Francis De Groot’s Sword is an episode from the series Australia’s Heritage – National Treasures with Chris Taylor, produced in 2009.

Series Synopsis
Take a voyage of discovery with Chris Taylor as he reveals the secrets behind a fascinating mix of treasures from Australia’s National Heritage List. In the third season of five-minute documentaries in the National Treasures series, Taylor travels around Australia delivering historical snapshots of objects and places from the National Heritage List. He talks with experts and enthusiasts, revealing fascinating insights into our famous and not-so-famous past.

Australia’s Heritage – National Treasures with Chris Taylor is a Screen Australia National Documentary Program produced in association with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and made with the assistance of the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts.

The building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge as a transport facility linking the city with the north shore of the harbour was a major event in Australia’s history, and represented a pivotal step in the development of modern Sydney and one of Australia’s most important cities.
Convict architect Francis Greenway had proposed a bridge over Sydney Harbour to Governor Macquarie as early as 1815. Tenders in 1900 to design a bridge resulted in all 24 schemes being rejected. Eventually a design for an arched bridge was begun in 1912, completed in 1916, and construction began in 1923.
Completion of the bridge in 1932 coincided with the darkest days of the Depression and many of the bridge workers released from their construction tasks swelled the growing ranks of the unemployed. New South Wales Premier Jack Lang championed the workers’ cause. This, and Lang’s decision to snub British royalty at the bridge’s opening, over which he would preside instead, incurred the anger of the New Guard, a right wing militia organisation styling itself as a citizen’s army to assist the police maintain civil order in times of unrest.
Funded by the ‘establishment’ and drawing heavily on the veterans of the First World War, the New Guard, of which Captain Francis De Groot was a leading member, saw its role as defending the peace and keeping subdued any potential uprising by unionists, the unemployed and the working classes all of whom they viewed as communists. Lang with his support for the working classes and his defiance of the establishment’s subservience to the financial institutions of Britain was an anathema to the New Guard who viewed him as a danger to Australian society.
The events surrounding the opening of the bridge embodied all the political tensions of the time.