Hot metal: Material culture and tangible labour 9781526106032

Citation preview

Hot metal

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also available in the Studies in Design and Material Culture series

STUDIES IN

DESIGN

The matter of art Materials, practices, cultural logics, c.1250–1750 edited by christy anderson, anne dunlop and pamela h. smith Bringing modernity home general editors Writings on popular design and material culture Christopher Breward judith attfield and Design and the modern magazine Bill Sherman edited by jeremy aynsley and kate forde The culture of fashion founding editor A new history of fashionable dress Paul Greenhalgh christopher breward ‘The autobiography of a nation’ The 1951 Festival of Britain becky e. conekin The culture of craft Status and future edited by peter dormer Material relations Domestic interiors and the middle-class family, 1850–1910 jane hamlett Arts and Crafts objects imogen hart Representations of British motoring david jeremiah Interiors of Empire Objects, space and identity within the Indian subcontinent, c. 1800–1947 robin jones The Edwardian house The middle-class home in Britain 1880–1914 helen c. long The birth of modern London The development and design of the city elizabeth mckellar Interior design and identity edited by susie mckellar and penny sparke The material Renaissance michelle o’malley and evelyn welch Bachelors of a different sort Queer aesthetics, material culture and the modern interior john potvin Chinoiserie Commerce and critical ornament in eighteenth-century Britain stacey sloboda Material goods, moving hands Perceiving production in England, 1700–1830 kate smith Crafting design in Italy From post-war to postmodernism catharine rossi Establishing dress history lou taylor The study of dress history lou taylor

& MATERIAL

CULTURE

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Hot metal Material culture and tangible labour Jesse Adams Stein

Manchester University Press

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Copyright © Jesse Adams Stein 2016 The right of Jesse Adams Stein to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents  Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN  978 1 7849 9434 1 hardback First published 2016 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in Linotype Compatil with Transat display by Koinonia, Manchester

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Dedicated to all those who laboured at the NSW Government Printing Office, Sydney, 1840–1989.

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Contents



List of figures page ix List oral history interviews xiii Author’s note xv Note on the text xvi Acknowledgements xvii I  Image, space, voice

 1 Introduction: labour, design and culture   2 The visual at work: oral history and institutional photographs

3 25

  3 Spatial and architectural memory in oral histories of working life 49 II  Technological transitions

  4 The continuity of craft masculinities: from letterpress to offset-lithography

73

  5 ‘Going with the technology’: the final generation of hot-metal compositors 98 III  Challenges and creative resilience

  6 (Re)making spaces and ‘working out ways’: women in the

printing industry

131

  7 Making things on the side: creativity at a time of institutional decline

160

 8 Conclusion: factory closures, material culture and loss

181

List of terms and abbreviations Select bibliography Index

198 202 209

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Figures

1 NSW Government Printing Office fabric patch (photograph page 9 by the author). 2 NSW Government Printing Office pressroom, showing Whitefriars machine, 1907, Sydney (courtesy of the State Library of New South 9 Wales, Sydney, Government Printing Office 1–10940). 3 The new NSW Government Printing Office Building, Ultimo, c.  1960s (photograph courtesy of John Cusack, reproduced with 16 permission). 4 Senior manager Bill Bright, incoming Government Printer Don West, outgoing Government Printer Victor Charles Nathaniel Blight, senior managers Sid Hampson and Fred Layt, 1973 (courtesy and copyright of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, Govern19 ment Printing Office 3–22215). 5 Two views from the Gov building towards Darling Harbour Railway Goods Yard and Sydney city, c. 1960s (photographs courtesy of 20 John Cusack, reproduced with permission). 6 NSW Government Printing Office photographers Alan Townsend, Alan Clifford and David Robinson, c. 1960s (courtesy of Alan 27 Townsend, reproduced with permission). 7 Ray Edwards hand-binding books, 1981 (courtesy and copyright of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, Government Printing 28 Office 3–17542). 8 Granville May, 1987, photograph for the Annual Report (courtesy and copyright of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, 29 Government Printing Office 4–45991). 9 Oral history interviewees Ray Utick and George Larden, former 32 press-machinists, 2012 (photograph by the author). 10 Slippery dip, Manly Baths, Sydney, 1947 (courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, Government Printing Office 38 1–36553).

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x

Figures 11 Alan Leishman pouring acid toner, 1962 (courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, Government Printing Office 2–22009). 12 Bob Day seated at a Monotype keyboard, 1985 (courtesy and copyright of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, Government Printing Office 4–38079). 13 The new site of the Gov, Ultimo, 1950, before the removal of the fig trees (courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, Government Printing Office 1–07729). 14 NSW Premier John Joseph Cahill and Government Printer V. C. N. Blight inspect the new Gov building, 23 February 1959 (courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney. Government Printing Office 2–13274) 15 The Photographic Section at morning tea, 1964 (courtesy of Graeme Murray, reproduced with permission). 16 The Gov building, showing the ramp to nowhere, 1985 (courtesy and copyright of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, Government Printing Office 4–40363). 17 John Lumley (right) and another worker lay the woodblock floors at the Government Printing Office, c. 1958 (courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, Government Printing Office 2–16673). 18 Plan of the Linotype room, drawn from memory, 2013 (by Robert (Bob) Law, reproduced with permission). 19 From when I started until intro of new technology, section sketch of the Government Printing Office, 2012 (by George Woods, reproduced with permission). 20 Spatial mapping of oral history stories, watercolour on paper, 2013 (sketch by the author). 21 Staff meeting at the canteen hall, c. 1960s (by John Cusack, ­reproduced with permission). 22 Press-machinist Shong Babbog operates a Heidelberg cylinder letterpress machine, 1966 (photograph by Ray Utick, reproduced with permission). 23 Press-machinists and engineers pose with a brand new Heidelberg ZP102 ‘Speedmaster’ lithographic press, 1977 (copyright Heidelberg, reproduced with permission, image courtesy of Glenn MacKellar). 24 Ray Utick with apprentice Dennis O’Loughlin and a Methodist minister in the Main pressroom, 1966 (courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, Government Printing Office 2–33643). 25 The bus-ticket machine in the Revenue room, no date (photograph by Ray Utick, reproduced with permission). 26 Selected film stills from Ray Utick’s Letterpress Machines of the New South Wales Government Printing Office, 1966, 8 mm film, six minutes (courtesy of Ray Utick, reproduced with permission). 27 The Mechanical room at the old Government Printing Office at Phillip and Bent streets, 1891 (courtesy of the State Library of New

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40 42 52

53 54 59

61 65 65 66 77 78

81 84 89 90

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Figures South Wales, Sydney, Government Printing Office 1–08362). 28 Apprentice compositor Les Davies, hand-setting type, 1967, photographed for apprentice recruitment (courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, Government Printing Office 2–34806). 29 Compositors Robert Garside, Bob Bonnano, Ray Bannon and Chris Shay pose at the imposition slab, 1981 (courtesy and copyright of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, Government Printing Office 3–14689). 30 Pieces (slugs) of metal type; Monotype and Linotype (photograph by the author, artefacts courtesy of Fred Power and Ray Utick). 31 (From left) Stuart Lincolne, Minister for Services Eric Bedford, and Government Printer Don West open the new computer area at the Government Printing Office, 1985 (courtesy and copyright of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, Government Printing Office 4–40604). 32 Monotype room at the Gov, 1965 (courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, Government Printing Office 2–27296). 33 Former hot-metal compositors undertake retraining on Comp-Edit machines, 1981. Former Linotype operator Alan Holten is on the far right (courtesy and copyright of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, Government Printing Office 3–17524). 34 Apprentice compositor Gary Wilson training to use a Linotype machine, 1978 (courtesy and copyright of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, Government Printing Office 3–46915). 35 Apprentice compositor Stephen Noyes, 1978 (courtesy of Stephen Noyes, reproduced with permission). 36 Stephen Noyes’ composing tools (photograph by Stephen Noyes, reproduced with permission). 37 A bookbinding assistant binding Australian Museum material at the Gov, 1965 (courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, Government Printing Office 2–27658). 38 Gita Hromadka and Lillian Taylor in the third-floor women’s bathroom. Photograph by Jackie Kitney, 1979 (courtesy and copyright of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, Government Printing Office 3–02728). 39 One of the first female press-machinists at the Gov, 1981 (courtesy and copyright of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, Government Printing Office 3–14659). 40 The senior executive team, 1986 (courtesy and copyright of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, Government Printing Office 4–44594). 41 The new Gov front door, 1986 (courtesy and copyright of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, Government Printing Office 4–31322). 42 Pirate ship depicting members of the Gov, published in The Graphic staff journal, December 1985 and the farewell poster, They Say Rats are Always the First to Desert a Sinking Ship, 1988 (courtesy of Sandra Elisabeth Stringer, reproduced with permission).

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xi

92 102

103 104

111 111

112 114 116 122 132

140 144 153 154

171

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xii

Figures 43 Tony Cliffe, Untitled (Aquatic scene of imminent danger), 1989. Dimensions: approximately 100 cm wide (courtesy of Ray Utick, reproduced with the permission of Tony Cliffe). 44 Selected pages from A Paradise Lost, 12-page foreign order booklet, 1989 (by Tony Cliffe, reproduced with permission). 45 Ray Utick, screen ‘capture’ of television interview with Terry Hagenhofer, 1989 (photograph by Ray Utick, reproduced with the permission of Utick and Hagenhofer).

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173 174 186

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Oral history interviews

The date range indicates years of service at the NSW Government Printing Office.1 George Bryant, despatch offsider 1959–61, interviewed 28 September 2012 Kim Cooper, bookbinder/planner 1977–89, interviewed 29 November 2011 Ken Duffey, press-machinist (Lithography) 1958–62, interviewed 11 February 2012 Victor Gunther, press-machinist (letterpress) 1946–52, interviewed 15 August 2012 Tim Guy, compositor/computer specialist 1972–89, interviewed 24 July 2013 Terry Hagenhofer, compositor/camera operator/supervisor 1973–89, interviewed 5 December 2011 Geoff Hawes, compositor/supervisor 1967–89, interviewed 16 February 2012 Rudi Kolbach, compositor 1957–63, interviewed 12 December 2011 Bob Law, Linotype operator/supervisor 1968–89, interviewed 27 February 2012 George Larden, press-machinist (letterpress) 1932–71, interviewed 14 March 2013 Alan Leishman, supervisor photographic reproduction/manager planning and liaison 1955–89, interviewed 28 October 2011 Neil Lewis, compositor/Monotype operator 1977–89, interviewed 17 January 2012 John Lee, compositor/document reproduction 1962–89, interviewed 2 August 2012 Anna Lyons, press-machinist (letterpress and lithography) 1970s – 1980s, interviewed 28 February 2012 Glenn MacKellar, press-machinist (letterpress and lithography) 1973–89, interviewed 1 December 2011 Granville May, press-machinist/manager 1976–89, interviewed 8 February 2012

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xiv

Interviews Phillip Morehouse, reader’s assistant 1963–89, interviewed 21 October 2011 Win Morehouse, reader’s assistant 1963–76/77, interviewed 21 October 2011 Graeme Murray, lithographic dot-etching and retouching, 1960s, interviewed 9 November 2011 Stephen Noyes, compositor 1978–84, interviewed 20 February 2012 Pamela Pearce, chief of division – marketing 1986–8, interviewed 23 January 2012 Phillip Rhoden, paper ruler/machinist in manufactured stationery 1963–9, interviewed 27 February 2013 Norm Rigney, press-machinist/planner 1964–89, interviewed 30 January 2012 Michael Rubacki, personnel early 1980s, interviewed 17 May 2012 Barry Skewes, compositor/proof-reader 1978–89, interviewed 17 January 2012 Lindsay Somerville, compositor/Monotype operator 1961–7, interviewed 15 December 2011 Sandra Elisabeth Stringer, graphic reproduction 1984–9, interviewed 17 October 2012 Ray Utick, press-machinist (letterpress and lithography) 1955–89, interviewed 13 November 2012 Don West, government printer 1973–89, interviewed 12 September 2012 George Woods, compositor/designer/planner 1960–89, interviewed 21 February 2012

Note 1 Some oral history participants requested that their identities remain confidential, while most consented to their names being made public. Those who sought the option of confidentiality have been given pseudonyms and some details about their position and duration of service have been withheld so as to de-identify them.

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Author’s note

Within this book the NSW Government Printing Office is often referred to as the ‘Gov’ for brevity. The term was in wide colloquial use by the Office’s employees, as indicated by oral history and staff publications.

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Note on the text

Chapter 2 is a revised and amended version of the journal article: J. A. Stein, ‘“That was a posed photo”: Reflections on the process of combining oral histories with institutional photographs’, Oral History Association of Australia Journal 35 (2013): 49–57. Copyright © Jesse Adams Stein 2013. Chapter 3 is a revised and amended version of the journal article: J. A. Stein, ‘The co-construction of spatial memory: enriching architectural histories of “ordinary” buildings’, Fabrications 24:2 (2014): 37–41. doi: 10.1080/10331867.2014.961222. Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, 2014. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd (www.tandfonline.com) on behalf of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand. Chapter 4 is a revised and amended version of the journal article: J. A. Stein, ‘Masculinity and material culture in technological transitions: from letterpress to offset-lithography, 1960s–1980s’, Technology and Culture 57:1 (2016): 24–53. doi 10.1353/tech.2016.0010. Copyright © The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. Chapter 7 is a revised and amended version of the journal article: J. A. Stein, ‘Making “foreign orders”: Australian print-workers and clandestine creative production in the 1980s’, Journal of Design History 28:3 (2015): 275–92. doi: 10.1093/jdh/epv012. Copyright © Oxford University Press, 2015. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, on behalf of the Design History Society.

