January 5: If blood should stain the wattle!

1891 Australia: Hard on the heels of the devastating Maritime Strike of 1890, the Shearers' Strike began when Logan Downs shearing station in Queensland employed non-union men to do the work. It was one of the most significant industrial actions in Australian history, and from February until May, central Queensland was on the brink of civil war.

Pictured: Soldiers protect a 'scab' worker against striking shearers, Bulletin, February 21, 1891

On May 16, famous Australian poet, Henry Lawson, while a journalist on Gresley Lukin's Boomerang and inspired by the shearers' strike, published in William Lane's Worker 'Freedom on the Wallaby', the last two verses of which read:

Our parents toil'd to make a home –
Hard grubbin 'twas an' clearin' –
They wasn't crowded much with lords
When they was pioneering.
But now that we have made the land
A garden full of promise,
Old Greed must crook 'is dirty hand
And come ter take it from us.

So we must fly a rebel flag,
As others did before us,
And we must sing a rebel song
And join in rebel chorus.
We'll make the tyrants feel the sting
O' those that they would throttle;
They needn't say the fault is ours
If blood should stain the wattle!