The following is a lightly edited transcript of the talk Sam gave at the Australian National Maritime Museum on Thursday 4 December 2025, to launch his exhibition “View from the Docks”. Sam’s exhibit sits directly opposite the historic “Wharfies Mural”, the main focus of the talk. The exhibition is running for a few more months and entry is free, so please go and check it out. The Australian National Maritime Museum is located at 2 Murray street, Darling Harbour, Sydney, Gadigal Country.

People are deeply curious about the docks.

The port is right there, the cranes are giant shapes looming, so often visible, stretches of landscape inviting reflection and curiosity. But the docks are also completely inaccessible. They are non-spaces really, to most people. Exclusion zones.

There are other reasons the docks are compelling to people — any job that features in Lego land or other kids’ toys draws a simple kind of curiosity. Dock work also seems like “real work”, at odds with other, more abstracted labour. But make no mistake, wharfies are also alienated from their labour. Alienated as fuck.

There is a certain romanticisation of maritime industries. I would argue that this romanticisation is often misplaced, as well as outmoded. I can’t say for sure, but I think when people picture life on the docks, they might be picturing a different waterfront, one from a bygone era. Every shift, we see punters peering through the cyclone fencing that locks us inside the terminal.

So, for better or worse, people are curious about places they can’t see. “Black box sites”, as my architect friend calls them. These kinds of places are also where some of the best art comes from, in my opinion.

Art helps people peer into the docks.

But it also helps the people at the wharves to see themselves, which I think can be an important thing.

Art also helps articulate our political struggles, which are in reality largely invisible. That is the challenge of the artist who is concerned with struggle: to make manifest power relations, social relations, amorphous shape-shifting dynamics. Things that cannot be seen with the human eye. How would you paint your relationship with your boss, for instance? That’s an invisible thing. How would you draw your relationship with the means of production? You kind of can’t.

But politically engaged artists attempt to do this impossible thing, in order to bring people into the fight, and to capture the beauty of the fight. Because it is beautiful, and there is meaning in this kind of life. Thankfully, new people are always coming up, and coming into this movement, all of the time. So you have to constantly say the same things, over and over again. We also make art so that, hopefully, workers in the future will remember the things that we think are important.

The Sydney branch of the Maritime Union of Australia is arguably the nucleus of the oldest wharfie union on planet Earth, having been founded in 1872 in a pub in the waterside suburb of The Rocks, not far from where the Sydney Opera House was built one hundred years later.

The Sydney branch of the MUA has long been the most militant and creative branch of any trade union in this country, in my opinion. It remains to this day remarkably staunch, and also communist-led — the only branch of any trade union in this country that can still boast that. The MUA has long understood that industrial struggle doesn’t end with wages and conditions, and that our unions are a way to manifest democracy en masse. Unionism is democracy replicated a thousand times over.

In the 1950s, around the time that wharfies started painting the above mural, union leader and militant commie Tom Nelson wrote this about the previous decade or so:

with the shorter working day and the development of action against the owners, came a great upsurge of activity. Various sporting bodies came into existence. A movie film group to entertain members was established. A unit to produce plays, and songs of the struggles and… ambitions of the union was encouraged. Thus we began to sever our dependence on the boss for his culture and entertainment. This period has been largely preoccupied with the struggle against the ruling class, whose ambitions were to drive us back.

So this is seventy or so years ago.

My dear friend Rosie sent me this quote from the book Wharfies: The history of the waterside workers federation by Margo Beasley. Turns out I was absolutely not the first struggling artist to find themselves working on the docks. Actually, I think it might be a bit of an archetype:

Perhaps the most exceptional developments in this period were the artistic activities fostered in Sydney Branch. They were aided by the actors, artists, film makers, musicians, poets and writers who, unable to make a living at their chosen professions, found themselves in wharf labourers’ ranks. Sydney Branch headquarters in Sussex Street was extensively remodelled in 1951 and 1952 to provide a canteen, art studio, hall, facilities for film production and musical performance, a library and a reading room. [My emphasis.]