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Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the time and energy generously given by the oral history participants in this project – former employees of the NSW Government Printing Office. It is these employees’ stories and thoughtful reflections that have given this history a life of its own. I hope I can do justice to some of their experiences as workers. Many former employees of the Government Printing Office assisted in this project; only some were formally interviewed. The following people generously provided their time, photographs, ephemera, archival materials, objects, recollections and encouragement: Bob Bartrim, Bill Brooks, George Bryant, Jackie Cliffe, Tony Cliffe, Kim Cooper, Peter Crozier, John Cusack, Frank Druery, Ken Duffey, Barry Elborn, Renato Gravagna, Victor Gunther, Tim Guy, Terry Hagenhofer, Alan Hagerty, Bob Hart, Geoff Hawes, Ray Hopkins, Alan Howes, Philip James, Rudi Kolbach, George Larden, Bob Law, John Lee, Alan Leishman, Neil Lewis, Glenn MacKellar, Granville May, Phillip Morehouse, Win Morehouse, Graeme Murray, Stephen Noyes, Pamela Pearce, Fred Power, Noel Quinn, Phillip Rhoden, Warwick Richardson, Norm Rigney, Michael Rubacki, Barry Skewes, Lindsay Somerville, Sandra Elisabeth Stringer, Robert Swan, Stella Tekstra, Allan Townsend, Ray Utick and Don West. Throughout the research process several interview participants went above and beyond in their helpfulness, showing great care and attention as the project progressed. Particular gratitude goes to former press-machinist Ray Utick, who regularly provided photographs, film, sound recordings, ephemera and slugs of metal type. Ray also assisted me in arranging an interview with former press-machinist George Larden. George was 102 years old when I interviewed him in 2013; he passed away in mid-2014. I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Peter McNeil, whose advice was invaluable, and who retained a relaxed and cheerful faith in my ability to produce this book, even when I was not so sure myself. Grateful thanks extend to the following academics, historians and experts who provided scholarly advice and encouragement between 2011 and 2015: Professor Paul Ashton, Professor Paul Atkinson, Dr Dennis Bryans, Professor Paul Carter,

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xviii

Acknowledgements Matthew Connell, Professor Raewyn Connell, Professor Kate Darian-Smith, Professor Kjetil Fallan, Dr Shirley Fitzgerald, Professor Rae Frances, Associate Professor Michael Golec, Gideon Haigh, Dr Daniel J. Huppatz, Dr Simon Jackson, Dr Jacqueline Lorber-Kasunic, Humphrey McQueen, Dr Lizzie Muller, Richard Peck, Dr Rosslyn Reed, Chris Ronalds SC, Dr Emma Rowden, Dr Zoë Sadokierski, Associate Professor Toni Schofield, Professor David Silverman, Dr Ann Stephen, Dr Susan Stewart and Professor Judy Wajcman. The following people provided recollections of the period and knowledge about government printing and union politics: former Commonwealth Government Printer John Thompson, former Government Printer of South Australia Don Woolman, Government Printer of Western Australia John Strijk, former National Secretary of the Printing and Kindred Industries Union John Cahill, former NSW Secretary of the Printing and Kindred Industries Union Gordon Cooke and Allan Wetherell of Sydney Institute TAFE. Special acknowledgement goes to Hazel Baker for her keen editorial eye, in the original version of this manuscript. I was also given extensive support in terms of accessing resources and research advice from the following people: Terry Royce, Jenna Price, Jemima McDonald of the University of Technology Sydney (UTS); Erika Dicker of the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences; Margy Burn, Kevin Bradley, Sue Chan and Ingrid Finnane of the National Library of Australia; Clancy Walker and Bev Brooks of the Sydney Historical Society; Sian Nicholls of Information Services, NSW Department of Finance and Services; Mark O’Brien of Global Switch Sydney; Zoe Pollock, formerly of the NSW History Council, and Joe Kowalewski of PrintNet. Thanks also to Bob Meade, Russell Walker, Phil and Liz Martini, Jeff Miles, Brian Freeman, Grant Hofmeyer, Colleen Crockett and Grant South. I would also like to thank the anonymous readers of this manuscript for their constructive and insightful feedback. The institutions and organisations that assisted with this research are the UTS Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building; the State Library of New South Wales; UTS Library; UTS Human Research Ethics Committee; NSW State Records; City of Sydney Archives; NSW Department of Finance and Services; the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union, the NSW History Council, the Penrith Museum of Printing, Oral History NSW, Oral History Australia and Manchester University Press. My husband, Eugene Schofield-Georgeson, possessed an enthusiasm and interest in this topic that allowed me the luxury of having challenging discussions about the politics of labour and design whenever I pleased, and for that I am very grateful. This book would also not have been possible without the unconditional love, support and close reading provided by Barbara Adams and Paul Stein. I am also appreciative of the encouragement and support given by Barnaby Bennett, Kylie Benton-Connell, Courtney Booth, Amy Corderoy, Nicole Gardner, Alice Grundy, Evelyn Kwok, Maria Gabriella Munoz, Dr Anthony Springford, Michael Slezak, Kitty Ray, Liam Ryan, Dr César Albarrán Torres and Marni Williams.

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PA RT I Image, space, voice

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1 Introduction: labour, design and culture

In March 2015 I was paid a visit by Grant Hofmeyer, a printer who had trained as a letterpress-machinist in the early 1970s. Grant had worked at the South Australian Government Printing Office for much of his life, and he continues his letterpress practice from a home studio. I was accustomed to meeting such printers; for years I had interviewed people like Grant about their attitudes to craft skill and technological change. We sat in a characterless university waiting area, and I made a passing reference to a Xerox laser printer in a nearby office, loudly churning out pages. ‘That’s not a printer!’ came Grant’s emphatic response, ‘That’s a press. A printer is a person.’ * * * In the first decades of the twenty-first century, the printing and publishing industries have turned their energy to online and electronic media. Jobs continue to disappear from printing, publishing and journalism. Even the most traditional of printed matter – government publishing – has become immaterial. Once literally bound by the authoritative presence of the leather codex, twenty-first-century government documents are now digital phenomena: ‘PDFs’, websites and e-books. The solemn authority that had been afforded to the tangible printed object has slipped from our grasp and once-respected institutions such as ‘Government Printing Offices’ now seem quaint and obscure. As the last vestiges of paper-based print culture appeared to disintegrate into ephemeral digital data, I began to wonder about the harbingers of this major shift. Who and what were the early casualties of the ‘digital switch’, and who was carried along with the tide? Significant technological shifts do not happen with a ‘bang’. They are gradual, creeping sequences that we unwittingly prepare for in advance, through our ‘will

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Image, space, voice to order’ and our connection with machines, as Lewis Mumford reminded us in 1934.1 The replacement of human labour with digitised technologies is not merely a contemporary issue; it has an established history dating from the mid-twentieth century. The period from the 1960s through to the 1980s saw the gradual entry of personal computers into domestic and workplace contexts in Western capitalist nations; a transition that has been well documented in sociology and social histories of technology.2 The introduction of computerised and automated technologies profoundly transformed the labour conditions and industrial politics in factory and office workplaces. In some cases, automation and computerisation made tasks less dangerous or physically taxing, but in many others, new technologies made employees’ hard-won trade skills redundant.3 Computerisation often reduced the number of employees required and it often degraded the workers’ connection to the production process. The weakening of workers’ labour power and the reduction of staff numbers contributed to a declining influence of printing unions. This narrative is well established. What is often missing from this record is an understanding of how the world of work is tightly interwoven with the tangible and affective worlds of material culture and design, even in supposedly ‘clean’ computerised environments. Work is inextricably bound up with a world of things, with and through which the social and gendered processes of workplace life are enacted and experienced. Understanding how we interact with and interpret design is crucial for appreciating the complexities of the labour experience, particularly at times of technological disruption. The significance of material culture in the labour process goes far beyond issues of technological retraining. Objects and design have their place in shaping and reshaping labour identities, cultures and environments. A thorough consideration of design in changing workplaces helps us form a more nuanced view of workers’ adaptive responses to technological change and workplace disruption. For instance, it helps to widen our gaze beyond ‘official’ labour, to consider the clandestine creative production undertaken by workers, the making of things ‘on the side’. While technologies constantly change (and supposedly progress) all around us, most of the machines that surround us are not particularly ‘new’. There are always the ‘slow zones’, the contexts where emerging technologies take a long time to filter in. Most of us are very familiar with anachronistic workplaces of one kind or another, so often filled with rapidly obsolescent technologies. There are offices still peppered with chunky desktop computers, whirring uncomfortably loudly, a little too hot to the touch. Then there are the factories that are too expensive to fully refit. It is in these slow zones that the remnants of past knowledge, skills and work culture quietly linger. Oversized and underused iron machinery rigidly structures paths across the shop floor; workers speak of being

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Introduction

5

retrained five times over. This book is not about the winners or pioneers of technological change. It is about the rest of us, and about the material legacies of a fast-paced world of technological upheaval.

Technological change in the printing industry Of all forms of manufacturing, it was in the printing industry in the second half of the twentieth century where objects were a particularly fraught matter. The disruptive manifestation of new computer typesetting equipment, for example, asserted its presence not merely through workflow changes, requalification and retrenchment. The fundamental physical presence of such new technologies also dictated print-workers’ futures. Linotype operators had to retrain their hands and minds, relearning to type, this time on small ‘qwerty’ keyboards. The new technologies bore a distinct resemblance to what was then seen as ‘feminised’ clerical technologies, producing gender-labour tensions and challenges for working-class masculinities. Those who formerly set the type – compositors – remember the fiddly but satisfying practice of hand-setting pages in lead type in preparation for letterpress printing. From the 1960s and 1970s, some of these compositors shifted their skills, transforming into digitally fluent ‘graphic designers’ who now speak knowledgably of software such as Adobe InDesign, and complain of being forever out-of-date with the latest version of the program. The arrival of these boxy, beige computers in the 1970s and 1980s signalled a new order, one characterised by individualism, seemingly opaque technical systems and the end of strictly delineated skilled trades and crafts. Those who survived the printing industry’s transition did so as individuals allied with ‘new’ technologies, detached from the collective craft culture of the past. Others chose not to retrain, and instead cherished their old craft skills through collecting memorabilia and treasuring obsolete trade tools. Hot Metal engages with both kinds of workers: those who remained tied to hot metal and those who, to some extent, relinquished that bond and sought connections with newer technologies. As previous studies have established, printing was an exceptional case; it remained a stalwart ‘craft’ well into the twentieth century compared to other more automated industries.4 In countries such as the United Kingdom (UK) and Australia, the labour supply of apprentices was tightly controlled by the printing unions, and printers were able to maintain longstanding technical practices (such as letterpress and hot-metal typesetting) through strictly delineated trade demarcation and industrial bargaining.5 By the second-half of the twentieth century, however, the printing industry – once the high-status bastion of traditional mark-making – was facing dramatic structural transformation and a steep learning curve. The public’s demand for printed matter continued to rise. The machinery required to

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Image, space, voice produce printed products was swiftly becoming more automated, making it increasingly attractive to employers. As a result, the period from the 1960s to the late 1980s saw the virtual extinction of hot-metal typesetting and letterpress printing in the global north. This period also witnessed the mainstream introduction of computerised typesetting and high-speed offset-lithographic printing. As a consequence, this three-decade period saw the almost complete disappearance of a swathe of printing crafts such as stereotyping, electrotyping, dot-etching and engraving, hand-binding, hand-embossing, hand-composing, paper-ruling, Linotype and Monotype operation and pre-press camera operation (see list of terms at end of book). The printing industry’s trajectory belongs to a larger story. It is part of a global transition, a process of deindustrialisation and a shift away from bureaucratic welfare-state models, towards neoliberal, free-market economics. As historian Steven High and photographer David Lewis note, deindustrialisation is more than an economic process, it is a cultural transition, and often produces stark ruptures in the social fabric of industrydependent communities.6 In the first half of the twentieth century in North America, Britain and Europe, industrial workers – often protected by trade-specific unions – had access to relatively high wages and ample job opportunities. Between 1900 and 1980 manufacturing employment in wealthy economies rose almost threefold, to 71.5 million.7 But by the 1970s, workers faced increasing job insecurity, due in part to technological developments, but also to the patterns of the globalised capitalist market, which led to the offshoring of cheap labour to the global south. Around 22 million manufacturing jobs were lost in North America between 1969 and 1976.8 Between 2000 and 2010, notwithstanding global growth in manufacturing production, manufacturing jobs fell from 17.2 million to 11.5 million in the United States (USA) and the UK saw a decline from 4  million to 2.5 million.9 In places such as Australia, the protections that had been afforded to domestic manufacturers were whittled away, replaced by ‘economic rationalist’ approaches to political economy. By the mid-1980s, the city of Sydney’s once-vibrant manufacturing sector had visibly declined, while growing economies in Asia provided cheap imports. For Sydney’s industrial workers, the old certainties of the modern era were disintegrating.10 A ‘job for life’ was no longer guaranteed, even in the previously secure government public service. The once highly prized skills of a trade soon became an old-fashioned encumbrance. What can the early stages of this digital conversion tell us about how complex systems evolve and about how people and collectives cope when faced with dramatic (but often clumsy) technological and organisational transformation? This book begins the process of answering this question, and in doing so reveals the dense interconnectedness of labour, technology, material culture and the culture of working life. In doing so,

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Introduction

7

Hot Metal operates on two levels: theory and content. On the one hand, it reveals a theoretical approach that consciously intermingles labour history with an attention to material culture and design, bringing a consideration of spaces, objects and embodied experience into a historical analysis of labour and working life. On the other hand, this book is also a historical study of an intriguing case. It explores the three-decade period prior to the closure of the New South Wales (NSW) Government Printing Office, Sydney, between 1959 and 1989 (hereafter referred to by its colloquial name, ‘the Gov’). This case speaks broadly about the social and material challenges of work in a deindustrialising society, and it gives voice to workers from a variety of perspectives: men, women, managers, skilled tradespersons and manual labourers. Of late, research in the fields of design history and material culture studies has been less engaged with the politics of labour and the culture of working life and more involved with innovation, consumption and designers.11 This was not always the case. Design history in the 1980s and 1990s tended to be more engaged with production than it is today.12 At the other end of this book’s disciplinary spectrum, labour history has engaged to some extent with material culture, chiefly in relation to archaeology and museum studies.13 There have been concerns, however, that p ­ rioritising material culture can lead to superficial and aestheticising interpretations that ignore worker experience.14 Hot Metal demonstrates that it is possible to delve deeply into material culture without losing touch with labour history. This book is therefore an interdisciplinary historical recovery, integrating labour history, design and material culture studies and oral history studies of working life. It asserts a method for collectively examining workers’ experiences: of technological change, precariousness, and of industrial decline in the second half of the twentieth century. These issues are approached in a manner that retains the voices of workers (through oral history), and adds relevant considerations of design and material culture in the workplace by paying attention to the role of objects, spaces and the embodied experience of technological change.

The aestheticisation of labour history? Historians have warned that the public historical treatment of industrial heritage too often falls into a celebration of industrial architecture and an aestheticisation of obsolete industrial machinery. Labour historian Lucy Taksa, for example, argued that this problem was encountered in the treatment of Australian railway heritage, where renovated buildings and refurbished train carriages at Sydney’s old Carriageworks have been transformed into reified spaces of consumption and entertainment.15 Taksa’s concern is that the material culture pertaining to the industrial past is appreciated only for its aesthetic and nostalgic potential, separated

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Image, space, voice from social and labour histories.16 The more intangible parts of labour history, such as workplace folklore, union struggles, worker practices and human stories, have been lost. Taksa therefore warns against historical approaches to the industrial past that emphasise objects and architecture, as this might risk an overly simplistic celebration and/or a fetishisation of machinery and industrial buildings.17 Must labour history be disassociated from material culture and design? My position is that this need not be the case. While Taksa’s argument certainly makes sense in relation to her given examples of railway heritage, I contend that, if executed properly, combining the history of labour with attention to material culture can be a highly effective interdisciplinary approach.18 As well as analysing workers’ experiences of technological, social and economic transformation, Hot Metal proposes that labour history, oral history and design are disciplines that can be combined fruitfully in a historical study. The focus on material culture and technology in history need not be merely about aesthetic or surface considerations, such elements are wholly social and political. This historical analysis takes into account the culture of working life; at the same time, the active and influential role of material culture is not forgotten, nor is it trivialised through an out-of-context celebration of industrial machinery. Here, human stories and material culture are tightly interconnected, each bearing upon the other. This approach can illuminate the complex and entangled ways in which people and technical worlds are sometimes allied, sometimes in opposition. It also allows us to learn of the (unauthorised) creative and resilient practices that can emerge in industrial contexts. Paying attention to material culture also means paying heed to what might be considered minor details and making room for embodied experience and unauthorised creative practices.

