Strike - looking for Australia's earliest workers' film

| Strike 1912 | For the Term of His Natural Life 1927 | Metropolis 1927 | Captain Thunderbolt 1951 |

Strike 1912

Looking for Australiaʼs earliest workers' film

Michael Organ

"The greatest of all Australian moral dramas."

Referee, Sydney, 10 January 1912.

Abstract

Australia's earliest feature film with industrial relations as a major theme was George Young's 3,000 ft long Strike of 1912. Set in a town on the northern Illawarra coal fields, it featured a strike by the workers, a disastrous coal face explosion, flooding of the mine, a cliff-top fight and death plunge, and a melodramatic sub-plot involving the daughter of the coal mine owner and a married conman who seeks to entrap her for monetary gain. The film, like so many other Australian film productions from the silent era, no longer exists. This article discusses the known actualities of Strike (1912) and the paucity of industrial relations themed features in that country's cinema history. 

Introduction

Australia has a rich labour tradition, arising out of the struggle of workers and their families to obtain fair wages and conditions and maintain a decent standard of living. Millions of words have been written on aspects of the labour movement and industrial relations in Australia, especially since the time of the great strikes of the 1890s and moves towards federation during the latter part of that decade.[1] However, local cinema contains precious few examples of feature films which bring a fair and thorough account of those struggles to the attention of the masses. The stories are there, the drama is evident. So why the absence? Why the silence? Why have Australian filmmakers shied away from portraying, and even glorifying where it is warranted, industrial conflict and the experiences of workers in seeking a better deal for ordinary workers and their families? Where are the dramatic presentations of picket lines, strikes and, in particular, coal mine disasters such as occurred at Bulli (1887) and Mount Keira (1902) - tragedies reported and mourned around the world?[2]

Australia was quick to adopt film as a form of mass entertainment when it became widely available in the early 1900s.[3] By 1921 the local population of 6 million was responsible for some 68 million attendances at the cinema annually. Going to the flicks was “a national obsession” and Australians, per capita, were the “keenest film-goers in the world.”[4] Newsreels and actuality (documentary) films were produced locally from 1896, with Melbourne’s Salvation Army Limelight Department playing a prominent role. In 1902 it exhibited Under Southern Skies, a two-hour-long documentary history of Australia comprising 200 lantern slides and 6,000 feet (100 minutes) of film.[5] Australia also led the world in the presentation of the feature film as we know it today, with the world’s first full-length feature, The Story of the Kelly Gang, produced in Victoria during 1906.[6] At 4,000 feet, or 66 minutes long, it outran the 5–10 minute American Nickelodeon features of the day and revealed the local audience’s interest in a sustained narrative. In comparison, Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) ran for 12 minutes and Frenchman George Méliès’ Voyage à Travers l’Impossible (1904) for 30 minutes.[7]

Australia’s earliest feature films presented stories which, much to the chagrin of the more conservative elements of society, highlighted the country's darker history. These included accounts of bushrangers, as in The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906) and Robbery Under Arms (1907); of the (mis)treatment of convicts in For the Term of His Natural Life (1908), Assigned to His Wife (1911), and The Mark of the Lash (1911); the race-based conflicts and political turmoil of the gold rush era, as in Eureka Stockade (1907), The Miner’s Daughter (1911) and The Co-ee and the Echo (1912). More acceptable were melodramas focusing on life in the bush, such as The Squatter’s Daughter (1910), On Our Selection (1920), A Girl of the Bush (1921); and, to a lesser extent, city life, such as in The Sentimental Bloke (1919), and The Kid Stakes (1927). The scope and variety of that first generation of Australian feature film production is revealed in Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper’s Australian Film 1900-1977: A Guide to Feature Film Production.[8] Of the 488 items listed therein, some 258 were produced prior to the widespread introduction of sound in 1930. The silent era (1896–1929) was therefore a relatively prolific one for Australian filmmakers, at least until 1913 when a Combine of local theatre owners and distributors killed feature production off.[9]

Sport, as an important element of working-class life and culture, featured heavily in Australian film production during the silent era. David Headon has argued convincingly that audiences then, as now, wanted more than simple saccharine-sweet melodrama or comedic shorts when they went to the cinema.[10] They were looking for local product, and sport was no exception. Newsreel footage featuring significant national sporting events such as the Melbourne Cup and boxing championships were popular, as were feature films dealing with the racing industry, as in Keane of Kalgoorlie (1911) and The Double Event (1911). The Australian male’s often disastrous penchant for alcohol consumption and gambling is seen in The Breaking of the Drought (1920). The desire for local product did not, however, override the demand for quality material, whether it be in the form of feature, actuality, comedic or newsreel film.[11] Industrial relations also featured on occasion, such as in relation to the widespread strikes of 1917, and later during the post WWII years, when industrial action during the Cold War period was blamed on the spread of Communism, and not on the ever present need for fair wages and conditions, and an end to exploitation. Workplace safety was also an issue in light of increasing industrialisation and technological innovation.

