I want to tell you about the significance of Harmers Haven in Wonthaggi’s rich social history and call upon you to protect the traces of this history still visible in this special, undeveloped little place.
From the time the State Coal Mine was established in 1909 Wonthaggi was a union town and the union’s activities reflected the concept of union as guild. Being “Union” at Wonthaggi signified membership of a tight-knit community.
In the 1920s, Wonthaggi miners and their families took respite from the bad air and hard conditions underground by joining with their union comrades at Wreck Beach (later known as Harmers Haven) on public holidays, on the short day-and-a-half weekends, and on their unpaid two weeks’ annual leave.
As Eddie Harmer noted, one of the most significant battles waged by the union in the 1930s was for ventilation in the hot, wet foetid mines, so taking ‘fresh air at the coast’ had immense symbolic significance as well as physical value.
At Wreck Beach the miners set up tents salvaged from the Powlett River construction site and relaxed together, held sporting contests, went fishing, and walked the beach. It was a sort of extended miners’ picnic, if you like. Without holiday pay, the Christmas-New Year period “was often very lean for miners and their families’ and a tent at the beach or a hut constructed from off-cuts or beach detritus ‘meant rabbits, fish and crayfish for the larder” as well as a change from long hours of backbreaking labour.
In the Depression years of the 1930s, when Wonthaggi was known as “Red Wonthaggi”, the encampments and huts took on a more critical dimension. In 1929-30 the miners at the State Coal Mine, now closely connected with the Communist Party’s Militant Minority Movement, were locked out for more than a year when they refused to take a 12.5 per cent pay cut. When the colliery reopened, shifts and wages were reduced by almost half and miners lost many more days’ pay to intermittent lay-offs. Some 400 miners, 25 per cent of the workforce, were retrenched in June 1931.
Many families lost their incomes and were unable to make payments on their homes. They were forced to survive these hard times by setting up, for the long haul, at Wreck Beach. Very soon most of the weekend and holiday huts at Wreck Beach were occupied permanently and new ones were being built. Some thirty huts were erected. Set into the dunes behind the beach, they were constructed from off-cuts of timber, flattened kerosene tins, and anything else that could be scrounged.
Eddie Harmer, who was unemployed from 1933 to 1938, had a four-room tent there, and he and his young wife and small children lived there for extended periods during those years. At that time Eddie was secretary of the local branch of the Unemployed Workers’ Union, which was a Communist Party front organisation.
Times were tough, and Eddie Harmer was reticent to recall the humiliations associated with being unemployed in later interviews, preferring to focus on how hard it had been for the women. But in an earlier interview, he told historian Wendy Lowenstein: “We ate a tremendous lot of rabbits. You could catch fish and get mushrooms and blackberries, and pinch spuds if you knew somewhere to pinch them from.”
There must have been good times too, because later, when he again had work, Harmer purchased one of the huts in the dunes. I’m told that the planting of red pelargoniums near one of the steps down to the beach still marks the site of Harmer’s original hut.
Young single miners, boys as young as 14, were also forced out to the miners’ encampment at Wreck Beach. Youths were routinely sacked when they reached 21 to save the State Colliery paying them adult wages and they could only receive the dole and sustenance work if they lived independently. Hence, many lads lived permanently in huts they built themselves at Wreck Beach, despite a concerted campaign by the Lands Department to tear down the huts and remove these “undesirables”.11 As secretary of the Wonthaggi Unemployed Workers’ Union, Eddie Harmer was a leader in the campaign to resist evictions from the camp.
Industrial relations soured again in 1934 and from March to July miners again went on strike. During this strike, unemployed miners camped out at Wreck Beach were called upon by the union relief committee to supply the town with fish and game and they did so for 17 weeks. As local historian WR Hayes says, ‘these huts were of extreme importance to the miners’ and memories of life and times at Wreck Beach are fondly remembered in oral histories of Wonthaggi.
A second “intentional community” was constructed at Wreck Beach in the 1950s. Inspired by the home grown “nativist movement” and by the achievement of paid holidays in 1947, a number of the larger progressive unions across the country established workers’ holiday camps with the idea of making a chain of retreats “from the mountains to the sea” where workers might spend their hard-won paid holidays. Camp Eureka is one of these, as is camp Currrawong near Sydney. In the same spirit, Communist and Miners Union activists in two of the most militant and close-knit coal mining regions in the country, the Illawarra and at Wonthaggi, both constructed small hamlet retreats on the coast.
Harmers Haven, as the settlement at Wreck Beach came to be known, is Wonthaggi’s own response to this movement. The historian of the “workers’ holiday camp movement”, Jo Holder, regards it as a site of major significance in the nation’s cultural history. It was the brainchild of Jack McLeod, the Communist Party’s local organiser in the 1950s and secretary of the Wonthaggi Working Men’s Club, and of Eddie Harmer, who was, by the mid-1950s, president of the local Miners Union.
