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           Shipping Stevedoring Port Services Hydrocarbons Diving  Sep-Oct 2008        |
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The Hungry Mile Name CampaignBy MUA News
The MUA is campaigning for the foreshore redevelopment of Sussex St wharves, East Darling Harbour, to be renamed "The Hungry Mile" in recognition of its maritime heritage and the men and women who worked the wharves and ships for two centuries. And we need your support! The Hungry Mile, where waterside workers sweated below decks for generations shifting the goods in and out of the harbour - as many as 24,000 up to the advent of containerisation - is now earmarked for parkland and a commercial centre. The Hungry Mile has inspired film, verse, song and rebellion. In the words of poet Ernest Antony: They tramp there in their legions on the morning dark and cold to beg the right to slave for bread from Sydney's lords of gold. The Hungry Mile, as it has been known since the Great Depression got its name from the men who trudged from wharf to wharf in search of work, some days going hungry, other days toiling around the clock without rest in tough and perilous conditions on 24-hour shifts under the degrading and inhuman Bull System. In the words of film-maker Keith Gow: Lined up like so many cattle, Worker was played against worker, Unionists against non-unionist. The Hungry Mile is a labour icon. It is where workers united in adversity in the great militant labour tradition of Australia. It is the birthplace of maritime unionism. Over the decades waterside workers struggled and won working conditions second to none. The Hungry Mile also marks the spot of some of the union movement's proudest solidarity protests - black bans on Japanese shipments pre- WWII, the Black Armada of Dutch arms during the Indonesian independence war in the forties, the French and US wars in Vietnam in the fifties and sixties, apartheid in South Africa, French nuclear tests in the Pacific, the Indonesian invasion of East Timor -a place where waterside workers time and time again took a stand. Help make this a part of Australian history, never to be forgotten. Watch a clip of the film about the Hungry Mile http://mua.org.au/aboutus/hungrymiles.html or download the full film http://www.mua.org.au/campaigns/general/hungry1.html Read the poem http://mua.org.au/campaigns/general/HungryMilepoem.html Then put in your submission to the NSW Government why Sydney should protect its heritage and adopt The Hungry Mile as the official name for East Darling Harbour. Go to http://www.newharbourheadland.com/EntryForm.cfm ENTRIES CLOSE this FRIDAY, August 11th Send us a copy and we will publish your submission on our website and in our journal at a later date. A short history The Hungry Mile and Maritime Invisibility by Rowan Cahill, President of the Sydney Branch of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, can be dowloaded below
Download more info: For further information
Public Campaigns: You can view MUA's publicly available campaign information in a variety of ways. Please select one of our public campaigns indexes. |
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This page: http://mua.org.au/campaigns/general/hungrymile.html Site proudly designed and engineered by Social Change Online |
© 2001 Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) |
