Fallon House is a heritage-listed trade union office at 1 Maryborough Street, Bundaberg Central, Bundaberg, Bundaberg Region, Queensland, Australia. It was designed by David Ballinger Goodsir and Harold James Carlyle and built in 1953 by Llewellyn Herbert Edwards. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 7 December 2012.
History
Fallon House, the Central District office of the Australian Workers Union (AWU), is situated in Maryborough Street, Bundaberg, on the corner of Quay Street. The building was designed by Brisbane architects DB Goodsir and HJ Carlyle, built by L Edwards, and opened in 1953. It is a low set brick modernist style structure comprising offices addressing Maryborough Street and a hall at the rear accessed from Quay Street. It was named in honour of former central branch secretary and state secretary of the AWU Clarence Edward Fallon.
Between the years of 1918 and 1957, the Queensland Branch of the AWU was the largest branch of the largest union in Australia, with the Central District Office (Bundaberg) one of six offices of the union in Queensland. This period of domination of the union also coincides with the career of Clarrie Fallon, a temporary organiser in Bundaberg from 1921 who rose to the pinnacle of power in the union at a time when the Queensland Parliament ministerial team comprised mostly AWU members.
The economy of Bundaberg, initially based on timber, quickly evolved into sugar production as foundation settlers selected land in 1867–68 under the "Sugar and Coffee Regulations" stemming from the Crown Lands Alienation Act of the 1860s which aimed to promote agriculture and closer settlement. The site of Bundaberg was officially surveyed in 1869. Coastal traffic grew, and copper was first mined at Mount Perry in 1871, which enabled Bundaberg to develop as a port and supply centre. Sugar plantations were established in the surrounding area and were to become the basis for the city's wealth as the industry boomed from the 1880s.
Colonial Queensland workers formed loosely based organisations in an effort to improve working conditions. One such union was the Eight Hour Day movement, which was initiated in Queensland in 1858 by stonemasons working for John Petrie in Brisbane. The movement remained strong throughout Australia into the early 20th century. Most unions were small locally based organisations with no legal status. A Trades and Labour Council was established in Brisbane in 1885, followed by the Trade Union Act 1886 which legalised unions as organisations. Trade unions then took on a more permanent character as the Queensland economy consolidated and grew. Queensland workers recognised the value in a strong united union movement and formed the Australian Labour Federation (ALF), a combined industrial and political organisation. The ALF replaced the Trades and Labour Council in 1889. Its secretary, Albert Hinchcliffe a printer by trade, and journalist William Lane established The Worker newspaper in 1890 as the official newspaper of the union. The Australian Labour Party (ALP) formed at the first provincial council meeting of the ALF in August 1890.
The Amalgamated Workers Union formed in Queensland in December 1891, from a merger of the Queensland Shearers Union and the Queensland Labourer's Union, during the 1891 Australian shearers' strike. Following the economic downturn and decline in unionism later in the 1890s, the Trades and Labour Council reformed in 1904. In 1905, three western branches of the Amalgamated Workers Union, in Longreach, Charleville and Hughenden, joined with the southern pastoral Australian Workers Union (AWU) to form a new union in Queensland. Its origins were in the Shearer's Union, which formed in Ballarat, Victoria in 1886. Registered through the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Act 1905, this merger established a branch of the AWU in Queensland.
Another new union, the Amalgamated Workers Association (AWA) was formed by miners on the Atherton Tableland in 1907. Membership comprised unskilled and semi-skilled workers. In 1908 the Bundaberg District Workers Union and the Mackay Sugar Workers Union became affiliated with the AWA. Union secretary Edward Granville (Ted) Theodore then embarked on a political career, entering parliament in 1909. In December 1910 union vice president William McCormack recruited the Amalgamated Sugar Workers Union into the AWA, and instigated a general sugar strike in 1911.
The 1911 Queensland sugar strike occurred after the phasing out of South Sea Islander labour, with workers claiming that many plantation owners had substituted black slaves with white ones. Workers sought better accommodation, wages and conditions, including an eight-hour day and a minimum weekly wage of 30 shillings, including food. The mobilisation of unionists from Bundaberg to Mossman was a major achievement, with the 1911 strike lasting over seven weeks in Bundaberg where the town's economy was largely based on the sugar industry. The end result of the strike was a Commonwealth Royal Commission into the sugar industry in 1911–12, which had been initially requested by Harry Hall, a Bundaberg AWA organiser in 1908 with a petition signed by 1500 Bundaberg sugar workers. The Royal Commission, with ALF Secretary Albert Hinchcliffe as secretary, concluded the AWA demands had been justified. The union victory was a watershed in organised labour in Queensland and Australia.
