Great strike of 1917 remembered at Sydney’s Carriageworks
An exhibition on the Great Strike of 1917 shows how dramatically Australia has changed in 100 years.
In August 1917, workers in the workshops at the Eveleigh Rail Yards — the site today of Carriageworks — went on strike to protest against the introduction of a new timecard system that was meant to improve productivity by recording how long it took men to complete tasks. Thousands in the rail transport system stopped work, and they were soon joined by thousands more in other industries, such as shipping.
It became the biggest strike in Australia’s history, causing immense disruption before finally collapsing after about six weeks, in the middle of September. Although relatively short-lived and unsuccessful, and not widely remembered today, the strike did have significant consequences for all those involved.
It was probably not very intelligent of the NSW transport authorities to try to increase work discipline and productivity at the time. The nation was exhausted and stressed by the already long years of World War I and the dreadful losses of life, while at home the wages of the working class had declined in real terms during the war years, and the first campaign to introduce conscription to provide yet more soldiers for the conflict had just failed.
On the other hand, 1917 was not good timing for a strike either. It was hard to expect the population at large to feel a lot of sympathy for a railway worker whose shifts were being tightened up when he could still go back to dinner with his family and a warm bed every night, unlike the young men who were dying in filthy trenches on the Western Front day after day.
Consequently it was easy to present the strikers as unpatriotic, to say the least. Thousands of volunteers from the country came to Sydney to help load and unload ships, keep a partial transport system working and maintain other essential services. There are press photos of them arriving in Sydney, setting up camp in places such as the Sydney Cricket Ground and Taronga Park, and lunching in shifts at the railyards. They were joined by university students and even schoolboys.
Naturally the unions called these workers scabs, but to others they were simply patriots doing their bit and supporting the men at the front. One old countryman interviewed in the oral histories that can be listened to in the exhibition laughed that he and his mates could load a ship in three days instead of the five the wharfies took.
Meanwhile there were almost daily marches through the city, with defiant speeches and music and singing. These caused enormous inconvenience and interruption to traffic, but the authorities wisely let them run their course, since they allowed the strikers to vent their feelings in an ultimately harmless way, while attempts at repression would have led to needless confrontations and possibly violence.
On the whole, the strike appears to have been reasonably well managed on both sides, with the exception of a couple of shootings (one of a striker, one of a strikebreaker), which will be mentioned later. Both sides seemed to accept there was a right to strike and to demonstrate, but also that these activities took place within the rule of law and that when the strike eventually failed men would go back to work.
This was even more remarkable when we consider what else was happening in 1917. For this was the year when the tsar was overthrown by the February Revolution, after the catastrophic losses of the Russian army; the provisional government that followed was violently overthrown by the Bolsheviks in what is known as the October Revolution in the same year, although these dates are in the old Julian calendar, and the two revolutions actually took place in March and November in our calendar.
Both events, and their timing, are significant: the overthrow of the tsar in March must have encouraged the left and therefore contributed to the unions’ willingness to undertake the strike in August. But the strike collapsed before the Bolshevik revolution, which could have radicalised attitudes on both sides: the rhetoric of unionists and politicians, and even the character of mass demonstrations, no doubt would have been different and more antagonistic after the Bolshevik coup.
The families of the strikers suffered heavily, struggling to survive for six weeks without pay, and there are many photographs of their wives collecting emergency supplies from relief centres. When the strike collapsed, feelings must have ranged between a sense of betrayal and relief at the prospect of going back to work.
Many were not taken back, however: about 3000 men were not re-employed and others were demoted. In another oral history tape, a worker who was too young to have taken part himself, but who later knew many who had, speaks of the difficulty of a new engine driver working with a coaler who had been demoted from the rank of driver after the strike.
These two not only had to work together in running the train but were obliged to eat together and even share a bedroom while on long trips. For men who despised each other, this must have been an ordeal. Eventually, a few years later, the penalties suffered by the strikers were abolished.