Recovering Sydney’s Government Printing Office, 1959–89 As a case study, the Gov is a rich example of a workplace that found itself – as many often do – ‘behind the times’ in technological terms. The Gov was both a government-run industrial factory and a service department that aimed to combine all of the printing trades and apprentice education under one roof. It was established in 1840 in the colony of New South Wales by Governor George Gipps. Law was not enacted until it was printed, and the frustrated Gipps found that the colony’s small collection of private printers placed no priority on government work, hampering his ability to govern. Similar institutions existed in Europe and North America, such as Britain’s HMSO (Her Majesty’s Stationery Office), established in 1786 (initially to control the supply of paper), and the United States’ Government Printing Office, established in 1861. Other examples include South Africa’s Government Printing Works and the Queen’s Printer for Canada.

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NSW Government Printing Office fabric patch.

NSW Government Printing Office pressroom, showing Whitefriars machine, 1907, Sydney.

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1

2

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Image, space, voice At its largest and busiest – between the 1920s and the 1960s – the Gov printed almost all state government materials and some Commonwealth material. It employed approximately 1200 workers in 1920, and when it closed in 1989 it employed 845 men and women.19 Until mid-1989, the Gov composed, printed, bound and distributed parliamentary and legal materials, such as Bills, Acts and parliamentary proceedings (Hansard). Its primary responsibility was to meet the printing needs of the NSW Parliament. Over time, its output expanded to include a variety of products: for example the electoral roll, ballot papers, departmental annual reports, duty stamps, school examinations and transport tickets. The Gov provided government departments, politicians, lawyers and judges with specialist handwork services such as hand-bound law books in half-calf leather, embossed stationery, gold leaf invitations and state photographic services. It should be evident by now that this book will not undertake traditional institutional history of this printing factory; its salience extends well beyond a piece of Sydney’s print history. Nor does Hot Metal chart each significant event that occurred at the organisation between 1959 and 1989. Rather, this date span – 1959 to 1989 – covers the years that the Gov operated from a newly constructed, modern building in the industrial Sydney suburb of Ultimo. The period draws to a dramatic halt in mid-1989. The Liberal State Government, under the leadership of Premier Nick Greiner, abruptly closed the factory, with only four weeks’ notice. In those final three decades, the Gov was a troubled institution. From the late 1960s, the Australian printing industry – traditionally characterised by a masculine craft culture and strong union control – began several disruptive shifts. Although computers were gradually introduced, various forms of hot-metal typesetting remained in use until the factory’s closure in 1989. It was also one of the first Australian factories to open non-­traditional apprenticeships to women. During this thirty-year period the Gov was pulled in conflicting directions by traditionalists, unionists, economic rationalists and those somewhere in between. As noted, between the 1970s and late 1980s we saw the phase-out of letterpress printing in favour of offset-lithography, and the obsolescence of hot-metal typesetting following the introduction of computerised typesetting. Between 1977 and 1989, there was a situation at the Gov where ‘old’ and ‘new’ technologies often coexisted in the same factory space, with letterpress machines operating next to offset-lithographic presses and Linotype machines operating in tandem with computer typesetting. By the early 1980s, letterpress was perceived as ‘over’ by much of the Western printing industry, and high-speed offset-lithography and computerised typesetting were increasingly dominant. The Gov was slow to change over. The traditions of government publishing were not easily adapted to the new technologies and in this sense the maintenance

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of traditional graphic design dictated the continued use of older technologies. The Gov’s transition from a letterpress printery into a computerised office (which was well under way by 1984) was not without its difficulties and it produced tensions that came to be expressed through workplace practices and material surroundings, as well as within the narratives that the Gov’s employees constructed – and continue to reshape – about themselves and their former workplace. Being both an official instrument of government authority and an industrial plant with a vigorous union presence, the Gov was a complex network of people, technologies, bureaucratic systems and printed matter, held together by sometimes-incompatible values and objectives. The Gov is a striking example of the longevity of certain technologies, and the massive disruption that occurs when entrenched socio-technical systems are finally eliminated. The story of the Gov speaks broadly about the impacts of deindustrialisation, not only in terms of job security, but also in terms of the material and affective qualities of the labour experience. Moreover, the termination of manufacturing enterprises such as this is not simply a loss of jobs; it also marks the end of a diverse set of workplace cultures and skilled design practices. The Gov enables us to see particularly clearly a clash of ideas about how to organise a complex institution and how to cope with the sociotechnical challenges of governing, making, working and belonging in a particular historical moment. Because it was a government establishment, the Gov differed from the commercial printing industry. Its priorities were originally about the production of governmental authority in tangible form, not about efficiency and profit. Many of its clients were proponents of formal, parliamentary-style design and they demanded long-established traditional processes, despite associated inefficiencies. By the 1980s, the political momentum of federal and state governance in Australia turned increasingly towards the politics of economic rationalism. Government-run enterprises became targets for closure, charged with the argument that private industry could do the job more affordably.20 Those who advocated reform and public ownership of assets envisioned that the Gov could become an efficient, computerised centre for handling government data. Hard-line economic rationalists and the private printing industry called for its closure, arguing that the Gov was inefficient and a ‘hotbed’ of industrial activity. In this context, the Gov’s very existence came into question in a way it never had before. These conflicting interests became thoroughly embedded within practices, machines and spaces at the Gov. The Gov was indeed a strong ‘union shop’, representing workers through the Printing and Kindred Industries Union (PKIU) and the Public Service Association (PSA), among other organisations.21 Prospective employees in the printing trade sought work at the Gov by contacting the

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Image, space, voice union. The PKIU branches were organised into ‘chapels’ and the branch leader was known as the ‘father of the chapel’ (FoC). An FoC was employed at the Gov on a full-time basis as a union representative. Given the collective strength of the PKIU, almost any issue involving technological change led to shop-floor tensions, discontent and industrial action. What happens to the people who are caught up in this change, what strategies do they use to survive, and how do they cope with the looming threat of redundancy? In examining these issues, Hot Metal weaves together source materials from oral history, photographic collections and archives to ask how people, technologies and spaces were mobilised to cope with precariousness and change (or, in some cases, a lack of change). Their responses varied from complete resistance to adaptation, from denial to acceptance. Such responses were closely connected to material culture and to practices of designing and making. Workers coped by building alliances and through unofficial creative production.

Building alliances Print-workers came to grips with their precarious circumstances by developing alliances with people and/or with technologies. This involved staking out territories (either spatially or by developing their skills). Some workers clung to their traditional trade skills and collective practices with pride and defiance, while others embraced new technologies with enthusiasm and an individualistic drive for self-improvement. As these new technologies increasingly faced obsolescence, however, the individually driven exercise of ‘self-development’ risked becoming inexorable and exhausting.

Unofficial creative production As explored throughout this book, many print-workers enacted their own narratives – of resilience, of belonging and even of industrial decline – through unsanctioned activities. Throughout my research, former employees introduced me to their ‘extracurricular’ practices at work. This included the clandestine production of printed materials, as well as betterknown shop-floor antics such as pranks, games and rites of passage for apprentices. There was a rich culture of humour, irreverence, creative (and sometimes resistant) practice. This mode of unofficial production should not be dismissed as a trivial part of workers’ stories. Indeed, the exercise of creativity was one of the means through which workers survived the uncertainty that they underwent in the 1980s.

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Accounts of printing labour and technological change The focus of most existing labour history research on the printing industry falls on the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries.22 Historians Rae Frances and James Hagan, among others, have analysed the complex relationships that evolved between print-workers, unions, employers, trade demarcation and technological innovation.23 In her analysis of the boot, clothing and printing trades, Frances deftly draws together issues of gender, technological change, definitions of ‘skill’ and industrial relations. Both Frances and Hagan use a close examination of industrial disputes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an approach that I have not taken in this book, although the significance of the unions should not be ignored. My approach is to look closely at ‘working life’ at the Gov.24 Crucially, working life entails not only the official activities of the institution, but also the unofficial, unreported acts that go on in the workplace. One discipline that overlaps with labour history is the history of technology. British and American work in this field offers useful parallels with other industries, in terms of workers’ adaptations to technological change, and the gender and class implications of these shifts. In this discipline, the work of Ava Baron (on gender, deskilling and the American printing industry), and Ruth Oldenziel and Roger Horowitz (on gender, labour and technological change) link technologies to gender-labour controversies.25 In addition, British and American labour historians and social theorists such as James Meyer, Steven Maynard, Paul Willis, Steven High and Paul Thompson provide a framework for interpreting labour relations in an era of increasing automation and declining manufacturing.26 To find examinations of the printing industry in the second half of the twentieth century, one must look to the discipline of sociology, and particularly to studies of gender and the labour process from the 1980s and 1990s.27 The most influential sociological examination of techno­ logical change, gender and the printing industry remains the work of Cynthia Cockburn.28 Other sociologists who have examined technological change in printing emphasise the (often negative) impact of technological change on workers, but, unlike Cockburn, these publications are usually less attuned to the way in which technologies intersect with issues of gender, power and the relations of production.29 Her 1983 text Brothers – on British newspaper compositors in the late 1970s – is revisited in Hot Metal for its powerful and still salient insights into gender and the materiality of technology. Cockburn’s evocative description of Linotype operators’ connection to machines led me to suspect that there was more that could be said about the role that material culture and embodied practice plays in a printer’s experience of technological change.30

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Image, space, voice

Design, material culture and workplace folklore in a printing house For the purposes of this particular study, the use of the term ‘material culture’ includes technologies, physical systems and spaces; it does not refer solely to autonomous objects. Sociologist and material culture theorist Phillip Vannini provides a useful description of the interconnectedness of studies of material culture and technology and, crucially, links this to action – to the things that people and things do: To study material culture is to study the technological underpinnings of culture, and to study technology is to study the material character of everyday life and its processes of objectification. What is central to such a view is an understanding of sociality and culture as a form of making, doing and acting.31

Vannini sees culture as ‘deeply shaped by techne – that is, craft, skills, creativity’ and, on the flipside, social life is deeply imbued with material properties.32 This interlinked consideration of technology and material culture lends itself to the methodological combination employed in Hot Metal, because this book tells a story that hinges on design tradition, materiality and technology as mobilising forces for change. Social and technical worlds are mutually constitutive and the associations attached to things are always in flux. The role that printing machinery, factory spaces, tools, printed products and bytes played in this context means that to understand the demise of traditional printing crafts and the rise of computerised work, a consideration of design, embodied experience and space is crucial. The materials that the Gov produced were ubiquitous and generally quite ordinary, black-and-white and frequently text heavy. Yet the sheer diversity of the Gov’s production was something that touched everyone, regardless of how little they were aware of it. In 1959 the Sydney Morning Herald proclaimed: The Government Printing Office is with every citizen from the cradle to the grave. It prints his birth certificate, his marriage licence, the form registering and certifying his death. For every bus and tram ride, he is given a government printed ticket. Many of his text books he reads in his Public schools … are Government Printing Office products; if he bets with a bookmaker on a racecourse his ticket has the Government Printing Office imprint; so has his car licence … his summons to court, the order committing him to prison if he refuses to pay a fine. A permit for a grazier to move sheep comes from the Government Printing Office; the award under which an employer pays his staff comes from the Government Printing Office; and his lottery tickets, and the bus, tram and train timetables he consults.33

Significantly, each of these human milestones was represented physically, in printed matter. In this respect, the Gov was the producer of designed objects that ratified a person’s social status. Not only did it enable the state

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to govern, it also provided the tangible provisions that allowed people to be affirmed as citizens. Craft and design theorist Glenn Adamson has noted that ‘one of the key problems in the study of material culture is the phenomenon of loss’.34 Although the Gov’s building still stands in inner-city Sydney, little remains of its interior or its contents. The building now houses a computer data storage centre. We do not have direct access to the larger material artefacts that would have existed in the factory between 1959 and 1989. In any case, the lack of a thorough repository of technologies is not necessarily a historical problem, as it is not my intention to provide a taxonomic history of technological change in printing. Such an approach would tell us little of the social and labour impacts. While we no longer have access to the building and many artefacts from the period have been lost, this book makes use of a wide variety of primary and secondary sources: oral histories from workers, photographic collections (both official and worker photographs), amateur film, staff publications, tools, ephemera and archives. Oral history is employed here to access individual and collective ways of talking about working life, and to explore workplace folklore. Interview participants’ recollections are handled with care and discretion and interpreted in relation to the existing body of knowledge about the complex and relative nature of oral history material. We cannot know precisely what former employees feel or think and we cannot treat oral history as a verifiable source of ‘facts’. Nonetheless, oral history can be used as a means to understand how former employees construct narratives about themselves and their workplace. Oral sources paint a complex picture of physical experience and the social and creative aspects of working life. They also show us how workers’ experiences rarely fit neatly into pre-existing historical frameworks. Oral evidence is used in tandem with more traditional forms of historical sources; at times stories are verified and at other times there are telling contradictions. Another major source is the extensive photographic collection of the NSW Government Printing Office, which includes thousands of images of employees, working spaces and technologies. The methodological complexities of dealing with oral history and institutional photographs are unpacked in the following chapter.

Chapter organisation and historical background Hot Metal is arranged in three parts. ‘Part I Image, space, voice’ establishes the methodological and theoretical use of oral history, photography and spatial analysis. As mentioned, Chapter 2 – a methodological oral history chapter – explores the possibilities that open up for historical analysis when workers’ oral histories are paired with institutional photographs.

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3

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The new NSW Government Printing Office Building, Ultimo, c. 1960s.

