On International Women’s Day in Melbourne, as Radical Women arrived at Victorian Trades Hall for the union-organised rally, women with mops and scrub brushes were cleaning around the statue of Zelda D’Aprano — a feminist unionist icon best known for her equal pay campaigning. We asked what happened. Did far-right goons vandalise the statue? They said they didn’t know. They were just told to get out there and clean it up.
Then social media posts by feminists and unionists revealed a disturbing trail of events. In a tribute to Zelda’s legacy, eight feminists had dressed her statue in an apron with the words, “Difficult Woman,” and spray-painted the words “8 hours for whom?”on the ground around her to highlight that working women do not get eight hours of recreation and eight hours of sleep to balance their work day. Zelda is best known for chaining herself to the doors of the Commonwealth Arbitration Commission in 1969 to draw attention to the legal foot dragging on equal pay. Trades Hall Secretary Luke Hilakari ordered all traces of this brilliant IWD message to be removed.
In honouring Zelda this way, the women also acted in solidarity with another well-known feminist, Grace Tame. Since addressing a huge Palestine protest in Sydney against the visit of Israeli President Isaac Herzog in February, she has faced vicious vilification by Zionists, in and outside of government. Her call to “Globalise the Intifada” openly challenged federal and state efforts to criminalise this chant, and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” as a hate crime. For this, Labor Party Prime Minister Albanese described her as a “difficult woman.”
This is part of governments’ increasing crackdowns on the right to protest, first to shut down the “difficult” Palestinian movement and then all the other burgeoning movements of dissent. If Victoria’s recently enacted anti-protest laws were in force in 1969, D’Aprano would have been thrown into prison.
“Thrown” isn’t an exaggeration: police violence against protesters keeps escalating as new laws expand their powers. This is what happened to the eight women — after Hilakari followed them, photographed them and turned them into the police. In dawn raids of their homes, police handcuffed and arrested them. The “Zelda8” are fighting serious charges of criminal damage to property, behaving in a riotous manner in public and graffitiing (not the statue but the footpath). Based on Hilakari’s baseless accusation of antisemitism — D’Aprano was Jewish — they could also be prosecuted under the new federal hate laws. It’s now commonplace at rallies for police to search protesters, beat them with batons, fire on them with rubber bullets and suffocate them with pepper spray.
Hilakari represents a union bureaucracy rusted onto the Labor Party, which acts in the interests of both capital and Zionism. This union misleadership is at odds with unionism, which is based on class solidarity. Any official union involvement or support in the Palestine solidarity movement is glaringly absent. By calling the Zelda8 “vandals,” Hilakari tried to drive a wedge between union members and activists — as though rank-and-file unionists aren’t organisers and mobilisers in the Palestine and other vibrant movements!
State violence, aided and abetted by top-down betrayals of unionism’s principles, needs an escalation of organised, united resistance. Let this also be Zelda’s legacy!
