AustLit

'When Pilbara Aboriginal pastoral workers started coordinated strike action in May 1946, the Western Australian press did not know whether or not to take it seriously. ‘Nothing workem longa you’, a spokesman for the strikers, identified only as ‘Toby’, was quoted as saying by the West Australian; ‘We bin strike’. Displaying a common mixture of disdain and mockery, the report went on to blame visitors from other stations who induced the workers to stay up playing cards so they would ‘resent the necessity of early rising’,1 and it was this, rather than the intolerable work conditions, that had brought on the strike. Not all contemporary reports were so flippant. Soon after the strike had started, the same newspaper acknowledged the dilemma the pastoralists and the state government faced. The ‘squatters’ could not work their stations ‘without the help of the natives’, who in turn could not live without ‘the help of the station owners and other employers’.2 Both parties stood to lose from what was portrayed as a mutually beneficial relationship. Furthermore, most station owners, the argument went, provided well for their station workforces and, indeed, some said that they gained little return from their beneficence.' (Introduction)