Dr Lucy Taksa
School of Industrial Relations & Organisational Behaviour, University of NSW

Abstract

The Eveleigh railway workshops in Sydney were not just a geographic location in which specific industrial activities occurred, but also a political space in which power was exercised by the state, bureaucratic authority, and also through industrial and political mobilisation. This paper focuses on the way that various social groups used certain spaces at Eveleigh to pursue their own class and community interests, discussing the functions of different meeting places at the site. By considering how various meeting places drew on communal and class relationships of those who were employed at Eveleigh, this paper will highlight the way workers and managers competed to control the use of space in order to influence industrial activism and political consciousness.

 

Introduction

In around 1887 the Eveleigh railway workshops began assembling, repairing and maintaining imported railway rolling stock and steam locomotives and building carriages and wagons. By the early 1890s over 2,000 workers were employed there and after locomotive manufacturing was begun in 1907, their numbers grew to 3,000 and remained at this level until the mid-1950s. From this time the technological changes associated with dieselisation led to a gradual decline in Eveleigh’s workforce so that only 300 remained by the time the shops were closed in 1989.¹

Eveleigh was an industrial landscape in which power was exercised by the state and bureaucratic authority, as well as by workers who engaged in struggles with railway management over working conditions and pay and who played an important role in the State’s labour movement. Some became prominent Labor Party politicians, others became prominent union activists. A smaller number, mainly communists, were in the vanguard of the railway shop committee movement, which had its genesis at Eveleigh in 1926. By the late 1930s the majority were members of the twelve trade unions that had coverage in the workshops, the largest of which included the Amalgamated Engineering Union, the Australasian Society of Engineers, the Australian Railways Union, the Federated Ironworkers’ Association and the Boilermakers Society.²

Throughout Eveleigh’s century of operations these workers united to challenge the NSW Department of Railways’ control over the labour process. One of the most visible examples of their industrial activism occurred in August 1917 when they mobilised against a modified version of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s scientific management, known locally as “the card system”. Because their strike action ended in a dismal failure for the labour movement, their subsequent struggles with management have attracted little attention; by comparison with the General Strike of 1917, their action in later decades was muted. Yet, despite being subdued, these workers continued to resist management’s authority, more often than not relying on the same practices that had formed a prominent feature of the 1917 dispute. Mass meetings and demonstrations remained an important part of the workers’ unity and resistance throughout the twentieth century.³

It is the nature of this resistance, how it changed over time and its outcomes that I seek to explore in this paper in order to consider the interface between work, place and mobilisation across time and space. My primary aim is to demonstrate that resistance is shaped by the ground on which it occurs and also that industrial activism involves spatial practices. What are spatial practices of resistance? In a broad sense they involve rituals, like processions, demonstrations and mass meetings, which seek to influence the public sphere and are enacted in the public realm, in those public places that are freely accessible to all members of the community. These sorts of collective spatial practices have attracted extensive historical interest since the 1960s.⁴ By contrast, little attention has been given to the part they played in struggles between workers and managers over the labour process and the workers’ ability to engage in collective action in the workplace itself.

How can the role of spatial practices in the workplace be analysed? How can their connections with those enacted in the public realm be understood? One way is to consider their role vis-à-vis both industrial struggles and struggles over space, over the terrain on which industrial struggles take place, over workers’ ability to occupy strategic positions and places in order to promote their interests. Such struggles involve domination, authority, conflict and the spatial practices of resistance. What are spatial practices of resistance? According to Steve Pile, “resistance does not just act on topographies imposed through the spatial technologies of domination, it moves across them under the noses of the enemy, seeking to create new meanings out of imposed meanings”. It “seeks to appropriate space”, to re-work it and divert it “to other ends”. It occurs not only “where space is denied, circumscribed and/or totally administered”, but also “between the spaces authorized by authority”.⁵

In short, spatial practices of resistance involve what Pile calls a “politics of location”. On the one hand, this involves the definition of authorized boundaries, which aim to confine people “to highly circumscribed spaces”, to control their use of space and to regulate who can and who cannot occupy specific spaces. On the other hand, it involves mobilization by communities of resistance, which seeks to challenge such boundaries. From this perspective, boundaries “are not fixed, impermeable and permanent” but are constantly altered by struggles to define alternative ways of living.⁶

