Obituaries Australia

Gerry Dawson, who died in Brisbane this month after a long and cruelly disabling illness, was an aggressive and tough man. He was also kindly, pugnaciously loyal to principle and a generous friend.

He was a communist union leader at a time when the papers habitually called the Queensland Trades and Labor Council "communist dominated". This was a backhanded tribute to such CPA identities as Gerry Dawson as Council president, Alec MacDonald as secretary and Jack Hanson as disputes committee president: all three now dead.

Gerry Dawson was a member of the Australian Council of Trade Unions executive for many years, including the period when four CPA members sat on it.

Gerry Dawson graduated to the Communist Party from early activity in the ALP—including election work for the then up-and-coming politician Vince Gair.

A carpenter, Gerry filled union positions from job rep to state secretary and Federal president of the Building Workers Industrial Union.

He could be tart in speech, and he often put this to good use. In the depressed years of the early 1960s, Harold Holt visited Brisbane as Menzies' Minister for Labor and agreed to meet a TL & C. deputation on the bad unemployment situation.

Holt was suave and urbane; he could turn on the charm. So it was arranged beforehand that, if Holt tried to oil things over, Gerry should have the job of ruffling them up.

As Holt was talking on benignly, Gerry's rasping voice brusquely interrupted him: "These unemployed figures that you're glossing over: they're human beings — you're talking about it all as if it was a bloody weather forecast."

Holt was glad to see the end of that deputation.

Gerry had a derisive wit: it went over tremendously at mass meetings. The pieces he wrote for the BWIU journal bristled with barbs against the boss and his ways.

He was at his best when he was tearing a jagged strip off arbitration, its basic wage niggardliness, its pomposities. He often appeared before the Queensland Arbitration court (usually with the BWIU's resourceful research officer Ron Brown, both held in high but wary respect by the employers). While other advocates would bob around in obeisance to the Bench, neither Gerry nor Ron Brown would even nod their heads. Such orthodox obsequiousness was not for them.

Gerry had an impatience with anything that he saw as timewasting, inessential, or unproductive; he was an impenitent absentee from some CPA State Committee meetings. He could be sharp with colleagues: it could sting.

There were many sides to Gerry.

After being on the first ACTU delegation to post-liberation China, Gerry spoke at a CPA State Committee meeting about the experiences there. He spoke of the people: their poverty, their cheerfulness, their resolve, their hopes — and emotion choked up his voice and he came near to tears.

Gerry Dawson had to retire as BWIU state secretary because of illness, and his last years were tragic.

A testament to his union work is the calibre of those who have followed him as BWIU Queensland secretary. First Tom Chard, an ALP leftwinger of the highest principle, integrity and courage and after Tom's retirement Hugh Hamilton, CPA State president and an outstanding figure in the civil rights movement in a Queensland besieged by Bjelke-Petersen.

Gerry Dawson has been entitled to our respect, our affection and now our grief.