Thumbs up, Craggy, a ceaseless advocate for a fair go

DAVID KEITH CRAGG September 16, 1957-March 16, 2025

David Cragg was a Labor scholar, policy wonk, ceaseless advocate for a fair go, Victorian union leader suspicious of utopians, who realised gradual improvements, aggregated, lifted people up, a Christian who knew fallen angels were on earth, had a mindset appreciative of the eternal as well as the ephemeral. All those things made him whole.

After university came long periods working in the labour movement. He came to know Laurie Short, the Sydney-based Federated Ironworkers Association (FIA) leader. He befriended numerous other union leaders, nearly everyone significant in Victoria. He wanted to appreciate the life journeys of others. Mike O’Sullivan from the Federated Clerks, then the Australian Services Union, was influential.

David felt the calling for union work and thought if he was going to be effective, he should get his hands dirty. Hence, this bespectacled and bookish-looking man clocked-on at Titan Nails in Port Melbourne, a BHP Steel site. He joined the FIA. In 1986, he stood for and won election as a rank-and-file organiser.

His leadership and negotiation skills were honed at workshop meetings, hearings before the industrial tribunals, direct bargaining with employers, and mass meetings of members. Workplace health and safety, workers compensation particularly interested him. But the FIA went through hard times, the steel industry shed thousands of jobs – and so too did the union. Thereafter, he helped organise Labor senator Robert Ray’s office in Nunawading, including serving on ministerial staff, then he returned to union work. The FIA merged into the Australian Workers Union (AWU), where David served as an official to 2009; then came nearly a decade as the elected assistant secretary of the Victorian Trades Hall Council, to “retirement” in 2018. Though someone this restless and energetic could never do nothing.

David was always in conversation with the past, his tours of gravesides of Labor heroes, his dedication to the heritage listing and renewal of the Victorian Trades Hall, his fiery though erudite speeches commemorating Eureka at Ballarat, spoke to that. Every time, there was an edge. He looked forward. He was a labour historian, sagely interpreting our world, referencing past lives for the continuing relevance of their example. He had unfrightened sympathy for the underdog.

Wine glass in hand, circa 2023.Credit: Andrew Landeryou

He was the son of Keith Wadeson Cragg (1916-1991), engineer, originally from Subiaco, in Perth, Western Australia, and Mary Elizabeth, nee Allen (1920-2006), from Tocumwal in the Riverina, near the banks of the Murray River, on the Victorian-NSW border. The couple had Robert (1948), Elspeth (1951) and, as David said, “a late surprise” when he came along in 1957.

His father was highly intelligent (dux of Perth Modern), a major in the Royal Australian Army Ordinance Corp, who met his future wife in Tocumwal in that short period when it hosted a US Airforce base. Keith attended Army Staff College in England after the war; then returned to Australia in the early 1950s. His world involved munitions, armaments, controlled disposals. At Crystal Brook near Gladstone, South Australia, David was born. Finally settling in Loch Street, Camberwell, Melbourne, the Craggs presented as a comfortable bourgeois family with a mixture of “arty” and “traditional” tastes. They were romantic lefties who read voraciously. Family lore says that ASIO’s Brigadier Spry had files that stymied the father’s career (though this is doubtful). Mum was educated to leaving level at PLC Melbourne.

His mother came from the country, a spot where there was two of everything; two butchers, the Catholic one and the Protestants’. Young David had a Melbourne Presbyterian’s suspicion of papists. A Sunday school teacher vividly imprinted an image of over-reaching Romanish tentacles. His folk were more freethinking. In his secondary years, David attended the Anglicans’ Trinity Grammar school in Melbourne. He was always going to be somebody.

At Melbourne University he grew up, emerging from a world of pleasant comforts to understand and confront the world. He appreciated French philosopher Rene Descartes’ quip: “Conquer yourself rather than the world.” That message he partly heeded. But with the more ambitious point, he knew understanding yourself should not go to waste.

The adult Cragg was already clearly discernible in the tall, geeky teenager at Melbourne University, sporting tan-brown corduroy jackets (the leather patches at the worn elbows came later), stovepipe blue jeans, serious look, smoky fingers (he liked a puff), pitch-black rim glasses, looking like he had arrived from a French saloon after a smart joust with Sartre.

