How Alan Pepler Stayed True To His Mates
Sydney Morning Herald
Wednesday September 3, 1986
KARRATHA: Train controller Alan Pepler was the third man out. He drove his small car under the raised security gate at the Cape Lambert plant, and slowly negotiated his way past the crude signs and the picketers' caravans and the cricketers in thongs.
The game, played up the bitumen road using metal stumps welded to a plate, broke up. The sweating crowd gathered, uncertain.
Alan Pepler, a lean man with grey in his black beard, had just made a momentous decision. At 49 he might never work again, for after 10 years on and off with the Cliff Robe River iron ore mine, he had just refused an order by the new Peko Wallsend management.
"I was rostered to shunt trains," he said, quietly. More men gathered. Mr Pepler stayed in his car and looked straight ahead. "I'm not qualified. I refused."
Have you been sacked? "I suppose so."
The men straightened and banged the car roof. "Good on you Alan. Well done. Good one, mate."
Alan Pepler had made his decision. He would remain a mate. But on the other side of the gate were about 200 men the workers regarded as scabs.
"They turned their backs on us. We'll turn our backs on them," said Kim Metcalfe, 31, a powerhouse worker and Australian Workers' Union shop steward.
"But there'll be no violence - you put that down. There hasn't been, and there won't be."
In Wickham, the company town about 10 kilometres from Cape Lambert, Father Vince Mills, 67, had just completed an interdenominational prayer meeting for industrial peace in his parish, Our Lady of the Pilbara.
Small and egg-shaped, looking like someone from a Graham Greene novel, Father Mills sucked his old pipe and mused about a town of about 3,000 souls that used to be pleasant. That morning he had selected a passage from Paul's letter to the Ephesians.
"Never have grudges against others or lose your temper or raise your voice to anybody, or call each other names or allow any sort of spitefulness."
Jim Boyd, 31, a workshop foreman, and a maintenance foreman, Duncan Gibb, 35, were the first and second men out.
Jim Boyd said he had been told to do the work of wages employees, had refused and quit. Or was it sacked? Workshop lawyers muttered darkly.
Jim Boyd recalled the moment of the decision - three o'clock that morning. With his wife, Chris, a part-time snack bar attendant, he had shared an emotional "last supper", and with her backing determined to "stay with the blokes".
"I had 18 men under me," he said. "I reckon I had a pretty good relationship with them. I had their respect. That has to be earned, not bought. How could I keep that if I scabbed?"
It was said quietly, but it was still the stuff of unionism. But Mr Boyd is not a member.
"I'm not right wing or left wing, I'm just me," he said. "I felt my action was morally justified."
The Wickham Hotel, its roof, like the church's, well dusted with the ochre of the Pilbara, was a sad quiet place.
In the town, a red car with three State politicians and a minder darted from house to house, a phone call here, an impromptu meeting there among the hoists and under the Eureka flag.
When news of the appeal court decision came through, there was muted applause from the 150 picketers but much scepticism.
Ian McRae, Robe's general manager of operations, reluctantly agreed to talk on a phone linked to the security box at the front gate.
Were the staff working on jobs that the wage workers normally handled?
"Yes, and they are all performing the jobs - unloading ore. We're doing what we said we'd do."
Had anybody been sacked?
"Not that I know of. We're waiting to hear from the commission in Perth."
Will you abide by the commission's ruling?
"I told you we're waiting to hear. Yes. Probably."
When they heard Mr McCrae's comments, the workers were confused.
"We don't trust the bastards," they said. "Whatever McCrae says here, Copeman will change."
© 1986 Sydney Morning Herald