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Chapter 3 sets the scene, quite literally: it is an architectural and spatial exploration of workers’ embodied and mnemonic experience of their factory. When it opened in 1959, Sydney’s new Government Printing Office was a refreshingly modern workplace. It was spacious, organised and apparently rationally planned (figure 3). At the opening event, the building was celebrated as a magnificent ‘monument to literacy and democracy’.35 As this chapter demonstrates, spatial memory can be a strong part of oral history content, and spatial and architectural parameters open up possibilities in both labour and material culture histories. ‘Part II Technological transitions’ is about how workers coped with particular technological changes: the shift from letterpress to offsetlithography and the transition from hot-metal typesetting to computer phototypesetting. Chapter 4 examines the experience of press-machinists, many of whom retrained in offset-lithography, letting go of their old letterpress skills. It highlights the significant place that machinery – the presses themselves – had in how the workers understood and redefined their identities as skilled craftsmen. Chapter 5 outlines the history of compositors (those who set the type) and reviews the way in which these changes altered the gender division of labour in typesetting. The 1980s produced a situation where new technologies and labour processes led to the creation of different divisions of labour, breaking down old divisions and, in some cases, producing new ones. Gender was one category that was at stake in the reconfiguration of the printing industry’s divisions of labour. The complex, shifting gender regime of the Gov was always present in the way in which machines, job roles and spaces were interpreted, navigated and transformed.36 As examined in Chapters 4 and 5, the gender regime at the Gov was not dictated simply by past tradition. The relations between gender and labour in the workplace are active and evolving, not static.37 The same applies to the way in which particular technologies and objects can become gendered at particular points in time; these associations are continually changing and being renegotiated. In some cases, new technologies are appropriated by those in power so as to replicate older divisions of labour.38 In other cases, new technologies represent a rupture in the dominant gender regime of a particular worksite. ‘Part III Challenges and creative resilience’ explores the creative, resourceful and sometimes resistant tactics that workers employed as a way of coping with institutional sexism, the drudgery of work and job insecurity. Chapter 6 returns to the issue of gender, this time considering the experiences of women in the printing industry and specifically at the Gov. From the early 1970s, the NSW Public Service began to embrace progressive concepts such as equal employment opportunity (even before the law obliged it to do so) and it encouraged the retraining of tradespeople in emerging technologies. Women – for so long maligned and forbidden

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Image, space, voice entry by unions into the patriarchal world of skilled printing trades – were increasingly encouraged to undertake non-traditional apprenticeships.39 From 1974 women were able to enter non-traditional printing apprenticeships at the Gov, and their numbers gradually increased. Nonetheless, continuing gender prejudice within the printing industry meant that women faced considerable challenges. These women were not passive victims of discrimination; they came up with strategic and creative ways of managing their situations and their tactics included the remaking of particular spaces and zones and the attainment of thorough knowledge of machinery. The contentious politics of lifting heavy objects is examined, revealing one of the ways in which actual embodied practice differed from prejudiced workplace rhetoric about women’s physical capacity. Chapter 7 uncovers the unofficial and sometimes underhanded prac­­ tices of making things ‘on the side’ and other imaginative ­transgressions in factory contexts. At a time of industrial decline and increasing job insecurity, manual creativity and play became an important part of workplace survival, as well as part of the industrial folklore. A ‘foreign order’ is Australian industrial slang, referring to a practice whereby workers produce objects at work – using factory materials and work time – without authorisation. This is an underexplored but global phenomenon with many names, including homers, side productions, government jobs, and la perruque. There are silences, however, about these furtive acts of creative production. Existing discourse – both in design and labour histories – tends to examine ‘official’ activities or products, potentially leaving out whole swathes of creative practice quietly taking place on the factory floor. The following brief explanation of the Gov’s changing political context helps us to understand the politicisation of the workers’ unofficial creative activities in the 1980s. The Government Printer from 1958 to 1973 was Victor Charles Nathaniel Blight (privately referred to as ‘Vicious Callous Nasty Bastard’ by some workers). Blight’s leadership style was emphatically authoritarian and set the tone for a hierarchical management style inherited from nineteenth-century printing organisations. The Freemasons held an influential sway in NSW public sector life in the mid-twentieth century and Blight was a Grand Master and Leader of the Masonic Lodge.40 At the time, there was a broad social understanding in the Australian public service that Masonic membership was crucial for those looking for promotion. The strength of the Freemasons at the Gov began to wane by 1973, with the retirement of Blight and the appointment of Government Printer Don West, a West Australian printing manager who had worked in newspapers and was unaffiliated with the Freemasons (figure 4). In 1976 the Labor Party’s Neville Wran was elected as Premier of the state of New South Wales. Henceforth, the machinery of government in NSW was gradually reformed. As described by historian Beverley

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Kingston, prior to the Wran reforms, the state public service had ‘management systems devised in an ad hoc fashion’, as well as ‘cases of wasteful demarcation, duplication and outright obstructionism’.41 The reforms were socially progressive and fiscally conservative, and are part of a broader political and economic realignment in Australia and internationally. Although Wran publicly distanced himself from (by then former) Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s radical agenda, like Whitlam, Wran embraced socially progressive policy. But by the 1980s, the neoconservative UK and US economic policies increasingly influenced Australian politics. This is widely acknowledged as a federal pattern, exemplified by then federal Treasurer Paul Keating’s policies of deregulation and economic rationalism (during his role in the Hawke government). In fact, the state of NSW predated Keating’s rationalist policies; Premier Wran’s leadership featured a drive to reform the public service in a ‘corporate management’ style.42 This meant that some public service departments were pressured to put more emphasis on outcomes that were financially measurable, and less focus on effectiveness or achievement on non-economic grounds.43 Fiscal targets and efficiency audits became the style of the time. Social values held less sway in decision making than issues of efficiency and profit. This contrasted with an older, bureaucratic attitude towards public institutions,

Senior manager Bill Bright, incoming Government Printer Don West, outgoing Government Printer Victor Charles Nathaniel Blight, senior managers Sid Hampson and Fred Layt, 1973.

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4

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Image, space, voice

5

Two views from the Gov building towards Darling Harbour Railway Goods Yard and Sydney city, c. 1960s.

which focused on regulations and a rationalist concept of legalistic order. By the time the Liberal Party’s leader Nick Greiner was elected as NSW Premier in 1988, the economic rationalist ideals on which he campaigned were already entrenched within the management of the state public service.44 Beset by negative predictions for the health of the NSW economy, the new state government became increasingly interested in

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raising revenue by the sale of government institutions: power stations, coal mines, railway infrastructure and printing offices. No longer was there a faith that centralised, government-controlled departments ensured efficiency, security and order. The unregulated commercial market was seen as the solution. This historical period is representative of a broader shift in global political economy; a move away from traditional manufacturing activity, towards individualised attitudes and a free-market service economy. Between the 1970s and 1980s, the city of Sydney also changed shape dramatically – from an industrial city with a working industrial harbour (Darling Harbour) into an ambitious and brash metropolitan hub and a glittering recreational harbour, with aspirations of becoming a global city and a centre of culture, banking, sport, tourism and technology. The eastern side of the Gov faced Darling Harbour. The Gov’s workers gazed from their factory building at the transformation of Sydney’s urban fabric from a working harbour and goods railway into a globalised service city45 (figure 5). As the demolition and redevelopment of Darling Harbour unfolded before them, it was as if they were witnessing their own decline and precarious status. The final chapter of this book takes us through those final days of the Gov. It reveals the emotive and powerful significance of material culture when an institution is extinguished. Objects were at the centre of this story of industrial decline. It is not simply that objects became connected to memory. During the factory closure, material culture both stirred emotions and consoled workers who felt they had not been respected by the institution to which they had been loyal. Thus we return to the central message of this book: history is not merely the movement of people through time, it is bound up with the ever-changing physical and spatial world. A bringing-together of labour history with design therefore seems not only appropriate, but entirely necessary. These chapters combine to show a method whereby oral history, material culture and stories of labour and working life can be productively brought together in the telling of an industrial history. Moreover, Hot Metal reveals the ways in which male and female workers – from a variety of class and trade backgrounds – responded to the dramatic social, political and technological changes associated with deindustrialisation. It is about how people – collectively and individually – resist, tolerate, endure and embrace the transformations of their working lives, through building alliances and unofficial creative practices. Both methods were strategic (and sometimes unconscious) responses to their increasingly precarious and swiftly changing situation. Like the rest of us, these printworkers wrestled for small fragments of autonomy and security in a world over which they had little or no control. Returning to Grant Hofmeyer’s remark about the laser-printing machine, it is important to be reminded

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Image, space, voice of the power that technologies can have over workers, past and present. A brand new, whirring machine can represent not only a loss of a livelihood but also the total diminution of a craftsperson’s identity and culture. In our rush to embrace all that is technologically new and innovative, there remains the risk that all we do is make ourselves more like machines, rather than bringing humanity into technology.

Notes 1 L. Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010 [1934]), pp. 3–5. 2 See for example: J. Agar, The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2003); A. Zimbalist (ed.) Case Studies on the Labor Process (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979); N. Ensmenger, ‘The digital construction of technology: rethinking the history of computers in society’, Technology and Culture 53:4 (2012), 753–76. 3 The two best-known and much debated texts on this pattern remain: H. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998 [1974]); D. F. Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984). 4 C. Cockburn, Brothers: Male Dominance and Technological Change (London: Pluto, 1983), pp. 36–55; A. Zimbalist, ‘Technology and the labor process in the printing industry’, in Zimbalist, Case Studies, pp. 103–26. 5 Cockburn, Brothers, pp. 19–23. See also R. Frances, ‘Marginal matters: gender, skill, unions and the Commonwealth Arbitration Court’, Labour History 61 (1991), 17–29. 6 S. High and D. W. Lewis, Corporate Wasteland: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialization (New York and Toronto: Between the Lines and Cornell University Press, 2007), p. 2. 7 P. Marsh, The New Industrial Revolution: Consumers, Globalization and the End of Mass Production (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 237. 8 High and Lewis, Corporate Wasteland, p. 3 9 Marsh, The New Industrial Revolution, p. 237. 10 For comparative experiences of labour precarity see R. Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co, 1998). 11 K. Fallan, Design History: Understanding Theory and Method (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2010), p. 37. 12 See for example: M. Berg, Technology and Toil in 19th Century Britain (London: CSE Books, 1979); E. Lupton, Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office (New York: Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and Princeton Architectural Press, 1993); M. Diani, ‘The social design of office automation’, in V. Margolin (ed.), Design Discourse: History/Theory/Criticism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 67–76; T. Fry, ‘Unpacking the typewriter’, Block 7 (1982), 36–47. 13 See for example: A. Green, ‘Perambulating scrapbooks and saloon-sawdust sifters: ghosts along the labor/material culture trail’, Western Folklore 65:1/2 (2006), 31–46. Green’s analysis on the relationship between labour history and material culture in American academic discourse suggests that studies of folklore have been more open to analysing material culture. See also B. Oliver and A. Reeves ‘Crossing d ­ isciplinary boundaries: labour history and museum studies’, Labour History 85 (2003), 1–7.

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14 L. Taksa, ‘The material culture of an industrial artifact: interpreting control, defiance, and the everyday’, Historical Archaeology 39:3 (2005), 8–27. 15 L. Taksa, ‘Machines and ghosts: politics, industrial heritage, and the history of working life at Eveleigh workshops’, Labour History 85 (2003), 65–88; L. Taksa, ‘“Pumping the life-blood into politics and place”: labour culture and the Eveleigh Railway Workshop’, Labour History 79 (2000), 11–34. 16 Taksa, ‘Machines and ghosts’, p. 66. 17 Notably, Taksa’s own work fruitfully uses material culture as part of a labour history analysis. See for example: L. Taksa, ‘Retooling the class factory’, Labour History 82 (2002), 127–33. 18 One example where aesthetics are sensitively integrated into labour history is High and Lewis, Corporate Wasteland. 19 R. C. Peck, NSW Government Printers and Inspectors of Stamps, self-published, Sydney (2001), p. 51. 20 B. Kingston, A History of New South Wales (New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 232–3. 21 The PKIU (1966–95) was formed as an amalgamation of the Printing Indus tries Employees’ Union of Australia (PIEUA) and the Australian Printing Trades Employees’ Union (APTEU). It later amalgamated with the Federated PhotoEngravers. Peak membership in 1970 was around 60,000, with the most well-known industrial action taking place in 1976, against John Fairfax and Sons’ introduction of computerised typesetting. See Chapter 5. 22 See for example: A. Baron, ‘An “other” side of gender antagonism at work: men, boys, and the remasculinisation of printers’ work, 1830–1920’, in Work Engendered (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 47–69; E. F. Baker, Printers and Technology, Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1974); D. Bryans, ‘The double invention of printing’, Journal of Design History 13:4 (2000), 287–300; M. Twyman, Breaking the Mould: The First Hundred Years of Lithography (London: The British Library, 2001). 23 See for example: J. Hagan, Printers and Politics: A History of Australian Printing Unions 1850–1950 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1966); R. Frances, The Politics of Work: Gender and Labour in Victoria 1880–1939 (Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 24 J. Shields (ed.), All our Labours: Oral Histories of Working Life in Twentieth Century Sydney (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1992). 25 See for example: Baron, Work Engendered; R. Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women and Modern Machines in America, 1870–1945 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999); R. Horowitz (ed.), Boys and Their Toys? Masculinity, Technology and Class in America (New York and London: Routledge, 2001). 26 S. Meyer ‘Work, play, and power: masculine culture on the automotive shop floor, 1930–1960’, in Horowitz (ed.), Boys and Their Toys, pp. 13–32; S. Maynard, ‘Rough work and rugged men: the social construction of masculinity in working class history’, Labour/Le Travail 23 (1989), 159–69; P. Willis, ‘Shop floor culture, masculinity, and the wage form’, in J. Clarke, C. Critcher and R. Johnson (eds), Workingclass Culture: Studies in History and Theory (Birmingham and London: Hutchinson, 1979), pp. 185–98; P. Thompson, ‘Playing at being skilled men: factory culture and pride in work skills among Coventry car workers’, Social History 13:1 (1988), 45–69; High and Lewis, Corporate Wasteland. 27 See for example R. Reed, ‘From hot metal to cold type printing technology’, in E. Willis (ed.), Technology and the Labour Process: Australasian Case Studies (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988), pp. 33–50; A. Game and R. Pringle, Gender at Work (London, Sydney and Boston, MA: George Allen & Unwin, 1983); R. W. Connell, Masculini-

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Image, space, voice ties (Sydney and Oxford: Allen & Unwin, 1995); R. W. Connell, ‘Glass ceilings or gendered institutions? Mapping the gender regimes of public sector worksites’, Public Administration Review (2006), 837–49. 2 8 Cockburn, Brothers; C. Cockburn, ‘The material of male power’, Feminist Review 9 (1981), 41–58; C. Cockburn, Machinery of Dominance (London, Sydney and Dover: Pluto, 1985). 29 See for example M. Wallace and A. L. Kalleberg, ‘Industrial transformation and the decline of craft: the decomposition of skill in the printing industry, 1931–1978’, American Sociological Review 47:3 (1982), 307–24; T. F. Rogers and N. S. Friedman, Printers Face Automation (Lexington and Toronto: Lexington, 1980). There are exceptions. Rosslyn Reed develops upon Cockburn’s understanding of the gender relations of the printing industry, adding a critique of the traditional conception of ‘skill’. See for example: R. Reed, ‘Journalism and technology practice since the Second World War’, in A. Curthoys and J. Schultz (eds) Journalism: Print, Politics and Popular Culture (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1999), pp. 218–28; R. Reed, ‘Anti-discrimination language and discriminatory outcomes: employers’ discourse on women in printing and allied trades’, Labour and Industry 6:1 (1994), 89–106. 3 0 Cockburn, Brothers, pp. 48, 96, 101. 31 P. Vannini (ed.), Material Culture and Technology in Everyday Life (New York, Washington, DC and Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), p. 3. His italics. 3 2 Ibid., p. 3. 33 ‘Service for citizen’s lifetime’, Sydney Morning Herald (24 February 1959), p. 26. 34 G. Adamson, ‘The case of the missing footstool: reading the absent object’, in K. Harvey (ed.), History and Material Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 192. 35 J. J. Cahill, Premier of New South Wales, speech at the opening of the new NSW Government Printing Office building, 23 February 1959, Sydney. 36 Connell, ‘Glass ceilings or gendered institutions?’ 3 7 Ibid., p. 841. 38 As described in Baron, ‘An “other” side of gender antagonism’, pp. 47–69. See also J. Shields, ‘Deskilling revisited: continuity and change in craft work and apprenticeship in late nineteenth century New South Wales’, Labour History 68 (1995), 1–29. 39 R. Reed and J. Mander-Jones, Women in Printing: Employers’ Attitudes to Women in Trades (Canberra: Women’s Bureau, Department of Employment, Education and Training, 1993). 40 ‘High honour for local man’, The Campsie News and Lakemba Advance (10 January 1973), p. 1. 4 1 Kingston, A History of New South Wales, p. 208. 42 A. Yeatman, ‘The concept of public management and the Australian state in the 1980s’, Australian Journal of Public Administration 46:4 (1987), 339–56; M. Considine, ‘The corporate management framework as administrative science: a critique’, Australian Journal of Public Administration 47:1 (1988), 4–18. 43 D. H. Borchardt, ‘Has the AGS a future? Some comments on current problems’, Government Publications Review 9 (1982), 391–9. 4 4 B. Kingston, A History of New South Wales, p. 209. 45 The author acknowledges the Cadigal people of the Eora nation as the traditional owners of the land around Darling Harbour and Ultimo in Sydney.