The Great Strike (1917) newsreels, National Film and South Archive, Canberra, duration: 3.35 minutes.

Strike Cripples Australia (1949), British Pathe, newsreel, London, duration: 1.53 minutes.

A study of Pike and Cooper’s listing reveals that the industrial struggles of the working classes in areas such as coal mines, factories, and on the farm were largely absent from the screen during the silent era, and no such tradition has developed in the interim. Many Australian films do contain elements portraying what could be defined as class struggle, though this is rarely their focus. Examples include the numerous accounts of the uprising at the Eureka Stockade (1907, 1915, 1949, 1971) along with those of the Kelly Gang, where social inequity is seen as a precursor to lawlessness (1906, 1920, 1923, 1934, 1951, 1970, 2003). Both bring to the cinema a true-to-life, uniquely Australian perspective on working-class rebellion against injustice, though not in the context of the workplace. The more recent post-apocalyptic Mad Max series (1979, 1981, 1985) follows in that tradition of rebellious heroes, though the links with Australian history therein are tenuous. Neither Eureka nor the story of the Kelly Gang have at their centre a portrayal of working-class struggle, nor of the value of unionism, nor for that matter of the fight for a “fair go” in an industrial sense (something the nation traditionally holds dear). So where are those stories in Australian feature films? 

They do exist, though they are few in number. The Sentimental Bloke (1919), underneath its overarching love story, portrayed the working-class struggle of city folk, though not in an industrial context. Three in One (1956), a movie about mateship, included a section entitled ‘The Union buries its Dead’, though it never found a local distributor.[12] Sunday Too Far Away (1975) dealt with the 1956 shearers’ strike. Protected (1975) concerned the 1957 strike by Aboriginal workers at Palm Island. Strikebound (1983) presented an account of a 1930s coal mine strike. On the documentary side there are numerous examples. Between 1897–1909 the Salvation Army’s Limelight Department gathered footage of workers at industrial sites including coal and metal mines, smelting works and dockland areas, some of which was included in Under Southern Skies (1902).[13] During the Cold War era, the Waterside Workers’ Federation Film Unit produced a number of films “by workers for workers” between 1953–8.[14] A more recent example is Tom Zubrycki’s Kemira - Diary of a Strike (1984), a documentary recording the sit-in at Kemira coal mine near Wollongong. 

In looking for evidence of working-class stories in Australian feature films from the silent era we are hampered not only by the apparent lack of material, but also by the fact that some 90% of such films have not survived. This is due to neglect on the part of film companies and society in general, wear and tear, and chemical deterioration of the fragile and combustible nitrate base film stock.[15] It is often only through posters, printed ephemera, stills, newspaper and magazine notices and reviews, and oral history testimony from industry players that the existence of individual film projects is known. Perhaps an even greater percentage of silent newsreel and actuality film has also been destroyed. 

A night out at the flicks during the silent era usually involved a viewing of comedy shorts and the lengthier feature melodramas, intermixed with newsreel gazette items. Music and sound effects may or may not have been part of the program, though there was usually some sound accompaniment.[16] Non-feature film offered a possible source of information on Australian and working-class issues, though the majority of newsreels, both local and foreign, were banal, aiming to entertain rather than inform, and often with a conservative, anti-union slant.[17] Topics such as unemployment, breadlines and political oppression were taboo, though of course there were exceptions. 

In 1908 the local firm of T.J. West presented packed houses in Sydney and Melbourne with footage of the 24 July Sydney tram strike, including ‘the violence of an angry mob; the derailing of a stationary tram car in George Street; inspectors returning the cars to the depots; and a tram worked by ‘blacklegs’ with troopers patrolling the streets.’[18] The following year J. & N. Tait featured footage of the Broken Hill strike, and a surviving film gazette item from 1917 reports on a march and rally in Sydney’s Domain during the great railway strike that year. With strikes and demonstrations a common feature of the Australian political landscape throughout the twentieth century, the opportunity existed to keep abreast of such issues via narrative feature film. However, local and overseas evidence would suggest that such opportunities were limited, and subject to censorship of unsavory violent encounters between workers and authority, or of actions deemed illegal. 