Why and how did Eveleigh’s workers engage in the politics of location? To answer this question we first need to define how workplace spatial practices were constituted. I would suggest that they can be related to (i) the spatial dimensions of the labour process; the shopfloor layout and the spatial organization of production, which confined workers to particular places and controlled and regulated how they performed their jobs; (ii) mass meetings in specific locations that promoted shared interests among workers and sought to challenge management’s control over the labour process; and (iii) struggles between management and workers over the right to hold such meetings in these locations. Attention to these three interrelated spatial practices locates the exercise of power, coercion and collective resistance in the broader physical surroundings of the workplace. It extends the field of impact between authority and resistance beyond the production process by demonstrating how spatial practices were influenced by management strategies and in turn, how they influenced relations and interactions between workers and management.⁷ However, while I recognise the importance of the spatial dimensions of the labour process, limitations of space prevent me from considering them here in any depth. Accordingly, this paper focuses on the spatial practices that challenged management control over space and those that were adopted by managers in order to limit employee resistance and contain industrial conflict. By looking past the more obvious manifestations of industrial conflict, such as strikes, amongst others, I seek to evaluate management’s success in preventing mobilisation that relied on and promoted class, as opposed to sectional interests.⁸

Spatial practices

According to Madeleine Hurt, space “was the earliest arena of public protest” through which “subaltern groups” in many different countries “expressed and enforced their moral economies” by subjecting delinquent politicians or employers to public censure. During the nineteenth century, she adds, the street became a “classic arena of working- class protest” and also one in which authorities undertook to control public spaces both ideologically and physically, often through the use of troops and police.⁹

Such efforts were not limited to Europe or the nineteenth century. In Sydney during the general strike of 1917, when workers protested against the card system’s introduction and rebuked the NSW Government for supporting it at public venues like the Domain and various street corners, government authorities also tried to restrain workers’ ability to use public space; the strike’s Defence Committee had to obtain police permission to hold processions.¹⁰ This effort to control spatial practices was later replicated inside the railway workshops and resulted in continuing struggles over space between management, workers and their industrial organisations.

How did management try to control spatial practices and how did struggles over space arise? In the first place, the spatial and administrative arrangements of the workshops enabled management to control workers. These were reinforced and extended by the card system, which constrained the way Eveleigh workers engaged in industrial action. As Frank Bollins, who began working in the carriage shops in 1934, commented:

the aftermath of the 1917 strike was still a predominant thought in the minds of many workers…right until the beginning of the 1960s. “Remember the lessons of 1917”, we were always told. “Don’t let’s go out on the end of the limb, don’t do this, don’t do that”.¹¹

Likewise, Stan Jones, who worked at Eveleigh locomotive workshops from the mid-1920s and Brian Dunnett, who worked there from the 1950s, thought that “the experience of 1917” made stoppages “quite a novelty as far as the workshops were concerned”.¹² It was against this backdrop that mass meetings organised by the rank-and-file shop committees and trade unions in and around the workshops, became a dominant means for promoting collective interests.

Second, and relatedly, struggles over space emerged as a by-product of such mass meetings. By resisting the Department’s efforts to define how and where such meetings could be held, Eveleigh’s employees negotiated the power of the state and railway management as well as differences amongst themselves. In doing so, they remapped the ground on which they toiled.

Managing spatial practices

The card system adopted in the railway and tramway workshops in July 1917 shaped the politics of location at Eveleigh in the decades after the general strike. As workers had complained in 1917, the system had immense spatial implications; its sequential ordering of tasks and control over the location of machines and acquisition of materials restricted them to certain machines and benches. These changes to layout and the organization of production limited their ability to exercise discretion, communicate, interact and collaborate with each other. The resulting spatial constraints on workers were highlighted in their testimonies before the Curlewis Royal Commission in 1918.¹³

Unionism was also constrained after the general strike. Following the de-registration of their unions, “ordinary union activity on the job” became difficult because workplace activists were constantly harassed.¹⁴ In this context, railway workers established informal rank-and-file shop-floor committees, although their success was chequered; they ceased operating after 1921, reforming temporarily in 1926, and then on a permanent basis during the early 1930s, from which time they continued to function in the workshops until the early 1970s.¹⁵ While their efforts centered on campaigns for improved working conditions and especially sanitary facilities, one of their underlying aims was to re-establish the workplace culture that had existed before the 1917 strike when “enforced union membership” was “a condition for friendly relationship” among workers.¹⁶ Their efforts were largely successful. Although they did not eradicate differences and divisions, or even conflicts between unions, they did mobilize the majority of workers, who consistently attended their mass meetings and who effectively became active foot soldiers in the politics of location.