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2 The visual at work: oral history and institutional photographs

All these pictures would have been posed for. Ha! You know, in reality, it wasn’t as orderly as that!1 – Former NSW Government Printer Don West

Oral history can serve a vital role when interweaving labour history with design and material culture. The way that printers speak, for example, is often rich in visual and material detail and peppered with industry slang. In the interviews undertaken for Hot Metal, the conversations revealed that retired printers typically retain an exceptionally thorough and detailed understanding of ‘obsolete’ technologies. They also possess a certain visual acuity and an appreciation of the complexities of representation. This is one of the reasons why their testimony can be of particular interest to design historians. Many of the retired printers I interviewed had maintained their connection to craft skills through a continued ‘hobbyist’ engagement with photography and letterpress techniques and through the meticulous compilation of ephemera and traditional printing tools in their personal collections. The resulting conversations – about their past working lives – often took a design-informed turn. To this already visual mix, I added photographs to the interview: institutional photographs taken at the Gov between the 1950s and the 1980s. This chapter is about the complex interplay of meaning that emerges when oral histories are used in combination with institutional photographs. This approach influences the interview itself and the various stages of interpretation. While institutional photographs do not show the ‘reality’ of workplace practices, such images can reveal some of the ways an institution sought to represent itself officially and its continued presence in memory and historical narrative. The use of institutional photographs during oral history interviews can provide insights into the disjuncture between bureaucratic representations and former employees’ personal

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Image, space, voice recollections of working life. My interviews revealed that print-workers possessed a confident and playful awareness of the grey area between institutional representation and everyday, embodied work practice and that they performed an active role in shaping some of those constructed images. This chapter opens up interdisciplinary links between oral history, design and visual culture by analysing the use of institutional photographs in the interview process, rather than personal or family images, which has often been the focus of previous research in this area.2 The relationship between oral history and photography is a relatively new but growing area in oral history literature.3 While recent scholarship in this field tends to focus on personal and family photographs,4 my interviews used photographs from an institutional archive. In the context of family photographic collections, the photographic record often belongs to those who are depicted. As physical objects and images, these photographs tend to be invested with strong attachments and associations, already tightly bound to memory and implicated in how individuals make meaning in their lives.5 The introduction into the oral history interview of workplace photographs (produced by an institutional employer) produces an entirely different scenario. This is a meaningful shift; many of these photographs are not personally owned by the people being interviewed, yet the images may still record important aspects of their lives. The first part of this chapter briefly introduces the photographic collection used for the Hot Metal project and outlines the process used for conducting oral history interviews in conjunction with institutional photographs. It then engages with existing theory in both oral history and visual culture, before exploring some specific examples where the introduction of photographs into the interview process opened up a productive gap, or a slippage, between official narratives and workers’ experiences.

The photographic collection The NSW Government Printing Office photographic collection is a remarkably diverse resource of nineteenth- and twentieth-century images, comprising over 200,000 digital images and photographic negatives of the colony and state of New South Wales.6 The collection grew from the production of the Gov’s staff photographers, who, from the 1860s onwards, provided visual documentation of the colony’s major events, public buildings and labour activities (figure 6). One of the most intriguing aspects about the Gov’s collection is that the Printing Office’s photographers turned their lenses on themselves, so to speak, to record their own workplace. The images range from close-ups of equipment and posed shots at award presentations to architectural views of the Gov’s purpose-built factory building. New, modern factory spaces

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NSW Government Printing Office photographers Alan Townsend, Alan Clifford and David Robinson, c. 1960s.

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appeared orderly, expansive and polished in 1958, before the machinery, equipment and workers moved into the new building. In photographs from the 1960s to the 1980s, print-workers pose amid stacks of paper, heavy cast-iron presses and electronic typesetting machines. Press-machinists proudly stand next to printing equipment. Retrained compositors, wearing collared shirts and shorts, slouch over computer keyboards. Bookbinders wield hand tools (figure 7) and hand-compositors attend to pages of type laid out on imposition slabs. Men in suits, grinning, assemble next to boxy electronic equipment. Many of these photographs were produced for

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Ray Edwards hand-binding books, 1981.

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Granville May, 1987, photograph for the Annual Report.

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promotional or reporting purposes, such as annual reports or apprentice recruitment and thus depict consciously posed scenarios. The constructed nature of these photographs does not, however, discount their value as sources, particularly when combined with oral histories. In examining these photographs we are reminded that factories were places that were overflowing with people and things: machines, printed products, workers, tools, containers, surfaces and modern, organised factory space, spaces to eat, spaces to change out of work clothes. For design and material culture analysts, these photographs point us towards the physical, embodied dimensions of this printing house as a workplace; it was once full of smells, sounds, tactility and relationships between people and objects. In 1986 the Gov was awarded a grant from the NSW Bicentennial Secretariat to conserve and digitise its photographic collection. Prior to that, the glass-plate and film negatives of these photographs were stored in the basement of the Government Printing Office building, in conditions that were less than ideal, particularly for the preservation of glass plates. By the 1980s, a number of staff at the Gov began to feel troubled by the storage conditions, which placed the plates at risk of water damage, scratches and breakage. Pamela Pearce, a former senior executive manager at the Gov, arrived at the Printing Office in 1986, having previously worked at the Australian Museum. She describes her shock at seeing the ­conditions in

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Image, space, voice which the glass plates were stored, and her commitment to the project of conserving, digitising and cataloguing them: There were glass plates everywhere, water pipes for the building ran across the ceiling, above the glass plates. … So I was totally, totally committed to that project. And I basically put my heart and soul into it. We … got the plates all catalogued, bringing in an indexer … that was something that I’m extremely proud of.7

A company was formed to copy the negatives, index the collection and transfer the images to film. Granville May (figure 8), a former printer and administrator of this photographic preservation project, recalled: ‘We set up a project called the Bicentennial Project and it was to basically … make the photographic collection accessible … I went and spoke to Sony Australia about their “laserdisc technology which was brand new and so I then got put in charge of the Bicentennial Project”’.8 The laserdisc system involved using late 1980s computing technologies to produce digital scans of glass-plate and copy negatives and it allowed users to search for an image in the collection on a digital monitor. For its time, the system was a ground-breaking digital image resource. After the Gov’s closure in 1989, the copy negatives and videodiscs were transferred to the State Library of New South Wales (SLNSW). In the mid-1990s the SLNSW re-digitised the laserdisc images and made them available online. The effect of digitising the laserdisc images (rather than scanning the original negatives) resulted in what appear to be very low-resolution images online. While this minor detail about image quality may seem trivial, the fuzziness of the images can potentially result in a strange sense of interpretive distance, as if gazing at the past through layers of cellophane. As a design historian, photographic quality was important to me. Being able to access high-resolution scans of the original negatives finally allowed the small details to come to the fore – a process that was vital for proper visual analysis and the close study of material culture, as examples in this chapter will demonstrate.

Institutional photographs With institutional photographs, the questions of ‘what?’, ‘how?’ and ‘in whose interest?’ are sometimes difficult to answer, although it is usually possible to say that photographs depicting workplace scenes were produced in a manner that was officially endorsed. Such images were taken and distributed to represent the institution in a positive light, to relay an appropriate image of the organisation to the public. The images are depersonalised; they depict idealised workplace scenarios, which, when closely examined, can reveal underlying societal values and understandings that structure the organisation of bodies, machines and tools. Given that many of these photographs were taken in the service of a government institution, the collection has a certain bureaucratic quality.

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American theorist Susan Sontag raised concerns about the bureaucratic classification produced by the photographic medium.9 She warned how, through institutional photographs, ‘the world becomes a series of unrelated, freestanding particles; and history, past and present, a set of anecdotes and faits divers’.10 This could risk a historical view that trivialises and fetishises isolated photographic images, rather than understanding their deep interconnectedness with social and historical contexts.11 This is why the institutional photographs from the Gov cannot easily stand alone; however, when they are juxtaposed with verbal accounts (among other sources), we have some hope of providing the connections that can be lost when images are isolated from their context. What happens, then, when an institutional photographic collection is reintroduced into a contemporary context, in an oral history interview? Former workers are the people who are best equipped to ‘read’ these institutional images, to tell a richer and more complex story about the layers of workplace history and institutional representation. Oral history content should not be used simply to decode or explain the photographic content; it can potentially tell us far more. Of course, the use of institutional photographs in the oral history process will not establish workplace practices ‘as they were’ in a documentary sense, but it can reveal some of the ways that this institution sought to represent itself and how employees responded to those attempts by the institution to present particular narratives. The examples provided in the second half of this chapter indicate that these former employees were (and still are) shrewd, active and sometimes mischievous contributors to the production of the Gov’s public ‘image’.

The interviews Between 2011 and 2013, I conducted oral history interviews with thirty male and female former print-workers who had worked at the Gov between 1932 and 1989.12 The interview participants represented a wide variety of trades and professional areas, including bookbinding, hand-andmachine composition, desktop publishing, letterpress and lithographic printing, dot-etching and engraving, graphic reproduction, proof-reading, design, union organisation, despatch and management, and included the NSW Government Printer from 1973 to 1989, Don West. At the time of interview, the youngest participants were aged in their mid-forties and the oldest was 102 (figure 9). Participants were recruited through a form of ‘snowball sampling’ and advertisements in trade journals.13 The resulting group was diverse in terms of socio-economic status and political ­affiliations; some had retired from full-time work, although many were still employed in the printing and publishing industries and other professions.

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Image, space, voice

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Oral history interviewees Ray Utick and George Larden, former press-machinists, 2012.

I often began the interview by asking how people found themselves in a job at the Gov (which was often a decision made with parental involvement, as many began as teenage apprentices). I asked about the process of learning a trade and about the impact of technological change on their work and on workplace culture. I posed careful, open questions relating to gender and industrial relations, as these topics tended to stir the strongest feelings. The interviews also allowed space for the participants to recollect freely with anecdotes and stories – many took the time to provide detailed accounts of practical jokes, workplace accidents and scandals. To each interview I brought along a variety of sample photographs selected from the Government Printing Office collection. In most instances, the photographs were shown to the interview participants towards the end of the interview session,14 when I had concluded most of my questioning. Often, while we were consuming refreshments, the photographic browsing would begin, usually quite organically. I left the recorder on during this period, with the knowledge of the participants. Many participants began by scanning photographs for familiar faces, staying quiet until they recognised someone they knew. This sometimes meant that the end of the interview consisted of silences or observations about the images that did not yield useful quotes, such as, ‘Yep, I know him … I know him … I know him

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too.’ This process required patience. Occasionally, particular photographs had the effect of sparking a conversation, reminding the participants of something they had forgotten and that I would not have known to ask about. When this happened, the conversation could start up again. In this way, some photographs operated as memory triggers.15 But that is not what is compelling about the use of institutional images in this process. Yes, the use of photographs in an oral history interview can remind us of the unpredictable mnemonic power of photographs and how the use of photographs in the interview process can enable different ways of talking about the past.16 More interestingly, however, I found that participants possessed a canny awareness of how their institution sought to represent itself publicly. In response to this formal performance of institutional competency – as demonstrated in the images used in annual reports and apprentice recruitment material – the workers responded playfully, with humour, irreverence and creativity.

Oral history: discourse, practice and photographs Since the 1960s, historians and social scientists have debated the merits of interviews and oral testimony. The question of whether or not oral history should be used at all was initially controversial.17 More recently, oral recollections have become a more accepted source for historical analysis; however, this does not mean that interpreting oral testimony is unproblematic or straightforward.18 As a form of historical inquiry, oral history is both valued and criticised for its ability to provide highly subjective historical accounts that are often rich with narrative and attitudinal content.19 Oral testimonies may at once reveal experiences that were hidden from ‘official’ histories, but they also contain a degree of selectivity, bias, confusion and other results of the vagaries of memory. In historian Paul Thompson’s seminal 1978 oral history text, The Voice of the Past, his emphasis falls on the justification of oral history as a legitimate source in the study of history.20 Thompson argues that oral history as a historical source is well geared to provide perspectives from the downtrodden, the marginalised and the overlooked members of society. He claims that the documentation of small details and of individual lives is a powerful way of understanding history, rather than interpreting history as something full of ‘great men’ and official documents. These little stories, Thompson says, can show the power of the ‘cumulative role of the individual’.21 In more recent years, oral history scholars have focused less on the need to justify oral history itself and more on the complexity of oral history practice and interpretation.22 The focus has shifted to what historians and social scientists can potentially do with the remarkable information contained within such interviews. Historian John Shields wrote openly about the complexity of interpreting oral history recollections of working life:

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Image, space, voice Recollections of the workplace are invariably coloured by a range of subjectivities … For the sharp-eared historian, this very subjectivity can add a whole new level of meaning … workers’ testimony can be shaped as much by hindsight, collective amnesia and myth-making as by the refracted actuality of past experience and feeling … it is incumbent on the historian to seek to recognise and explain these distortions.23

It is in this spirit that historian Alistair Thomson explains that ‘unreliable memories’ can be ‘a resource, not a problem’.24 Historian John Murphy likewise argues, ‘oral recollection provides particular opportunities to examine the role of memory in reconstituting the past, as a process which occurs in and through language’.25 Expanding on Murphy’s suggestion, we can see that it is not only language that works to construct meaning about the past; what is ­articulated in oral history also draws upon visual, material and spatial memory. Oral history can also supply insight into a rich culture of storytelling, of tradebased jargon and of institutional folklore. Strictly speaking, it does not always tell us exactly what happened. Rather, oral histories tell us how people construct narratives about what happened, which, one could argue, has more influence on the pattern of history anyway.26 Together, these interviews begin to depict something of a collective mentality – filled with sentiments, contradictions, repeated phrases and so on – that make up the folkloric life of a factory. I am able to obtain factual details from existing records. For other stories told by interview participants, the focus need not be on specific historical accuracy or finding ‘facts’, but on more personal interpretations and values, thus exposing participants’ outlook on the world, for example their understanding of their identity and the role that gender might play in that conception.27 Being aware of these layers of complexity is vital to understanding oral history material and presenting it in context. As with the interpretation of archival photographs, it is important to acknowledge and understand how the process of oral history is not just about capturing meaning that is ‘out there’ in the world. Oral history actually constructs and generates meaning on a number of levels; this happens through the processes of questioning and listening, through transcription and finally, through quotation and dissemination.28 First, the interview itself is an instance where meaning is co-constructed by the interviewer and the oral history participant, and getting a person to talk can be a delicate and strategic matter.29 The act of listening to and transcribing recorded oral histories also conveys understandings that can only be sensed, not easily distilled in written language; changes in tenor, pitch, non-verbal exclamations and hesitations all add extra layers of meaning. Later, the historian further shapes meaning and interpretation through their careful selection of quotations from interview transcripts. Oral history and material culture studies have great symbiotic potential, given the interview’s ability to bring to the fore embodied accounts

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and tangible details.30 Although material culture and embodied experience are significant elements in Hot Metal, during my research, interview participants were not guided too sharply in the direction of providing sensory or design-based recollections of objects and machinery; this was done so as to not ‘force’ observations.31 As the following quote indicates, however, the interviews nonetheless tended to be peppered with embodied and sensory descriptions. Former compositor Neil Lewis talked about the apprentice compositors’ pastime of flicking type: But Jeez, times I was left with little scabs on me legs, where people have got you in the legs from flicking type. We used to get into trouble for it, but you could always … they used to have Venetian blinds on the windows, and someone’d be head down, doing something, and you’d hear this­­pppfffsssshhhhh, right past you, and then the little piece hits the Venetian blinds – tink! It’s amazing no one got a lost eye out of it.32

The movement and sound conveyed in this quote alone adds a great deal to the still and silent photographic collection. Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson remind us that there is ‘a complex multiplicity of gendered, cultural and identity-specific variables that we must negotiate as interviewers’.33 An interviewer’s subject position not only affects the process of interpretation and writing, the subjectivity of the interviewer also shapes the nature and content of the interviews themselves.34 As with all social discourse, oral history participants’ responses are (often unwittingly) modified to the presumed subject position of their interviewer. Matters of class, gender and occupational experience are all factors that must be negotiated before, during and after an interview. As a tertiary-educated younger woman, I found that some participants – particularly older men – would occasionally address me in a manner that might be construed as patronising and they were at times unwilling to tell me stories that they deemed ‘unfit for my ears’. Interview ­participants’ reticence to talk generally emerged in relation to supposedly ‘dirty’ stories, such as stories about streakers, swearing and initiations.35 Some interview participants felt it was their duty to educate me about former printing technology, and spent a great deal of time explaining to me how things worked. There was a persistent desire to ensure that I understood the hot-metal typesetting and the makeready process for letterpress. I did not entirely discourage this sort of explanation, even though it occasionally resulted in long and turgid descriptions. Such a thorough description of obsolete technology can, in and of itself, be a significant addition to the historical record. At times this kind of conversation opened a window to what participants thought was most important or most exciting about their work and indicated their immense pride in possessing a ‘hard-won’ trade skill and maintaining all the acquired knowledge that goes with it.

