Review of Jean Devanny's "Sugar Heaven."

I read Jean Devanny's "Sugar Heaven." It's a novel about the 1935 Weil's Disease strike that traces the development of a cane cutters wife from scab to trade unionist. Devanny was a member of the Communist Party in north QLD during the strike itself, and Diane Menghetti uses her novel as an eyewitness account in her essays on the strike in "The Red North," and "The Big Strikes." Devanny herself claims some of the characters were based on real people, and some were fictional.

The novel starts with the background to the strike; the planning meetings of the committee, the prelude strike the previous year, the horror of the Weil's Disease, and the difficult job of cutting cane by hand. It then goes into the strike itself, and the protagonist gradually comes around to supporting the strike; having an epiphany during the tense moments of its first defeat. It ends with droves of workers, along with the main characters, applying for Communist Party membership during the last struggle in the Tully region.

Both Devanny and Menghetti describe the AWU officials as the cause of their defeat at the negotiating table. The AWU undermined the strike by refusing to participate, organising scabs, and using it's influence in the ALP to mobilise the State Government against the strike. Why the AWU felt challenging the Communist Party from the unpopular side of a life and death issue is not known, but they have a history of misjudging the situation on the ground (see the history of the UFU and the Wide Comb Dispute).


 

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