Muttaburra, 1891

IT IS mid-March, two months after the strike started. Two hundred union shearers are camped outside town in the driving rain with guns in their hands and the passion of the aggrieved in their hearts. They are tiptoeing around the edge of civil war and they are creating Australian history.

New contracts and falling wages have brought about their stand-off with pastoralists, the military and imported non-union workers. But by mid-year they will put down their weapons, called off by their cash-starved unions.

This Great Shearers' Strike will be seen as an organisational fiasco, incredibly begun months ahead of the shearing season. But it will be Australia's defining moment on the cusp of the 20th century and its legacy will be profound.

The events of this year will help crystallise the objectives of the labour movement, lead to the formation of the Australian Labor Party and, out of the harsh gidgee scrub and black soil plains of western Queensland, forge Australia's working class identity.

Muttaburra, a grazing centre about 120km north of Longreach, could be the story of the Queensland bush.

In the 1880s it was reputed to be the busiest town in the west. But it was facing one of the toughest periods in inland Queensland's settled history and it was already doomed, like other bush towns, by decisions made in Brisbane.

The town had campaigned for a railway in 1881 to cart its wool to distant markets but ambitious plans for a new transcontinental railway, linking it to other inland centres, coastal ports and guaranteed prosperity, were never realised.

Too far to the north of the railway which would forge west towards Longreach during the strife of 1891, Muttaburra was effectively finished.

The town began as a teamsters' and travellers' camp where stock routes met at the junction of the Landsborough and Thomson rivers, and it grew up servicing the Scottish Australian Company's run at nearby Bowen Downs and other stations.