Australian Dictionary of Biography

William Sydney ‘Shorty’ O’Neil (1903–2000), miner and trade union leader, was born on 27 July 1903 at South Broken Hill, New South Wales, son of South Australian-born parents Michael O’Neil, cobbler, miner, and shearer, and his wife Catherine, née Beerworth. After attending Broken Hill convent school, William started work on the Broken Hill line of lode in 1917, aged fourteen. Beginning as a surface worker at the Broken Hill Proprietary Co. Ltd’s ‘Big Mine,’ he joined the Amalgamated Miners’ Association (AMA), beginning a lifelong involvement in unionism. His father had taken part in the shearers’ strikes of the early 1890s and was reputedly involved in the torching of the paddle steamer Rodney on the Darling River during the pastoral strike of 1894.

Switching to engine cleaning, O’Neil joined the Federated Engine Drivers’ and Firemen’s Association. The deprivations associated with the eighteen-month-long Broken Hill ‘Big Strike’ of 1919 to 1921, along with the manner of its resolution through agreement by both unions and mine management to recommendations from the president of the New South Wales Industrial Court, led him and many fellow mine workers to conclude that neither strikes nor arbitration were the right approach. In the aftermath of the strike, the syndicalists reworked the miners’ union as the Barrier branch of the Workers’ Industrial Union of Australia (WIUA), associating it with the nationwide One Big Union movement, which was committed to collective or direct bargaining rather than working through the arbitration system. In 1923 the mining and town-sector unions together established a new peak body, the Barrier Industrial Council (BIC), which was to ensure closed-shop unionism and supervise the formation of a system of triennial agreement-making and local peak-level collective bargaining. It was a system that would become the defining feature of O’Neil’s life, with the BIC’s first president, E. P. ‘Paddy’ O’Neill, being a role model. On 18 September 1926 in the sacristy of the Sacred Heart Cathedral, Broken Hill, O’Neil married Olive Blanche Hocking.

During the 1930s and 1940s O’Neil worked underground at the North Mine. There he served his apprenticeship in rank-and-file activism, under the tutelage of the Communist Party activists Frank Kelly and Arthur ‘Floss’ Campbell, who were prominent in job committees established by the Militant Minority Movement in the early 1930s. Becoming president of the North Mine job committee, he led a pivotal strike at this mine in 1945. The job committee movement gave him both political experience and a base of support among the rank and file that assisted him in seeking high union office. Having served on the WIUA committee of management, in 1950 he was elected to the influential position of WIUA check inspector of workplace safety, a position once held by his erstwhile mentor Campbell.

In 1948 the WIUA presidency was won by Norm Dunleavy, who supported the anti-communist Australian Labor Party Industrial Groups. O’Neil appeared to Dunleavy ‘both a dangerous militant and a threat to his own aspirations to leadership’ (Shields 2001, 33) in the BIC. When O’Neil took up the role of WIUA delegate to the BIC in 1953, it set the stage for a bitter fight for primacy between the two men, with O’Neil aligning himself with Paddy O’Neill’s successor as BIC president, the left-wing Federated Engine Drivers leader Bert Kersten. During Kersten’s presidency, O’Neil was a BIC trustee before becoming, successively, junior vice-president and senior vice-president. Following Kersten’s retirement in 1957, O’Neil won the BIC presidency, becoming just the third occupant of that position. In that year he also attended the International Labour Organization conference in Geneva as an Australian delegate. The following year Dunleavy contrived to have O’Neil defeated as WIUA check inspector and then sought to exclude him from contention for the BIC presidential election by withdrawing his status as a WIUA delegate. However, O’Neil secretly joined the Theatrical Employees’ Union and put himself forward for presidential re-election as that union’s delegate, succeeding in holding the presidency thanks to the support of the town-based unions, whose combined delegate strength was greater than that of the WIUA. For the rest of his tenure as BIC president, he would experience no other significant challenge to his authority.

The BIC reached the height of its prestige and power under O’Neil’s leadership. By the late 1950s, it was being described by outside observers as the de facto local government. As well as imposing a ban on married women’s paid employment, the council not only regulated job access and labour supply but also leisure activities, shopping hours, illegal two-up schools, off-course bookmaking, the local press, and beer prices. On O’Neil’s initiative, it increased its social control in 1962 by purchasing the Barrier Daily Truth, the WIUA newspaper, and forcing local unionists to subscribe.

O’Neil’s attempts to intervene in local matters were not always successful. While in 1966 Broken Hill Council workers achieved a thirty-five-hour week with assistance from the BIC, other town employees continued to work longer hours. During this fight O’Neil came into conflict with the Australian Broadcasting Commission journalist Bob Bottom, who had alleged that the printers at the Barrier Daily Truth—by then owned by the BIC—had been themselves refused shorter hours. Bottom was summoned to come before the BIC, but declined to appear and was fined. He appealed to his own union, the Australian Journalists’ Association, which paid the fine but agreed that he be gagged. In 1969, O’Neil’s last year in office, the BIC and the Truth found themselves in court in an action for defamation as a result of an ill-conceived attempt to drive out of Broken Hill a number of women who had been brought to the town to sell the salacious publication The King’s Cross Whisper.

Through much of his presidency O’Neil continued to work as a miner. Following his retirement in 1965 from the North Mine, he began employment in a local concrete batching plant. He remained active in local civic and union affairs, helping manage the Broken Hill Base Hospital Contribution Fund, which was another of the town’s union achievements. Retirement was ‘bitter-sweet,’ however, for during the tenure of Joe Keenan, O’Neil’s successor as BIC president, the council’s power diminished and ‘its ability to shield its domain from the outside world began to crumble’ (Shields 2001, 36). While O’Neil saw his son, Bill, rise to the position of BIC president, an assault by management during Bill’s presidency (1985–95) eroded the system Shorty had worked for so many years to preserve.

Although only slightly more than five feet (152 cm) tall, in the mid-1960s at the height of his power, O’Neil was the ‘undisputed King of Broken Hill’ (Bottom 1963, 19) and the leader of the most powerful local union movement in Australia. He was a devotee of Australian Rules football and horseracing, helping to establish the local St Patrick’s Day race meetings and regularly attending the Melbourne Cup. Predeceased by his wife (d. 1975) and their daughter, Shirley (d. 1997), and survived by their son, he died on 24 March 2000 at Broken Hill and was buried in Broken Hill cemetery. A ‘fearless’ negotiator who ‘could make a weak bargaining position look strong’ (Anderson 2000, 71), in many ways he ‘personified the complexities and contradictions of the local union movement’ he had dedicated himself to: he was ‘a militant who despised radicalism; a labourist with a deep distrust of lawyers and arbitration; [and] a democratically elected and unpaid official who saw no inconsistency in wielding the institutional power of unionism “over” as well as “for” working people’ (Shields 2001, 30).