In Focus: John Falzon

John Falzon might have a busy professional life – he’s a poet, teacher, sociologist, administrator and social justice campaigner, among other things – but he is driven by the simplest of motivations, writes Will Brodie.

“I just want to be socially useful to the movement,” Falzon says.

He means the union movement, which he says is “at heart, a social movement that is able to create incredible social change”.

“Unthinkable things are made possible, not because you have benevolent or wise leaders, but because you have a social movement. It’s always social movements that create social change.”

In pursuit of being useful, Falzon has published books, studied for degrees in literature, theology, philosophy, politics and social analysis. He also led St Vincent de Paul for 12 years. Now, he’s a senior fellow in inequality and social justice at think tank Per Capita and a visiting fellow at the Australian National University’s School of Regulation and Global Governance.

Due to his inspiring and fierce yet gentle and down-to-earth campaigning, he is in demand as a keynote speaker and teacher of liberation sociology to unionists all over Australia.

Education is central to everything he does, but it was far from a foregone conclusion for Falzon himself, given his upbringing.

Falzon’s parents left Malta, then England, in search of greater economic opportunities. Though Falzon’s father was a voracious reader who was keen to learn, he was also poor. He worked as a tailor, then a bus conductor in London, then in Australia, he was a quarry labourer testing road materials.

Falzon’s mother was also keen to learn, but as a teenager she was pulled out of school to work as a waitress in her family’s café, taking orders because she was her family’s best English speaker.

When the Falzon family landed in Australia, they lived in a relative’s garage in Sydney’s west. Though Falzon says he was a “nerd” and “bookworm” from the outset, a precocious reader even at age two, a multi-degree future was far from a given growing up in Blacktown, in Sydney’s west.

Importantly, Falzon’s parents encouraged him to follow his passions. “And, you know, I’ve never forgotten that,” he says. “That was a time when a lot of migrant working-class kids like me, sometimes pressure was placed on the kids, because the parents wanted them to get a well-paying job.

“And my dad always stuck by me. I just thought it was beautiful the way he used to say to me, completely counter-culturally, ‘If you decide you want to be a street sweeper because that would bring you joy and give you a sense of fulfilment, I will be proud of you, and I will be happy in exactly the same degree as if you get a law degree and earn good money’.”

Falzon took the “incredible liberation” of this support to heart – he took books to family gatherings as a child, and his first PhD thesis was a cycle of poems.

The parental support he received taught him “a very radical vision of the value of people and the value of people’s work”, which dismisses the notion that how much someone earns indicates their social or personal value.

Libraries: Temples of learning

Libraries were Falzon’s “temples of learning” and education staff his greatest benefactors.

“I’ve got some fond memories of school librarians who took pity on me,” he says. “They saw I was interested in all sorts of things, and they would come and ask how I’m going, and tell me something about the book they saw I had.”

Lacking the internet, Falzon spent hours “just hanging around the library”.

“It wasn’t a discipline, it was an out-of-control passion,” he says.

Falzon says libraries were the “great repository of possibilities” that opened up his world. The books, writers, and thinkers he found in them were his greatest mentors.

As a young man, Falzon began to read philosophy, politics, and critical theory as much as literature, which broadened his mind enormously. His eyes were opened by a “tatty little cheap paperback” by jailed American social activist Angela Davis.

“And that had a huge impact on me, just knowing that there were people in the world who were struggling for justice; this was something that just totally enthralled me. The idea that there are people, that there are movements who wish to create the possibility of a different kind of society. This just captured my imagination in the same way as poetry. In fact, I would be very loath to separate those two strands in my education.”

Falzon has never disentangled those strands, his sociology course containing epigrams from poets, and his poetry references to the struggle for equality.

“For me with poetry or for any writer, if their writing is true to their life, then it has that resonance that speaks to the heart. For me it’s never just an intellectual or an aesthetic exercise.”

A May Day Poem
by Dr John Falzon (2020)

Here is where we start from
where it hurts
where our hope is hidden
in the fresh wound
here where our story
is made of old scars
here
my comrade
in the struggle
where our home is
here
where we’re free
to be tender
clench our courage
shout our soul
our social surge
our intimate democracy
our hunger for what
makes us human
our beautiful battalion
our simple solidarity
here.

Unions: The simplest truth

Falzon was always familiar with trade unions because his father was always a member, and often a delegate. He also absorbed the powerlessness of his mother, who in Australia worked “extremely hard in both paid and unpaid jobs” in the informal economy, lacking union coverage.

