People Australia

Norman Leslie (‘Big Norm’) Gallagher (1931-1999) builder’s labourer, trade union official and Communist 

Birth: 20 September 1931 at Carlton, Melbourne, Victoria, son of native-born Alfred (Alf) Gallagher (c.1900-1943), labourer, and Minnie, née Carrick, machinist, born at Hobart Tasmania. Marriage: 12 April 1952 at St John’s Catholic Church, Clifton Hill, to Melbourne-born Jean Iris Bennett (1930-2016), a boot-machinist. They had a daughter and a son. Death: 26 August 1999 at Footscray, Melbourne; usual residence McLoughlin’s Beach. Religion: brought up and married as Catholic. 

• A working class boy from Collingwood, Norm was educated by nuns at St Joseph’s College, Collingwood, leaving school aged 14 to work at Melbourne markets. Boxed professionally.
• By the age of 16 he was a builders’ labourer and by 18 a Builders Labourers Federation (BLF) organiser. In 1961 he became federal secretary of the BLF.
• In 1971 he was Victorian BLF secretary and was engaged in a power play with the NSW Branch led by Jack Mundey. Gallagher was a Communist Party of Australia activist who followed Maoist line following the split.
• A founding member of the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist) in 1974. He perfected guerilla warfare strategies in the building industry (stopping concrete pours) but was reputedly involved in soliciting secret commissions.
• Following the 1981 Royal Commission he was sentenced to 18 months in gaol and was fined $60,000 while the BLF was deregistered.
• Retreated from public eye in the mid-1990s and ‘conspired with a couple of others to destroy the CPA (M-L)’.
• Gallagher was a controversial figure about whom opinion remains divided. Opponents claim collusion with employers and developers (Burgmann & Burgmann). The ‘most notorious unionist the country has seen in decades’ (SMH). Proponents assert ‘Norm Gallagher was Australia’s greatest working class leader’ (S. Black).
• Cause of death: respiratory arrest, renal failure, retroperitoneal haemorrhage and cardiac failure, secondary acute myocardial infarction. 

Sources
Meredith Burgmann and Verity Burgmann, Green bans, red union: environmental activism and the New South Wales Builders Labourers’ Federation (Sydney, 1998); Sydney Morning Herald, 27 August 1999; Vanguard, 8 September 1999; leaflets from funeral.