Meanwhile, the unions celebrated the firmness of those who had held out during the strike under the name of Lily Whites — a slightly unfortunate choice of an expression already associated with a movement in the American Republican Party, intended to maintain white control and stem the rise of black influence, which had driven many voters to the Democratic Party instead.
Decades after the strike, as we hear from other oral histories, bitter resentments were still harboured against strike-breakers and veterans of the strike were celebrated with badges and with wordy testimonials and certificates.
As well as photographs, documents and oral histories, this exhibition includes many colourful union banners and smaller standards representing different union groups. It also includes several works commissioned from contemporary artists, usually variations on the themes and visual motifs used in the period material.
Thus Raquel Ormella has stitched banners that recall the style of union banners but has made them from period cloths and has conceived each as dedicated to one of the Lily Whites. Another is a more elaborate variant on the larger banners, while a third is based on a game of snakes and ladders. But none of these works is as compelling as the documentary material, for neither the playful, the sentimental nor the conceptual approach proves successful in connecting with the very different world of Australia a century ago.
The most interesting item in the exhibition is a film shown in the second and smaller room. It is a sort of chronicle of the various stages of the strike, apparently interspersed with bits of newsreel footage, and was originally an hour or so in length. The film was made by Arthur Charles Tinsdale and shown in a private viewing in Haymarket on October 8, 1917, just after the end of the strike.
Tinsdale’s documentary was meant to open in Narrabri on October 25, and a reproduction of a poster publicising it is included in the exhibition. The director’s claim to present an objective or even-handed treatment of the events, while not downplaying the strong feelings on either side, is supported by the reproduction of two contemporary cartoons. And one thing both make clear is the relation of the strike to the war, and how one conceived the actions of the strikers in relation to the soldiers at the front was crucial to the question of its legitimacy.
In the first, published by The Worker on August 16, we see the ghost of an Anzac encouraging a striker: “Stick it out, old mate, or this country won’t be worth coming back to.” The second cartoon, published in reply a week later, on August 23 in the Mining Standard, has the ghost of a soldier berating a striker: “You dog! To scab on me while I go down and out.” Particularly interesting is the way a highly emotive insult in the language of unionists is used to imply the strikers themselves, in the broader national context, are the real “scabs”.
The poster goes on to list the main events of the strike in a series of headings. Among these is “the Killing of Flanagan”. The copy of the poster here reproduced is marked with a large cross in the left margin, by Walter Wearne, whose brother Reginald had shot a striker. Walter was a member of the Legislative Assembly and one of the main organisers of the country volunteers, and naturally did not want this episode to receive any further publicity.
The showing announced on the poster was cancelled, the film was re-edited to omit the contentious scene, but for some reason it was never shown again. Much of it was lost, and what is shown here represents two recovered segments that have been restored and digitised. But it is enough to give us a vivid sense of the mood of the time, and especially of the character of the Australian population in 1917.
To our eyes, the most remarkable thing is the homogeneity of the people. Everyone is wearing a suit — differences in quality of tailoring are apparent only at close quarters — and everyone is thin in an age before junk food and sugary drinks. Above all, everyone is white, or rather Anglo-Celtic: ethnic oppositions were mainly between different groups from within the British Isles, particularly the English and the Irish, the former Anglican and more middle-class, the latter Catholic and predominantly working-class.
But even these differences are relative, for despite the political passions of the time, the gap between working-class and middle-class incomes and ways of life was much narrower than it is today. This is ultimately why the contemporary artists in the exhibition have difficulty connecting in a meaningful way with the events of 1917. Australia today is far more diverse, both in the vast differences of wealth, education and way of life and in the diversity of values and beliefs.
Even politics has changed: unions and strikes seem almost like survivors of another age, demonstrations have been replaced by surges of chatter on social media, and it is specialist issues of gender, culture and race that most excite the tweeters. The collective idea of a people has been undermined by competing lobby groups and corrupted by incessant polling, opinion replacing policy. For better and for worse, it seems more than a century since the Australia of 1917.
1917: The Great Strike
Carriageworks, Sydney. Until August 27
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