A reader of my book Australia’s Secret War: how unions sabotaged our troops in World War II has sent me an undeservedly forgotten little volume, Humour is their weapon: laugh with the Australian Wharfies, by Communist journalist the late Rupert Lockwood, and published in Sydney by Ellsyd Press.

An academic, one Peter Stanley, complained my book relied on anecdotes by Australian servicemen of wartime strikes and sabotage and did not give accounts by watersiders, who were, along with coal-miners and some munitions and shipyard workers, the most high-profile strikers of the war.