Allan Whittaker sailed to war in October 1914. Hundreds turned out to farewell the troopships, the very first contingent to sail out from Sydney. They gathered in a bustling throng by the wharves at Woolloomooloo and sang songs, waved flags and flung streamers to the men high above them on the transports.

Leaning over the railing, Allan Whittaker may well have caught one. As HMAT Afric pulled away from Finger Wharf, the thin paper ribbons were broken and the soldiers’ last physical link with Australia fell into the sea.

Whittaker was a Victorian by birth, even though he enlisted in Sydney. He had lived around Yarraville for most of his life and worked as a waiter in Port Melbourne. Perhaps it was a love of travel and adventure that took him north. Perhaps the same restless spirit persuaded him to sign on for war service. Whatever the reason, almost a year would pass before Whittaker saw home again. The Afric slipped past the entrance to Port Philip Bay in the early hours of the morning, crossed the Great Australian Bight and steamed on towards Albany. There it joined a great armada – thirty-six transports and three escorting cruisers destined for the battlefields of Europe.

It wasn’t long before Private Whittaker saw action. After a few months of training in Egypt, the 1st Battalion was dispatched to Lemnos, the staging base for the invasion of the Dardanelles. Whittaker landed at Gallipoli around eight o’clock in the morning on 25 April 1915, just as the Ottoman troops were rallying to drive the Anzacs into the sea. Within half an hour he’d been wounded. A Turkish bullet ploughed into his left foot, leaving behind a gaping wound. Whittaker struggled back down to the beach and was evacuated to a hospital ship crammed with dying men. He’d survived Gallipoli but would never fight again.

Allan Whittaker arrived back in Port Melbourne in August 1915. A man who had sailed with the first contingent and fought on the first day of the Landing was also on one of the first ships of wounded to be repatriated to Australia. The ‘Heroes of the Dardanelles’ were received with enthusiasm at the wharf. Some families had been gathered on the foreshore since early light, expectant mothers gazing out to sea, their ‘shining eyes’ hungry for the Hororata’s arrival.

Heroes of the Dardanelles: A cross for Allan Whittaker planted beside Port Melbourne’s war memorial. Whittaker was also remembered in a commemorative service marking the 85th anniversary of the 1928 Dock Strike. Courtesy Bruce Scates.

As the ship approached the shore, one of the first things Whittaker would have seen was a sign reading ‘Australia is Proud of You’ displayed on the pier gates. A ‘welcoming arch’ of gum leaves and wattle blossom festooned the wharf entrance beside it.

Unloading the vessel was a lengthy business. ‘Many of the [sick and wounded] looked pale and thin,’ The Argus reported, ‘some of them limped on sticks or crutches; one or two showed empty sleeves.’ An ambulance whisked the stretcher cases away quickly, the authorities were concerned the sight of badly damaged men might prejudice recruitment. Whittaker himself limped ashore with the other walking wounded. A few in the boisterous crowd unwittingly cheered for the ‘venereal cases’ dishonourably discharged from Egypt.1

Australia may have been proud of its returning veterans, but men like Whittaker found the return to civilian life far from easy. The pension he was paid was never enough to support him. At first he received less than half the basic wage. Then, as his wound healed, his ‘incapacity allowance’ was reduced accordingly. By 1917, Whittaker’s pension was just fifteen shillings a fortnight at a time when an unskilled labourer in regular work could expect seven shillings a day.

The restaurant trade had suffered during the war so he took on work at the wharves. It was a challenge for a fit man, let alone an injured one: wrestling with the great weights tangled down from ships’ cranes; lugging loads into the hulls of steamers; and buckling beneath crates of produce, blackened sacks of coal, and greasy bales of wool.

Work on the wharves in early twentieth century Australia was heavy, dirty and dangerous. It was also poorly paid. In busy times, Allan Whittaker could barely scrape a living for himself, let alone his extended family. Like most who lived in the port, the young man struggled with debt, hardship and poverty. Every week, the landlord, the storekeeper, the gas man and the grocer claimed what little money he had made.

And work at the wharf was day labour. As each ship came in, Whittaker queued up with hundreds of others hoping he’d be ‘taken on’. By the late 1920s the export markets were failing, Australia faced the Great Depression, and every day the lines of hungry idle men grew longer and longer.

An injury at the wharf would mean that Whittaker couldn’t work at all. The union would do what it could to support him: sickness pay, a bag of groceries, sometimes even a loan. But there was no such thing as workers’ compensation. Men broken by the weights they carried were left to live off charity, and men injured – even crippled – on the wharves would have been far better off having lost a leg on the Somme. When he came back from war, Allan Whittaker had been promised a land fit for heroes. Now he laboured for a pittance through a fourteen-hour day.