This building [the new maritime union headquarters] also housed the New Theatre for several years. An art group, through which lessons were conducted at night for wharfies and on weekends for children, was established by artists… Banners on contemporary political and industrial issues were produced in the studio for May Day marches and demonstrations…

The establishment of the innovative Waterside Workers’ Film Unit was recognition by the branch leadership of the importance of cinema as both an art form and a communication medium…

(The film unit is still going to this day, remarkably, and even recorded this lecture the night it was delivered.)

Playwrights and actors also used to produce politically educational plays, plays that explored working life, which were performed for workers during their smoke breaks. The plays were written to last the exact length of the smoko, and toured across sites and industries. This was commonplace.

All of this is to say that the industrial battles and the industrial consciousness of the membership was what informed the artistic practises of the union, and i would argue, vice versa — with the art and the industrial militancy feeding back and forth into one another, in a kind of swirling double helix. Tom Nelson put that point this way, talking about the wharfies mural: “We decided to put our history on the wall”. “It was our struggle — our political and economic struggles — that developed our cultural policies”.

Back in 1954, it was wharfie Rod Shaw that came up with the initial idea to paint a mural. It was originally intended to wrap around the whole canteen space of the union headquarters on Sussex street. He sketched the initial design out on the walls, in chalk, while workers eating in the canteen looked on.

He wanted to depict a kind of drill-core-sample of the history of the place, our industry, our work and our fumbling attempts to make a better world. As former Sydney branch head Paul McAleer said a few years ago, the mural

shows workers arm in arm with others, in defiance to this rotten system that continues to try subjugate us to the worst forms of abuses and exploitation… [The mural] inspires solidarity with others, not only across the Australian waterfront, but globally.

I would argue that the mural is an almost psychedelic collapsing of spaces and events. A wharfie clutches a little red book, the writings of Karl Marx. He is painted leaning forward, pointing out a path to follow. I also reference Marx in one of my artworks that sits on the opposite wall.

The wharfies mural also depicts a lot of exhausted workers. Men lining up, in “the pick-up”, hoping to be chosen for a shift: a common practice before the union civilised the industry. This is something I also explore in my work opposite the mural, how much this has changed, how much maybe it hasn’t — we don’t wait for shifts by lining up along the wharf anymore. We wait for an app to tell us if we’re working or not now. Same same, but different.

The mural shows workers lugging giant sacks, bagged wheat, wool, iron — all duties that would now be carried out with the aid of machinery, and much of it buried inside of anonymous shipping containers.

The mural depicts police brutality — still obviously a very real thing, especially now our police are militarised and armed with chemical weapons, when back then all they had were batons. Last year, we saw police attack and arrest MUA members and officials for taking part in Palestine solidarity actions in the ports of Sydney.

The mural also depicts the interconnectedness of labour struggle. Socialists don’t just care about the union movement because workers are having a hard time and that tugs on our heart strings. Nah, it’s also because through organised workers, we can talk to other people outside of our usual silos, and through striking, we can give all other social movements teeth.

The mural depicts rural workers, miners, peace activists, and workers who have been killed in war — another sickening perennial.

The artists tried to fold in other campaigns and historical moments of significance to everyday people: the fight for the 8-hour day (first won in Australia), universal suffrage (which is the right for everyone to have a vote, something we now take for granted), the formation of the Australian Labor Party, the world’s first labour party (unfortunately the mural doesn’t have time or space to explore whether or not this was a mistake), the General Strike (which is a strike of many or all industries, across a city or country), dole queues, anti-fascist organising, along with what we now call OHS tragedies. The mural attempts to give a head nod to decades of working-class history.

There’s also one of my favourite bit, this extremely faggy depiction of a wharfie in nothing but hot pants, for some reason, with their nice big butt sticking out proudly. I would love to know the back story of this section of the mural if any older comrades have any insight.

Anyway, the mural was, and remains, an ambitious artwork. It took a decade to complete, with most of the work conceived and painted by dockworkers. Hundreds of people stood back and admired the mural as it took shape in the union canteen, offered suggestions and input — argued, modelled, picked up a paintbrush.

It was a collaborative and collective effort, which mirrors the dock work that it depicts. Almost everyone’s work is inherently very collaborative, but those in the maritime industry especially. So again, the art mirrors the industry.