“My dad really treasured his involvement in the union movement. He didn’t bang on about it, he wasn’t ideological about it, but to him it was like the simplest truth. He would say to me, ‘the worker needs other workers. If you’re alone you’ve got no protection. If you stand together, you’re protected’; it was as simple as that.

“And so it was just so obvious to me from a very, very young age that being in a union is a simple and sensible and right thing to do.

“And again I saw that in my dad’s working life that the union was therefor him.

“When he got industrial cancer, when he was exposed to known carcinogens in the solvents that he was expected to use in testing those road materials, the union was there for him.”

The illness was a devastation in Falzon’s father’s life because “he actually enjoyed being at work, particularly for social reasons”.

“He worked very hard, he always took on overtime, all of that,” Falzon says. ”But he used to come home, kick off his steel-cap boots, and he’d be wearing his King Gees, and he’d sit at the dining room table, light up a cigarette, have a cup of instant coffee and we’d all sit together, and he’d tell us what happened at work that day. It was sort of a ritual, and he loved it.

“It was just a terrible devastation when he was physically unable to continue working because of the cancer; it took away a great deal of joy and meaning in his life, which had a huge impact on my social justice awareness.”

Such experiences formed connections for Falzon between what he was reading and his “immediate, concrete reality”, a fruitful trait which continues – Falzon often synthesises personal experiences with big ideas.

At university, Falzon was exposed to middle-class and upper-class people for the first time; however, when he started teaching at Western Sydney University, he says it was “so beautiful and special” to connect with kids like himself, many of them from working class migrant backgrounds.

“Many of them were the first in their families to go to uni,” he says. “For other [social] classes, there might be a tendency to take going to university for granted. But for me and for those kids who I was teaching, there was a freshness and an excitement and it was terrifying as well. Because wow! We’re really here! How did this happen?”

John Falzon with IEUA Victoria Tasmania Branch Deputy Secretary Kylie Busk

“It was just so obvious to me from a very, very young age that being in a union is a simple and sensible and right thing to do.”

Teachers, justice, and change

Falzon speaks with a lot of teachers through his work in the union movement, and he’s deeply engaged with education issues.

“There is a real crisis both in terms of funding, but also in the sort of structure of work for teachers and teacher workloads, and the lack of value placed on teachers,” he says.

He’s appalled at the attitude to safety in professions like nursing and teaching where “the rules regarding exposure to injury don’t apply, because you’re doing this out of love. You’re in a caring profession. The student comes first, or the patient comes first.

“And teachers are expected to just cop it on the chin and carry on, because that’s the cultural expectation – it’s considered part of the job.”

He is horrified by the serious psychosocial and physical injuries teachers are exposed to daily. “Because we are systemically allowing that kind of exposure to injury to occur within what should be a really happy and creative space,” he says.

“And it just beggars belief how you can create that inclusive, happy, respectful, liberating space for learning while you know that the worker who is facilitating that learning is suffering injury, not on an exceptional basis, but on a regular basis. And so to me, at every level, it’s profoundly wrong.

“We need to think about teachers as workers. I think there are a number of dangerously and deeply held prejudices regarding the work of teaching that we need to completely reconfigure.”

Falzon says defending the rights of education workers has fallen to the union movement. “I think it’s part of that individualism in society that capitalism fosters deep in our souls. And so sometimes there is a culture of ‘as a parent I’m a client’,” he says.

He thinks education has, to some degree, been commodified. “But I think it actually goes beyond that. If there’s a sense of ‘well, I’m the client and you’re simply providing the service’, your wellbeing is immaterial to me’.

“Education should matter so much that we would want to create that environment where there is mutual respect and enjoyment. As someone who has enjoyed learning all my life, I can’t comprehend how people can learn to their real full capacity when it’s a deeply unpleasant and injurious experience.”

Hope in the face of crisis

Falzon isn’t fazed by the myriad challenges modern progressives face.

“We need to imagine the unimaginable and we need to change the parameters of the possible,” he says. “And you know the fall of apartheid is a great example of that, as is the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was also unthinkable not that long ago that we’d have marriage equality in Australia.”

Falzon sees his liberation sociology as “a means, a set of tools to think critically about concrete reality and to understand that concrete reality is something in motion, and subject to change that doesn’t come from above.

“People through history have brought about incredible change in every aspect of their lives, and we have the capacity to bring about further social change to create the kind of society where people can care for each other, for themselves and for our planet.”