Ray Harrison
Ray Harrison (1921-2018) was a union activist and lifelong fighter for social justice. For most of his life he was a rank and file metalworker in the Sydney Redbelt. He held elected positions in union and combined shop committees and together with his wife, Joan Harrison, was active in social justice and community campaigns. He was a member of the Communist Party of Australia from 1956 until its dissolution in 1991.
Back to Minto day
90th
SEARCH Foundation 2015 AGM
Sydney members who attended the SEARCH Foundation 2015 AGM included Brian Aarons, Sam Altman, Linda Burnett, Graham Chuck, Steve Cooper, Graham Drew, Chris Elenor, Adrian Graves, Ray Harrison, Tony Hawkins, Russ Hermann, Winton Higgins, Ron Marriott, Tom McDonald, Audrey McDonald, Daren McDonald, David Mendelssohn, Peter Murphy, Warwick Neilley, Declan O'Byrne, David Pink, Oliver Plunkett, John Poulos, Pat Ranald, Mark Stevens, Don Sutherland, Casey Thompson, Sally Trevena, Mick Tubbs, Richard Walsham, Jacqueline Widin, Lindsay Wood.
SEARCH Foundation
Sydney attendees of the SEARCH Foundation 2006 AGM included Ray Harrison .
MINUTES OF THE SEARCH FOUNDATION AGM
HELD IN SYDNEY ON OCTOBER 22, 1994.
Adam Farrar, Cliff Willard, Vic Slater, Eric Aarons, Judy Gillett, Peter Murphy, Greg Giles, Richard Archer, Chas Begg, Jack Vernham, Graham Drew, Laurie Aarons, David Baker, Vern Moffitt, Jack Wright, Bill Whiley, Jack Cambourn, Peg Hewett, Ray Harrison, Joan Harrison, Albert Laird, Bert Heinemann, John Brunskill, Gwyneth Regione, Pat Ranald, Rob Durbridge, Vera Deacon, Pat Elphinston, Norma Nord, Gloria Garton, Evelyn Healy, Kevin Healy, Hal Alexander, Bev Symons, Joyce Stevens, Brian Aarons, Roger Milliss, Jack Mundey (afternoon).
Chairs Judy Gillett (am), Greg Giles (pm) Adam Farrar (am), Brian Aarons (pm)
Apologies: Evan Phillips, Carol Aarons, Josie Moynihan, Adrian Shackley, Jim Endersby, Pat Ranald (afternoon), Adam Farrar (afternoon), Rob Durbridge (part morning).
"Red Ray"
As Ray tells it, his first political act came towards the end of World War II:
- I was at Uranquinty out of Wagga in the Vale of Winds. I was an electrical fitter at the RAAF flying school. It was the end of 1945 and the Indonesians were resisting the attempts by the Dutch to recolonise. The Dutch Air Force was touting for recruits from the RAAF. We had a meeting at the Base and decided that none of us would join the Dutch Air Force. The Labor government eventually followed our lead and no one was allowed to go, by Air Force orders.
At this stage over 3000 CPA members were in the armed forces. Ray was demobbed in 1946, and managed to acquire the all-important Tradesman’s Rights certificate as a fitter. In June 1946 he married Private Joan Manser, an Australian Women’s Army Service (AWAS) ambulance driver and nurse, whom he had met while stationed at Amberley airbase near Brisbane. They had a son and four daughters, and a personal and political partnership spanning 58 years.
By 1949, Ray was working at the Canite Factory in Pyrmont. The workers were all stood down by CSR management, so to earn a quid, Ray and a mate hitched to Wilberforce to cut bakers’ wood for the seven-week duration of the lockout. From CSR he went to the Balmain Power House and the fight around the Communist Party Dissolution Bill. Although Ray didn’t join the CPA until 1956, he was already a fellow-traveller.
Ray next went to the Gas Company and worked with leading communist Ernie Thornton from the Federated Ironworkers' Association (FIA).
