By Alexander Brown
This year marks 80 years since the United States Army Air Forces plane Enola Gay flew over Hiroshima and dropped the first atomic weapon to be used in wartime. A second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three days later. The bombs killed between 150,000 and 246,000 people and devastated the two cities. The bombings provoked a nuclear arms race, in which states tested ever more powerful weapons of mass destruction. The Soviet Union conducted its first successful nuclear weapons test in Kazakhstan in 1949; the British theirs in the Montebello Islands off Western Australia in 1952. The military strategy that emerged was dubbed by its theoreticians with a moniker that indicated their self-consciousness of its insanity: Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).
The people of Wollongong have been fighting against militarism, imperialism, and nuclear madness since the early 20th century. Coal miners were influenced by the internationalism of the International Workers of the World (IWW). When Labor Prime Minister Billy Hughes initiated a referendum on conscription to supply bodies for the killing fields of Europe, local workers fought a vigorous campaign against conscription that resulted in a resounding 65 per cent NO vote in Wollongong. In the 1930s with fascism on the rise globally, Australia's wannabe Führers formed the New Guard. Local branches of the Workers Defence Corp and the United Front Against Fascism formed to oppose them and fought a decisive battle with the New Guard in Crown Street. A subsequent boycott of New Guard members’ businesses prompted their rapid decline locally.
When Spanish officers launched a coup against the elected government of Spain, Port Kembla steelworkers Jim McNeill and Joe Carter volunteered to fight for the republic and Wollongong’s labour movement raised funds for Spanish relief and the Republican cause. When McNeill and Carter returned from Europe in 1938, they were welcomed as heroes in a city where local waterside workers had struck that year, refusing to load the tramp steamer Dalfram with pig iron bound for Kobe, Japan. They knew it would fuel aggression against China. The Lyons Government and its Attorney-General, the infamous 'Pig Iron' Bob Menzies, favoured appeasement of Japan but Port Kembla wharfies and the local labour movement saw more clearly that the war material steel giant BHP was selling to Japan would one day return to Australia as bombs and bullets.
In March 1950 the international Partisans for Peace launched the Stockholm Appeal, a signature campaign calling for a ban on nuclear weapons. In Wollongong its supporters promoted the appeal and opposition to nuclear weapons became a key theme in May Day marches. When the Cold War turned hot in Vietnam, a young Louie Christofides sat on the railway line at Wollongong Railway Station in front of a train carrying conscripts to Sydney for the war in Vietnam. He was later jailed for refusing the draft. Wollongong women – including his mother Helen and peace activist Sally Bowen – chained themselves to the railings of the public gallery in Federal Parliament, seeking justice for Louie and voicing their opposition to the war.
Following Australia's withdrawal from Vietnam between 1971 and 1973, the anti-war energies that had been aroused in the movement transformed into a movement for nuclear disarmament. In the 1980s the threat of atomic weapons loomed large, as sabre rattling between the United States and the Soviet Union threatened to turn nuclear.
Annual Hiroshima Day marches brought the peace movement together, culminating in 1986 with the United Nations International Year of Peace. In that year Wollongong City Council convened the International Year of Peace Committee that organised a civic commemoration of Hiroshima Day and installed a bronze plaque at the corner of Crown and Church streets in the Wollongong City Mall.
My own life became entwined with the Wollongong peace movement in 2001, following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The neoconservative Bush administration used the attacks as an excuse to launch a new global War of Terror. Wollongong mobilised rapidly to express our opposition to this new global war, protesting the attacks on Afghanistan and forming a new anti-war organisation, Network Opposing War and Repression (NO WAR). In February 2003 we organised the largest peace demonstration in Wollongong history, bringing 5,000 people into the streets to say no to the war on Iraq.
In 2022 peace activists formed Wollongong Against War and Nukes to oppose the AUKUS military pact and the threat of an east coast nuclear submarine base at Port Kembla. While AUKUS promises nuclear-powered submarines for Australia, we fear it will deepen our involvement in America's forever wars. It covers not only technology transfers, but also the stationing of more US troops and US bases in Australia, and greater integration of Australian military assets under US command and control.
When Israel launched its most recent wave of genocidal violence against the Palestinians in October 2023, a new generation of activists convened Wollongong Friends of Palestine. Like the wharfies who sought to halt Japanese military aggression by stopping pig iron exports in 1938, local opponents of Israeli aggression have fought the genocide in occupied Palestine by disrupting operations at local steelmaker Bisalloy Steels. Activists claim Bisalloy profits by selling armoured steel to Elbit Systems for use in IDF armoured vehicles.
Wollongong’s proud history of peace activism is currently being celebrated in the Peace Movement Illawarra exhibition at Wollongong City Library.
The exhibition features photographs and artefacts in the main Wollongong library and an online exhibition on the Illawarra Stories website.
I will give a talk on history of the local peace movement as part of the exhibition at 5pm on Monday, July 28 at Wollongong Library and a Japanese kamishibai storytelling performance to remember Hiroshima at the library at 11am on Saturday, August 2.
There will be origami peace crane making workshops in various branches of the library.
Wollongong Against War and Nukes will take up a residency at Wollongong City Gallery from 25 July until 12 August, with a full program including screen printing and badgemaking workshops, lantern making, kids’ activities and a concert. Check out stopthesubs.org for details. We will conclude the residency and commemorate 80 years since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with a lantern parade at 5pm on Saturday, 9 August at Civic Plaza, Burelli St, and marching to Belmore Basin. I hope you can join us!
About the writer
Alexander Brown is a writer, publisher, and activist living in Port Kembla. He is the father of two children and wants them to grow up in a world free of war and nuclear danger. Alexander wrote extensively on the history of protest and cultural resistance to war and nukes in Japan and Australia as an academic working in both countries. Since 2022 he has been working in the community sector in Wollongong and writing about our rich local history and politics.
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