Broadmeadows

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Briefly they’d united, these workers of the world,

Against speed-up & unsafety, employers &

Union honchos both; marshalled themselves. And struck.

From out Europe’s faults they’d come: badlands, bloodlands, Applying theories fled, lists of names read, the luck Of reprieve life, then migrancy — now four thousand strong

And free (to work): Turks, Greeks, Croats, Serbs, Slovenes, Slovaks — All the Slavs — joined in one solid stopped line to Geelong

And out to the You Yangs, granite proving ground.

In Broady they’d used bricks & bottles, glass on

The factory floors, fire hoses turned on offices: down Tools, down fence, down walls; unified they held the line,

Held their nerve, these old country expatriates, laughed down The local velvet fist: rigged votes, bought reps, bought headlines, Pretend talks, pleas for coolings-off, threats of mass lay-offs,

Public bluffs & ultimatums, stand-over deadlines —

We’ll move both plants to Asia — ten weeks of riotous stand-off — And then they won. They won! Was this, then, the redemption

Of what they’d heard called ‘multiculturalism’? Seasons of Blood, name, tribe, nation, creed, tongue, cause, old resentments And ressentiments, en masse melting-potted, or, rather,

Pressure-cooked down for clarity & concentration:

Migrants, rank-&-filers … all become Aussie brothersin-arms? For they’d won: more pay, more work, more women;

Less fume & spill & leak & speed; safety signs in other Languages; more toilet breaks (and more often!);

And less overtime, which is when accidents happen.

1980: Enter, into this, my father. St Vincent’s

Bin-dressed, hair home-cut with cock’s tail, smiling too much, then Wrongly; come on the crest of Asiatic sea-throng, come

From weird war without real end, from unreal continent Of dim practices, unregisterable blood quantums, Repeating sly, lidless, lineless faces — surely not