Most of the people who worked on the mural were wharfies. Some were artists who later became wharfies, some were wharfies who became artists. One dockworker, Clem Millward, had studied painting, and came to work night shifts on the wharves so he would be free to paint during the day. Not that different to my situation, really. Millward said that painting the mural “involved a lot of people, a lot of time, a lot of thought, you know a lot of everything – a lot of heart”. Another wharfie, Sonny Glynn had never trained formally as an artist, which obviously doesn’t matter — he became one of the mural’s key contributors. Wharfie Ralph Sawyer also worked on this mural during the 1950s. He continued painting placards and union banners until the end of the century.

It seems that the process of developing the mural seems was generative, and kind of stitched into the organic life of the union for many years. It’s as if the actual visual manifestation of the mural is only one aspect of the thing. Sure it exists, it looks great, there it is, but it’s possible that the actual making of the thing that may have been more important than the finished object.

The long-time headquarters of the union, on the walls of which the mural was painted, was sold in 1991. One of the conditions of the sale that the union insisted on was that the mural would be preserved. Wharfie and MUA hero Jimmy Donovan (who I drew a portrait of, which hangs on the opposite wall) went to art classes at that original union hall from when he was nine years old, with his mum running the class.

He grew up watching the mural being slowly painted, as he moved into dock work, and he was in permanent awe, from all reports. He was one of the murals biggest admirers and defenders, and his life was kind of tethered to it — another swirling double helix.

Anyway, when the union moved, Jimmy was part of the effort to make sure the mural was painstakingly removed from the guts of the former building — which was not an easy task. It was painted directly onto the thick old walls of the building, not on plasterboard or cladding. It took an enormous amount of effort and care to remove the mural, reportedly requiring lasers and advanced, expensive, complex technology.

But they got it done, because I guess that’s what workers do. And the mural was then transported and suspended in the new union rooms. Gough Whitlam came to the opening.

Then, in 1996, the MUA moved again, and the mural was at this time donated to the Australian National Maritime Museum. The museum was better placed to care for this vulnerable, beloved object. The mural underwent at least two years of conservation treatment paid for by the Maritime Union of Australia. One single panel of the mural was exhibited at the musuem from 2008, but the vast majority of the artwork was locked away in storage for thirty years. The union was not delighted. The museum didn’t have the resources or the space to put it on permanent display. Perhaps it was also too hot politically, who knows.

Three decades went by with the mural in storage. This drove the wharfies insane, with retired members in later years occasionally barrelling up from the union rooms to the museum in gangs to interrogate management about why their mural was still hidden away.

Then, in 2022, toward the very end of his life, Jimmy Donovan worked with MUA officials Warren Smith and Paul Keating (not that Paul Keating, the good one) and the staff at the Museum to secure a long-term, permanent installation of this work.

Australia doesn’t have a lot of works like this — and especially not in big formal institutions like the publicly funded Australian National Maritime Museum.

The permanent display of this work was timed for the 150th anniversary of the Maritime Union of Australia, in 2022. Paddy Crumlin, then head of the union, invited me to come along to this celebration, and flew me up from Melbourne. I had just helped judge ‘The Struggles That Made Us’, an occasional art prize that the MUA runs (which demonstrates the unions ongoing commitment to the arts — “art is union business” — is not a forgotten slogan of yesteryear).

At this celebration a handful of MUA Sydney branch officials and members asked me if I wanted to work on the waterfront. They could see that I’m feral for collectivism I suppose, that I’m a committed unionist, but perhaps they also knew something I didn’t know at that time, about the history of artists and the wharf, and about how working on the docks could benefit my relationship to struggle and my contribution to the movement. And that also the good wages that wharfies have built up could perhaps take the boot off my little artist neck. I said I was all good. As much as I love Sydney, I didn’t want to move there.

At that event in 2022, I remember telling Deputy National Secretary Warren Smith that I felt moved by the mural, and that I would like to write something about it someday, partly to push myself to think more about it, to learn about it, and also to try to explain to other people why it’s special and why it matters. I didn’t know I would exhibit across from the mural years later. I also didn’t know that I was about to start working on the docks in Melbourne, a month or two later.

