So – who’s heard of the 1946 Pilbara Marrngu (Aboriginal) Stockmen’s strike – a full 20 years before the Wave Hill walk-off? For that was immortalised by Gough Whitlam pouring sand into Vincent Lingiari’s hand, leading to the equivocal success of the 1968 Equal Pay decision? A few in the West were alerted to their State’s pastoral pioneering in 2022 by the late Nyaparu William Gardiner’s paintings of the Old People who survived the strike shown in Perth. But most of Australia remains in blithe ignorance of an Indigenous industrial action that should be in every school history book, and may well be better celebrated on May1st next year when we will ‘celebrate’ its 80th anniversary.

A few might recall the 1987 documentary film, ‘How the West Was Lost’, which took out an Australian Human Rights Award that year. Fortunately, it’s now been restored by the master, Ray Argall, and it was shown to a packed house in Sydney at the Cinema Reborn Festival, and will be shown in Melbourne at the Lido on Friday. In Sydney it was introduced by director David Noakes and Rose Murray, a descendant of the Nyangumardu and Nyamal strikers.

In 1987, though, a number of them – now white-bearded and grizzled – were able to give their direct experience of the hardships of the working life on Pilbara stations running a million sheep and entirely dependent on native labour to operate. Amazingly, it was less hard to survive on strike for an uncertain number of years – officially three, though many in the film claimed to still be on strike in 1987. And they did so without food supplied by the stations, denied post-War ration books when they had money to buy anything, with constant police hasselling and periods of riotous imprisonment and squatters with guns. And ironically, their survival resulted from the first concerted efforts at mining in WA – something soon noticed by certain White men!

The mining came about through one Don McLeod. A Communist with a mining bent, he’d been investigating the Pilbara during the 40s when he fell sympathetically in with the Strelley Mob. They had actually begun talking of a strike in 1942 against their often rotten meat feed, with four shillings a fortnight in pay for their slave labour. As they planned methodically, a 6 week conference was held at Skull Springs – now why was it called that?? – to select two leaders, Dooley Bib Bin and the ‘half-caste’ Clancy McKenna; and secretive visits to all the stations prepared the Mob for action on May 1st 1946 – Labour Day. McLeod became their intermediary with the authorities.

Of course, these were people without calendars. So sheets with the days to be marked off were distributed – shown in reconstructed sections of the film. For Noakes had consulted well in advance – especially with elder Jacob Oberdoo – and mixed up such dramatic scenes with sometimes proud, sometimes pained story-telling to a fascinated younger generation, joyous corroborees and sporadic historic reportage – from mainly left-wing sources, as the State newspapers were told not to report this “communistic” action. Scenes where large groups of the old men ‘played’ at being chained up and marched off to prison, as groups of 33 actually were, were a delight to watch. By the time 66 were crowded into the cells still chained, singing through the night, the cops gave up and set them free.

Much narration is done by Don McLeod, who’d published a book of the same name as the film in 1984. He died in 1999, aged 90, and is buried on Strelley Station. But he still looks lean and mean in the film as he calmly recounts events, sitting in a paddock – no doubt on one of the properties now owned by the former strikers. And there were 800 of them – quite a number to corral. At the time, it was illegal for them to leave a station without the squatter’s permission – though church and left-wing activists brought an action in 1949 allowing the Blacks to legally organise. It was then, too, that the Seamens Union backed the strike by refusing to handle wool from affected stations – resulting in a 30 bob a week pay offer. This isn’t mentioned in the film – because, I suspect, many participants refused to go back to work for Whitefellars.

As William Gardiner commented on his exhibition, ‘He is Myself’ in 2022, “Doing these paintings is how I remember our Old People. These pictures I’m showing you are from my memories. It’s a hard life in those days and we had to change a lot in this life”. That could just as easily be said of the film as well.

And ‘How the West was Lost’ is available from Ronin Films.