POET of the proletariat

MUA member gets top gong for contribution to workers’ culture

Bryn Griffith, MUA seafarer, writer, Fleet Street journalist, poet and playwright has taken out the coveted Australia Council Ros Bower Memorial Award for 2005.

The award is in recognition of the Welsh Australian's contribution to community arts in Western Australia.

"Bryn brought poetry, plays and music to factories, shipyards, hospitals and mining camps," said Australia Council Community Cultural Development Board Chair, Chris Tassell. "As a writer he documented these experiences in poetry and prose and founded his own publishing house to encourage community writing."

But Byrn has also contributed to the Maritime Union, as arts officer for UnionsWA, writer in residence on the vessel Irene Greenwood, author of Wharfies: A Century of Work on the Wharves and now as the writer of our oral history project.

The MUA has commissioned him to work on a collection of life histories of our veteran seafarers and waterside workers, the first of which will be incorporated into the history of the Seamen's Union of Australia. This is a project the union is undertaking with La Trobe University in Melbourne.

Bryn Griffith was born in Swansea, Wales. His grandfather had been a bard - or custodian of the Welsh tradition of story telling and poetry writing.

But the family lived by the harbour and it was the sea that first tugged at Bryn's heart as a young boy.

He fell in love with the old sailing ships he'd watch on his way to school. Ships like the Pamir coming in and out of the harbour, shipping wheat from Australia.

"I tried to run away to sea as a boy," he said. "But was too young."

Bryn finally left school and set sail at 14, shipping out on Scandinavian vessels. In the fifties he was blacklisted for being a strike leader when in the merchant navy.

"The union was run by the employers," he said. "I was militant. I didn't get a ship again."

By then in his twenties, Bryn returned to his studies at the Harlech College in North Wales, a college for unionists. He studied philosophy, economics, history and English. He won a scholarship to Oxford University but turned it down to become a writer in London.

After 10 years at sea he launched his career as a poet, playwright, journalist and scriptwriter.

Bryn worked as a correspondent for the Welsh daily, The Western Mail, and as an industrial correspondent, theatre critic and book reviewer for the labour weekly, Tribune, where he covered the British seamen's strike in the 1960s.

In the heady sixties and seventies Bryn toured Britain and Australia as a performance poet. He remembers early morning readings on the Sydney wharves.

After marrying an Australian and making the West his home, Bryn worked on Stateships and then the tugs in Dampier, Port Hedland, Bunbury and Fremantle. Opportunities in film and television were few in the west.

But in 1977 he was appointed inaugural Arts Officer to the Trades and Labor Council of Western Australia. It was during these years Bryn commissioned the heads of John Howard, Peter Reith and Premier Charles Court and got the May Day march going again.

"We used to have a May Day dinner and concert with shows," he recalls. "They were large venues, like the entertainment centre. One May Day I organised a big dinner at the Pirate's Den. The main guest was (Seamen's Secretary ) Elliot V Elliot. When it came time for him to speak he gave us hell. 'What are you buggers doing organising concerts and dinners,' he roared. 'You should be out marching in the streets.'"

So the following year Bryn organised the first May Day march in more than a decade. He's still on the May Day committee.

The Trades and Labour arts co-ordinator was a first for Australia - perhaps the world. The idea was to take arts and culture to the working community, but also to bring out their culture.

He organised a major art prize with construction and ship building company Sabino putting in a big chunk of the money. Each year the council held an exhibition in one of the Perth skyscrapers. It was a major art prize.

"We found people with real talent," he said. "Especially in the construction industry among workers of European descent. Some went on to win national prizes and become professionals."

Like most immigrants they had only found manual labour in Australia, but many had been artists, musicians or professionals in their homeland.

Bryn developed a close friendship with the conductor of the state symphony orchestra, David Measham. He agreed to take the orchestra to the railway workshops for lunchtime concerts.

"We'd get 2000 workers listening. Sometimes middle-aged men in overalls would come out of the audience, European refugees. They'd come up onto the stage and take up an instrument and play along with the orchestra," says Bryn. "They might be somewhat rusty but usually they knew the music by heart. This always moved the audience and orchestra alike."