The geography of resistance

Industrial mass meetings brought workers into regular contact with each other and provided an avenue for communication in a context in which interaction was being tightly controlled by bureaucratic and spatial arrangements. Initially the two most prominent places in which they were held were the entry gates to the workshops. Those employed on the southern side of the railway tracks in the locomotive shops met at the Boundary Street gate on the workshops’ Redfern border. Those employed on the northern side in the carriage, wagon and paint shops and stores, met at the gate on the junction between Codrington and Wilson Streets in Darlington. These two spaces were strategic locations in which workers exercised their collective power, expressed outrage against railway management, the government and employers generally and struggled to promote alternative ways of working and living. Because officially the gates were no longer on railway property, workers could meet at these locations unhindered by any constraints from management.¹⁷

From 1919, mass meetings tended to revolve around the advocacy of industrial unionism. In June 1925, the gauntlet was taken up by the Australian Railway Union (ARU), whose organizers addressed workers during their lunch-hour. By September 1926, the frequency of such meetings had increased alongside the revival of the rank-and-file committees.¹⁸ But while workers could exercise autonomy on the streets outside the gates, their rights over space inside Eveleigh were limited and had to be fought for.

In order to overcome such limits, workers employed on the Locomotive side began to organise meetings in a large open area in front of the First Aid Station that was half way along the main workshop building and therefore accessible to all employed on the southern side of the railway line. On the other side, those in the main Railway Store, held meetings in their meal-room. And it was here in 1926 that conflict with management erupted when the Head Storekeeper and the Controller of Stores informed ARU organiser Harry Melrose that he “had no right to be there”. Melrose was not, however, easily dissuaded. He continued the meeting until the whistle blew to mark the end of the lunch-break because as he saw it, the union “‘legally and morally’ had the right to hold meetings during the meal hour”, which he described as “the slaves” own time. “It was peculiar”, he thought, “that the boss should decree how that time should be spent.” This encounter marked the first of many efforts to control the workers’ spatial practices.¹⁹

Meanwhile, those employed in the Carriage and Wagon shops held their meetings on a massive deck inside the timber mill. In 1929, the ARU’s paper, the Railroad, reported that the Superintendent of the Carriage and Wagon shop “almost developed apoplexy” when he was told by employees that the union’s State Secretary had arrived to address a lunch- time meeting here.²⁰ But according to Stan Jones, management’s greatest antipathy was reserved for the carriage shop committee whose meetings drew on links with the Labor Council and mobilised workers from numerous occupations and unions.²¹ Since these committees promoted class, as opposed to sectional identities and interests, they were deemed to be political by the Railway Commissioners who formally prohibited union representatives from addressing meetings of employees on railway premises on 11 March 1930.²²

The fact that organisers from the FIA addressed members on the benefits of union membership at the gates in 1928 illustrates the extent to which the Department could successfully exercise authority over space and impose and police spatial boundaries.²³ However, it would be a mistake to conclude that continued use of the gate area for mass meetings reflected the Department’s total power over space. As the ARU’s continuing campaign to obtain the right to hold lunch- hour meetings inside the workshops illustrates, workers struggled against the territorial boundaries defined by authority. Increasingly, too, they challenged authorised spatial boundaries by marking out strategic locations in which they could exercise some degree of autonomy.²⁴

This struggle over the right to hold meetings was fundamentally related to the struggle over the labour process. Most mass meetings held during the late 1920s focused on the continued operation of the card and bonus systems that had been implemented in the workshops in 1917 and 1918. In 1931, a meeting organized by the ARU and FIA carried a resolution in favour of holding weekly shop meetings to help rid the railways of this “serious menace to the entire membership of the Trade Union Movement”.²⁵ And it was in this context that management stepped up its campaign to eliminate the workers’ strategic use of space. On 4 December 1931, a joint ARU-AEU meeting was disrupted by several of the Department’s managers on the grounds that special permission had not been granted. In 1933, union meetings were prohibited on Departmental premises, as were shop committee meetings in 1935 on the grounds that they increased conflict between unions and shop committees. In response, the ARU’s journal countered by stating that the shop committees helped to break down differences that divided workers.²⁶ Clearly, the field of contact between authority and resistance, between the Department’s divide-and-rule tactics and the shop committee and union efforts to unite workers in collective action, had territorial implications.

