Australian
Screen

an NFSA website

A Big Country – On the Hook (1976)

play
clip
  • 1
  • 2
The hungry mile education content clip 1, 2

Original classification rating: PG. This clip chosen to be PG

Clip description

Waterside workers are seen on the wharf while the voice-over describes their comfortable work conditions and job security, A montage of historical footage shows a queue of workers in the 1930s, and waterside workers using horses and drays on the wharves. We hear the wharfie’s poem, 'The Hungry Mile’, which describes the era before unionisation, when men tramped 'the hungry mile’ to the waterfront before dawn each day in the hope of picking up a shift.

Curator’s notes

by Janet Bell

This is a well-made and effective reminder of what the world of the worker was like before unions came into existence on the waterfront. The beautifully shot and adroitly selected footage comes from the archive of the Waterside Workers’ Federation Film Unit, which was set up in the 1950s to counter some of the anti-union propaganda of politicians and big business. The close-ups of the men in the queue of workers are striking, made even more so by the reading of the poem on the soundtrack.

It’s interesting to conjecture how this very urban story about the 'wharfie’ came to be produced by the Rural Department of the ABC. This unusually sympathetic portrait was probably deliberately compiled to show the people of the bush something about the history of life on the wharves, so central to getting agricultural produce in and out of the country. The program has a clear and lucidly written script narrated by one of Australia’s best-known documentary filmmakers, Bob Connolly, who left the ABC in the early 1980s. With his wife and filmmaking partner Robin Anderson their best-known work is The Highlands Trilogy about Joe Leahy in Papua New Guinea (see First Contact, 1983, Joe Leahy’s Neighbours, 1988, and Black Harvest, 1992).

Teacher’s notes

provided by The Le@rning FederationEducation Services Australia

This clip shows scenes of the working conditions of the waterside workers in the 1970s, comparing them with scenes from a film illustrating the working conditions of the waterside workers in the 1930s. It opens with scenes of workers on the wharves in the 1970s followed by dramatised black-and-white footage from the Waterside Workers Film Unit 1955 production The Hungry Mile, which re-created the harsh conditions endured by workers in the 1930s. A voice-over narration includes lines from the poem The Hungry Mile.

Educational value points

  • In this clip the filmmaker attempts to counter prejudice against dock workers in the 1970s by indicating how their unions had improved conditions from the slave-like conditions of the past. The growth of unions and industrial action in the late 1960s and early 1970s during a period of economic growth and full employment alarmed both business and governments. Of all unionists, dock workers were perceived as the most militant and quickest to go on strike.
  • The commentary and black-and-white footage indicate the severe and primitive conditions of work on the docks in the 1930s and later. Men are shown engaged in physically demanding labouring work manhandling cargo. Men were often injured carrying enormous loads during long shifts and were poorly paid with no job security. There were no changing rooms, no washrooms and no toilets. Horsedrawn vehicles such as the one shown were used well into the 1950s.
  • Footage of haggard men in a queue presents the humiliation endured by those who, desperate for work, had to take part in ‘the pickup’, in which a foreman would select 40 of the biggest and strongest men to load and offload a ship from a crowd of hundreds during times of scarce employment. This unregulated ‘bull’ system prevailed until the Second World War called the stronger men away, and was susceptible to favouritism and corruption from bribery.
  • Dramatic scenes are shown from The Hungry Mile, a film made by the Waterside Workers Film Unit in 1955, one of 13 documentaries made to dramatise and draw attention to the experiences of working people in Australia. It focused on the harsh experiences of those who worked on the wharves in the 1930s. The worn faces of the men, played by 1950s waterside workers and pensioners, convey the desperate need for work in the Great Depression years.
  • In the clip, lines are read from the ‘wharfie poem’ The Hungry Mile, a work by Ernest Antony (1894-1970) who tramped Sydney’s wharves during the 1930s looking for work. The poem conveys his familiarity with the conditions he describes and the language communicates his intent to inspire a desire for social justice in his fellow workers. Always part of the trade union movement, he contributed his poems to labour movement publications in the 1920s and 30s.
  • ‘The Hungry Mile’ was the name maritime workers gave to the mile of wharves between Darling Harbour and Miller’s Point on Sydney’s waterfront along which workers tramped each day seeking work in an industry that did not offer permanent work in the 1930s and 1940s. The Hungry Mile was also an urban slum area where generations of maritime workers and their families lived close to the wharves in rooming houses, rented premises and shared housing.

In these scenes from the 1970s waterside workers are seen working on the wharves.
Narrator Lazy, beer-gutted commos. In Australia you couldn’t have a worse image than that. Its reality depends on your background. To the middle classes, strike-happy wharfies on their noisome dockyards are the sweaty armpit of Australian industry. To the working classes, the wharfies are an inspiration – a living tribute to what unionism is all about. Men pulling in from $10-15,000 a year for their 35-hour week. They don’t work if it’s too wet, they don’t work if it’s too hot, but they still get paid for it. Whatever your image of them, Australian wharfies in the ‘70s are doing very nicely, thank you. But it wasn’t always like that. Everything they’ve won, they’ve won the hard way. Go back 30 or 40 years and it’s a very different story.

Dramatised black-and-white footage re-creates the harsh conditions endured by workers in the 1930s.
1930
Narrator A wharfie poem describes just what it was like.

They tramp there in their legions on the morning dark and cold
To beg the right to slave for bread from Sydney’s lords of gold
They toil and sweat in slavery, t’would make the devil smile
To see the Sydney wharfies tramping down the hungry mile.

Every port city had its hungry mile – the waterfront street where the jobs were handed out and, if it wasn’t slavery, it was close to it. If you got a job at all it could be a 24-hour shift working in the most appalling conditions. And then there was the bull system.