Vale Patrick Geraghty 1928-1016

Patrick Geraghty was not quite 20 when he won his first confrontation with the skipper of a British ship. Up on the hatch cover, with the rest of the crew around him, according to the newspaper report, he calmly picked 97 maggots one by one from food served to the crew before the skipper admitted there was something wrong with it. It was the precursor to a lifetime spent in the fight for better conditions at sea. Patrick Geraghty spent his life making a difference to the lives of others. The opportunity to do so was the reason he became a union official in 1967. It was the principle he pursued as federal secretary of the Seamen's Union of Australia from 1978 until he retired in 1993.

Driven by great compassion, and endowed with wisdom and political good sense, he understood that justice and fairness was something that had to be fought for. He had clear principles guiding his actions and a skill in negotiating which earned him the respect and admiration of friends in and outside the labour movement and among political adversaries alike. Always braced with a mischievous sense of humour, his chuckle was as characteristic as his red hair turned white, his honesty and genuine humility.

Pat Geraghty began life in difficult times in the inner suburbs of Sydney. He was born into a Catholic working class family in 1928, on the eve of the Great Depression. His father had returned from World War One, like many thousands of diggers, with tuberculosis. He died when Pat was 10 years old. Pat grew up in Balmain's waterfront community, and was schooled by the Christian Brothers. His demonstrated gift for mathematics won him a scholarship to study accountancy but served him less well when he indulged his fondness for betting on the horses.

Geraghty knew from his own childhood the harshness of poverty and struggle that working people faced. He saw it again when he went to sea as a deckhand in 1947, in an industry that was characterised by casual opportunity, lack of training, long periods of time at sea and no repatriation home. Seafarers lived in the poorest parts of towns around the world. As a young man he joined the Communist Party and later the Socialist Party of Australia though he was never an ideologue. He was too much of a humanist and a pragmatist. Communism was the means to envision a different future, and to effect meaningful change. It was the the political star to steer by but it was the membership who ran the union.

Pat Geraghty with Nelson Mandela

In South Africa he was outraged at the injustice and cruelty he observed of the racial system of apartheid. Opposing the Menzies government's policy of 'non-interference' on South Africa, Australia's maritime unionists were among the first in the world to respond to the United Nations' condemnation and join the international protest movement.

In the mid-1980s Geraghty led the SUA into a new international organisation, Maritime Unions Against Apartheid, to enforce the UN's oil embargo. He was there to welcome Nelson Mandela a decade later when apartheid was finally brought to an end.