Remapping the ground for struggle: The making of Red Square

Mass meetings enabled Eveleigh’s employees to remap the terrain on which they engaged in struggle over their rights because they fostered industrial links across occupations and unions and spatial connections between different parts of the workshops. In 1938, when the Railway Commissioners issued an edict prohibiting workers’ from taking their traditional morning tea-break at 9am, a large meeting was immediately held in the carriage and wagon works. But instead of staying there, “a flood of men poured on Wilson Street gate”, where shop committee and union delegates foreshadowed a combined campaign against this attack on their “30-year-old custom”.²⁷

These meetings at Eveleigh’s margins formed an important part of Sydney’s political landscape. Jim Scullin chose the Boundary Street gate to address its employees as part of his election campaign in 1928, as did Jack Lang in 1934.²⁸ Such activities effectively linked the parochial realm of the workplace with the public realm and in doing so they became enmeshed in workplace struggles over space. When Lang attempted to deliver his industrial policy speech in this same space in 1937, he was cut “off the air” by the person who was supplying electricity from the Eveleigh gate-house for amplification. This event marked a crucial stage in Eveleigh’s politics of location. To prevent such regulation of space from being exercised in the future, shop committee activists launched a campaign for “the right of free speech in the workshops themselves”, a right that Stan Jones thought “was finally attained in practice if not in open acknowledgment, by the authorities”.²⁹

How was this outcome achieved? First, workers disregarded management’s recurring bans by continuing to organise meetings inside the workshops as part of their struggles to prevent conditions from deteriorating, for better pay,³⁰ against a management-approved union that was formed in 1939,³¹ against the introduction of a new bonus and time keeping system in the same year,³² and dangerous working conditions.³³ Second, they established a degree of control over one particular meeting place.

By the late 1940s, Ambulance Square had become closely associated with the workers’ efforts to protect and promote not just their sectional concerns but also their broader industrial rights. Their association with this place was reflected in the nickname it was given by the workers during the late 1940s, when it became known as Red Square. Red Square provides a valuable insight into the process by which “a spatially connected group of people” mediated the field of impact between authority and resistance. Through the spatial practices that were enacted in it, the workers made it a strategic location in which they contested management’s control over space and boundaries. Initially, they appropriated this space for lunchtime games of rugby and gradually they diverted it to other industrial ends so that it became part of their resistance, much like the entry gates.³⁴ Both Bob Matthews and Jack Bruce stated that Ambulance Square was renamed Red Square “because all the union meetings were held there and the union movement was pretty heavily into communist control”. “So it became communist, communist—red, Red Square.”³⁵

According to Syd Kain and Jeff Aldridge, delegates would let workers know when meetings would be held by chalking notices up throughout the various shops.³⁶ And Bob Rhymes, said that two shop committee delegates would then be sent to address meetings in the Square once a month. In the main these would be attended by those who had “paid about 10 pence a year” to be affiliated to the committees, as well as “other interested people”.³⁷ Individual unions would also organize meetings at this location, as part of their own specific campaigns. But “if there was a matter…that affected the whole of the workforce…of an important industrial nature”, a Combined Union meeting would be called. According to Jack Bruce if a proposal was made “to have a stoppage or something like that over some issue, it may be pay related, if there was a campaign developing…options would be put up to you in Ambulance Square” and any opposition to it was aired there. As he put it, “They were fairly aggressive speakers and they fairly aggressively got people behind them”. Once a vote was taken, remarked Bob Rhymes, “generally the majority decision was accepted as…binding”.³⁸

