People Australia

Andrew (Andy) Stuart Stepney, also known as Andrew Stuart Stepley (1851-1914), Aboriginal paddle-steamer hand, shearer, strongman and trade unionist

Birth: 26 December 1851 in Adelaide, South Australia, son of Edward Stepley or Stepney, cook, and Elizabeth, née Stewart, who signed with a mark. Marriage: Single. Death: 16 July 1914 at Benevolent Asylum, Waratah, Newcastle, New South Wales. Cause of death: spastic paraplegia and heart failure. He was buried in the Sandgate Cemetery with Methodist forms.

• As a boy Stepney worked on ships, then at a pastoral station of the Chirnside brothers in Victoria. After the alcohol-induced death of his mother he found himself destitute in Melbourne. A newspaper there described him in 1865 as an intelligent, fifteen-year-old vagrant when he applied for admission to the industrial school to learn the trade of tailor.
• In 1874 he was working on the paddle steamer Wentworth, trading on the Murray, Darling and Murrumbidgee rivers.  A “well-known character on the Darling,” in 1881 he was described as “A Wilcannia [NSW] celebrity”. In December 1886 he was a digger at the Teetulpa goldfields, South Australia.
• By 1887 he was back in Wilcannia, where he joined the shearers’ union. He was said to have participated in a shearers’ strike in Hay in 1890.
• In August 1894 he led a group of striking unionists harassing strike-breaking shearers at Tindarey station, near Cobar. He was summonsed on a charge of wilful trespass to appear at Cobar Court.
• Spent some time in Queensland after the 1894 strike, and regularly attended cricket matches at Mutti.
• Unhappy about being described as “an American negro”.  He claimed that his father was a “Zulu chief, captured young and turned into the boatswain of a British man-o’-war” and that his maternal grandmother was Aboriginal.
• Contributors to newspapers reported the feats of physical strength performed by “Black Andy”, described as the “strong man of the Barwon”. According to one account, he was “6 ft 4 ins [cm] high . . . 20 stone [ kilos] in weight and he measured 50 inches [cm] round the chest”. Another reporter wrote that as a lad he witnessed Stepney’s feats of strength and described him as “17 stone, all bone and muscle”.
• About 1908 he “settled down in a little town across the Queensland border and set up a business selling fruit, fish, etc.”

Sources
Jordan Humphries, ‘Aboriginal unionists in the 1890s shearers’ strikes: a forgotten history’, Marxist Left Review, No. 22, Winter 2021: https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/aboriginal-unionists-in-the-1890s-shearers-strikes-a-forgotten-history/