It is ironic that whilst the working classes have traditionally formed the bulk of the cinema going public, film has not reflected working-class struggle to any substantial degree, especially in Australia and America. This is in contrast to the situation in Communist countries such as Russia and China where there has been a proliferation of government-sponsored films dealing with class war, though the majority of these must be labelled as biased political propaganda. As American author Steven J. Ross points out, there was an active campaign in the United States from the earliest days of cinema against the positive portrayal of unions and working-class struggle.[19] The conservative forces behind the film conglomerates, supported by government censors and figures such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s J. Edgar Hoover, “never prevented hundreds of films from showing labour organisations as murderous, grafting brutes, while their capitalist opponents embodied all the virtues.” On the other hand, Ross also found that American filmmakers were more concerned with portraying the hardships of working-class life during the silent era than at any other subsequent period in the industry’s history, and the same could be said for Australia.[20] Michael Shull identifies over four hundred films dealing with this subject.[21] Within that group, some one hundred pre-1918 films centred around capital–labor conflicts, with the majority sympathetic to the problems of the working class and condemning greedy capitalists. The Russian revolution of 1917 put paid to such portrayals, and in the United States an anti-radical sentiment, combined with the post World War I Red Scare campaign, gave rise to the aforementioned demonisation of the union movement and united labor. As the Australian cinema industry was, according to one recent commentator, “entirely under Uncle Sam’s grubby thumb” following the formation of the Combine in 1912, the opportunity to see leftist and working-class features locally was thereafter severely diminished.[22] From that time on, Australians mostly saw what the American film industry wanted them to see. 

Filmic presentation of working-class issues was also on the agenda of the Communist Party, which formed branches in many western democracies, including Australia, during 1919–20. Slow to manifest, it was not until the early 1930s that Communist Film and Photo League features appeared in the United States and Britain, along with independent newsreel productions by political activists.[23] Unfortunately, Communist Party association with film-making and presentation of working-class issues alienated the mainstream studios and limited opportunities for release. 

Anti-union attacks occurred in Australian features as well. For example, Ken G. Hall’s Tall Timbers (1937) included an episode where the hero discovers a union man being hired by the villains to disrupt work at the timber mill. The unionist later sabotages the work and endangers the lives of employees. 

Despite these forces railing against them, there were opportunities for working-class stories to reach large audiences via the silver screen. The silent era was a time when films could be produced relatively cheaply and profits generated quickly due to the popularity of this new form of mass entertainment. The opportunity arose for organisations, and even local communities, to produce films free of interference and censorship. Such did take place in the United States and, to a much lesser degree, in Australia. For example, in 1927–8 the community of Young in southern New South Wales collaborated with director Phil K. Walsh to produce a 102 minute sprawling historical drama entitled The Birth of White Australia. Presenting a general history of the settlement of Australia by the British, it featured the riots against Chinese gold miners at Lambing Flat near Young in 1861. The film’s anti-Asian stance, promotion of “British White Australia” and failure to acknowledge the rights of local Aborigines, mirrored D.W. Griffith’s racist epic, The Birth of a Nation 1915, a film which glorified the Klu Klux Klan, debased black Americans and ignored native Americans.

Evidence of the proliferation of local films in Australia during the silent era is to be found in the fact that during 1911 some 51 feature films averaging between 3,000-4,000 feet in length were produced. This was a figure not bettered until 1975. Some 30 features were also produced in 1912. Unfortunately, the creation of the Combine during that year and an increasing influx of foreign films, mostly from the United States, brought a halt to the large number of Australian productions, as fewer distributors tied up more and more venues. The advent of sound in 1929 further limited the ability to make cheap, truly independent features. Film making and presentation was now more expensive, the major production companies gained greater control over production and distribution. Censorship regimes also became centralised and more conservative.[24] 

In those glory years of the silent era prior to 1913, one film stands out in our search for an Australian feature dealing in substantial part with a modern industrial workplace. It is George Young’s Strike of 1912. It is also a film which, like so many others, no longer exists and, as a result, very little is known of its detail. This article seeks to address that, based on reports and advertisements in newspapers of the day and research covering the history of Australian cinema during the silent era, prior to the coming of sound in 1929.

----------------------

The Shooting of Strike 1912 

Early in January 1912, the Sydney newspaper Referee reported that the Australian Film Company had “in active preparation …. the greatest of all Australian moral dramas - Strike.” A further report noted that scenes were being shot at a coal mine on the New South Wales south coast.[25] During this period film shoots were relatively short, in the range of a couple of weeks, or a month or two at the most. This changed after World War I. For example, the epic For the Term of His Natural Life was shot between August and November of 1926, and finally released in June 1927 following an extensive period of editing and print production.

