An investigation of rank-and-file participation in the three large-scale industrial disputes that marked the onset of the Depression in Australia reveals glimpses of some of the individuals involved. This paper looks at three of those people in close-up: Chas Collins, a Brisbane railwayman and Communist, sacked for his stance in the 1928 waterside strike; Eileen Egan, a Melbourne woman who defied the authorities during the 1929 timber strike; and Tadeusz Wlodarczyk, mining electrician and one-time confidante of the NSW Minister of Mines, who sided with locked-out coal miners following the police shootings at Rothbury in December 1929. The names of Egan and Collins appeared in newspapers only fleetingly, while Wlodarczyk gained short-lived notoriety before returning to a life lived away from the public eye. This paper considers the information available about them in various sources, and the limits of the historical record concerning their lives, and by implication, those of many others.