Paula Bloch (1937-2010)
Sydney: Paula Bloch, 2001-2003.

A complete set of Australian printmaker and activist Paula Bloch’s woodblock series inspired by her participatoin on the picket line at Port Botany during the 1998 Maritime Union of Australia dispute with Patrick Corporation and the Howard Government. The series documents the artist’s direct experience of one of the most significant industrial confrontations in modern Australian history, in which Patrick sought to sack its unionised workforce in an attempt to break the M.U.A. The complete series is here offered together with 2 variants and 2 original sketch concept drawings. Full list of items: 1. M.U.A. Here To Stay: Port Botany at the Picket Line. Signed and numbered colour woodblock. 2/5 dated 2001; 1b. Colour variant, unsigned; 1c. Original sketch concept drawing; 2. M.U.A. Supporters Stay: Jennie George Reports at Port Botany. Signed and dated 2003.; 2.b Original sketch concept drawing.; 3. Sydney Town Hall Square: Rally of Unionists and Supporters. Unsigned.; 4. Maritime Union of Australia: Protest Meeting at Darling Harbour.; 4b. Black and white variant.; 5. [MUA Here To Stay]. Smaller format: 31cm x 30cm, unsigned. Bloch, who fled Nazi Germany with her parents as a child, wrote of the dispute: “I escaped Hitler’s Germany with my parents just before the war, and grew up with a strong commitment to people’s rights. The waterfront lock-out was such a shock – fascist tactics in Australia.” Her prints combine a personal political conviction with a formal language drawn from European protest graphics and the screenprint traditions of the 1970s Tin Sheds poster workshops. Four of the five prints are held in the National Library of Australia (the present third print, Sydney Town Hall Square, apparently unrecorded.)