Back in 1911-12 things were different. The director of Strike was George Young, a retired stage manager from theatre company J.C. Williamson’s and brother of the comic opera star Florence Young. The Australian Film Syndicate, later the Australian Film Company, with which Young was associated, had only been formed in 1911 and was based in North Sydney. It went into liquidation in May 1913. Alex Hellmrich, a distributor of the time, later recalled that Australian Film Syndicate / Company pictures

...were very crude … and although I was successful in placing them, they had no drawing power, and were turned down by a number of exhibitors on account of their crudeness and unsuitability.[26] 

It is unclear what Hellmrich was actually referring to here, and whether the crudeness was related to technical issues or others such as script and acting. George Young is known to have produced a number of films in the year prior to Strike, including The Golden West (1911), Three Strikes to Her Bow (1911), Gambler’s Gold (1911), and The Octoroon (1912). Strike was to be his last feature, and the last known production by the Australian Film Syndicate. Young later appeared as an actor in The Monk and the Woman (1917) and had a bit part in Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925), a Hollywood production. 

With location shooting preferred in Australia during the early silent era, due to the scarcity of indoor studios and small production budgets, the decision to film in the southern coalfields of New South Wales was a logical one. Wollongong was located on the coast just 50 miles south of Sydney, and was easily accessed by road or rail. Numerous coal mines dotted the side of its steep, forested escarpment, and their entrances were relatively close to the aforementioned roads and rail track. 

Bulli coal mine, circa 1887

Props in the form of industrial buildings, workers cottages, railways, tramways, and jetties at the nearby makeshift harbours were readily available, as were the miners themselves and their families. The mines and infrastructure were not only relatively accessible, but they also provided a picturesque industrial landscape set amidst a temperate rainforest and coastal plain of farms and villages. 

With so much of Australia’s early film focusing on the bush pioneer mythology, Strike was an opportunity to present a modern melodrama in a semi-urban, industrial and coastal environment. This was indeed novel, as American director William Worsley observed, because film-making in Australia often emphasised “the drama of man’s struggle against nature [i.e. the bush] in the face of great physical and mental hardship, his eventual triumph, and his magnificent reward”.[30] As noted above, the turmoil of city and urban working-class life was to a large degree ignored, in favour of countless portrayals of conditions beyond the 'never never', where sheep, cattle, bush fire and drought were the co-stars. 

The people of the Illawarra were quite familiar with cinema by the time George Young and his team visited the region early in 1912 to film Strike. On 10 February 1897 Edison’s Cinematographe was presented in the main town of Wollongong. This was less than five months after moving pictures were first projected to a paying public in Australia at the Melbourne Opera House. In the immediate years following, and throughout the first decade of the 1900s, travelling picture show vendors such as Phelan, Cook, Check and Anderson presented motion pictures in halls up and down the coast.[31]

Check's Pictures wagon, circa 1920, Scarborough, New South Wales. Source: NFSA.

An undated photograph (illustrated above) from the National Film Sound Archive collection shows the Check’s Pictures wagon standing by the side of the northern Illawarra coast road, with Scarborough Hotel in the distance and the adjacent village hanging somewhat precariously on a sliver of land between the mountain and the sea.[32] During Christmas of 1907 the Tait Brothers brought to Wollongong The Story of the Kelly Gang.[33] In 1911, at the height of the production of local feature films, and as evidence of the increasing popularity of cinema-going amongst the Australian public, the first purpose-built cinemas were erected in Wollongong - the Garden Picture Palace and the Crown Picture Palace.[34] Some short actuality film had also been made in the Illawarra during this period, including coloured footage taken from an engine during a run from Otford to Scarborough in 1907, and also of the opening of Wollongong Hospital two weeks later. George Young’s movie camera may have been an oddity to the locals when he arrived to film Strike in January 1912, but it was not unknown. 

Scenario

The scenario for Strike was based upon a story by Casper Middleton. According to an advertisement in the Brisbane Courier of 18 May 1912, the film ran for approximately 60 minutes and comprised six sections:

(1) In Love with an Adventure
(2) The Marriage Ceremony
(3) In the Bowel’s of the Earth
(4) The Explosion of the Coal Face
(5) The Fight for Life in the Flooded Mine
(6) The Rugged Cliffs, over the Precipice to Death below. 

A brief review in the newspaper two days later described the film as follows:

Kings Pictures. 

A truly excellent program was put forward at the Lyceum on Saturday before two audiences that night, filling the capacious house of entertainment to its doors.... [The program] led up to the star picture of the evening which was set in a New South Wales coal mine and gave some vivid glimpses of life "down, down, down in the mine below." There was the usual romance of love woven into some thrilling scenery, including an explosion, a fight for life in the flooded mine, and a fatal fall over a grim precipice.

