The ACTU has announced the launch of the Australian Workers Film Guide, an archival website that’s the result of a research project at Swinburne University.
Spawned by the need for greater documentation on essential Australian labour history films, the guide is the first of its kind to provide a comprehensive record of such films, and is intended for educational and cultural purposes.
The guide covers everything from feature films to documentaries, promotional videos and even TV commercials. There are also a handful of interviews and extended on-camera oral histories, and a select number of historical working class newsreels.
Dr Jeff Bird, filmmaker and Lecturer in Film & Television at Swinburne University of Technology, is the author and project manager of the Australian Workers Film Guide. Having a personal interest in the history of the working class and being a filmmaker himself, it was seeing the National Archives in Washington, DC and its preseveration of American labour history that first spawned the idea of the Guide. ‘It was remarkable,’ he said.
Bird also noted that while many books had been written on the history of narrative film in Australia, no comprehensive studies had been conducted on Australian working class documentaries and non-fiction screen media.
When the project was in its initial stages, Bird assumed there would be roughly 50 titles to go through. Some 400 films later, the mammoth guide was ready to launch. ‘We unearthed a large number of forgotten and lesser know films,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot more out there than I thought!’
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While the site doesn’t provide streaming access to said films, Bird and associates have meticulously prepared each entry with information on the filmmakers, length, and genre of each film, along with educational content summaries. This also includes links and/or general information on where the films can be accessed.
Bird is a director of a handful of films about Australia worker’s movements, most notably Blood on the Coal, a documentary covering 150 years of stories from the Queensland coalfields, and Last Stand at Nymboida, about the worker’s co-op that emerged after a mining disaster in 1976.
‘Having made a number of films concerned with Australian labour history, I’ve spent quite a bit of time delving into archives in search of footage and visual records,’ he said. ‘In a way I just stumbled into these stories, and it was my colleague Paddy Gorman that really pushed for this project that would help tell these untold stories.’
‘We came up with the idea to create a guide of working class films – something that could stimulate a wider interest in this relatively unexplored aspect of Australian history, and be a useful resource for other filmmakers, researchers, academics and film commentators.’
‘It was important to me to see this part of film history preserved, because it really shows you the human element of all these workers’ movements that have come before us,’ he said. ‘The conditions we have today didn’t come from nowhere, they had to be fought for. And it’s so important to remember that’.
The Guide is the result of a research project conducted by Swinburne University of Technology. It was funded by the Union Education Foundation, a charitable trust established by the Australian Council of Trade Unions.
The Australian Workers Film Guide is now live.
