The Eveleigh railway workshops opened in 1887 in Sydney. It can be considered during the first half of the 20th Century as a central rail establishment strongly emblematic for the country. Indeed, in addition to its considerable size (3 000 workers between 1907 and 1950) he was led by the State and located closer to the Parliament, within a public space of foreground. Eveleigh thus played a decisive role in the great general strike of 1917, resulting in an overwhelming labour defeat that marked for decades Australian workers. These railway workshops represent a privileged observatory to understand how the space can both be a challenge and a mean for the working-class. Implementing the problem of spatial practices, this article analyses the confrontation between workers and leaders around the process of labour and the right of workers to organize collectively at their place of work. The study of spaces in particular enlightens, on the one hand, the manner in which managers tried to control the movement of workers. On the other hand, it reveals how the latter fought to occupy strategic places, thwart the direction in its willingness to establish borders. It was also to increase their control of the labour process and their autonomy from the coaching of bureaucracy, finally to define and defend different ways of working and living. Such practices helped workers of Eveleigh to rework the space for their own purpose. In short, they were essential for the implementation of a space policy and the transformation of the status of the workshops, these outposts of the fight which became stakes of victory. By their situations on this disputed soil, various locations are studied, including "red square" and the entrance portals, which had acquired a status of relative autonomy whose workers used to frustrate the measures that were imposed on them during the course of their work and who deprived them of freedom.