As a maintenance fitter, Ray was able to get around the worksite, talk to other workers and distribute publications. If he lasted long enough before getting his ‘week in lieu’, he would be elected as a union delegate and play a role in the shop committee and the local CPA branch. He was known around the traps as Red Ray, and was renowned for his dedication to selling Tribune on the jobs and in pubs around Liverpool. Much of Ray’s industrial and political work in the 1950s and early ‘60s was in countering the push by the National Civic Council (NCC) ‘Groupers’ into the union movement.
By 1964 Ray was working at Pettifords, an ACI subsidiary, and had become president of the Hurstville No 1 branch of the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU), which had over 1200 members.
By the mid-1960s, opposition to the Vietnam War was building. Ray was showing anti-war films and, on his job and others, they won the right to knock off early to attend anti-war demonstrations in town.
The local CPA publication was The Punchbowl Beacon which had stories from the factory, and articles about the margin. Ray contributed stories, but other comrades distributed it at the gate, as it didn’t help to be identified by the boss as a communist.
Ray talked of meeting with trade union officials from Indonesia, who disappeared in the aftermath of the 1965 military coup. This was the year his wife, Joan, joined the CPA, after being active in the Union of Australian Women (UAW) and the women’s movement for many years. Together they became active on the Liverpool Council Peace Committee and Access Committee.
Following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 the CPA split in 1971, with the so-called ‘Russian-liners’ forming the Socialist Party of Australia. Ray stayed with the CPA and, despite bitterness and acrimony, managed to work with pretty much everyone on industrial campaigns – he always had the capacity to connect with other people of whatever left hue. In 1969, a million workers including some from non-union shops went on strike against the industrial court’s penal powers. There were 3,000 at the meeting in Bankstown.
July 1971 saw big demonstrations against the South African Springboks rugby team who were playing in Sydney. Ray said:
- July 1971 was my Mother’s 80th birthday party. It was also the big demonstration against the Springboks at the Sydney Cricket Ground. I went into work to get some bolt cutters. I was due to be working that Saturday so I had to make excuses to the foreman before sidling out. I hid the bolt cutters down the leg of my trousers and into my socks to get into the game. There were all these rugger buggers chanting through the fence: “Paint them black, send them back”, ugly. After cutting the fence which was supposed to keep us from the ground, I was thrown over the top barbed wire strands and kicked by the muster of coppers stationed around the ground inside the fence. A number of people had got onto the ground. They took us up to the cells in Darlinghurst. Fred Hollows, I didn’t know him then, was in there writing on the walls ‘Land rights for Aboriginals’. He had a look at my eye socket which was bleeding. I never did get to Mother’s birthday party.
In 1972 Ray went to Canberra to support the Aboriginal tent embassy. By 1973 he had scored a waterfront job as a maintenance fitter at Seatainers in Balmain. Ray described this as “like winning the lottery”. The organisation and militancy of the Waterside Workers’ Federation had won excellent wages and conditions.
Ray retired in 1988 but stayed politically active. He went along with the decision to dissolve the CPA in 1991 and continued as an active member of the SEARCH Foundation.[1]
Communist son-in-law
Chris Elenor was Ray Harrison’s son-in-law. Ray came into Chris’s world when, as a migrant Pom, he took up with Ray’s eldest daughter, Paula Harrison. Chris quickly became enmeshed in the extended and extensive networks of Ray and Joan Harrison’s family, the Communist Party of Australia and the wider left movement. Chris joined the ‘Left Tendency’ in the Party in 1974 and in the recent period was elected to the SEARCH Foundation committee. In 2005 Chris helped Ray write the story of his post-war working and political life for the online publication Vintage Reds. This biography is largely informed by Ray telling his own story. When Ray left Liverpool, he lived with Paula and Chris for five years before moving to aged care.[2]
SEARCH Foundation Sydney
Sydney attendees of the SEARCH Foundation 2014 AGM included Ray Harrison .