Bryn also helped organise folk bands and theatre groups to tour the Pilbara and held poetry readings and folk nights in the union owned pub in Fremantle known as The Blockhouse. It stopped when things got too rough after a few punch-ups.

In 1980 Bryn was appointed writer-in-residence with the Australian merchant navy following an Australia Council Art and Working Life program grant. He spent six months writing about shipboard life, running writing workshops, recording oral histories of the crew and gathering a collection of poetry.

"When the Arts Council asked me if I wanted to go back to sea, I said 'been there done that'. But then they told me it would be as a writer. Just to write poetry. Write about people working and talking. I agreed."

Bryn sailed on the Irene Greenwood out of Fremantle around the coast to Hobart, Melbourne, Bunbury and back.

"I sat around the place, did a bit of splicing with the bosun, talked to people and got into the bar a fair bit in the evening. I stayed with the ship for a couple of months, got a taste for it and went back to sea."

Sea Poems was published with a grant from the ACTU and Arts Council and launched aboard the Irene Greenwood in Fremantle Harbour.

"She was a bloody good ship," he said. "It's a shame they sold her."

In 1987 the Waterside Workers' Federation commissioned Bryn to write an industrial history of the branch - a tale of solidarity and working class commitment. When the union could not find a publisher, Bryn founded Platypus Press and published it himself.

"I thought stuff you, we'll do it ourselves," he said. "We sold out the first edition."

Bryn kept up his union involvement and was elected national conference delegate after amalgamation. He was a delegate to conference in 1995 when the Weipa dispute broke and penned a poem in its honour from the floor of conference in Sydney Trades Hall.

Bryn says the highlight of his time with the union was the Patrick lockout of 1998.

"It was fierce in Fremantle," he said. "I was on the tugs so I was there every single day and every night. We'd come down after work. It was like being in a Hollywood movie. One night we confronted 600 coppers in full riot gear. The farmers were threatening to storm the wharves. We had thousands of people defending us. Big numbers. The people of Fremantle poured in. I'll never forget that night. The solidarity. It was quite something."

Bryn remained both an arts worker and a maritime worker, until he retired from the Fremantle tugs three years ago to devote all his time to writing and the arts.

Many of his published works - 15 books all up - reflect his love of the sea and his union: Starboard Green, The Dark Convoys, Sea Poems, Ocean's Edge, The Sailor and Wharfies.

But back in his homeland Bryn has been criticised for not writing within the Welsh literary zone.

"If you come from a culture as strong as I come from you never forget," he said "I'm still Welsh. But seafarers have a culture of their own. Really, if you're a seafarer you can't be a nationalist. The world's your oyster."

The Ros Bower Memorial Award is a highly coveted major national award established in 1981 "to recognise distinguished effort in fostering and furthering the principles espoused by Rosalie (Ros) Bower, founding director of the Community Arts Board". Only one is granted each year.

"I felt a bit stunned really when I found out I'd won, " said Bryn. "You can't apply for it. You have to be nominated."

The award ceremony was in January, complete with Welsh boys choir, his three former wives and his old mates from the ships and union rooms.

Recognition in the West Australian newspaper came in a double page spread: 'Poet of the People'

"The idea of linking the arts with the world of work probably originated with American singer Paul Robeson. The celebrated baritone often sang for workers on construction sites and in factories around the world, usually paying a visit to his daytime audience during lunchtime breaks."

Robeson sang at the Sydney Opera House construction site and the Perth Midland Railway Workshops in the1960's. It could be said Bryn followed in Robeson's footsteps by taking the WA Symphony Orchestra back to the railway workshops to perform for workers in the eighties.

Together with his Seafarers' Retirement Fund, the cheque from the Arts Council will mean Bryn can now devote his time to writing.

But like all MUA veterans, he is retiring from the workforce, not the struggle. He is also leading a campaign against the federal government axing community arts funding.

"The head of the arts council is a mate of John Howard's," said Bryn. "They're only interested in big ticket numbers like the opera, not community or worker art.

"A lot of people are losing their jobs and I feel we've got to do something for them. They've helped us in the past. Unless we put up a fight there won't be any funding for workers' culture in future."