On 6 December 1966, Chairman Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution arrived briefly and violently at Dalgety’s Wharf in Brisbane, Australia.
It’s an incident which has largely been forgotten in the tumult of history, but it played a pivotal role in the escalating turmoil that was about to engulf Hong Kong.
The eyes of the Hong Kong authorities had been fixed nervously on Macau across the Pearl River estuary where an uneasy calm had returned after the violence of November.
They did not expect signs of trouble to arise 7,000km away in sunny Queensland on that hot summer’s evening.
Brisbane newspaper of record the Courier-Mail’s coverage of the riot at Dalgety’s Wharf, New Farm.
Onboard the Dutch cargo ship SS Straat Malakka at Number 2 Wharf, the captain, Frederick Panhuyzen and his officers were expecting trouble and they were armed and ready.
They were barricaded in the bridge, along with Panhuyzen’s wife and two children – a three-year-old boy and six-month-old baby.
Captain Panhuyzen had joined the ship just a few months earlier in Mombasa. The Straat Malakka, with a crew of 52 Chinese and 16 Dutch officers, was on its regular run between Australia and the southeast coast of Africa.
In Brisbane it was discharging fish meal and was due to sail that Friday on its return route to South Africa, Mozambique and Kenya.
According to an account by the ship’s radio officer Cor Jacobs, trouble began when two crewmen – junior sailor Lau Shu Kan and full seaman Tong On – failed to turn up for their shift and were duly disciplined.
They objected to their punishment and threatened the cargo clerk, Lau Kwan To, who had acted as their translator, for misrepresenting them.
The mood worsened and the threats escalated
The mood among the deck crew worsened and the cargo clerk locked himself in his cabin to escape the escalating threats.
At around 4pm the cargo clerk was removed from the ship under Queensland Police protection and taken to a hotel.
An argument ensued with the remaining crew and at 5.30pm Lau Shu Kan was forcibly removed from the ship by water police and placed in a police car.
That was the start of the riot.
Angry seamen pursued the police car as police fired shots over their heads
Angry seamen followed and surrounded the police car, pushing to overturn it. The driver kept his head and got clear, with the police firing a couple of shots over the heads of the pursuing mob.
The crew turned back to the ship, grabbed an assortment of weapons, principally choppers, knives and crowbars, and headed for the bridge.
Panhuyzen and the officers, armed with revolvers and spearguns, told the men their actions constituted mutiny and ordered them back.
Six of the crewmen kept coming up a ladder and the captain fired three shots at their legs. One shot went through a man’s leg and struck another.
The Straat Malakka in happier times, from a video filmed in Hong Kong’s Taikoo dock in 1963.
A dozen police cars rushed to the wharf and two ambulances took the wounded to Royal Brisbane Hospital while a screaming mob of around 40 Chinese seamen from the Tjinegara, which was berthed nearby, tried to reach the Straat Malakka.
The next day, 80 Chinese seamen from other ships in the port attempted to board the Straat Malakka where by now the crew were spending most of their time in meetings, which mainly consisted of readings from the Little Red Book and slogan chanting.
Brisbane police sealed off the wharf and for the next week the problem ship was the centre of much shouting and bargaining.
The Brisbane police report absolved the captain, agreeing he had the right to control a state of mutiny with armed force if necessary.
Quotations from Mao’s Thought, also known as the Little Red Book, inspired the seamen in the Brisbane dispute. From Your Girl Reporter’s collection.
The crew had a different version. They claimed that, after Panhuyzen refused to negotiate, some of them went to the bridge to speak to him and were confronted with the captain and four of his officers armed and waiting for them.
They claimed they had no intention of using violence and were unarmed when the shooting began.
The Australian wharfies’ union, the Waterside Workers Federation of Australia, contacted the Chinese crew and blacklisted the ship, along with its sister vessel the Tjinegara.
No work could be done as long as the officers remained on board, nor should there be any reprisals against the Chinese and the striking dockworkers. A legal complaint was filed, alleging unlawful arrest and detention of Lau Shu Kan and claiming damages against the captain on behalf of Lau and the wounded.
On Sunday 11 December, according to the radio officer’s account, Panhuyzen was ordered to Hong Kong, with his wife and children, by the shipping line. This prompted an indignant reaction from the unions who demanded to know how the captain could be allowed to leave the country while there were active court proceedings against him.
The Straat Malakka, in a still from the same home movie filmed in 1963 in Hong Kong.
At the end of December, a completely new Chinese crew was flown in from Hong Kong by chartered plane which also repatriated the original crew. The new sailors found their quarters decorated with inflammatory texts.
The ship finally sailed for Melbourne in early January with a new captain and within a few weeks the rest of the officers had been transferred to other ships.
In Hong Kong, the Seamen’s Union, claiming a membership of 20,000, moved the event to centre stage with a series of demands on the shipowners.
The demands were modelled on the concessions wrung from the Portuguese in Macau
Early in February, things were at an impasse, with the company refusing to sack the master and accept responsibility for the incident. Nor was it prepared to make up the pay lost by the crew while the negotiations dragged on.
These demands were described at the time as ‘Macau-style’ because they were modelled on the concessions wrung from the Portuguese in mid-December.
But by the end of the month the company had had enough and was starting to give ground, agreeing to make up the lost pay but still refusing to sack the master.
By mid-March it was all over. Captain Panhuyzen, by now master of the Silindoeng – a ship with no Chinese crew – sent a letter of apology to the union and the company added one of its own.
The Communists rejoiced in their victory and the pressure mounted at a number of places around Hong Kong where workers and management were engaged in industrial disputes over a number of issues.
Hong Kong was a tinderbox and, by May, the unrest had exploded into the worst violence in the little colony’s history.
© Maria Spackman 2021
Further reading:
You can read the firsthand account by Cor Jacobs, the Straat Malakka’s radio officer here
And you can watch that home movie filmed aboard the ship in Hong Kong, 1963, courtesy of Michael Rogge here
You might also like:
Be the first to comment