Larry Petrie bombs the SS Aramac

1893 Australia: Next door to William McNamara's first bookshop at 238 Castlereagh St, Sydney, Larry Petrie (Larry De Petrie; Laurence Petrie) ran a Labour Bureau to help unemployed men find work. After telling Ernie Lane he was off to blow up a non-union ship, the American anarchist booked a passage on the SS Aramac.

On board at midnight on Thursday, July 27 near the entrance to Moreton Bay, about seven nautical miles south of Point Lookout, there was a tremendous explosion in the forecabin.

“The funny thing was” said Petrie some years later, “that the moment the bomb went off my first and only thought was to save people’s lives.” ...

Scottish-born Petrie was a good-looking man with a big moustache who worked as a casual labourer. A co-founder of the Melbourne Anarchist Club in 1886 and the Social Democratic League in 1889, he also tried to get a Six-Hours Movement going to demand a six-hour working day, and formed a small branch of the American organisation, Knights of Labor, a Freemason-like radical sect which Henry Lawson joined, as did William Lane, George Black, WHT McNamara and others. An anarchist by temperament and persuasion, although he didn't use the term of himself, Petrie became Australian Workers Union (AWU) Secretary-Organiser in Sydney ...

One day in March, 1901, while he was working as a general watchman at the railway station at Villa Rica, Paraguay following his extreme disillusionment with William Lane and his New Australia disaster, Petrie jumped onto the line to push a child out of the path of an oncoming train and was himself killed. His body was claimed by another refugee from New Australia, Rose Cadogan (Rose Summerfield) ...

According to Roderick (1991, p 106), in Personal History: Henry Lawson and I, Gilmore says that Petrie told her while in Paraguay on the New Australia communal venture, that Petrie told her that he had placed the bomb in the Aramac ...