The story appears to have revolved around a villainous foreigner and adventurer by the name of Von Hoeke. He arrives in a town and charms a young woman named Mabel, the daughter of the local coal mine owner. Another young man by the name of Jack - a coal miner - also has eyes on Mabel. Von Hoeke courts her in order to gain access to the family's house and steal money from her father. In the film, Von Hoeke is about to marry the deluded girl when his deserted wife arrives on the scene and exposes him as a fraud. In revenge, Von Hoeke goes to the mine and, whilst underground, induces the miners to go out on strike. He then forcibly abducts Mabel and imprisons her in an old mine shaft. An explosion then occurs at the coal face and, as a result, the mine is flooded, trapping Mabel. The hero, Jack, arrives in time to save her from the flooding waters. Von Hoeke tries to escape, but Jack tackles him and, in a cliff-top struggle, Von Hoeke falls to his death. Jack and the girl are happily united.[28] 

The cast included script writer Casper Middleton and Roland Conway, both of whom had worked on Young’s Gambler’s Gold. Strike was Conway’s third film. He went on to star in a number of Australian silent features, including The Woman Suffers (1918), Robbery Under Arms (1920) and The Romance of Runnibede (1928). 

The precise location of the filming is not known, but was likely in its northern suburbs of Wollongong, which had the highest density of mining operations and easy access to nearby villages. During shooting Middleton and Conway were the victims of an accident. The incident was reported in the Sydney newspaper the Referee, on 17 January 1912, as follows:

To secure a picture for their forthcoming production of  'Strike' the principal actors of the Australian Film Company Limited, journeyed to a coal mine on the South Coast last week. Messrs. Caspar Middleton and Roland Conway were the victims of an accident. While struggling on a truck at the mouth of the tunnel the lashings gave way, and both were precipitated into the sloping shaft. Fortunately the two actors escaped with a severe shaking.

Following the completion of outdoor filming, final editing took place at the Australian Film Company’s North Sydney studio. On 17 January it was announced that production would be delayed a few days due to the fact that nitrate film could not be procured until 20 January in order to produce the projection print from the negative. This is perhaps evidence of the high demand for local product and the frenetic pace of feature film making in Australia during the boom period of 1911-12. The delay meant that Strike was not completed and ready for distribution until the beginning of March, which was nevertheless a relatively quick turn around. 

Release of Strike

With filming completed by the end of January, through February it was edited and made ready for release. The first notice of a screening appeared on Sunday, 10 March 1912, within the Sydney Truth:

The King's Theatre, cnr. George and Harris Streets, [Sydney].... Note - On Tuesday afternoon next, at 3 p.m., the Australian Film Company's latest production, entitled "STRIKE," will be shown at this Theatre in addition to the above program.

Another notice appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday, 30 March, where the film was announced to be shown alongside a production of Charles Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewhit:

In addition to above Mammoth Attractions we are 
Showing a Special-Added Feature,
AN AUSTRALIAN PRODUCTION
entitled
“STRIKE”
A Romantic Drama of Thrilling and Sensational Scenes,
Suggested by the well-known Author,
CASPER MIDDLETON
This Special Attraction will be shown at Matinees only
from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. for 3 days, viz.
MONDAY, TUESDAY and WEDNESDAY

The Sydney Truth newspaper published a brief, one line review on 31 March:

Strike - A romantic drama of thrilling and sensational scenes, suggested by the well known author, Casper Middleton. This special attraction will be shown at Matinees daily, from 11 am. to 5 p.m., for 3 days, viz., Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

Strike officially premiered at Sydney’s Lyric Theatre on Monday, 1 April 1912. The Lyric, located in the busiest part of Sydney near the Haymarket on George Street, was operated by Canadian J.D. Williams. Along with the adjacent, though more palatial Colonial Theatre, the Lyric formed part of Australia’s first multiplex, running a then novel continuous program from 11am to 11pm.[37] William’s price cutting entry fee of 3d or 6d, along with a complete change of program every Monday and Thursday, and a flood of lights and music on the footpath drawing patrons in, saw his theatres emptying and filling to capacity 12 times a day. During its brief 3-day Sydney run, Strike ran as a second-string feature at the Lyric, during matinees only. As such it received little notice and no significant reviews appeared in the major dailies. 

