The NFSA's reconstruction of the censored 1917 film The Great Strike has been inscribed in the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World Register. The UNESCO Australian Memory of the World Program honours documentary heritage of significance for Australia and the world, and advocates for its preservation.
August 1918 marks the centenary of Australia's 'Great Strike' – one of the nation’s largest industrial conflicts, which officially started on 2 August 1917. For the centenary, the NFSA has reconstructed a censored film which hasn't been seen in 100 years.
With an original running time of one hour, The Great Strike was released in October 1917 in the dying days of the strike. It was shown only once, and then it was embargoed, censored and given a new title: Recent Industrial Happenings in NSW. It is believed that no more than one or two prints of the full film have ever existed.
For a long time, the NFSA has preserved a 12-minute fragment from the censored Recent Industrial Happenings in NSW. It was considered the only surviving footage, but in 2016, we discovered a six-minute reel containing additional scenes. Our experts scanned the two reels and edited them together, using a 'synopsis of scenes' published in the newspaper The Daily Post in 1917. This ad included a chronological listing of the film's scenes, and that information allowed us to identify which moments were missing and recreate the original film as accurately as possible.
This is the resulting film:
NFSA reconstruction and restoration of surviving footage from The Great Strike (1917).
With more than 90 per cent of Australia’s silent film heritage thought to be lost, it is likely that these censored scenes have vanished forever. If you know anything about the missing footage, please contact us at enquiries@nfsa.gov.au.
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This article was first published in 2017. The text was updated in 2019.
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