THE RAVENSWOOD STRIKE

The declining years of a gold-mining town are fraught with the tensions and bitterness of unfulfilled hopes. As the supply of gold diminishes, surviving mining companies desperately seek more capital to maintain operations; some take the gamble of new and risky ventures, others try to cut costs by updating machinery and streamlining production overheads. A gradual population exodus occurs, leaving those who stay to savour the memory of elusive wealth. Local folklore offers varied reasons for the collapse of the field. As Geoffrey Blainey acknowledges. this is rarely attributed simply to the exhaustion of payable ore: "If only the company had bought new pumps, if they'd extended that drive at the 1600 foot level another seventy feet, if they'd sacked that mean manager." 2 In the ''merry-go-round of blame " attached to the demise of the North Queensland town of Ravenswood, one event stands out: an industrial dispute affecting principally the New Ravenswood company from November 1912 to July 1913. The villain of the piece, however, differs according to prejudice: on the one hand, Archibald Lawrence Wilson, general manager of New Ravenswood Limited, who at the height of the dispute allegedly declared, "I made this town and I'll bugger 3 it before I'll give in to the strikers!"; on the other hand, the workers themselves, led astray by "Irresponsible outside agitators" 4 from a "purely Socialistic " trade union. Of course, apportioning blame in any Industrial dispute is an exercise of dubious merit, more so when historical records are incomplete. Notwithstanding, a study of the Ravenswood strike does reveal some of the economic and social pressures affecting a small. Isolated gold-mining field in its twilight years. Visitors to Ravenswood in 1912 would have observed scant evidence of community decline. Indeed, a more likely Impression was one of solid prosperity. After the formation of the New Ravenswood company in 1898, the town had flourished. New timber, masonry and red bric