During the latter half of May 1912 Strike had a successful Brisbane showing. Initially due to run at King’s Lyceum over six nights commencing Monday 21 May, Strike was cut back to two due to the early arrival of “another Great Star feature” in the form of the 2,000 ft. long American western Monarch of the Prairie.[39] The scant amount of detail available on the film's content was addressed somewhat in a 18 May advertisement within The Brisbane Courier and the Observer:[29] 

King’s Pictures
The Lyceum only. Direction C.E. King Matinee
To-day, at 2.30.
Commencing To-day,
The Great Australian Sensational Drama.
“STRIKE”
Over 3000 ft in length.
Scenes— (1) In Love with an Adventure
(2) The Marriage Ceremony
(3) In the Bowel’s of the Earth
(4) The Explosion of the Coal Face
(5) The Fight for Life in the Flooded Mine
(6) The Rugged Cliffs, over the Precipice to Death below.
—Beside—
A well-selected programme of all picked subjects.
ORCHESTRA SIGNOR TRUDA
ILLUSTRATED SONGS GILBERT LEARMONTH
—
Prices: 6d. to 1/6. Reserved Seats 6d. extra. Bookings at Palings.
—
To-day at 2.30. Tonight at 8. Phone 2361 

The film's length of 3,000 feet would have run approximately 50 minutes when shown at the then common, hand-cranked shooting and projection speed of 16 frames per second.[27] The Brisbane notice freely used words such as “thrilling” and “sensational” to describe the film. The Brisbane Courier reviewer reported that Strike was “of exceptional quality” and that the Lyceum’s audience acknowledged it with “enthusiastic applause.”[40] The film was then taken up by entrepreneur Hugh Black and run to a large open-air crowd at Brisbane Cricket Ground on Saturday, 25 May, with a programme of American comedic and dramatic shorts and illustrated songs by Taitus George. Black also presented the film at Spring Hill and in repeat sessions. 

No further evidence has been found of the wider screening of Strike in the other states, or of a showing in the Illawarra where the original outside filming had taken place. The reason for the latter may have been that the region's coal mines were regularly on strike, or it was felt by the local distributors inappropriate to show a film so named, especially with memories of the the Bulli (1887) and Mount Kembla (1902) disasters still resonating throughout the community.

Whether Strike dealt in any substantial manner with the circumstances of the coal miners is unclear. Underneath the melodramatic narrative, film goers may have seen aspects of working life at a coal mine. It is also unknown whether the film took a pro- or anti-union stance, or was neutral in regards to the industrial turmoil surrounding the strike. We can only guess at the manner in which director George Young portrayed the strike sequences and the use he made of the local mine workers. The lack of fulsome reviews or screenings across Australia suggests a low quality production, resulting in minimal impact. In addition, a major fire in the Australian Film Company's Melbourne offices on 30 November 1912 destroyed a large store of flammable nitrate film and related material, thereby putting paid to release and re-release of their features in Victoria and beyond, The company went into liquidation shortly thereafter.

Strike (1925), Russian film poster.

The Russian director Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike (1925), with its graphic portrayal of the harsh working conditions of Russian foundry workers and the strained living conditions of their families, points to the realities of the time, as do extant photographs and contemporary published accounts of life on the southern coalfields, including newspaper reports and the findings of various commissions of inquiry into mine disasters and industrial accidents. Whether Young's Strike included actuality elements is unknown.

 

Sergei Eisenstein (dir.), Strike (1925), Russia, duration: 94.24 minutes.

Reviews would suggest that Strike was primarily a romantic melodrama, though with sensational and exciting scenes centred on the coal mine explosion and flooding, and a cliff-top struggle between the hero and villain. The unionists of New South Wales and Queensland may have viewed it with disdain, in light of their own recent bitter experiences. Whilst the official newspaper of the Australian Workers Union in Queensland, The Worker, contained no reviews of Strike, the increasing power of the cinema in forming and swaying public opinion did not go unnoticed. The full-page cartoon frontispiece of its 15 June 1912 edition featured “A Capitalistic Film”, with a projected image of a sinister, cigar-smoking, top-hatted capitalist pointing menacingly out of the screen to the audience below. 

A Capitalistic Film, The Worker, 15 June 1912.

The message here was clear - “Working men. It’s your money we want”, for higher food prices, increased rents and monopolies. No doubt the cartoonist and editors of The Worker were wondering where the films were which more accurately and fairly portrayed the often harsh realities of working-class life in Australia. Their viewing of Strike during its Brisbane run may have been the spark for such questioning. 

Not much is known about the completed version of Strike apart from the few newspaper notices referred to above. No footage of the film has surfaced. Neither are there extant stills, posters, related ephemera such as a script or theatre program, or copyright material lodged with the relevant authorities. All the negatives for films produced by the Australian Film Syndicate during 1911–12 were purchased by A.C. Tinsdale’s Austral Photoplay Company in 1918 and their fate remains a mystery.[35]

Young's precise reasons for making Strike are likewise unclear. He and his team, during this early flowering of independent Australian film making, may have been attempting to reflect the fact that industrial issues figured large amongst the working classes of Australia’s cities and rapidly expanding urban areas. For example, the people of the Illawarra were still recovering from the devastating Mount Kembla mine disaster of 1902 which killed 96 men and boys. Moreover, in January 1912 industrial turmoil was flaring in Brisbane because the tramways company refused to recognise union members’ right to wear union badges. This resulted in a general strike across the city, the first of its kind in Australia. Demonstrators took to the streets, and on 2 February - Black Friday - 15,000 were dispersed by mounted police. In such an environment, Casper Middleton set his melodrama in the context of a New South Wales coal mine and striking workers. 