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Image, space, voice During interviews, participants’ comments about women undertaking apprenticeships were occasionally modulated in deference to their interviewer (with participants perhaps sugar-coating the transition to mixed apprentice intakes, in a way that they might not have if their interviewer had been male). These verbal concessions were often relatively easy to pick. Rehearsed phrases, internal contradictions and cliches characterised some of the discussions about women undertaking printing apprenticeships, for example. Assumptions based on my gender and presumed inexperience could sometimes work to my advantage. On occasion, it allowed me to take note of particular contradictions, discrepancies and over-simplifications that may not have come to light had I given the interviewee the impression that I ‘knew it all’.36 In a similar process to that undertaken with oral histories, the gleaning of photographic meaning is contingent upon the contexts of interpretation that emerge during the interview and, afterwards, in the processes of visual analysis and the presentation of history. Photographic theory has established that meaning in historical photographs is not simply given, waiting to be discovered.37 Rather, meaning is deeply contingent upon the subject position of the viewer (who they are, what they know, where they come from) and the contexts of interpretation and re-presentation. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall has explored how in photographs (as with oral histories) meaning is produced on a number of levels and how it changes at different historical stages.38 Philosopher Susan Buck-Morss reminds us that meaning in historical photographs is an ever-changing, mutable thing and that the same photograph may mean something very different to a historian compared to what it might mean to a former employee. The process of bringing photographs into an interview context, and later publishing them, produces meaning: Images are the archive of collective memory … The complaint that images are taken out of context … is not valid. To struggle to bind them again to their source is not only impossible (as it actually produces a new meaning) it is to miss what is powerful about them, their capacity to generate meaning, not merely to transmit it.39

Photographs, like oral history interviews, provide fertile but subjective territory for the exploration of human society, helping us navigate issues about how we shape our world, how this world shapes us and how we attempt to capture it before it vanishes.40 There are risks, however, that the exploration of black-and-white historical photographs can slip into the terrain of nostalgia.41 One must remain wary of a photograph’s ability to produce simplistic, ‘rose-tinted’ attitudes to the past. Nonetheless, the mutable status of photographic meaning allows such images to trigger fruitful discussion and generate new ways of understanding older worlds. The combination of oral history and photography is a discussion that was spurred on in 2011 by Alexander Freund and Alistair Thomson’s edited

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collection of essays, Oral History and Photography.42 Prior to Freund and Thomson’s publication, oral historians’ references to using photographs occurred haphazardly and the organised theoretical discussion about photographs in the oral history process was a notable gap in Englishlanguage oral history literature.43 Oral history has come some distance since the early advice to oral historians to be wary of using photographs during interviews, as they could easily ‘generate false memories’ or kill the conversation entirely.44 Of course, the intersection between oral history and photography is not a new phenomenon in practice.45 The handling of photographs and other imagery is undoubtedly well integrated into the work of historians and oral historians alike. While earlier studies tended to treat photographs as memory triggers in interviews, as ‘evidence’ to back up a verbal claim, or simply as illustrations to accompany quotes, the possibilities are more diverse and complex.46 The collaboration of labour historian Steven High and photographer David Lewis, Corporate Wasteland, charted deindustrialisation in Canada and offered a unique approach to the integration of oral histories and photographs. Alongside High’s historical research and oral histories, Lewis included his own photographs. These images were often captured after the closure of factories, revealing crumbling relics of Canada’s industrial heyday. High and Lewis emphasise that ‘the oral history interviews act as a crucial counterpoint to the nostalgia that the photographs may produce’.47 They also emphasise that Lewis’ photographs are not ‘documentary’ evidence, but present a ‘viewpoint’, a sometimes bitter and poignant representation of the social and environmental realities of postindustrial Canada.48 One matter that is still somewhat under-discussed is the multiplicity of interpretive functions of historical photographs when introduced into the interview context. Judith Modell and Charlee Brodsky’s Envisioning Homestead project is notable here, chiefly because these historians interpreted photographic material as being a major part of what the participants had to say.49 In researching the community of Homestead, Pennsylvania, Modell and Brodsky brought along their own selection of photographs (from press images and community archives) and encouraged participants to provide their own personal images. Their aim was that the photographs would act not only as reminders, nor as mere ‘illustrations’ to stories; instead, the photographs would become part of ‘a conversation about the past’ in a context wherein the interviewer and participant would collectively re-examine the photographs.50 This enabled a ‘re-viewing’ of verbal history, sometimes adding specificity and confidence to the participants’ recollections.51 It helped their interview participants to put their experiences in a broader historical context, to ‘make these points “history”’.52 A similar dynamic was particularly apparent in my interview with press-machinist Victor Gunther. Victor began as a ‘rouseabout’ (runner

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Image, space, voice boy) at the Gov in 1946 when he was fifteen years old; he was indentured as a letterpress-machinist apprentice in 1947. Photographs were a central part of this interview because Victor had brought a published book of photographs with him: the 1988 publication of NSW Government Printing Office photographs known as Priceless Pictures.53 During the interview, he regularly pointed to particular photographs that had significance to the stories he wanted to tell. Here, Victor pointed to figure 10: Let me show you something in here. When I started. ‘Slippery dip, Manly Baths Sydney 1947.’ Right? 1947. That’s when I got me apprenticeship. I was living over there in Manly. I used to catch the ferry to go to work every day, down at Manly Wharf. This slippery dip, I used to dive for money. Thruppence, ha’pennies and pennies. I’d dive in and put ’em in me mouth. They’d throw out thruppence and sixpence and they’re the best ones, because when they hit the water and they go down like that, you could see ’em shine, and you’d could grab ’em, put ’em in your mouth. I used to do two bob or two shillings, out at the back, which was in the harbour side. It was deep water. The rich ones, the people with plenty of money’d throw the two bob out there, and I’d dive in and go after ’em. Now, that slippery dip: I used to stand up on the top

10

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Slippery dip, Manly Baths, Sydney, 1947.

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of that and dive into the water, all the way down. People used to come along the Promenade and I’d dive in there and they’d all crowd up on the wharf and watch me … That was one of my lurks, when I was younger. Now, that’s when I was apprenticed, when I got me papers [indentures]. And that photo was taken in 1947.54

During the interview, Victor’s recollections sometimes pertained to the Gov and at other times they did not, at least not directly. Of course, as an interviewer I would not have known that the slippery dip photograph could have any significance for Victor; this was something he (literally) brought to the table. In the act of pointing to this published institutional photograph, Victor made his personal story part of his sense of history. His recollection tumbled out in a way that showed a strong interconnection between his identity, his work experience at the Gov, his recreational experience after work and the mnemonic presence of photographs in memory. There was also a powerful sense that Victor wanted you to know that he was there, almost right at the moment the photograph was taken, larking about, catching your coins as they fell through the water. The use of photographs during the interview process did not always place participants’ experiences in context or affirm existing i­nstitutional narratives. Rather, the conjunction of oral history interviews and ­institutional photographs sometimes destabilised established institutional accounts about the Gov, and opened up new avenues for understanding workers’ relationships with their institution, as the following two examples attest.

‘Typical, as they say’ Consider the photograph ‘Alan Leishman pouring acid toner, 1962’ (figure 11). Alan commenced at the Gov in 1955 and was apprenticed in photoetching and engraving. He worked in the photography and lithography sections, ultimately becoming a senior manager, staying until the factory closure in 1989. The following excerpt is from an interview that was undertaken with another man, Graeme Murray, who had been apprenticed in lithographic dot-etching and engraving in 1960. While Graeme referred to figure 11 in the interview, the image was not actually present in front of him. In this way, Graeme’s interview took on a visual sensibility, indicating the residual trace of institutional photographs within his memory of working life at the Gov. Graeme recalled: We produced all these posters it was occupational health and safety, but they never knew the word then … But Alan [Leishman] was in a situation where he was working with a lot of dangerous nitric acid, all the time, and he was in an area there where they have massive baths where they put zinc plates in to be etched with this acid. Alan used to have this dustcoat. Everyone had dustcoats … and Alan’s one was particularly shredded because of the acid splashes over the years … But they had this poster … they wanted to show

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Image, space, voice the safe way of handling acid. So they brought into our section: the proper rubber gloves, up to the elbows, they brought in special aprons, they brought in goggles, hair thing, the whole lot. The photographers photographed him with all this gear on. As soon as they finished photographing him with all this gear on, they took all the gear back and Alan went back to his dustcoat! Typical, as they say.55

11

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Alan Leishman pouring acid toner, 1962.

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As Graeme’s comment indicates, institutional photographs were a strong presence in these interviews, even when they were not visible. The quote also tells us about the production and use of one of these photographs in its original context. This discussion also opened up an avenue where Graeme was able to talk about how the ‘official’, institutional, version of events differed from his on-site knowledge of the Gov. One month after interviewing Graeme, I interviewed Alan Leishman and showed him figure 11. Seeing the image of himself in 1962, Alan immediately shifted to another (related) story: Oh yes! That was the old acid! We did have an interesting incident at Liverpool Street. When we were packing up to move [to the new building], there was myself and a chap called John Devrice. Previous to that, we used to get acid in earthenware jars. We were on the fifth floor and as he walked around the corner it clipped one of the corners and a full earthenware jar, [over a foot] high and pure nitric acid went everywhere! I grabbed him and threw him into a sink … The interesting thing with that photograph is that a lot of that safety equipment was taken away immediately after they photographed it. They came and photographed it for health and safety and they took the equipment away. 56

In this case, figure 11 functioned as a memory trigger: Alan i­mmediately recalled the workplace accidents that came with using hazardous materials. But more than that – Alan’s comments again remind us that the employees were fully conscious of the staged nature of institutional photographs and they were aware (and somewhat amused) participants in this production of institutional imagery. In other words, they were cognisant of the gap between workplace practice and performed institutional representation. Here we have moved from the use of a photograph as a memory trigger and a historical document into territory that begins to examine the epistemic status of the image.57 These two interviews opened up discussion about the circumstances in which the image appeared in the first place and how its use evolved over time. Two decades later, in the mid-1980s, apprentice Sandra Elisabeth Stringer joined the Graphic Reproduction section at the Gov. During her interview, Sandra glanced at figure 11 and said: ‘That was actually an OH&S poster we used to have on the walls there.’58 The photograph of Alan Leishman pouring acid toner lived on – as a poster – for almost three decades at the Gov.

Man at a Monotype Early in my research I encountered a photograph depicting a seated man, captured in profile, who appeared to be operating a hot-metal typesetting machine (figure 12). At first glance, one might assume that this image depicted a compositor at work. However, the date of the image – 1985 – is itself of historical interest; for a worker to be operating Monotype or

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Bob Day seated at a Monotype keyboard, 1985.

Linotype machines in a large factory context in 1985 was unusual, as this hot-metal typesetting technology was reasonably obsolete by that stage. After a number of oral history interviews in which figure 12 was shared, it became clear that the machine was a Monotype keyboard, that the man posed with the machine was not a Monotype keyboarder and that he was not operating the machine properly. When former compositor Rudi Kolbach considered the image, he could tell from the man’s posture that something wasn’t right. There were two stages to Rudi’s interpretation. Recognition, with a statement, then a closer look: ‘Yep. Still workin’ on the Monotype keyboard. Well, they didn’t sit that far away and they don’t have a copy there and they never, ever looked at the keyboard, because they learned to touch type, without any need to look.’59 As Rudi explained, there was no copy present from which to type. Former Monotype operator Lindsay Somerville had a similar response, but he also indicated his embodied knowledge of the practice of Monotype setting: Oh, there’s a Monotype, yeah. That was the old thing. No copy in there – he’s not working! He hasn’t got any copy on the board! And ahh ahh that hose doesn’t look like it’s connected anyway. So he wouldn’t be setting like that. Look at it! He’s too far back. Look at his back, he’d kill himself. You had to sit with your legs apart, to get close enough. Then you had to swing it around, to use the bold and italics and so on.60

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There was pleasure in Lindsay’s analysis here, pleasure in being able to ‘read’ this photograph expertly enough to ascertain swiftly that the photograph was in some way staged. When compositors such as Lindsay might have assumed that their traditional printing skills and knowledge were permanently lost, this process allowed them to put their craft skills to use again. Another interview participant was able to identify the man pictured. Former Linotype operator Bob Law’s response adds detail in describing the character of the man pictured: There’s Bobby Day! This man was a Mono-caster. Bob Day. He passed away. He wasn’t a Monotype operator. That was a posed photo. He was a real character, he’d walk around … he’d just had a haircut and everyone was really bagging him about his shocking haircut and he’d walk around and say, ‘I went to the barber’s yesterday,’ and I said, ‘Make me like a fighter!’; ’cos all boxers in those days used to have real basin cuts. He was a funny bloke. But he’s long gone, too.61

The man sitting at the Monotype keyboard – Bob Day – was not indentured as a Monotype keyboard operator; he operated a hot-metal Monotype caster machine (a large machine for producing individual metal letters from rolls of punched tape). Linotype operator Geoff Hawes confirmed this identification: ‘Bobby Day! That guy sittin’ at that keyboard would not know anything about it! He was a Mono-caster operator and they’ve got a photo of him sittin’ at a machine! He wouldn’t know a thing about it.’62 There was a hint of ruffled feathers in Geoff’s response. The fact that he specifically mentioned Bob Day’s trade (Monotype casting) was ­significant. Geoff emphasised that Bob would have had no knowledge of how to use this machine, he was pretending to be a Monotype keyboarder. Monotype keyboarding was traditionally seen as a higher-status printing trade than the casters and in normal circumstances demarcation rules set by the PKIU would have strictly prevented Bob Day from even touching a Monotype keyboard.63 We have discovered that this image was posed and that it depicts a scenario that is not a scene of actual work in the factory. This should not be perceived as a problem, but it means that historians must work much harder to decode and contextualise images of ‘work’, taking care not to jump to conclusions. When brought into an interview context, this photograph discloses a moment of play, once a manual trade had disappeared. It also brings to light an aspect of the trade demarcation rules of this period in the printing industry. The fact that this man was pretending to operate the machine was not merely silly; it would have been a significant transgression against union-decreed demarcation rules, had the photograph been taken one year before, in 1984. Why do the years matter? Archival evidence confirms that the Monotype room at the Gov finally closed down in April 1984.64 By 1985 – the date ascribed to this image – the Monotype keyboard machines were no longer in place in the old Monotype room.

