Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 15
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[Page 15]
7
sight it was too. Up the coast at Newcastle the long coal wharves were crowded with sailing ships engaged in carrying Greta coal right across the Pacific to Valparaiso, the principal port on the Chilean coast. But this flourishing trade was in process of being killed by frequent strikes under the leadership of the socialistic rabble-rousing secretary of the Seamens Union: one William Morris (Billy) Hughes, who was destined much later to become an anti-Labour Party Prime Minister of Australia, and to die worth about £70,000, with never a legacy for a worthy cause.
In general,people of all countries were free to enter other countries without passports or visas,and only Turkey and a few unstable South American Republics insisted on such irksome formalities. Trade between most countries was free of governmental levies, taxes, or duties,or at worst subject to only very low protective or revenue customs duties. Britain had gone free trade in 1860 and remained so until 1932, replacing the lost revenue with income tax for the first time.
Nearly all of Australia's requirements of machinery, tools, domestic hardware, wearing apparel, cement, steel sheets and sections, corrugated roofing iron, fencing wire, and wire netting, were imported from the U.S.A.or from Britain or Continental Europe. Competition was keen, prices were stable, and quality was excellent. In some cases articles were sold at lower prices than in the country of their origin; this was particularly true in the case of American imports, such as firearms and tools of trade.
Britain bought most of our wool and shipped it home to process it into yarns, suitings, and woollen piece goods and then ship some of it back to us at prices highly competitive with those of our own inadequately protected woollen mills, still in their struggling beginnings, and getting little encouragement or financial backing from the English capitalists or the local banks which, directly or indirectly, were mostly under English or Scottish control.
Before federation, Victoria was well ahead of N.S.W. in manufacturing, and Victorian footwear and wearing apparel were crossing the Murray into the "mother state", and even going up the