Larry Petrie and Australian terrorism

1893 Australia: Next door to William McNamara's first bookshop at 238 Castlereagh St, Sydney, Larry 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, Queensland, 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.” ...

Some of the significance of this explosion can be seen from the uses to which it was put. The Sydney Morning Herald editorialised on August 4, 1893 that:

"… The Aramac explosion makes the eighth trouble on board ship within almost as many days. The Burrumbeet and the Sydney dynamite incidents … then came an extra-ordinary accident between the Ellingamite and the Guiding Star, the latter vessel foundering … Next the wreck … of the steamer Hilda … and the blow up of the barque Argo in Sydney Harbour ..."

Scottish-born Larry Petrie (1859 - March, 1901) was 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 ...

Petrie's bombing attempt at Sydney's main docks
In her old age, poet Dame Mary Gilmore told the National Times, May 6 - 11, 1974 of an earlier unsuccessful attempt of Petrie's to blow up Circular Quay, the main dock area of Sydney. No date is given, but it’s probably 1892.

Petrie had left a bomb is a drain at the Quay, and some of his associates decided to remove it. While Mary Cameron (as she was before marrying William Gilmore) watched out for police, with great trepidation the diminutive Member of NSW Parliament Arthur Rae (1860 - 1943) crawled up the drain and removed the bomb, having volunteered to do so because at 5 feet tall he was the smallest person in the clandestine operation. Rae was Vice President of the AWU and one of the founders of the Australian Labor Party. In 1891 he was one of the first 36 Labor members elected to Parliament; he was later a Senator in the Australian Parliament (1910 - 1914, 1918 - 1935). Alongside Artie Rae and Mary at this extraordinary occurrence was Chris Watson (1867 - 1941), third Prime Minister of Australia and the first Labor PM ...

Tagged: terrorism, australia, labor+history, radical+history, history