some of the principle's that guide this involvement for me.

I grew up as the youngest child in a family of four children with a mum and a dad in the back blocks of Warranwood up the road from Warrandyte, which was then a real hillbilly area with many very poor families trying to make a living on small-holdings.

During this time our family was very poor and I remember my mother not being able to afford new dentures and having only one dress to wear. I remember that dress to this day. It was a slightly shiny fabric with big red and pink roses on it. I remember my mother sitting on the back steps in this very dress singing songs to the many stray dogs my brother and I were constantly bringing home. And the dogs just sitting there, adoring her.

At the same time my father was a travelling salesman and he always had to be dressed well. I recall him leaving the house in a suit and tie with a well-ironed shirt. We would frequently not see him until the following week or more.Even as a small child the inequity of this relationship was very evident to me and at the same time something I could not reconcile.

My brother and I decided to dispense with the 'mum' name at about twelve years of age in recognition of the fact that our mother was an individual in her own right, although we were full of a laugh and called her "passionflower" and other fantastic names for some time before calling her by her real name, Edith. This was the blossoming of my feminist consciousness. Edith went on to become the very famous Edith Morgan to whom this book is dedicated.

One of the incidences that occurred in our family, which was very important to the development of my beliefs and understanding of the world, occurred when I was about eight years old. The repossession blokes in white shirts and thin black ties came to repossess our car. They were blond, thin and clean cut, mean spirited looking people. There was of course an argument and my father emerged from the house with the shotgun threatening to blow them away. This was hugely exciting for me and in fact blew away any perceptions of mine of living a law abiding and authority respecting life.

Our home was a very political home with a lot of discussion, involvement in the ALP and the emerging Socialist Left. This was also the time of the emergence of feminism, which had a profound effect on many women's lives and the relationships they had with husbands and the view of their role within the family.

Many of the men around us were extremely angry about this threat to their dominance. For the women this was a uniting and empowering time with shared struggles and honesty in the retelling of their stories.

At the end of my sons' primary years I needed to change my life. I knew that the late nights spent working on completing a job was not sustainable with a young boy attending high school. I needed a proper job that would pay regular money and I needed the support of my family in raising an adolescent person. I did get a job at Fitzroy Council in the Women's Support Program. This was a very stimulating time, working with a team of women and providing a feminist service to women and their children living in the high-rise flats. The program we ran was primarily a group program with women learning from one another and changing their lives in very elemental ways.

During this time the union was very strong in local govern- ment and achieved many great things for workers. There was a strong feeling of unity within the union members and lots of fun we did have. It was this involvement in the union at Fitzroy that led to my being so incensed at the brutality of the attack on the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) by Peter Reith and the Liberal Party. When this happened a close friend of mine and I virtually abandoned our work and lent our numbers to the people flocking to the docks in support of the Unionists under attack.

Management at work were not very happy with us, but what could they do but sack us?

This is not, in fact, a very easy thing to do. What happened at the docks was a remarkable and uplifting thing. It really proved that the 'People United Will Never Be Defeated'.

For the two weeks or so of the shut down a new community was structured on the road leading to the wharf. There were thousands of people coming and going. Other hundreds just staying and not going home till Reith and his tools were defeated.

To sustain this number of people was a mammoth task and it happened through people as individuals and a community uniting to defeat a common enemy. There was: - the group of young people ('ferals' I think they were termed at this time) who set up a kitchen and provided free and very cheap meals to whoever showed up;

- the musicians who provided their services free to see us through the long and cold nights;

- the workers with welding gear joining together iron girders as barricades against the police;

- a whole union movement united to provide things like toilets and coordination to ensure no entry was left unmanned at any time and no protester was left hungry or unappreciated or unprepared;

- Edith and Molly who stopped the train and sent that poor train driver probably off for years of trauma counselling;

- the night of standing all night long in solid formation being buzzed constantly by police helicopters and the police arriving the next day in huge numbers to break the picket and having to turn tail knowing they didn't stand a chance.

We were in a war zone, but a happy war zone in many respects, because we were united.