Frank Lundie

Who was Frank Lundie?

Francis Walter "Frank" Lundie was an Australian trade unionist.

Lundie was born at Port Adelaide to railway labourer John Lundie and Maryann Josephine, née Moran. He was educated at local public schools but at the age of eleven began working as a station-hand in western New South Wales. He joined the Amalgamated Shearers' Union in 1887 and was president of the Adelaide branch from 1889. He served as an organiser from 1892 until his appointment as secretary from 1900, a position he would hold until his death in 1933. He was a leader of the 1894 shearers' strike and was president of the United Labourers' Union's South Australian branch from 1907 to 1912. He married Elizabeth Margaret Battens Armstrong on 20 January 1891; she died in 1907, and he remarried on 20 January 1909 to Edith Mary Armstrong.

A moderate supporter of direct action, Lundie was also a member of the United Labor Party and strongly believed it should remain under the control of the working class rather than politicians and union leaders. He engaged in bitter disputes with the Verran Labor government in 1910, and continued low-level opposition to the party leadership until 1917, when he was able to harness the resentment over the conscription split to take over the party. Lundie was elected president of the party executive and later that year defeated William Spence to become the AWU's national president, a position he held until his own defeat by Arthur Blakeley in 1919. His attempts at direct political involvement had been less successful: he was defeated for the Senate in 1917 and 1919 and for the South Australian House of Assembly in 1905 and 1924. He was, however, a member of Port Adelaide City Council from 1900 to 1909 and Adelaide City Council from 1909 to 1931. A teetotaller, Lundie died in 1933; his funeral was attended by around a thousand people. An ex-prisoners' hostel in Whitmore Square was named after him in 1963.