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The hard times are biting and when workers are put off it’s always the migrants who go first. Then there’s a desperate wait for work in a long and humiliating queue.
Curator’s notes
The Great Depression of the 1930s is just around the corner and the fight for work is becoming desperate. Hungry Italian immigrants will cross picket lines and scab in place of the striking wharfies. This is exactly what the shipowners want in order to destroy the union and play the workers off against each other to lower wages and conditions.
The great breakthrough with this miniseries was the use of subtitles for native Italian speakers. Channel 10 was not sure that audiences would accept this for prime time commercial entertainment but the audiences loved it and the series rated well.
The writer Mac Gudgeon’s mother had been a Tivoli girl so it wasn’t hard for him to place Max’s girl Maggie (Noni Hazlehurst) in this world. Maggie’s father Les (Warren Mitchell) is a vaudeville comedian who entertains the crowds while the girls are changing their costumes. Vaudeville was the television of its day and Mac was very familiar with this world that he’d been dragged along to as a kid long after his mother had left the Tivoli stage.