Gough was great; though he learnt Labor heroes, too, have flaws. Bob Santamaria’s activists and the commies were active on campus. He knew what he was against, but curiosity led him to wonder why others thought the way they did. He read about Marx, Catholic thinkers, Fabianism, labour history, and Trotskyism (a close relative was carried away by that cult). What a mixed bag it all was. At Melbourne University he came under the influence of Michael Danby and other Jewish students. He was forging himself as a social democrat, respectful of other traditions, sympathetic to the meliorists and civilisers in Labor rather than the big-talking radicals. He read and read. His conscience was his guide. He always had Israel’s back in ALP debates. A moral toughness of unflinching fibre went with an appreciation of others thinking. On societal progress, David saw that most social change happens through gradual trends. The creative, cumulative process of small victories mattered more than any loud talk.

Bob Hawke, David Cragg and Bill Shorten, circa 1986.

Aged 20, Victorian Young Labor’s whirlwind then president Mary Alexander got her troops, including David, to attend Christmas Midnight Mass at St Francis in the city. (This was the church where Arthur Calwell usually prayed after the 1955 ALP split – a point Cragg relished.) David survived the experience, loved the tradition, liking Catholics – a habit he continued.

No man was ever more determined to live, seek entertainment and life’s joys, as David’s body quarrelled with the looming likeness of death. He liked craft beers and blood-red Shiraz. Never brand conscious, labels were secondary to the taste. Over a decade ago, heart problems slowed him down. Stents and bypasses kept him alive. Recently, emphysema wracked and tore at his lungs. All of those in gasping confrontation claimed him in the end. After one operation, he joked “it only hurts when I move”. A year ago, across the deep south in America, he went in search of rhythm-and-blues music and song and grog, from Louisiana to Tennessee, hillbilly country. A friend from uni days asked: “Are you well enough to travel?” Cragg shot back: “That’s the point.” He hated flying. But he needed to feel, see, taste where the music he loved came from. Freedom is a love affair with being human.

Friendships and loyalty were everything. After close friend Geoff Coxson died David kept in touch with his widow and her children, even attending school graduations as if an affectionate uncle. Hundreds thought their friendship was meaningful, personal, and privileged. True. He kept friends close. One blessing of death is that you can now ignore what people say about you. But not in this case. You wish he knew how much he was loved. How much he is missed. On social media, in conversations, emails and telephone calls, they group and reminiscence about the man. Why? The worlds of others were touched by him. He made an impact, bringing the past alive, the present more interesting.

That wonderful, daft smile of his went up in mischief. Vividly in mind’s eye you see those thumbs up gestures, toasts, and his warm generous sayings delivered in a deep, distinctive voice: Good on you!; “Bless your heart”; “Fight the good fight”; “Do svidaniya” (Russian, “until we meet again”); “Bless you”; he loved to “have a natter”; and “hasta luego” (Spanish, “see you later”).

It is a great thing to be so nice a person. Nice means pleasant, considerate, gentle. He was never weak, though. He entered battles to win, not to retreat. He hated defeat. He set out to convince, persuade, cajole. You can appreciate an opponent, understand where they are coming from, and still have a ruthlessness born of conviction. David Cragg was nicest when standing for something he believed in. He wanted to win you over. I am not sure that he had any enemies, which is rare for someone with sharp opinions, to be fondly regarded by all regardless of tribal allegiance.

His articles are a concatenation of people and events and the times in which they existed, about how things came to be. Years later, he wrote excoriatingly on the crimes of Soviet communism. Many of his reviews and short pieces on aspects of labour history sparkled with insight and grace. For example, his review a couple of years back in the Australian Fabian journal on the memoirs of Max Ogden, the ex-communist and retired metalworker, is one of the most sober and insightful I’ve read on modern Labor, Australian unionism, and on opportunities gained and missed.

Published the day after he died in labour history newsletter Recorder was David’s review of Nick Dyrenfurth’s and Frank Bongiorno’s A Little History of the Australian Labor Party. He wrote the authors had shown that the ALP is “capable of adapting in different times and handling unforeseen challenges and external shocks. It has endured, and will continue to do so, because there are things in life worth fighting for.” Those things animated David, too. One hopes his essays might one day be collected because what he wrote was important.

With his friend the late Senator Kimberley Kitching, he got the powers-that-be in the party to back the Magnitsky legislation to sanction dictators and their enabling friends.

“Death, where is thy sting?” David Cragg lives on – in our minds and memories. Anyone who fights for what he believed, ensures his ideals never die.

A commemoration of his life will take place at the Melbourne Trades Hall from 2.30pm on Thursday, March 27.

Michael Easson knew David Cragg for 40 years through the Labor movement.