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Image, space, voice Instead, the machines were taking up space elsewhere at the Gov, redundant machines waiting to be discarded. In this photograph, Bob Day was not performing everyday work at the Gov: he was posing at a recently historicised object, a new relic. The act of posing with this relic and recording the act shows a playful, but also respectful, acknowledgement of the dramatic transitions facing the printing industry. Once I was able to access a high-resolution version of figure 12, a few additional details became clear. In the background of the photograph, a number of large machines (most likely Monotype casting equipment) were swathed in drop-sheets. To the right in the middle ground, a sign read: ‘Goodbye, Farewell and Amen: MONO.’ And so – far from being an image of a man at work, typing at a Monotype machine – this image was a spirited but memorialising tribute to an out-dated technology, a lost trade and an outmoded skill set. The machines that Bob Day would have mastered could well be visible in this photograph; they were (probably) underneath the funereal drop-sheets in the background. When coping with large institutions in the middle of a major transition and technological change, employees can be remarkably adept at expressing humour, giving some solace in a world of bureaucracy and skill loss. This chapter is not intended to present a comprehensive picture of all of the ways that institutional photographs may be used in an interdisciplinary material culture and labour history project; rather it provides some examples of how the photographs used in the preparation for Hot Metal were not mobilised simply as memory triggers or illustrations in the service of oral history. At times, oral quotations and photographs contradicted one another; at other times they were mutually reinforcing. The spoken word can open up visual possibilities or a photograph can send us down new paths of meaning that may not have otherwise been traversed. The exercise of handling these disparate source materials necessarily involves careful decisions. It is an ongoing process of judgements, selections, close examination and decoding: telling stories with photographs and producing vivid images with words. An exploration of the connections between these two types of sources should occur in a manner that is constantly cognisant of the socially shaped nature of both photographs and oral testimony and the role of the historian is to carefully assess the way in which these sources coalesce. The spoken word can open up visual possibilities and the use of photographs (in the interview and in the interpretive stages that follow) opens up potential for new ways of speaking about the past. The Gov offers a particularly rich example of this, partly because we have the privilege of access to a large and diverse photographic collection and because many former employees of the Gov are alive to tell their stories. These playful or absurd actions – such as Bob Day’s memorialising performance at being a Monotype operator, or Alan Leishman’s obliging

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charade demonstrating the supposedly correct use of protective equipment – have become embedded in the historical archive. Without the interview content, however, these photographs are but two of more than 4000 of images of workers at the Gov. Once just a few of these photographs are introduced into oral history interviews, new stories emerge and we are reminded of the ways in which memory, history and visual culture can fruitfully intersect.65 The convergence of oral histories and institutional photographs can bring about a productive slippage, or a gap, between what is said and what is pictured. It is precisely because these sources do not match up neatly that the stories and the images are so compelling. This illuminating gap hints at the complexity of labour experience and begins to disclose the relationship that these workers had with their workplace. It provides insight into how people coped with the challenges and bureaucratic rituals that characterised this particular public service factory: through irreverence, humour and through a tolerance of the human flaws inherent in bureaucratic process.

Notes 1 Don West, interview with author, 12 September 2012. 2 A. Freund and A. Thomson (eds), Oral History and Photography (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) p. 7. 3 Ibid., p. 1. 4 Ibid., p. 7. 5 Getting participants to respond to family photographs is not a straightforward matter either, see A. Freund and A. Thiessen, ‘Mary Brockmeyer’s wedding picture: exploring the intersection of photographs and oral history interviews’, in Freund and Thomson (eds), Oral History and Photography, pp. 30–1. 6 This picture collection is held with SLNSW, Sydney. Nineteenth-century glassplate negatives from this collection are preserved separately, at NSW State Records (NSWSR), Sydney. 7 Pamela Pearce, interview with author, 23 January 2012. 8 Granville May, interview with author, 8 February 2012. 9 S. Sontag, On Photography (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1979 [1973]), p. 156. 10 Ibid., p. 21. 11 Ibid., p. 23. 12 After 1989, some workers stayed on at the newly formed agency, the Government Printing Service, a small government department that managed the brokering of printing jobs to the private sector and the output of essential government publications. 13 Snowball sampling, also known as chain-referral sampling, is a technique whereby existing participants help to recruit new research participants, by recommending those that they know. 14 Judy McKinty and Margaret Tomkins had a similar but subtly different strategy when engaging in an oral history project related to the Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind (RVIB). In their interviews, they were presented with photographs before the formal interview process, with a variety of results. J. McKinty and M. Tomkins,

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Image, space, voice ‘From the cradle to the grave: Sister Lindsey and the blind babies’ nursery’, Oral History Association of Australia Journal 34 (2012), 27–31. 15 Freund and Thomson, Oral History and Photography, p. 4; H. Slim, P. Thompson, O. Bennett and N. Cross, ‘Ways of listening’, in R. Perks and A. Thomson (eds), The Oral History Reader, London and New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 148–9. 16 Freund and Thomson, Oral History and Photography, pp. 5–6. 17 P. Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988 [1978]), p. 68. 18 Perks and Thomson (eds), The Oral History Reader, pp. 3–4. 19 P. Hamilton, ‘The knife edge: debates about memory and history’, in K. DarianSmith and P. Hamilton (eds), Memory and History in Twentieth Century Australia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 14–5. 20 P. Thompson, The Voice of the Past. 21 Ibid., p. 259. 22 See for example: Perks and Thomson (eds), The Oral History Reader; Darian Smith and Hamilton (eds), Memory and History; S. Leydesdorff, L. Passerini and P. Thompson (eds), Gender and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); P. Hamilton and L. Shopes (eds), Oral History and Public Memories (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008). 23 J. Shields (ed.), All our Labours: Oral Histories of Working Life in Twentieth Century Sydney (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1992), p. 3. 24 A. Thomson, ‘Fifty years on’, p. 584. 25 J. Murphy, ‘The voice of memory: history, autobiography and oral memory’, Historical Studies 22:87 (1986), 157. 26 D. Silverman, Interpreting Qualitative Data: Methods for Analysing Talk, Text, and Interaction (London: Sage, 2001), p. 272. 27 B. Davies and R. Harré, ‘Positioning: the discursive production of selves’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 20:1 (1990), 43–63; Leydesdorff, Passerini and Thompson (eds), Gender and Memory. 28 A. Oak, ‘Particularising the past: persuasion and value in oral history interviews and design critiques’, Journal of Design History 19:4 (2006), 247, 345–56. 29 S. McHugh ‘The aerobic art of interviewing’, Asia Pacific Media Educator 18 (2007), 147–54. 30 L. Sandino, ‘Oral histories and design: objects and subjects’, Journal of Design History 19:4 (2006), 280. 31 For discussions of the careful handling of material culture in oral history, see Sandino, ‘Oral histories and design’, pp. 275–82; J. Wilton, ‘Telling objects: material culture and memory in oral history interviews’, Oral History Association of Australia Journal 30 (2008), 41–49; L. Sandino and M. Partington (eds), Oral History in the Visual Arts (London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2013). 32 Neil Lewis, interview with author, 17 January 2012. 33 Perks and Thomson (eds), The Oral History Reader, p. 118. 34 McHugh, ‘The aerobic art’; C. K. Riessman, ‘Doing justice: positioning the interpreter in narrative work’, in W. Patterson (ed.), Strategic Narrative: New Perspectives on the Power of Personal and Cultural Stories (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2002), pp. 193–214; L. Sandino, ‘Oral histories and design’, p. 275. 35 J. Shields, All our Labours, pp. 106–7. See Chapter 4 for a brief account of apprentice initiations, which were arguably a form of institutionally condoned child sex abuse. 36 Oral historian Siobhan McHugh has explained a similar scenario, where her ‘mild manner and heavily pregnant condition perhaps led him to underestimate [her] understanding’, allowing her to pick up discrepancies, see McHugh, ‘The aerobic art’, pp. 147–54.

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37 S. Buck-Morss, ‘Visual studies and global imagination’, Papers of Surrealism 2 (2004), 1–29; A. Sekula, ‘On the invention of photographic meaning’, in V. Goldberg (ed.), Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988 [1975]), pp. 452–4; D. Price and L. Wells, ‘Thinking about photography: debates, historically and now’, in L. Wells (ed.), Photography: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 9–64; J. Tucker with T. Campt, ‘Entwined practices: engagements with photography in historical inquiry’, History and Theory 48 (2009), 1–8; S. Hall (ed.), Representation, Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: SAGE, 1997), pp. 13–74. 38 Hall, Representation, pp. 3–4. 39 S. Buck-Morss, ‘Visual studies’, p. 23. 40 Freund and Thomson, Oral History and Photography, p. 10. 41 S. Sontag, On Photography, p. 15. 42 Freund and Thomson, Oral History and Photography. 43 Ibid., pp. 3, 19–23. Freund and Thomson provide a thorough list of oral history publications that refer to the use of photographs. See also B. M. Robertson, ‘Book review: Oral History and Photography’, Oral History Association of Australia Journal 34 (2012), 78. 44 Thompson, The Voice of the Past, p. 134; E. Stokes, ‘United we stand: a synthesis of oral and pictorial history’, Oral History Association of Australia Journal 5 (1982), 132–3. 45 Freund and Thomson, Oral History and Photography, p. 2. 46 See for example: P. Hamilton, Cracking Awaba (Sydney: Shore Regional Organisation of Councils, 2005); M. Park, Doors Were Always Open: Recollections of Pyrmont and Ultimo (Sydney: City West Development Corporation, 1997). 47 S. High and D. Lewis, Corporate Wasteland: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialization (Toronto and New York: Between the Lines and Cornell University Press, 2007), p. 13. 48 Ibid, p. 14. 49 J. Modell and C. Brodsky, ‘Envisioning homestead: using photographs in interviewing’, in E. M. McMahan and K. L. Rogers (eds), Interactive Oral History Interviewing (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1994), pp. 141–61. 50 Ibid., p. 145. 51 Ibid., p. 145. 52 Ibid., p. 159. 53 Priceless Pictures from the Remarkable NSW Government Printing Office Collection 1870–1950 (Sydney: NSW Government Printing Office, 1988). 54 Victor Gunther, interview with author, 15 August 2012. 55 Graeme Murray, interview with author, 9 September 2011. 56 Alan Leishman, interview with author, 28 October 2011. Alan later acknowledged that they were eventually provided safety equipment. 57 Freund and Thomson, Oral History and Photography, p. 3. Recent oral history literature that involves interviews with photographers also covers this territory, albeit in a different way. Howard Bossen and Eric Freedman conducted oral history interviews with both steelworkers and the photographers who depicted them. See H. Bossen and E. Freedman, ‘Molten light: the intertwined history of steel and photography – The roles of oral histories and other first-person accounts’, The Oral History Review 39:1 (2012), 1–14. 58 Sandra Elisabeth Stringer, interview with author, 17 October 2012. ‘OH&S’ refers to occupational health and safety. 59 Rudi Kolbach, interview with author, 12 December 2011. 60 Lindsay Somerville, interview with author, 15 December 2011.

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Image, space, voice 1 6 62 63 64 65

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Bob Law, interview with author, 27 February 2012. Geoff Hawes, interview with author, 16 February 2012. Cockburn, Brothers, pp. 44, 52–3. Government Printing Office Staff Journal, 8:1 (1984). Tucker with Campt, ‘Entwined practices’, p. 3.

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3 Spatial and architectural memory in oral histories of working life

Introduction What happens if we invert the cliche ‘if walls could talk?’ and explore what former factory workers might say about those walls? At first this may sound absurd, but in a broad sense this chapter demonstrates this very approach, for it is here that we turn our attention to the richness of content contained within workers’ memories of the buildings in which they worked. While the disciplines of oral history, design history and architectural history are all beginning to engage with the expansive possibilities for cross-disciplinary interaction,1 the question of how spatial memory operates in the interview context is yet to receive thorough attention.2 Earlier approaches to the mingling of oral history with architecture tended to focus on interviewing architects.3 By contrast, the approach taken in Hot Metal involved interviews with print-workers and, through this process, it uncovered a wealth of spatial, architectural and design content. The building in question for this research was the former ‘Gov’ (figures 3, 16). Designed in the 1940s under the supervision of NSW Government Architect Cobden Parkes, the Gov was a purpose-built printing factory. Completed in 1959, the building was used as a printing house until the closure of the Government Printing Office in 1989. This chapter demonstrates how design and architectural histories can combine the more traditional analysis of form, archival materials, drawings and photographs with the creative development of a ‘mnemonic spatial projection’, emergent through the interview process. One unexpected outcome of the oral history interview process was that the conversations with print-workers contained frequent references to architectural features, design elements and to delineated sections of the building. It became apparent that the Gov, as an institution and as a building, continues to

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Image, space, voice exist and transform through memory, reminding us how memories can be closely tied to space, architecture and location. This reconstruction of spatial and architectural history occurred not through oral history alone, but through an integration of archival materials, oral histories and ­photographs. This chapter will first establish the theoretical terrain surrounding space and memory, before providing background historical detail pertaining to the Gov’s building, enriched by the details of workers’ recollections. It will then explore the existence of ‘architectural rumour’, gleaned through the oral history process. The final part gathers together multiple oral histories to produce a collective reconstruction of workers’ recollections, integrated in a speculative section-rendering, a construction of mnemonic space developed through the interview process. As we saw in Chapter 2, the interview is a site where meaning is made. This chapter outlines how, through oral history, a co-construction of spatial memory is produced between the interviewer and the interviewee. Oral history enables something approximating a collective spatial memory to develop. Through conversation the interviewer and interviewee move around the building, between levels and along corridors, reconstructing the built environment as they speak. The research process enacted for Hot Metal included the drawing and mapping of memories, both by the interviewer and interviewees. A secondary theme running through this chapter is an alternative avenue for understanding and interpreting ‘low-significance’ architecture. While the architecture of the Gov might easily be dismissed as an unremarkable or compromised example of post-war, modernist public architecture, the research revealed the wealth and diversity of information and meaning that could be gleaned through speaking to workers about their former workplace, indicating that the Gov was a place of cultural significance for Sydney’s industrial and governmental history. In 1998, heritage consultants Graham Books & Associates made the following assessment of the building that housed the Gov: The building has a low degree of historical significance as the first Printing Office building in which every phase of activities could be maintained. In terms of aesthetic quality it is considered to have low significance as a discrete item … The retention of the building is optional, demolition is acceptable.4

Designed during a time of post-war steel shortage in Australia, the Gov is not a steel-frame structure, despite being a large-scale modernist design. Post-war material shortages were a significant hindrance to public works in the late 1940s and early 1950s.5 The Gov is a veritable bunker made of reinforced precast concrete. It takes up the entire length of the block on Harris Street in Sydney’s Ultimo. At the time of writing, the building still stands; its sheer bulk as a concrete structure has made demolition unviable.