Though Strike may have been a first for Australian cinema, there was ample precedent abroad for such a film. As early as 1904, the French had produced a short feature entitled The Strike.[36] In it several striking workers are killed in a confrontation, and in retaliation the wife of one then kills the factory owner. She is put on trial, but freed when the owner’s son asks for mercy, knowing that his father was culpable in his mistreatment of the workers. A number of overseas films dealing with industrial issues and strikes began to appear with the new decade. 1910 saw the release of the 10 minute long British newsreel magazine item A Day in the Life of a Coalminer. The following year a number of features appeared, including The Long Strike, The Strike at the Mines in the United States, and The Strike Leader in Britain. Later releases included The Strike (USA 1914), The Strike (Sweden 1914) and The Strike Breakers (USA 1919). The British film The Right to Strike appeared in 1923, followed by Eisenstein’s classic Strike in 1925, and the German Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in 1927, with the latter two revealing the suffering and often tragic consequences of industrial disputes and harsh retaliatory action against striking workers. We will perhaps never know how George Young’s Strike of 1912 sits amongst those films.

Acknowledgements 

I would like to acknowledge the assistance of film historian Andrew Pike, film archivist Ray Edmondson, Professor Jim Hagan, Dr. Nancy Huggett and Dr. Joseph Davis in the compilation of this article. 

Notes 

1) Stuart Svenson, Industrial War: The Great Strikes of 1890–94, Ram Press, Wollongong, 1995. 

2) Stuart Piggin and Henry Lee, The Mount Kembla Disaster, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1992; Donald Dingsdag, The Bulli Mine Disaster 1887: Lessons from the past, St. Louis Press, Darling Heights, 1993; Michael Organ, ‘The Battle of Bulli’, Illawarra Unity, 2(4), 2001, pp. 27–44. 

3) E. Reade, Australian Silent Films—A Pictorial History of Silent Films from 1896 to 1929, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1970; J. and M. Long, The Pictures that Moved—A Picture History of the Australian Cinema 1896–1929, Hutchinson, Richmond, 1982; Graham Shirley and Brian Adams, Australian Cinema—The First Eighty Years, Angus & Robertson, 1983; Ina Bertrand, (ed.), Cinema in Australia—A Documentary History, UNSW Press, Kensington, 1989; J. Dennis, Aotearoa and the Sentimental Bloke—Making Films in Australia and New Zealand in the Silent Period, Moa Films, Wellington, 1993. 

4) Diane Collins, Hollywood Down Under—Australians at the movies: 1896 to the present day, Angus & Robertson, 1987. 

5) Chris Long, ‘Australia’s First Films: Under Southern Skies (1902)’, Cinema Papers, 106, October 1995, pp. 38–41 & 54–5. 

6) Ina Bertrand, ‘The Story of the Kelly Gang 1906: early film form and film exhibition in Melbourne’, Australian Journal of Screen Theory, 9/10, 1981, pp. 167–79; Ina Bertrand and Ken Rob, ‘the continuing saga of …. The Story of the Kelly Gang’, Cinema Papers, 36, 1982, 52 pp. 18–21 & 87; Brian Reis, Australian Film—A Bibliography, Mansell, New York, 1997; J. Barrett Hodsdon, The Dawn of Cinema 1894–1915, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 1999. 

7) Hodsdon, op cit.; Phil Hardy, Science Fiction, Aurum Press, London, 1994. 

8) Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper, Australian Film 1900–1977—A Guide to Feature Film Production, Oxford University Press, 1980. 

9) Ibid., p. 4; Bertrand, op cit., 1989, pp. 41–6. 

10) D. Headon, ‘Significant Silents: Sporting Australia on Film, 1896–1930’, Journal of Popular Culture, Summer 1999, 33(1), pp. 115–27. 

11) Nancy Huggett, A cultural history of cinema-going in the Illawarra 1900–1950, Ph.D. thesis, University of Wollongong, 2002. 

12) ‘The Union Buries its Dead’ is the title of a famous short story by Australian writer Henry Lawson, and supposedly upon which the Three in One segment was based. 

13) Chris Long, ‘Australia’s First Films: New Light on the Limelight Department’, Cinema Papers, 107, December 1995, pp. 34–7 & 56–7. 

