In 1854, the diggers of Ballarat fought back against oppression at the Eureka Stockade. 15-year old Montague Miller was among them. Sixty years later, when the Industrial Workers of the World faced jail for opposing an imperialist war, Monty was among them too.

His must be the remarkable activist career in Australian history.

Wounded at the stockade, Miller escaped and found work in the town. Later he moved to Melbourne where he got involved in pro-democracy politics, and the Carpenters' Union which he represented at Trades Hall. He was frustrated by the narrow craft exclusiveness of the union, and was known for his emphasis on solidarity of the whole working class.

Monty was active in the Secular Association's campaign to open the library and art gallery on Sundays. He argued for scientific alternatives to religion, but rejected the ‘Darwinist’ notions popular at the time which emphasized genes over free will and accepted ‘survival of the fittest’ as a social model.

He joined the Anarchist Club and worked with its leaders, yet found himself dissatisfied with their individualist philosophy.

In the 1890s depression, Monty organised food and fuel for the unemployed. After the unions met industrial defeat, worker militants turned to building the Labor Party, hoping that political action would overcome their industrial weakness. Miller worked closely with the party's founders, while refusing to see it as the sole solution to workers' problems.

He entered a new stage in his political career in the mid-1890s when he moved to Western Australia.

Not long after arriving in Perth, Monty threw himself into a major building workers' strike, the biggest industrial conflict WA had known. Amidst the strike activities, Miller agitated for breaking down barriers between different crafts. When after a week the union president proposed a return to work, he unsuccessfully argued to battle on.

Monty next involved himself in the Labour Church, the Mental Liberty League, and the Social Democratic Federation. On behalf of the latter he lectured on the fight for women's emancipation. He paid regular visits back to the eastern states, addressing meetings wherever he traveled. But he was still looking for the right political vehicle. He found it early in the new century, discovering the Industrial Workers of the World.

The IWW, or ‘Wobblies’, called for One Big Union across all industries, and declared that 'The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.’ They promoted social revolution. This was just what Monty had been looking for. He became chair of the Melbourne IWW club, and later established a branch in Fremantle.

When the First World War broke out, the Wobblies stood against the patriotic tide. Infuriated by mass resistance to the war, which defeated attempts to introduce conscription, governments hauled IWW members before the courts and threw them into jail.

Miller, now in his seventies, defied the hostile judge. His final speech appeared in the press, calling for ‘the complete emancipation of the worker from all the disabilities and discontents of the capitalist mode of production’. Convicted, but not imprisoned because of his advanced age, he resumed mass agitation, travelling again to the east where a crowd of 30,000 cheered him in the Sydney Domain.

For continuing his IWW activities, a Sydney court sentenced him to six months' hard labour. Again, his age saved him from actually serving it, and he lived to stage another speaking tour around Australia. In his last months, he still had the energy to join an illegal march in Brisbane, before retiring to Perth to finish his book, Labour's Road to Freedom. A road we are still on.