Iconic Black Friday Poster ‘Äustralia’ draws back the Queensland curtain to reveal the Black Friday strike of 1912
‘Australia’ draws back the Queensland curtain to reveal the Black Friday strike in 1912. This iconic poster by James Thomas Case has been digitised recently at SLQ.
The poster is a reproduction of Jim Case’s cartoon from the front page of the Worker. Case’s depiction of a shocked maiden, ‘Australia’, drawing back the Queensland curtain to reveal the police brutally clubbing Brisbane workers on ‘Black Friday’ during the 1912 general strike became a classic among Australian political cartoons,” according to the Australian Dictionary of Biography Online. The poster has the Queensland shield on top of the curtain and the Australia emblem hangs on her waist.
Interestingly, when the cartoon was first published in the Worker on 2 February 1912, ‘Australia’ was more scantily clad. The poster depicts different features of the woman, and a more conservative view of her bosom, perhaps showing the artist’s sense of humour, or with a view to selling more posters and postcards that were reproduced from the original. Time and distance make it hard to know why the original was altered.
Original Black Friday cartoon from the Worker, 2 February 1912
Case and his cartoons were renown for representing politics and industrial Labor in Queensland during a radical time. Case had a long history with the Worker and its affiliation with the Australian Labor Party. A native Queenslander from Caboolture, he left school at the age of 14 to work in the machine room of the Worker. Upon winning a cartoon contest at the paper in 1908, he became the resident artist and then chief cartoonist in 1909. His national reputation was made as a World War I anti-conscription cartoonist in 1916 and 1917. During the two referenda his work appeared in Labor and union papers throughout Australia.
Case’s many works can be found in the Worker, digitised by the State Library of Queensland and available in Trove.
C.Cottle – Digital Content Curator, State Library of Queensland