14) Lisa Milner, Fighting Films—History of the Waterside Workers’ Federation Film Unit, Pluto Press, Sydney, 2003. 

15) Ray Edmondson and Andrew Pike, Australia’s Lost Films, National Library of Australia, 1982; ‘Australian Silent Film’, in Ross Harvey and Anne Lloyd, Australia’s Lost and Missing Documentary Heritage, Australian Memory of the World Project, Report, 30 April 2003. [Web site] www.amw.org.au. 

16) Rick Altman, ‘The Silence of the Silents’, The Musical Quarterly, 80(4), Winter 1996, pp. 648–718. 

17) Collins, op cit., p. 68. 

18) Reade, op cit., pp. 34–5. 

19) Steven J. Ross, ‘Struggles for the Screen: Workers, Radicals and the Political Uses of Silent Film’, The American Historical Review, 96(2), April 1991, pp. 333–67. 

20) Steven J. Ross, Working-class Hollywood: Silent film and the shaping of class in America, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1998. 

21) Michael Slade Shull, Tinted shades of red: The popular American cinematic treatment of militant labor, domestic radicalism and Russian revolutionaries, 1909–1929, Ph.D. thesis, University of Maryland College Park, 1996. 

22) Collins, op cit., p. 1. 

23) Russell Campbell, ‘Film and Photo League Radical Cinema in the 30s’, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 14, 1977, pp. 23–5. Lilian Pizzichini, ‘Silent Witness: A History of Alternative Newsreels’, New Statesman, 1 September 2003, pp. 26–8. 

24) Ina Bertrand and Diane Collins, Government and Film in Australia, Currency Press, Carlton South, 1981. 

25) Referee, Sydney, 10 and 17 January 1912. 

26) Pike and Cooper, op cit., p. 21.   

27) The length of Strike is given as 33 minutes in a number of published listings of Australian film. This, however, is based on the running of the 3000 feet long film at the modern sound standard speed of 24 frames per second. As silent films were usually shot at 16fps, it is more appropriate to give their length according to this rate, rather than the faster 24fps. 

28) A relatively detailed scenario of Strike is contained in a review published in The Brisbane Courier and the Observer (hereinafter cited Courier), 27 May 1912, p. 5. 

29) Courier, 18 May 1912, p. 2. 

 30) John Tulloch, Legends on the Screen: The narrative film in Australia, 1919–1929, Currency Press, Carlton South, 1981, p. 345. 

31) R. Parkinson, Gauffered Velour: A history of motion picture exhibition and picture theatres in the Illawarra district of New South Wales 1897–1994, Australian Theatre Historical Society, Campbelltown, 1995. 

32) Check’s Pictures (photograph), item 353497, National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra. Illustrated Bertrand, op cit., 1989, 53. 

33) Illawarra Mercury, 13 and 17 December 1907. The Story of the Kelly Gang was presented at Wollongong Town Hall on the evenings of Thursday and Friday, 19 and 20 December 1907. Also shown was footage of the 1907 Melbourne Cup. 

34) Parkinson, op cit. 

35) Cooper and Pike, op cit., p. 100. 

36 Internet Movie Database, [Web site] http://www.imdb.com.  

37) C.A. Jeffries, ‘The Greater J.D. Williams Banyan Tree’, Lone Hand, 1 July 1911, pp. 275–84. Reproduced in Bertrand, op cit., 1989, 56–60. 

38) Sydney Morning Herald, 30 March 1912; Daily Telegraph, 30 March 1912. 

39) Brisbane Courier, 21 May 1912, p. 2. 

40) Brisbane Courier, 22 May 1912, p. 6. 

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Australian Film Syndicate / Company feature releases

• The Golden West, Romance of the West Australian Goldfields, 2,500 ft, 22 March 1911.
• Three Strings to Her Bow, Fine farcical comedy, 10 April 1911.
  
• Little Jen, Romantic adventure set on the Colorado goldfields, 17 April.
• The Diamond Cross, A sensational bush romance, 4 August 1911.
  
• Black Talbot, The Australian bushranger, 4 August, 1911.
• A Gambler's Gold, A fascinating pictorial story of the turf, 1911, 3,000 ft.
• The Octoroon, January 1912.
  
• Strike, Romance and disaster on the Australian coalfields, March 1912, 4,000 ft. 
• The Wedding of Adam and Eve, A comedy novelty, 1912.
  

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NB: The article was originally published in Illawarra Unity, Journal of the Illawarra Branch of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, 5(1), September 2005. This version contains amendments and updates.

| Strike 1912 | For the Term of His Natural Life 1927 | Metropolis 1927 | Captain Thunderbolt 1951 |

Last updated: 18 April 2023

Michael Organ