Not a lot is documented about the establishment of Harmers Haven. As Jack McLeod’s son, Don, reminded me, the 1950s were times of intense persecution for Communists, and they kept mum about much of what they were up to so as not to draw attention to themselves or to implicate their friends and families. His father, he said, was circumspect until the end of his days when it came to his involvement with “the Party”, still fearing persecution even after a history of involvement with the Party had become rather fashionable.
What is known is that in 1951 Jack McLeod, who was then a member of the Communist-dominated Wonthaggi Borough Council, purchased a 198-acre strip of Crown land behind Wreck Beach and proceeded a few years later to parcel it out to fellow Communist Party members and to local union militants with the intention of forming a tight-knit socialist community on land that already had a history of the miners’ struggle imprinted on it.
McLeod, Harmer, and their fellow Communists were creative people, dedicated to the union, to the practice of socialism, to living according to the precepts of workers’ solidarity and community. They were creatively engaged with progressive social values and international movements such as the peace movement. Perhaps there is a trace of the informal discussions that led to the idea of the community in Harmer’s recollection that one day in the 1950s Wattie Doig, Jack Mulligan and Jack McLeod, all fellow Communists, arrived at his hut at Wreck Beach. “We were talking together and I can’t remember which one – Jack McLeod, probably – came up with the name Harmer’s Haven’.
Where McLeod obtained the funds for such a venture remains a matter of speculation to this day. It is perhaps enough just to note that in 1951 Australia’s Prime Minister Robert Menzies was hell bent on sequestering the Communist Party of Australia and militant union bank accounts and that the targeted unions and the CPA were equally determined that he should not have their funds.
The first of the new fibro houses at the old settlement, revived and creatively envisaged by Jack McLeod as a place of retreat and inspiration that carried on the spirit of the union as guild, were constructed in 1956. In the late 1950s, Eddie Harmer, still under pressure of eviction by the Lands Department, moved from his original hut in the dunes to the more salubrious shack on Viminaria Road that still bears the sign “Harmer’s Haven”. The last of the old huts in the dunes was occupied until 1976 by Jim McDonnell, who, as a 15-year-old had built it and lived in it with another unemployed boy through the Depression.
There is thus a continuous historic overlap between the settlement as it now is, back through Jack McLeod’s vision of community, and further back to the original miners’ camp of the Great Depression and beyond.
People who spent their holidays here as children in the 1950s still remember that it was a vibrant community where people gathered in one another’s modest weekenders and debated life and politics with vigour, where they valued the wildness of the place and where children were encouraged to roam about and have adventures. Into the 1990s, it was a truism among real estate agents at Wonthaggi that properties at Harmers Haven never came through their books.
Right up until the present, the weekenders along Viminaria Road have continued to be passed down to people whose social and political values have echoed McLeod’s and Harmer’s original vision – even as property values have inflated. Harmers Haven was never just a row of houses but an actively functioning community of like-minded people.
Because many of the houses have been passed down the generations, or passed on to like-minded people, in the tradition set by the originators of the community, there still exists a folk memory of a time when Harmer’s Haven was known to locals as Jack McLeod’s “Commies’ Corner”.
Jo Holder stressed that these settlements are an irreplaceable part of our cultural heritage and that any remaining footprint of their presence should be preserved. Harmer’s Haven is such a place. The houses along the unsealed road are deliberately set into the vegetation behind the dunes and the name Viminaria Road still reflects the influence of the original nativist aesthetic. Since the 1960s residents have fought against moves to kerb and seal the road because they valued, as we still do, the rough ambience of the place that Jack and his fellow travellers also valued.
While a number of new houses have been constructed at Harmer’s in recent years, those changes make it more urgent that what remains of the original trace and ambience of McLeod’s vision be protected. The history of places like these is so easily lost. If the physical structures and the ambience of place is not protected, the memories which those structures prompt are also lost to us. Like Bulgo in the Illawarra, Harmers ought to be on Wonthaggi’s register of places of significance so that another generation can be told of the proud and significant history of the place.
Harmers Haven preserves in its rough ambience and its single row of modest dwellings set into the bush an irreplaceable trace of the history of Wonthaggi and Victoria, and we call upon you to take good care of what remains of it.
This is an edited version of a submission historian Dr Marguerita Stephens made to Bass Coast Shire Council in 2003 opposing subdivision of farmland at Harmers Haven. The subdivision went ahead. Eddie Harmer’s house no longer exists. Although most of the houses are still weekenders, the small fibro shacks have gradually been replaced by grander designs.
References‘Black Gold, Kindred Spirits’, documentary film directed by Jeffrey Bird, 1998
Lowenstein, Wendy Weevils in the Flour (Hyland House Melbourne)1978.
Hayes, W.R.,The Golden Coast : History of the Bunurong (Bunurong Environment Centre, 1988.)
Chambers, Joe & Lyn Out To The Wreck (Wonthaggi & District Historical Society)
Jo Holder interview on ABC Radio National The Comfort Zone, January 2003.