As had been established practice during the 1930s, the workers “had to make application to the Works Manager for permission to hold a meeting”, and the Manager would then make “a phone call down to the head office in the city”. Jeff Aldridge commented that “Red Square was used purely for domestic issues in relation to” the appalling amenities, and for combined union meetings, which were unlikely to cause strike action. While both Louie Cavelieri and Vince Russo thought that if meetings related to an existing or impending dispute, then management would withhold permission, or if a meeting was still in progress when the last lunch whistle blew, “someone would move the meeting adjourned” and the workers would proceed to the Boundary Street gate. At such meetings, added Jeff Aldridge, “you had to stand outside the gate and the microphones were just placed inside the gate and connected to the watchman’s humpy to allow the people to be addressed”.³⁹

This movement between Red Square and “the Gate” not only challenged the spatial technologies of domination inside the shops, but also highlighted the inconsistencies and ambiguities in the authorized boundaries enforced by management. Many workers noted that the Railway Commissioner accepted the gates “as not being on the premises”, so that meetings there were technically “off the job, as long as the speaker was outside”. In commenting on how the workers were able to use the Department’s electricity for loud speakers from the 1950s, even though they generally “stood inside the gate”, Louie Cavalierie said of management, “look how silly they were”, “always telling us, ‘Go outside’.”⁴⁰

Eveleigh’s workers were empowered by such inconsistencies. In stark contrast to the drama involving Lang in 1937, when the police were called to contain an assembly that was gathered at the Boundary Street gate in the early 1950s, it was the workers and not the authorities, who were able to exercise control over the public realm outside the gates. None of those who have mentioned this event recall the issue that caused the problem. But Jack Lloyd thought that it “must have been very important because there was police cars there, there was an inspector and a sergeant, a few other coppers down there.” His description of the ensuing altercation highlights the significance of the gate area as a ground for struggle in the politics of location.⁴¹

As soon as Stan Jones, the Shop Committee Secretary, took the chair and began speaking through the microphone, he moved a resolution to discontinue the meeting “until the presence of the police” was removed. At this point, a toolmaker/rigger from the large erecting shop got up and:

said, “F the police”…So as soon as he said “F”…three coppers grabbed him and whizzed Jacky off, and Stan Jones said: “…It just proved my point we cannot hold this meeting while these police are in our presence”. Well big Jack Anderson,…he said: “They’re not going to take Jacky away, we’ll go down and turn the car over and get Jacky out”. So everybody charged down to get the police car. Stan Jones…intervened and they agreed to release Jacky later on if we let their car alone. So…the police went straight away and we continued our meeting.⁴²

This act of resistance illustrates how particular “contested and embattled terrains can be reinscribed, redefined, remapped.” The extensive efforts that had been made to regulate the workers’ use of space and to confine them to highly circumscribed spaces, had not prevented spatialised resistance. On the contrary, through such continued resistance Eveleigh’s workers had succeeded in creating an “autonomous” social space in which they challenged management’s and the state’s definitions of boundaries and acceptable behaviour. ⁴³

Their success became even more visible during the late 1950s, when management approved the placement of an old de- wheeled railway carriage on blocks at the back of Red Square for use as a meeting room by shop committee and union officials. This development marked another important shift in the politics of location. For although initially meetings were only allowed in this place that became known as “The Kremlin” during lunch times on Tuesdays, subsequently permission was also obtained for meetings to be held during working hours.⁴⁴ Vince Russo said that shop stewards would meet here to discuss problems and tactics. Subsequently they would approach management with their proposals and “if management wouldn’t listen” they would call a mass meeting and present their resolutions and once they received endorsement the shop stewards would inform management that failure to fulfil demands would lead to a stop work.⁴⁵ The existence of “The Kremlin” in the very space that had come to be associated with mobilisation and resistance effectively extended the workers’ autonomy over space within the workshops.

