Entangled experiences of class: The 1891 Queensland bush workers’ strike

On the seventeenth day of a trial, one 'close and drowsy' afternoon in a courtroom in Rockhampton, central Queensland, in May 1891, fourteen men would finally learn of their fate.The charge was conspiracy, in that context taken to mean two or more people intimidating, threating, obstructing or by any other means inducing people to belong to unions or alter their mode of conducting business. 1 The room was filled with lawyers and police officers, pastoralists and court officials, newspaper reporters and an unknown mix of local observers.After spending two nights deliberating in seclusion and communicating to the judge several times that they could not reach a unanimous decision-each time to be sent away to consider the matter furtherthe jury found twelve of the accused to be guilty.The fifty-two-year-old, English-born and Cambridge-educated Supreme Court judge, George Rogers Harding, 'with trim beard and glittering eye-glass', firmly put aside the jury's unanimous plea that the sentences be as lenient as possible, reminding them where their responsibilities ended and where his prerogative prevailed. 2 The twelve convicted that day were united by their involvement in the shearers' and bush labourers' strike that had been in progress since January.They had no known prior convictions among them and were otherwise an eclectic collection of men with diverse backgrounds.Half were immigrants from Britain and Ireland-a higher proportion than for the Queensland population as a whole, of whom about seven in ten were Australian-born. 3 Of those whose religious affiliations are known, some were Catholic, some Anglican.Others eschewed denominations and were instead 'free thinkers', when fewer than two per cent of people counted as Queenslanders so identified. 4 They ranged in age from twenty-five to forty-nine, but most were in their 1 Stuart Svensen, The Shearers' War: