The Great Strike: excerpt

The Great Strike of 1917 achieved little for those who stopped work, yet it remains one of the most significant industrial disputes in Australian history. 

It began on 2 August 1917 at Sydney’s Eveleigh Railway Workshops and Randwick Tramsheds, when around 6,000 railway and tramway employees walked off the job. The immediate cause was the introduction of a time-card system to monitor individual productivity – a change workers viewed as an intrusion on their autonomy and a threat to job security. 

The strike spread rapidly, involving nearly 100,000 workers across New South Wales and Victoria, including coal miners, waterside workers and seamen. Over six weeks, transport and supply lines were paralysed, while weekly rallies in Sydney’s Domain drew crowds of up to 150,000 people. 

This footage is a clip from The Great Strike, a film released in October 1917 during the dispute’s final days and restored by the NFSA in 2017 from two surviving fragments. It provides a rare visual record of the time – workers filling the Domain, banners raised, solidarity made visible. The film has been interpreted both as a union document and as political propaganda, revealing the charged atmosphere of early 20th-century Sydney and the growing power of visual media in shaping public perception. 

The strike ended in September 1917 without success. Many unions were deregistered and thousands of workers returned under harsher conditions – yet the Great Strike endures as a defining moment in Australia’s labour history and the struggle for workplace control.

Explore more footage from The Great Strike