The politics of location

The numbers attending the mass meetings varied according to which bodies organized them and also the issues being addressed. Brian Dunnett recalled that during the 1950s union meetings inside the workshops usually attracted 50 to 60 people. But when “a major issue” or “a big political event” of “national importance” arose the “major political players of the day” would address crowds of around two or three thousand. Numerous workers remembered speakers from the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and the Communist Party addressing lunchtime meetings at Ambulance Square or in the Locomotive workshops’ canteen and entertainment area during election campaigns. Included among them were Les Haylen and HV Evatt, both Federal Labor Members of Parliament, and Jim Healy, Secretary of the Waterside Workers Federation.⁴⁶

The ability to hold such political meetings inside the workshops during this period indicates just how successfully Eveleigh’s workers had insinuated their rights over space and dislocated spaces of resistance from the spatial practices imposed by authority. In doing so, they expanded the boundaries of the workplace and incorporated within them spatial practices traditionally associated with the public domain. At the same time, workplace spatial practices had an impact on industrial struggle and also on the public domain as was demonstrated on 6 June 1961 when a major struggle for a wage increase culminated in a transport-wide strike and a mass demonstration. Dunnett’s account of this combined union action indicates that the politics of location at Red Square, the gates and other parts of Eveleigh in the intervening decades provided the foundation for overcoming occupational, organisational and spatial differences and divisions between workers. As he put it, this was “the first time in 50 years, the Railway stopped as a whole. It was…one of the most amazing industrial experiences…to see this stoppage occur…all transport in Sydney stopped”. On the day of the strike, thousands of people marched from the their individual shops on both sides of Eveleigh, picking up smaller groups as they went on their way city’s centre, where about 20,000 transport workers came together. This event was extremely significant because it laid “to bed of some of the 1917 differences that arose.… So it was a pretty moving industrial period to see something that had virtually haunted people for a period eliminated”.⁴⁷ It was also followed by further mass action. On 5 July 1965, all trains and buses stopped in NSW during a twenty-four hour strike.⁴⁸

In Dunnett’s view, it was not only the nature of work at Eveleigh that influenced the type of industrial activities that occurred there and made it “a political area”, but also its proximity to the NSW Parliament. The workers’ ability to “put on a demonstration…in half an hour or so, which they did do very effectively”, increased Eveleigh’s “industrial muscle”, he thought.⁴⁹ In other words, spatial practices adopted at Eveleigh after 1917 were not only closely linked to those that were traditionally associated with workers’ struggles in the public realm but they also played an important role in shaping the nature of workplace resistance. Over time they challenged management’s authority over space and changed the way industrial conflict was manifested inside the workshops.

Conclusion

Spatial practices provide us with a useful avenue for investigating how workers and managers struggled over the labour process and workers’ right to organise collectively. They illustrate how managers tried to control workers’ movements in and across space and how workers struggled to occupy strategic locations in order to challenge authority and its regulation of boundaries, to enhance their power vis-à-vis the labour process, management and bureaucratic authority, and to articulate and promote different ways of working and living. At Eveleigh, such practices enabled employees to rework space to their own ends. In short, they were pivotal to the politics of location and the transformation of the workshops from a ground for struggle to a struggle over ground. Within this contested terrain Red Square and the entry gates became relatively autonomous domains in which workers succeeded in circumventing the arrangements of domination that were imposed on them during the course of their work.

