Doug Carpenter, who died last week aged 90, was for 30 years from the 1950s one of the best-known faces of Canberra unionism. From a time when the population was about 50,000 to when it grew, at the rate of about 10 per cent a year, to 250,000, Canberra had a building and industrial workforce almost rivalling the size of the white-collar public service. And the power and significance of organised labour was much greater than it was today.
Over that period, Carpenter was the ACT organiser and secretary of the Transport Workers Union, and, for many years, president of the ACT Trades and Labour Council. The TWU's influence over the distribution of goods gave it a critical position in ACT industrial disputes, particularly in the building industry, but also, at critical times, over supplies of beer at Christmas, luxury goods in shops, or even the capacity of Canberra airport to land aircraft. And on anti-Vietnam and anti-apartheid activities.
Carpenter would joke that he had, in his time, by calling Commonwealth car drivers out on strike, caused three prime ministers to have to walk to work.
Carpenter was affable, agreeable, honest and pragmatic, fiercely loyal, a man of his word, popular among his members and highly respected by employers. He did not hesitate to use his industrial clout to good effect for his members when the opportunity arose. Nor did he hesitate to use tactics now controversial, such as pattern bargaining, and secondary and selective boycotts.
His influence extended well beyond the ACT: he was a delegate to the Australian Council of Trade Unions, a close comrade of Ivan Hodgson, leading light of the national TWU, and, by personality as much as proximity, well known and respected by senior federal Labor figures. He is said to have once been offered, and to have rejected, a winnable place on a Labor Senate ticket.
Carpenter was old school, down to the blue, (or, generally white) singlet, with a friendly but definite scorn for the modern university-educated industrial advocate who had never actually got his hands dirty. He certainly had in his progress from worker to union activist, unpaid delegate to employed organiser, and a good deal of his effectiveness came not only from a deep understanding of the jobs that his members performed but a common sense appreciation of human nature and realities on the workplace floor. He was a devoted reader and very well informed about literature and current affairs, and he was passionately fond of poetry.
If militant by instinct and passionate about his beliefs, he was far from the zealot. He was a strategist as much as a tactician, as interested in the war and the battle. Very much as a part of this he was sociable, used the power of a beer to get antagonists talking to each other, and was quick with a quip or a memorable, but generally affectionate, nickname.
He was also an ardent pacifist, perhaps the more so because he was a returned soldier, a member of the 6th Division who fought in Libya and Egypt. Like many Australian soldiers of legend, he had no great fondness for discipline. Before the war he had been a capable boxer; at one stage during it, he demonstrated this fact to a junior officer and got six months in the brig for his pains. In action he was in anti-tank units and saw terrible carnage, including seeing a convoy containing one of his cousins obliterated by dive bombers, and the amputation of a mate's leg by pocket knife. These experiences later saw him treated in Australia for what would now be post-traumatic stress syndrome then called shell shock.
Carpenter was born at Yass, the fifth of seven children, and, on leaving school became an apprentice butcher in Queanbeyan. In 1936, working at the Canberra Steam Laundry in Braddon, he met Queenie, a few years younger than him, whom he was to marry when back in Australia in 1943.
At war's end, he took a job as a bus driver, running a firewood business on the side. This was what took him into the TWU. He finally stood down from the union in 1985.
He once succeeded in tripling my wages when I was a copyboy at The Canberra Times in 1972. The job involved much driving and Carpenter decided I was eligible for the TWU, then threatened management with a black ban on newsprint deliveries until I was properly paid. The industrial action was over in an hour; when, months later, I finally took up a cadetship, my pay dropped 50 per cent.
In retirement Carpenter was a devoted grandfather, daily taking children to Ainslie Primary from his home in Torrens Street. Less alert in recent times, he succeeded, with a good deal of support, in staying in the community rather than in a home, and retained, to the end, affection for a beer and a sardonic joke. He leaves Queenie, his wife of 65 years, daughters Denise and Pam, four grandchildren and a great grandson. Jack Waterford, with help from Peter Downie.