Mick Young
Stories about Mick Young must be legion. Once a delegation fighting to save Port Adelaide Adult Matric (Saint Ethelton Behind the Wire to its inmates) from being chopped by the Bannon and Hawke governments was invited to put its spiel before the Port FEC. Listening to the delegation leader drone on about the 700 papers sat per year and the median mark of 74 was a bit like listening to paint dry. When the speaker got to the part where he stated that more people sat through night lectures every week in the Port studying Matric Medieval History than sat through the monthly FEC meetings Mick just had to tell the delegation to piss off. Mick and St Etheltons folded in the Port at about the same time.
At the Federal ALP Conference in Canberra which established the Three Mines Policy in 1984, Mick had invited the protesters to use his rooms. So his place was filled with such lively and about to be bruised spirits as people who would stand around on 44 gallon drums labelled "radio active waste" wearing gas masks and looking like the front cover of Green Left #224, or surf the bow waves of nuclear armed warships, or do water fasts on the steps of Parliament House Adelaide to protest the exploitation of the Great Artesian Basin by Roxby Uranium, or fling themselves in their wheelchairs in front of the bulldozers on the Franklin. Those were the days comrades.
When Mick was bailed up by a shearers rep during the wide comb dispute — Jesus, Mick we've got to do something you've seen these machines they look about as elegant as a hold with hungry boards — Mick dug deep and produced a caser for the cause.
Mick made available copies of such documents as the Fox Report on Ranger Uranium to the Port CANE [Campaign Against Nuclear Energy] during their long campaign to have Port Adelaide City declared a Nuclear Free Zone. Mick had shown film of the disaster of the French nuclear fuels reprocessing plant at a time when Port Adelaide had been one of the sites mooted for a uranium enrichment plant.
Port CANE, in its presentation to the FEC, was able to detail the story of the early deaths by cancer of all of the boiler makers at the Radium Hill shop as those details had been written up in Battler and shown in Backs to the Blast. All the workers had died before they were sixty. Mick as AWU rep for the Pirie region had serviced other workers besides shearers — Riverland fruit pickers, pastoral workers, SA Mines Department workers at Radium Hill and at the yellow cake factory at Port Pirie.
Mick said — look up north I've just met an old mate from Radium Hill and he's worked Mary Kathleen and Rum Jungle and he's on to Ranger and he's just fine. Like me.
Vale Michael Jerome Young. Died April 1996 aged 59 in Sydney of Leukemia. Surely we live in an age of Faith.
Hec Kavanagh
Port Lincoln, SA
Aborigines
Once again the Aboriginal people are being persecuted by the powers that be. The supposed rorts carried out by members of the Aboriginal Legal Services in Qld pale into insignificance in comparison to the rorts, murder and persecution carried out by the whites against the Aboriginal people over the last 200 years. Even though they have seized this entire country off them, they still have not given them back part of the land that once was theirs. Instead they are defining ways and means of depriving these people of their just rights, that is owning part of the land that once was theirs.
Shame on the way we and the powers that be are treating the Aboriginal people. Shame on the way the Native Title Act was instituted to force the Aboriginal people to get on their bended knees and beg the white man's courts of this country for parts of the land that was stolen from them. Yes! Stolen from them.
Why penalise the Aborigines for rorting the system while the powers that be continue to go on rorting theirs. Shame on the way the whites are still treating these landless people in their own country. Let us be fair dinkum for once and give these people back part of the land that once was theirs so that they can retain their dignity and respect in their country of origin. It's about time the powers that be did away with all this mumbo jumbo capitalist crap of forcing the Aboriginal people to go to the courts to ask for land that was stolen from them.
WG Fox
Brisbane
Scapegoating
This year is certainly not the year of tolerance.
State, Territory and Federal Governments either singly or in concert are attacking minority groups right, left and centre.
Dole recipients, trade unions, Aboriginal funding, Aboriginal organisations, Native Title, indigenous rights and public drunkards are receiving public vilification.
Workers' wages and conditions, the handicapped, sexual deviates, health workers, the education system and environmental groups are feeling the effects of policies that lead to repression.
Who is next? Almost certainly the Aboriginal land councils and the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (NT) will be up for dismemberment or abolition. What a pity we don't have a political opposition!
Col Friel
Alawa NT
Energy
In WA the State Electricity Commission never promoted power economy because it would diminish their revenue! (We had the most or highest charges from all states!) But somehow there is no money for powerlines underground. And Council by Council has to fight for it. So up north (cyclone country) where there is a very good reason for buried power lines, nothing is done either (of course). Also for health reasons powerlines should be buried! (Magnetic fields and the human body!)
Josie Leeden
South Perth
Macedonia and Greece
A comment on the now-suspended Hellenic and Macedonian clubs at Melbourne University. Rather than squabbling over the corpse of Alexander the Great both these clubs would be better off trying (at least trying!) to find some common ground.
My intellectual sympathies are with the Greeks in the Macedonian dispute, in the sense that "Macedonia is Greek" is a slogan with more historical evidence to support it than the contrary assertion. But nation-state politics obliges the Greek supporters of this view to adopt standover methods and these methods cannot work given the fact that the implausible ideology of the anti-Greek Macedonians is supported by the big guns in the European Union and elsewhere. It is up to the Greeks to be more intelligent and try to find a better way of relating both to the "gypsy Skopjeans", as they call them, and to the EC masters of both sides in the dispute.
I would also like to appeal to the Macedonians (who invoke the socialist traditions of former Yugoslavia to strengthen their case against the Greeks) to try harder to work out a more convincing way of promoting these ideas in a post-Yugoslavia world. The cultural heritage of Greece is so huge that no convincing vision of socialism can just exclude it or bypass it, whatever nationalist Greeks did to Communists and Macedonians two generations ago.
The European Union and "anti-racist" Australians will extend sympathies to the Macedonian underdogs and so on, but are socialist Macedonians really content just to be recipients of humanitarian patronage?
I recommend the books of Ellen Meiksins Wood to students in both these clubs: in particular Democracy against Capitalism and Peasant Citizen and Slave. Neither have anything to say about Alexander the Great.
Wayne Hall
Athens Greece