Endnotes
1 NSW State Heritage Inventory; Ray Markey, The Making of the Labor Party in New South Wales, 1880-1900, NSW University Press, Sydney, 1988, pp. 99-103; Mr. Guthrie, History of Eveleigh Workshops, Unpublished Report, p. 7, and Correspondence: Assistant Chief Mechanical Engineers to F.P.H. Fewtrell, Works Manager, 14 April, 1955, State Rail Authority Archives (SRAA), A88/44 Box 3, p. 5; R. G. Preston, The Eveleigh Locomotive Workshops Story, Australian railway Historical Society, NSW Division, Sydney, 1997, pp. 16-17.
² Lucy Taksa, “Pumping the Life-blood into Politics and Place: Labour Culture and the Eveleigh Railway Workshops”, Labour History, no. 79, November 2000, pp. 11-34; Stan Jones, “Eveleigh—The Heart Of The Transport System”, Daily News: Feature for Transport Workers, 19 January, 1939.
³ Lucy Taksa, “Defence not Defiance: Social Protest and the NSW General Strike of 1917”, Labour History, no. 60, May 1991, pp. 16-33; Lucy Taksa, “Scientific Management and the General Strike of 1917: Workplace Restructuring in the New South Wales Railways and Tramways Department”, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, no. 4, September 1997, pp. 37-64.
⁴ Lyn H. Lofland, The Public Realm: Exploring the City’s Quintessential Social Territory, Aldine De Gruyter, New York, 1998, pp. 9-10, p. 20; Dan Coward, “Crime and Punishment: The Great Strike of NSW August to October, 1917”, in J. Iremonger, J. Merritt and G. Osborne (eds), Strikes: Studies in Twentieth Century Australian Social History, Sydney, 1973; George Rude, The Crowd In History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England 1730-1848, Wiley, New York, 1964; E.P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century”, Past and Present, no. 50, February 1971, pp. 76-136.
⁵ Steve Pile, “Introduction”, in Steve Pile and Michael Keith (eds), geographies of resistance, Routledge, London, 1997, p. 13, pp. 15-16.
⁶ Pile, ibid., pp. 27-31.
⁷ Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power: from Detroit to Disney World, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1991, p. 12, p. 16, pp. 18-19; Interview, Stan Jones, 8 September 1983 and 1988.
⁸ Stephen J. Deery and David H. Plowman, Australian Industrial Relations, 3^rd Edition, McGraw Hill Book Co., Sydney, 1991, p. 34.
⁹ Madeleine Hurd, “Class, Masculinity, Manners, and Mores: Public Space and Public Sphere in Nineteenth Century Europe”, in Eliz abeth Faue (ed.), The Working Classes and Urban Public Space: Special Issue of Social Science History , vol. 24, no. 1, Spring 2000, p. 75, pp. 80-1.
¹⁰ Taksa, “Defence not Defiance”, pp. 16-33; R.W. Connell and T.H. Irving, Class Structure in Australian History, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1980, p. 193.
¹¹ Interview, Frank Bollins, 1988.
¹² Stan Jones, 1988; Interview, Brian Dunnett, 10 May 1996.
¹³ NSW Parliamentary Debates (PD), Vol. 67 (1917-1918), p. 448, p. 491, pp. 495-96, p. 500; Sydney Morning Herald, 8 August 1917; J. B. Holme, “The NSW Strike Crisis of 1917”, Supplement to NSW Industrial Gazette, vol. 13, no. 2, 1918, Appendix no. 7, p. 65; NSW Government Railways, “Eveleigh Locomotive Workshops”, n.d., B253, SRAA, Sydney, p. 8; Mr. Justice Curlewis, Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Effects of the Workings of the System known as the Job and Time Cards System introduced into the Tramways and Railways Workshops of the Railways Commissioners, NSWPP, vol. 5-6, 1918, p. 10, p. 9, p. 27;
¹⁴ Interview, Stan Jones, 1988.
¹⁵ G.A. Patmore, A History of Industrial Relations in the NSW Government Railways: 1855-1929, Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, University of Sydney, 1985, pp. 357-58, pp. 439-46; Interview, Stan Jones, 1988; Alan Wilson, “The railway shop committees’ struggle”, Fifty Years of Struggle, vol. 1, pp. 45-6; Alan Wilson, “Australia’s First Shop Committees”, The Modern Unionist, June 1971, pp. 39-40.