In 1928, the wharfies went on strike. Allan Whittaker joined them. Men prepared to work at non-union rates (‘scabs’ as they were called by the unionists) were brought in to take the place of the strikers. As the Depression deepened, employers hoped to break the union and pay a desperate, casualised workforce a fraction of a living wage. Police, armed with guns and brandishing batons, lined the wharf to protect the strike-breakers. Tempers rose, fighting broke out, and police fired their revolvers once into the air and then into the crowd.

‘There were a number of shots fired,’ one witness reported, ‘it was like a machine gun.’2 Several claimed police had fired as protestors fled the scene. Many men were seriously wounded, Allan Whittaker amongst them. More might have died had some constables not disobeyed their panicking commander and fired away from the crowd.

Allan Whittaker had survived the withering fire of Gallipoli. But a shot fired by a fellow Australian would end up killing him. That, and the conditions he’d endured in the trenches and then back in Australia. When Whittaker was taken to hospital, his teeth were described as ‘filthy’. Some were broken and the stumps of those that remained were riddled with decay.

Whittaker’s teeth reflected the poor diet of soldiers: monotonous meals of hard tack biscuits, bully beef and jam. A similar diet was the lot of most men working the wharves, and doctors described Whittaker as a weak, malnourished man. Filthy teeth quickly infected the wound at the back of Whittaker’s neck – five teeth were extracted in the hope of saving him. But three months after his admission to hospital, Whittaker died of toxemia and an abscess on the brain. Chief Commissioner Thomas Blamey rejected public calls for a full parliamentary inquiry.

‘The shooting was fully justified,’ he declared. ‘There must be no half measures.’3 Blamey was a vehement anti-unionist and a supporter of paramilitary movements plotting the overthrow of Labor governments. Not everyone who ‘fought for freedom’ during the Great War really believed in democracy.

The remains of Allan Whittaker were interred in Fawkner Cemetery. The union turned out to bury its own. Amongst the mourners were the family and friends who had welcomed Allan home to Port Melbourne. They lowered the coffin slowly, gently into the grave and pulled the ropes away. The eulogy that day reminded onlookers that Allan Whittaker had fought for his country. But the debt owed to a veteran didn’t extend to the right to work, or to provide for a family, or to a decent living wage.

The union turned out to bury its own: Allan Whittaker’s grave in Fawkner Cemetery. The Whittaker family tomb also serves as the memorial for Allan’s younger brother Cecil, killed aged 19 in France. As Cecil was underage, his mother signed his enlistment papers. Note the regulation Commonwealth War Graves Commission tombstones behind Whittaker’s grave. The authorities accepted that these veterans had died as a result of their war service and subsidised both their funeral expenses and the cost of the grave. This privilege was not accorded to the Whittaker family. Courtesy Greg Whiddon.

By the height of the Great Depression, around one third of Australia’s returned men had joined the dole queues. The ‘lucky ones’ eked out a living from their war pensions. Some were sent to lousy blocks of land as soldier settlers. Some survived on charity. And some – in the city Whittaker was born in – laboured for rations building Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance. The men who dug the trenches of Flanders and the Somme were dressed in their old army greatcoats, given a pick and shovel, and put to work levelling the site of Victoria’s war memorial. Returning home, Whittaker had been told Australia was proud of him. His story suggests otherwise.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING: This story draws on Allan Whittaker’s service dossier NAA: B2455 WHITTAKER ALLAN; his repatriation record NAA: B73 R44423; and the Coroner’s Inquest into the death of Allan Whittaker, PROV VPRS24, 1929: 428. The authors gratefully acknowledge the fine eulogies delivered in memory of Allan Whittaker by historian Chris McConville, retired Supreme Court judge Frank Vincent and Martin Foley, MLA, (Member for Albert Park). Thanks are also due to Paddy Garrity, Perce White and Kevin Bracken of the Maritime Union of Australia. For more information on the life of dock workers in Port Melbourne see Wendy Lowenstein and Tom Hills, Under The Hook (Melbourne: Melbourne Bookworkers in association with the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, 1982); Rhonda Wilson and Sue Formby, Good Talk (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1985). Further background on the Dockers’ strike is provided by David Baker, ‘“You Dirty Bastards, Are You Fair Dinkum?”: Police And Union Confrontation On The Wharf’, New Zealand Journal Of Industrial Relations, vol. 27, no. 1, 2002, pp. 33–48. For differing assessments of Blamey’s fascist sympathies see Michael Cathcart, Defending The National Tuckshop (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble/Penguin Books, 1989); and D. M Horner, Blamey (St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1998).

1 Argus, 26 August 1915.

2 Coroner’s Inquest Allan Whittaker, PROV VPRS24, 1929 428.

3 Labor Call, 8 November 1928.