Fast forward a few years, and the Maritime Museum and I started working on the ‘View From The Docks’ exhibition of my work. The museum collects and displays works relating to all aspects of waterways around this continent, but they hadn’t collected much contemporary work about the docks — not in a while. When we were initially discussing what my exhibition might feature, the curators suggested I produce a contemporary version of the Wharfies Mural. This suggestion made me shit myself, just quietly. There are so many reasons this would not be possible. One, I’m one individual gronk, not dozens of wharfies. We don’t have a decade to paint the thing.

These days I currently work very limited hours, which at present gives me a very different experience of the job, compared to my workmates.

I have only been working on the docks for a little over three years, which is a millisecond in this industry. Also, my work is pretty lowbrow, so I’m not sure I could pull off this kind of earnest mural. My work is scrappy and goofy in an intentional way — there is something about cartoons and using humour that encourages people to engage with my work more readily, and in a way that feels fitting for this era. Constructivist, angular, militant, stoic artwork looks great. A lot of leftist art has looked like that through history, but at the moment only 10 per cent of people in this country are union members, strikes are down since the 1970s by 97 per cent, and we have the most repressive anti-strike laws of any OECD nation. Consciousness is not really at a high watermark, so goofy cartoons feel fitting. There’s an inherent self-deprecation to cartoons that I resonate with.

So no, no way could I make a contemporary version of this mural, I am not worthy. And I’m also not entirely sure our moment is worthy either.

But as a thought experiment: what would we depict, if we were to try to paint a modern-day version of the Wharfies Mural?

We could include something about how casualisation has returned to the wharf, in a big, new kind of way.

Any contemporary mural about the waterfront would have to feature giant robotics. Many wharves now have 90 per cent less labour than they did when the wharfies mural was painted. So perhaps the mural would need to feature more metal than flesh.

And I’m not even sure how to visualise AI. How do you draw robots possessed with the spirit of Elon Musk and free market capitalism?

We could paint someone enjoying long stretches of downtime, which at my work there is a lot of, thanks in large part to the automation. This down time is when I drew several of the pieces that form the “View from the Docks” exhibition.

The people enjoying downtime depicted in the mural could be sitting in a pretty comfortable crib hut, playing chess, gambling, doom scrolling, learning a language or, yeh, drawing little pictures.

We would paint industrial accidents, faces smashed in through falls, teeth knocked out by metal, fingers snapped again and again, unreported near miss, near miss, near miss, smash.

We would paint union members and officials of the Sydney branch getting dragged off by police for standing in solidarity with Palestine. We would paint women on the waterfront, more and more of them coming into the landscape, and the unfair double standards and the stupid bullshit they face. We would have to paint a far more diverse workforce than the one depicted in the mural, which was painted when the White Australia policy upheld a white supremacists wet dream. We would have to paint the odd MUA member gunning for a return to these policies, through One Nation. We could try to paint the fight against automation at DP world, and the MUA’s years long, ongoing solidarity efforts alongside the Gomeroi people in their opposition to the Santos Narrabri gas mining project.

We could paint the unions efforts to ensure a just transition, to make sure we have sustainable offshore work, beautiful expansive offshore wind farms, gas rigs being decommissioned and brought to shore by well-paid and safe seafarers.

We could paint the union movement’s complicated relationship with the Labor Party, our overreliance on them, too often asking them to fight on our behalf rather than fighting for ourselves. Anthony Albanese might be painted as a puddle of skin on the floor, unsupported by a spine.

Perhaps a group of workers should paint all of this. The original mural was, after all, incomplete. It was supposed to wrap around the entire canteen. Communist splits and divisions ended that. The mural itself is a giant metaphor.

Like the 1950s Wharfies Mural, a contemporary version would be a mixture of victories and defeats, gaining ground in some ways, losing it in others.

There are no permanent victories and no permanent defeats. That’s why the Wharfies Mural is great. It lacks the didactic, simplicity of some early communist art. Australia prefers a bit of realism, and a healthy dose of self-deprecation. There’s probably as much about loss as there is about gain in the Wharfies Mural.

But, as an international workers movement, we are not afraid of celebrating our victories. The production, and the endurance of this artwork, its proud, permanent display in the National Maritime Museum, is, I think, one of those victories.

Huge respect to everyone who worked on it. Painting it, and getting it up here. If you can see the water, join the MUA!