¹⁶ The Railroad, 30 August 1938, p. 8.
¹⁷ Interview, Stan Jones, 1988.
¹⁸ OBU, 1 April 1919; Railway Union Gazette, 11 July 1925, p. 15, 10 September, 1926, p. 11.
¹⁹ Railway Union Gazette, 10 September, 1926, p. 11; The Ironworker, No. 2, 1 January, 1928, p. 14; The Railroad, 10 June 1929, p. 5; Redfern Branch Report, Quarterly Report of the Federated Society of Boilermakers and Iron Shipbuilders of Australia , vol. 6, no. 59, October 1929, p. 137.
²⁰ The Railroad, 10 June 1929, p. 5.
²¹ Interview, Stan Jones, 1988; Interview, Frank Bollins, 10 August 1998.
 ²² The Railroad, 10 April 1930, p. 22.
²³ The Ironworker, 1 January 1928, p. 14;
²⁴ Pile, “Introduction”, p. 14.
²⁵ The Ironworker, May-July 1929, p. 32; The Railroad, 10 March 1931, p. 10; 10 December 1931, p. 5; J.T. Lang, The Great Bust: The Depression of the Thirties, (1962) McNamara’s Books, Leura, 1980, pp. 302-5.
²⁶ The Railroad, 10 December 1931, p. 5; 10 April 1933, p. 8; 10 April 1935, p. 10; 10 May 1935, p. 12.
²⁷ The Labor Daily, 11 November 1938, p. 5; The Railroad, 15 November 1938, p. 14.
²⁸ “Mass rally of Eveleigh railway workers listen to an election speech from Jack Lang at Redfern, August 22, 1934”, Sydney: At Work and Play Photographic Collection, Still 00354, Mitchell Library, Sydney; “They will Vote For Labor To-morrow”, Photograph of Eveleigh workers listening to an election speech by J.H. Scullin, Leader of the Federal Labor Party, Barrier Daily Truth, 16 November 1928.
²⁹ Interview, Stan Jones, 1988; The Railroad, 17 August, 1937, p. 2.
³⁰ The Railroad, 10 February 1932, p. 2; 29 June, 1937, p. 11, 27 July 1937, p. 1; 1 April 1941, p. 5; 8 April 1941, p. 1; 15 July 1941, p. 1; Eveleigh News, 1954-1972.
³¹ The Railroad, 7 February 1939, p.1; 14 February 1939, p. 2; 21 March 1939, p. 2.
³² The Railroad, 4 April 1939, p. 2;
³³ The Railroad, 23 May 1939, p. 5; 30 May 1939, p. 7; 11 March 1941, p. 1; 1 July 1941, p. 3.
³⁴Pile, “Introduction”, p. 16; Interview, John Barnes, 31 March, 1999.
³⁵ Zukin, Landscapes of Power, p. 12, p. 16, pp. 18-19; Group Interview, Bill Driver, Frank Bollens, Gordon North, Bob Matthews, Bill Leech, Jack Bruce, Bob Rhymes, 17 November 1996; Interviews, (Jack) John Robert Bruce, 25 March 1996, Hal Alexander, 15 April, 1996; Frank Bollins, 1998; Bob Matthews, 1996; Group Interview, Jeff Aldridge, Syd (Spencer) Kain, Jack Lloyd, John Lee, Bob Rhymes, 5 March 1999.
³⁶ Taped conversation, Jeff Aldridge and Syd (Spencer) Kain, 14 March 1999.
³⁷ Bob Rhymes, Group Interview, 1996.
³⁸ Interview, Jack Bruce, 1996; Bob Rhymes, Group Interview, 1996.
³⁹ Bob Rhymes, Group Interview, 1996; Jeff Aldridge, Group Interview, 1999; Interviews, Louie Cavalierie, 5 November 1997, Bob Rhymes, 31 July 1998, Vince Russo, 30 October 1998; Conversation, Jeff Aldridge and Syd (Spencer) Kain, 1999.
⁴⁰ Pile, “Introduction”, p. 14, pp. 28-30; Bob Rhymes and Jack Bruce, Group Interview, 1996; Interview, Keith Johnson, 23 February 1996, Cavalierie, 1997.
⁴¹ Pile, “Introduction”, p. 29; Interview, Jim Jeckland, John Lee and Bob Rhymes, 22 October 1992.
⁴² Group Interview, 1999.
⁴³ Pile, “Introduction”, p. 28; Donald S. Moore, “Remapping Resistance: ground for struggle and the politics of place”, in Pile and Keith (eds), geographies, pp. 88-89, p. 91.
⁴⁴ Interviews, Louie Cavalierie, 1997, Vince Russo, 1998; Jack Lloyd, Group interview, 1999; Conversation, Jeff Aldridge and Syd (Spencer) Kain, 1999.
⁴⁵ Interview, Vince Russo, 1999.
⁴⁶ Interviews, Jack Bruce, John Willis, Keith Johnson, Brian Dunnett , Bob Matthews, 1996; Jeff Aldridge, Group Interview, 1999; The Eveleigh News, No. 1, May 1954,
⁴⁷ Interview, Brian Dunnett, 1996.
⁴⁸ John Gunn, Along Parallel Lines: A History of the Railways of New South Wales, 1850-1986, Melbourne, 1989, pp. 452-3.
⁴⁹ Interview, Brian Dunnett, 1996; Gunn, Along Parallel Lines, p. 440.