Pat Geraghty, John Coombs & Tas Bull (courtesy MUA)

Vale Tas Bull

Rowan Cahill surveys the wharfie leader's life.

Tas Bull, union leader, internationalist, socialist, seafarer, waterside worker and writer, died in his Sydney home on Thursday, May 29, aged 71.

Five days later, on an unusually warm, sunny winter morning, 1000 mourners gathered to farewell Bull. Preceded by the banner of the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA), they followed the hearse along the legendary section of the Sydney waterfront known as the Hungry Mile.

Sydney's wharves shut down for the day, and at midday work on the wharves nationwide stopped for a minutes silence as a mark of respect.

Up until the 1940s, before job permanency, the Hungry Mile was well known to maritime workers, seamen and wharfies alike, who scoured its length seeking work. It was also the scene of many bitter industrial struggles.

These hardships and struggles became part of Bull's awareness, dovetailing with family stories about the Depression and forming an historical backdrop as he worked alongside Hungry Mile graduates in the tough maritime world following World War II.

Tasnor Ivan Bull was born in Sydney in 1932, his first name a combination of Tasmania and Norway, the respective birth places of his mother and father. In retrospect the name was apt, symbolically prefiguring the internationalism of his adult life.

The future trade union leader grew up in a caring household in Tasmania that brought together positive attitudes towards work; some sketchy working-class political concepts; books, reading, ideas, and a sense of informal learning.

Bull's father, an electrical contractor, had been a seaman, and seafaring was a Bull family tradition. His mother came from a Salvation Army background, the culture of which pervaded Bull's childhood, possibly adding to the senses of purpose and organisation he later brought to the trade union movement.

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