The Hungry Mile and ‘Maritime Invisibility’

By Rowan Cahill

The majority of exports and imports that sustain and nourish this island continent are maritime reliant. No ships, no seafarers, no maritime workers, no ports, no Australia as we know it; as simple as that. Maritime workers have contributed significantly to the development of this nation and its wealth, and continue to do so.

Sydney is a port city, a city built around, and owing its origin to, a port. The streetscape of the Central Business District retains skeletal evidence of this, with backbone roads running inland from the former maritime hub of Circular Quay.

A long, ongoing, process of mechanisation after World War 2, dramatically changed and helped improve working conditions at sea and ashore. Until then, however, maritime work was labour intensive, working conditions were primitive.

It was unromantic, unsung work involving the exploitation of the human body to the extent that exhaustion, death, injury, often crippling, and bodily breakdown were not uncommon.

The sea took its toll as well, even in the modern period after steam and diesel power had replaced the age-old, often dangerous and injury causing, sail technology. The twentieth century abounds with merchant marine casualties off the Australian coast.

While maritime workers generated vast profits for employers and investors, they were poorly paid. As historian Michael Cannon has written about Australian shipowners in his book Life in the Cities (1975), "Nowhere in the psychology of these self-made men was there any place for the idea that lower-class families should share in the increased wealth of the nation".

Confronting this attitude and contesting the power relationship involved, with a view to improving their working conditions, maritime workers variously began organising trade unions during the early 1870s in many of the ports that dotted the Australian coast.

By 1902 the two largest sectors of the maritime workforce, the seamen and the wharf labourers (wharfies), had established their own national trade union organisations, the Seamen's Union of Australia (SUA) and Waterside Workers' Federation (WWF). Over the course of the century these unions successfully improved the wages and conditions of their members, and in 1993 amalgamated to form the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA).

Maritime workers and their unions have long been an integral and visible part of the life of Sydney, until technological change gradually shifted port activity to Botany Bay during the 1970s onwards, and Darling Harbour and the Rocks were gentrified in pursuit of the tourist dollar. Until then, maritime workplaces on the city foreshores were part of the Sydney cityscape, as were the communities of Woolloomooloo and The Rocks where many maritime workers and their families lived in close-knit communities during the nineteenth and well into the twentieth centuries.

In political campaigns, protests and demonstrations, especially during the tumultuous Cold War days of the 1950s and 1960s, large contingents of wharfies and seamen were dramatically, theatrically, present, identifiably so in large numbers, with union banners and placards.

Modern technology changed the nature of maritime work, and greatly reduced the number of people employed in the maritime industry; the process continues today.

A major result of this is that Sydney maritime workers are not as visible as they once were. Technology has changed too the nature of the waterfront; maritime workplaces, once on full view to the public, are now locked behind security and safety fencing.

In a sense the maritime worker has disappeared from Sydney as a cityscape, and in 2003 the State government of NSW announced its determination to eventually end Sydney's role as a working port, thus freeing up foreshore land for development.

Despite this 'disappearance', organized maritime workers still have significant political and industrial clout, something the anti-union government of Prime Minister John Howard learned during the bitter confrontation with the MUA in 1998

But there is another sort of invisibility regarding maritime workers; as maritime historian Frank Broeze wrote in his book Island Nation (1998), maritime workers "have often been repressed in Australia's historiography, not least because the militant wharfies and seamen who helped tame distance were living proof that Australia was not the country of conflict-free consensus that conservative orthodoxy preached for so long."

A Sydney site that challenges this invisibility is the 'Hungry Mile', the name maritime workers gave to what was the mile of wharves between Darling Harbour and Miller's Point, today a mix of pleasure palaces, tourist venues, and remnant maritime industrial facilities, accessed by strolling along Sussex Street and Hickson Road. In its day it was a political and industrial site that has claims to being the engine room of a great deal of the wealth of the state of NSW, and of the nation.

It was to this mile of wharves that maritime labourers in the nineteenth century and on into the 1940s, tramped each day regardless of the weather to find casual, low paid work

The bull system pitted worker against worker, at times violently. For many labourers it was a despised, humiliating, demeaning experience. As historian Margot Beasley explains in her book Wharfies (1996): "Under this system, men assembled in a public place to be chosen for the day's work by foremen or stevedoring agents of the shipping companies. Favourites for work were the "bulls", men of such physical strength they could work longer and harder than others. Such a system also favoured compliant and docile workers and facilitated discrimination against militant or troublesome men who might agitate for improved conditions. Bribery for work was another result."

For many maritime workers the Hungry Mile and their associated experiences, tramping for employment from pickup to pickup regardless of weather, being sized up by employers' agents, scrutinised, selected, rejected, the daily routine, the competition between individuals and between gangs of workers, the angst, the uncertainty, the corruption, resulting senses of injustice, of being demeaned, victimised, came to represent the essence of capitalism, and helped shape the direction and colour of their politics, and their relationship with employers. For generations of maritime workers, the Hungry Mile lit the fires of social justice in their bellies.

Alongside its industrial and political roles, the Hungry Mile was an urban area, a site of working class domesticity. Generations of maritime workers and their families lived within the geography of the Hungry Mile, so close they were part of it.

From the government-built flats for the families of maritime workers on Observatory Hill, to the long rows of tenements in Kent Street, to the rooming houses on Sussex Street, one of which in 1907 was packing in 200 maritime labourers, a community developed. Historian Winnifred Mitchell has described the lives of families within this community as being "like those in a coal-mining village".

It was in this urban geography close to the Hungry Mile that families lived, children were raised, and thousands of future workers learned about the world, how they related to it, and how it was to be faced.

Rowan Cahill is a historian and writer, and is President of the Sydney Branch of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History.