Ratbags & Rabblerousers – A Century of Political Protest, song and satire – Warren Fahey

From the Father of Federation, Henry Parkes, to the Depression hero big Jack Lang, ‘Pig Iron’ Bob Menzies, Arthur (‘Two Wongs don’t make a White’) Calwell, Job Bjelke-Petersen and Pauline Hanson, Alan Bond and Christopher Skase, Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke, Keating and Howard, the great and the eccentric are immortalised in rousing, and often scurrilous, verse. Here are tales of union warfare and political splits, strikes and blacklegs, judges and felons, racial conflict, anti-war marches, conservation, abortion and anti-uranium protests; and the eternal story of rural struggle, of the swaggie, the drover’s wife and the ‘broken-down squatter’. The songs are headed by a brief account of their context, recalling for the reader the long struggles for power and survival that has made up history.