Australian Dictionary of Biography

Albert John Marks (1924–1998), trade union leader, was born on 20 December 1924 at Cottesloe, Perth, oldest of four children and only son of Violet, née Western, and her husband Albert Joseph Marks, commercial traveller, both Western Australian born. Jack attended East Claremont State School and gained his Junior certificate from Claremont Central School in 1939. Although he recalled Depression memories of going barefoot and eating bread and dripping, his father remained employed, so the family was better off than many..

In 1939 Marks became an apprentice fitter at J. and E. Ledger Ltd, a foundry and engineering business in East Perth, where he encountered communist ideas among his workmates. After arguing once too often with his boss, Frank Ledger, he lost his job. Enlisting in the Royal Australian Air Force on 14 August 1943 for service in World War II, he flew (1945) as a wireless officer with No. 8 Communication Unit in New Guinea. He had been promoted to flight sergeant in 1944 and temporary warrant officer in 1945, and was discharged in Perth on 5 June 1946. Having contracted malaria, he was admitted to Hollywood Hospital, Perth, where he met his first wife, Una Bernice Loftus, a shop assistant. They married on 24 July 1948 at Wesley Church, Claremont, and were to have three daughters, Karen, Diane, and Lynette, before divorcing in 1980.

Marks returned to Ledger’s and completed his apprenticeship in 1948, but was not retained as a tradesman. By 1947 he had joined the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). He found employment in May 1949 as a fitter and turner at the government railway workshops at Midland. There he gained a reputation as a man with a persuasive tongue who could be loud and vulgar, earning him the sobriquet ‘noisy scrub bird’ (McIlwraith 1998, 14) and a reputation for hard drinking. The area around his lathe in the machine shop became known as ‘red square’ (Oliver 2013, 97) because he used lunch breaks to tell his fellow workers about communism.

In 1948 Marks had joined the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU), where his militant views were tolerated; soon he was a shop steward. Despite his prominent role in an unsuccessful six-month-long metal workers’ strike in 1952, he and fellow communist shop stewards won respect among employees because they worked assiduously to gain better wages and conditions, including founding the Joint Railways Union Committee, a peak body of union officials, who cooperated to achieve improvements in the workplace.

Gaining his reputation at the workshop’s flagpole, the site of worker meetings, Marks was a popular speaker. Patrick Gayton, a patternmaker, recalled he was ‘a great orator’: ‘He was funny, he used to [say] “have you seen the daily sausage wrapper today?” [meaning] … the West Australian’ (Gayton 2003). Phillip Bristow Stagg, a turner and iron machinist, believed that if Marks had joined the Australian Labor Party (ALP) instead of the CPA he would have become a member of parliament. Standing for the House of Representatives seat of Swan in 1954, Marks received only 1.65 per cent of the vote. The result was even worse when he stood in Fremantle as an Independent in 1972. In 1962 he had been part of a union delegation to Moscow to observe the May Day celebrations. He was unable to attend the event because of a typhus infection, but visited industrial sites, and on his return reported favourably on workplace conditions in the Soviet Union.

A member of the Coastal District Committee of the AEU, Marks became a paid organiser in 1967. His work took him to the Pilbara where the iron ore mining industry was expanding. Workers faced long shifts, and poor housing and working conditions in extreme heat. He brought his customary zeal to the task. In October-November 1970 he toured the region, travelling almost 13,000 kilometres in an area he described as ‘bigger than NSW, Victoria, New Zealand and Tasmania put together’ (Oliver 2013, 59). His work paid off. AEU membership increased by more than two thousand between 1967 and 1971, the year in which the union amalgamated with other metal workers’ unions to form the Australian Metal (later Manufacturing) Workers’ Union (AMWU).

In 1979 Marks and a fellow organiser, Laurie Carmichael, were arrested under the State government’s oppressive Section 54B of the Police Act, for addressing a rally of striking workers at Karratha. They were charged with unlawful assembly—which under the legislation meant a meeting of three or more people—without a permit. The arrests triggered massive protests culminating in two million workers across the nation striking on 21 June 1979. Marks and other unionists who were charged for subsequent protests refused to pay their fines, which were paid by third parties. Moderates in the Trades and Labor Council became worried that the ‘Reds’ were exercising too much power. In the next election, Marks lost his position as TLC junior vice president to a political moderate, the musician’s union official Harry Bluck. Having steadily lost faith in communism, in 1981 he left the CPA, and from thereon actively supported the ALP. He was elected AMWU State secretary in 1987.

After retiring in 1989, on 31 January 1990 at the Perth Registry Office, Marks married Joan Chitty, an employee of the TLC and a divorcee. He served on many committees, including appointment (1987–93) to the Perth Theatre Trust. In 1992 he was appointed chair of the PTT by the minister for the arts, and proved adept at fund-raising. Always an advocate for workplace safety, he oversaw asbestos removal from the Perth Concert Hall using his union contacts to ensure the job was completed efficiently. He also served (1988–95) as a councillor of the City of Perth and was inaugural mayor (1995–98) of the Town of Vincent.

As a shop steward and an AMWU official, even his political enemies gave Marks grudging respect. He rose above the stigma and failed political ambitions associated with belonging to the CPA, but his wholehearted commitment to unionism exacted a heavy emotional price. Much of his life was spent away from his children, a personal tragedy for one who saw his main role as looking after people. A biography published in the year of his death recorded his assertion that Australian workplaces had long been sites of confrontation: ‘if we are going to change our entire methodology towards planning, work and skilling, there has got to be a big change in our culture’ (Read 1998, 420). Marks’s health declined as he aged but he remained active in public life. He underwent successful heart surgery in 1991 but later developed cancer and died at Mount Lawley on 2 October 1998. Survived by his second wife and the three daughters of his first marriage, he was cremated.