The success of the AWA's 1911 sugar strike, led the ALF (reformed from the TLC in 1910) to initiate the general strike of 1912, the first of its kind in Australia. The ALF called all 42 of its affiliated unions to support dismissed tramway workers in Brisbane. The strike was quashed by armed police on "Black Friday", 2 February 1912. McCormack, who had been chairman of the Townsville strike committee, could see that the failure was due to the inability of the ALF to co-ordinate statewide action and conciliatory negotiations. He was keen to re-align unions in Queensland.
As a precursor to the formation of the Australia-wide Australian Workers Union, McCormack and Theodore attended the AWU national conference in Sydney in 1912, and sought out interstate amalgamations. This resulted in the merger of the AWA, of which Theodore was president, with the essentially southern based Australian Workers Union (AWU). Other unions which also joined forces at this time included the Rural Workers Union, the Carriers Union and the Rabbit Trappers Union. In Queensland the three AWU branches were consolidated into one and the state divided into six districts. The amalgamation was formalised on 1 July 1913. The AWA had held a virtual monopoly in North Queensland and the new organisation led to the national membership of the AWU reaching 62,000, 22,321 of whom were Queenslanders, making it the largest branch of the largest union in Australia at the time. This amalgamation spelt the end of the ALF. McCormack and Theodore were convinced that the AWU model of the amalgamation of smaller unions into One Big Union (OBU) was the way forward. EG Theodore was the first president of the Queensland branch of the AWU. The political affiliations of the AWA and subsequent AWU contributed to the election of the Labor government in Queensland in 1915, remaining in power for almost 40 years.
Recognising the need for a formal meeting place for unionists, the Bundaberg Eight Hour Day committee approached the Lands Department in July 1919 for a site for a Trades Hall. At the time, union meetings were held outdoors on the corner opposite the School of Arts. An informal lease (No. 453) was drawn up by the Lands Department to the union trustees, for the northern half of the allotment on the western corner of Quay and Maryborough Streets, allowing a building to be erected on the site. In March 1922 the Eight Hour Day Anniversary Committee was granted a three-year lease on the property.
The Bundaberg Trades and Labour Hall opened on the corner lot on 8 May 1922. An Eight Hour Day Parade was held followed by a sports gathering and dinner in the hall presided over by the president of the Bundaberg Trades and Labour Council. When the district land officer inspected the property in July 1923 he indicated that it comprised a five-roomed timber building (the Trades Hall) and offices adjoining occupied by the Australian Workers Union built of wood with two large rooms. By January 1924 the Bundaberg Trades and Labour Council had purchased the Perpetual Town Lease No 6087, of the corner allotment and the improvements on it i.e. the Trades Hall and adjoining offices. The lease document was drawn up in November 1924.
The Trades and Labour Council reformed in Brisbane in April 1922, coinciding with a renewed fervour for the establishment of One Big Union. A meeting in May at the Brisbane Trades Hall, addressed by the Queensland AWU Branch President AW Riordan, sought support for a union representing the whole of Australasia. The process had commenced in New South Wales, initiated by the miners' unions, which formed the Workers Industrial Union of Australia (WIUA) in 1918. At that time it did not have the support of the AWU, and since the WIUA was intent on dismantling the existing industrial and political system, this threatened the status quo of the AWU in Queensland which survived through its mutually beneficial relationship with the ALP and the sitting Labor government, making the OBU concept unpopular.
Bundaberg was a starting point for many AWU officials, including Clarrie Fallon after whom the Bundaberg AWU building is named. He began his working life driving a parcel delivery van, and became a representative of the Australian Carrier's Union in the Gladstone district in his youth. Becoming a member of the Bundaberg and District Sugar Workers and General Labourer's Union around 1908, he then worked on the railways. Fallon's father had been a shearer, involved in the great strikes of the late 1880s and his mother was a shearer's cook, and both had strong interests in the labour movement. Fallon's AWU career began as a temporary organiser in Bundaberg in 1921, where he initiated some of the union's work for better conditions for sugar workers, and pioneered the union involvement with the cattle industry. Two years later he was appointed manager of the central district's Rockhampton office. By 1928 he was northern district secretary, based in Townsville. In 1933 he was elected state secretary of the AWU Queensland Branch, managing director of the Queensland Worker and chairman of directors of the Labor Daily Newspaper Co. Ltd. By February 1938 he was president of the Queensland central executive of the ALP and was elected federal ALP president in July that year. In 1940 he was elected general secretary of the AWU. He resigned from this role for health reasons in February 1943, and resigned the ALP federal presidency in 1944. The same year he was appointed to the University of Queensland Senate. By 1946 he was again the Queensland branch secretary, fighting for a 40-hour week for shearers in Queensland.
AWU memberships were fairly evenly spread throughout the state in the 1920s, although a slightly larger membership existed in the Northern region, with the South West the smallest. For example, in 1924 the Northern Region had 5723, Central and Far Northern had over 5300, Southern 4728, Western 4493 and South Western had 3619.