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Historical background Appreciating the striking modernity of the Gov in 1959 necessitates some understanding of the structures that came before it. From 1841, the NSW Government Printing Office was located at Phillip and Bent streets in Sydney. New premises were constructed on this site in 1856, and this building was later renovated and extended.6 Nineteenth-century accounts of the Gov describe an institution that was almost always in need of more space.7 The character of the old printing office was a hodgepodge accrual of materials over time: exposed light bulbs hung low, ceilings were equipped with chains and pulleys and the floors were covered with a patchwork of surfaces. Interview participant George Larden, a press-machinist who worked at the Printing Office from 1936, described machinery as being ‘scattered all over the place’.8 Victor Gunther, who commenced at the Gov in 1946, emphasised that the Printing Office was the ‘number one fire risk’ in the city. He added, ‘smoking was not allowed, but the toilet was very popular for a quick puff’.9 Multiple interviewees referred to one section of the factory as ‘Siberia’, because it was so far away.10 From 1908, the Government Printing Office began making plans for relocation to improved premises, but the outbreak of the First World War, the Depression and then the Second World War understandably slowed this process.11 During the Depression, the NSW Department of Public Works’ energy went into the creation of simpler and more affordable public buildings to generate employment, such as schools and hospitals. Government Architect Cobden Parkes described the harried state of affairs for government building design during the Depression: The Depression suddenly settled over the [Government Architect’s] Office … almost overnight the emphasis was for plans to permit immediate employment rather than the normal work of proper design … In the decision to build … often the foundations were excavated and the footings poured from original sketch plans, and the working drawings would follow … It was development at its very worst, but it was clearly recognised that the scheme to provide employment was paramount.12

This description goes some way to explaining the slow completion of the more complex and expensive printing office building and provides insight into other Public Works’ decisions in the 1930s. In 1944, a site in Ultimo was finally selected for the new printing factory.13 For most of the twentieth century, Ultimo and its neighbouring suburb Pyrmont were industrial, inner-city slum areas. One interview participant, George Bryant, grew up on the Pyrmont–Ultimo borderline and worked as a despatch offsider at the Gov from 1959. He witnessed the construction of the new printing office, describing the following incident while pointing to a photograph of Ultimo (figure 13).

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The new site of the Gov, Ultimo, 1950, before the removal of the fig trees. Right there was the hugest Morton Bay fig [tree] you’ve ever seen. Oh it’s enormous! You can see the pub across here, the Wentworth Park Hotel, and the roots of it went into the [pub] site. The first thing I see was: they moved these big packing cases in. … and everyone was, ‘what’s goin’ on?,’ you know? … It was the talk of the place. Everyone used to say, ‘what’s in them packing crates?’ you know? … We used to come up here to get the tram. There was no buses, and I used to get the tram. And everyone used to head for there because there was shade under the fig tree. None of the other stops had shade … everyone was really cheesed off about losing that tree! Oh, that was a talkin’ point of the district for ages. You know, that was the only shade we had.14

The first sod of earth was turned at the site in 1950 and the fig trees were removed.15 For five years, the Ultimo community missed the desirable shade provided by the fig tree and the ostensible reason for its removal remained unclear to them. Development approval for the new Government Printing Office building was ‘inadvertently not sought’, with approval finally given in 1956.16 Continuing material shortages hampered the building’s progress, and there were engineering problems – a deep fissure was discovered in the subsoil. Finally, in November 1958, staff began to move into the new building.

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The new printing office building was designed under the supervision of Parkes, known for his relatively conservative style and interest in the Dutch architect Willem Marinus Dudok.17 The Harris Street facade features vertical concrete fins and a rounded corner clad in slate blue ceramic tiles. The fins were intended to provide sun protection and the tiles were purely for ‘aesthetic relief’, although arguably neither feature was entirely successful.18 Former press-machinist Ray Utick experienced the move in 1958, from the city factory to Harris Street: First time we saw it, it felt big. Like, everything was new … They gradually brought everything over to Ultimo … It was cleaner. It was more laid out correctly, nice and meticulously laid out … All the big machines on one side of the building, the smaller machines on the other side … It was like heaven, then, the new one, compared to the old one.19

The new building was officially opened by Premier John Cahill in Feb­­­ ruary 1959, more than fifty years after calls for a new building were first made20 (figure 14). At first, the renewed printing office was seen as a modern marvel; it could boast of spacious, organised and hygienic workspaces21 (figure 15). The contrast between the new Government Printing Office and other factory spaces in Sydney was stark. Alan Leishman, apprenticed in photo-etching and engraving in 1955, remembered the new building in the early 1960s:

NSW Premier John Joseph Cahill and Government Printer V. C. N. Blight inspect the new Gov building, 23 February 1959.

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The Photographic Section at morning tea, 1964. It was seen as being very modern … the place was built like a World War II bunker. It’s not steel frame … the ceilings were enormously high in some sections … I think for what it was originally it worked well. It was solid. It stood up well. Had good lighting. It had good facilities … Compared to what we’d worked in … it was bliss!22

Alan holds himself at an interpretive distance from other attitudes to the Gov, using terms such as ‘seen as’, but he makes it clear that the reassuring solidity of the building was significant. Not all workers were quite so impressed by the building, as we shall see further on.

Spatial memory While the idea of remembered domestic space (‘memory house’) has been established in philosophy and architectural theory, what use can be made of the multiplicity of spatial memories that are produced within a large institutional building?23 This question began to emerge throughout the interview process. French philosophical theorists Maurice Halbwachs, Gaston Bachelard and Paul Ricœur each established that memory is, among other things, a spatial phenomenon.24 The experience of memory is imbued with spatial information. As an architectural structure, a factory building can function as a signifier, as well as a physical vessel,

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s­ imultaneously containing and symbolising the institution to its employees and clients. It helps to think of such a factory building both in terms of its reality as a built structure, but also as what design theorists Joyce Malnar and Frank Vodvarka call a ‘spatio-sensory construct’ – a building that functions powerfully through remembered embodied experiences, as well as through photographs.25 Architect Juhani Pallasmaa has elucidated the deep connection between memory and architecture, explaining how ‘we understand and remember who we are through our constructions, both material and mental’ and ‘our recollections are situational and spatialised memories’.26 This understanding of memory as embodied, sensory and, crucially, spatial, recalls Halbwachs’ earlier writing on collective memory.27 Halbwachs described the relationship between memory and space as one that is often thought to be so obvious that it is not worth observing. His arguments formed an important part of refuting the notion that the act of memory is something that transports us outside of space and outside of our bodies.28 Rather, we are kept solidly on the ground – in physical space, not outside of it. Ricœur similarly explained how the ‘corporeal and environmental spatiality [was] inherent to the evocation of a memory’.29 He linked this spatialised and mnemonic phenomena with multiple types of space – lived space, geometric space and inhabited space – and associated history as ‘narrated time’ with the way space is ‘constructed’.30 Space is constructed both through memory and in a literal, physical sense.31 Pallasmaa also reminds us of the projected nature of spatial memory, explaining that ‘remembering is not only a mental event; it is also an act of embodiment and projection’.32 This points towards a way to talk about factory buildings such as the Gov as both physical, geometric (modernist) spaces and as continually evolving mental spaces, sites of narrative construction. As we saw in Chapter 2, oral history does not, strictly speaking, tell us exactly what happened. Rather, oral histories tell us about how people construct narratives about what happened and, significantly, how people place themselves in relation to the past. A critical understanding that the spoken word and written transcript are rich historical resources enables us to begin to identify thematic and linguistic patterns, such as how participants tell stories in place and space. Moreover, it is not only language that works to construct meaning about the past; what is articulated in oral history also draws upon visual, material and spatial factors.

Space and order In the mid-twentieth century, factory labour structure – and its palpable architectural expression – was still very much about the hierarchical organisation of discrete components. Workers either had a single trade, or were seen as ‘unskilled’ (i.e. they were responsible for some repetitive, simple

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Image, space, voice tasks), and they tended to be corralled in triangulated central arrangements. This suited the printing unions, such as the PKIU, which could use industrial demarcation and membership requirements to protect their members’ skill base. Certain machines and tasks were ‘off-limits’ unless a tradesperson was indentured in the relevant trade. Such categorising systems were also expressed spatially. The design of the building was intended to allow a flow of activities from the top (fifth) floor, down through the building, to despatch.33 Accordingly, at the Gov, the top floor held the Government Printer’s office and administrative sections. The fourth floor was dedicated to the hot-metal composition process and housed the Proofreading room; level three was dedicated to hand-compositing (typesetting) and letterpress-machining (printing). Folding and binding were located on the second floor and the first floor held lithography (another form of printing), as well as the photographic section and ‘manufactured stationery’ (e.g. envelopes, exercise books). The ground floor contained the entrances, shop and despatch. The levels of the building essentially replicated the printing process, a spatial system that was intended to promote productivity and efficiency. This arrangement also reflected the divisions between white-collar and blue-collar labour. The spatial organisation of the factory building regularly weaved its way into the interviews, although direct responses to architectural queries sometimes took the form of a mundane listing of what was on each floor. What is significant, however, is the way in which interviewees, when recounting the building, appeared to be mentally travelling through the space as they spoke. The interview with former Linotype operator Bob Law offers one example of many similar statements: Goin’ ’round the building: opposite the reading room was the stereotype room, where they used to get images and cast them and put them on wooden blocks. That was a pretty highly technical department to be in, but one of the first ones to disappear … There was that. I’m going down the corridor. Next to that was the Parliamentary room, I think, which was a composing room, but it also had its own printing presses in there. On the other side of the corridor was the confidential room, where all the ballot papers were done … what else … the further down you got oh, they had all sorts of printing rooms down there, and the very last room on the other side was the engineers … But that was just on my floor.34

The spatial nature of interviewees’ stories often emerged without specific prompting. As with Bob’s recollections of the building, former camera operator Terry Hagenhofer also took the listener on a journey through the building, recounting an altercation with another apprentice: The guys used to play table tennis on the [imposition] slab (that’s where you set it, where you used to lock all the jobs up) – so, morning teatime, one of the big apprentices, big giant of a bloke, came up to me one day and he give me this money and he says,

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  ‘While you’re over at the shop, can you get me a pie.’   And I’m goin’, ‘I’m not goin’ over to the shop!’ and he says,   ‘While you’re over at the shop, can you get me a pie.’ I was p’d-off with that, thinkin’, ‘Oh, these buggers are making me go over.’ So I’ve come back, and they’re playing a game of table tennis and I’ve put his pie right in the middle of the game. Anyway, this other guy I’d never met, ended up being Geoff Hawes, he says,   ‘Oh good on ya, you bloody little smart ass.’ Then I said something to him, and he says,   ‘Mate, I oughta kick you fair up the ass.’ And I said,   ‘Yeah if you can catch me!’ ‘cos he was a pretty big bloke, but I fancied myself as pretty nippy. Well, he’s come at me, and I’ve taken off through the Composing room, and he’s chased me through the pressroom, and he’s behind me all the way, and I couldn’t get away. And I’ve run into the Font room thinking I’m safe, and he’s got hold of me – nothing rough … Anyway, I disliked him for years … then five or six years later, we used to see each other in traffic on the way home … We were just chattin’ one day, and he says,   ‘Do you wanna get a car-pool goin’?’ He ended up being the nicest bloke.35

Terry’s story is not only about the process of growing up, it also navigates the listener through the third floor at morning teatime. The act of recollection is a reliving of particular memories, manifesting itself as a reconstruction of space through memory. These interviews were peppered with exchanges such as ‘which floor was that on?’ and ‘you know that bit at the back of the building?’ There are far too many instances to quote here in full. As an interviewer, I began developing my own projected image of the Gov. This meant that I, too, became invested in understanding this history, both spatially and architecturally, prompting further questions, as well as further examination of archives and photographs. The spatial divisions within this large building also gave it a labyrinthine quality. Several interviewees used the term ‘rabbit warren’ to describe it, notwithstanding the fact that it was designed as an organised, modern structure. Sandra Elisabeth Stringer, who worked in Graphic Reproduction, described the building as a place in flux: It was a funny place, a bit of a rabbit warren. Different places, different rooms … you’re ducking down little funny sets of stairs and corridors … things had been tacked on, so it changed a lot. Different rooms’d spring up all the time … You were able to work out where [the overseer] would be waiting for you, and go in a different lift … and end up coming down from the fifth floor. He’d always be left wondering what on earth was going on. 36

Former compositor Philip James described similar hideaway areas, indica­­ ting an exploratory attitude that some workers took to their workplace: There were other floors above, with myriad small rooms, water storage areas, nooks and crannies, lift shafts with iron ladders reaching up to more small rooms with windows, some with sweeping views of the city skyline. Out on

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Image, space, voice the roof area itself, there were iron ladders leading up to small areas right on top of the lift shafts, where you could go to have lunch, sunbathe, or just hide away. You couldn’t be seen by anyone up there.37

The meanings attached to the printing office building are fluid and they changed dramatically in the three decades that the building functioned as a factory. In the late 1950s and 1960s this solid, chunky building was viewed as a form of modern democracy in action. It was respected for its technological displays of efficiency, reliability, trustworthiness and governmental authority. It was the location where law became law, through its tangible creation in print on paper. The space itself seemed to say ‘we value your work’. Workers were not always convinced, however, and they revelled in telling stories of how things were wrong with the building. Despite the Gov being designed along functional lines, there were many elements in its design that were rather dysfunctional and made work physically difficult. Oral testimony suggests (and archival evidence confirms) that the westerly aspect of the building made it very hot in the afternoons, and the concrete fins and Venetian blinds offered little reprieve.38 Monotype operator Lindsay Somerville recalled: ‘They didn’t air-condition the place. But it got really hot in summer, it was unbelievably hot. Especially in the Mono – in the casting room, where they’re casting molten lead, and in the Lino room. It was just incredibly stifling.’39 Pressmachinist Norm Rigney explained that the intake ducts for the air-cooling system were on the eastern side of the building, adjacent to the Darling Harbour railway goods yard. He cheerfully explained that the soot was sucked into the building: The air conditioning, of course, it used to suck in all of the ‘fresh air’ from the back of the building, and there was an air-conditioning room in the ground floor, which was up in the top corner. And it used to suck it all in, but down the back was Darling Harbour railway goods yard, and the steam engines used to phht pphht phht phht past, and all the smoke used to get sucked up through the intakes. And of course you’d get the smell of the steam engines. It never ever bothered me, because I loved trains.40

The Darling Harbour goods railway operated until October 1984. Many interviewed print-workers spoke of watching the trains (and of the air pollution they generated). During the 1980s, the Darling Harbour area was decommissioned as an industrial port, and rebuilt as a recreational harbour with spaces designated for shopping, hotels, a convention centre, parks and public promenades. From those east-facing windows, the Gov’s employees progressively watched the demolition of the heart of industrial Sydney. Although the 1980s iteration of Darling Harbour was later popularly lambasted as a poor example of postmodern architecture and urban design, at the time its revitalisation was strikingly visible evidence of the rebirth of Sydney as a global service city.41

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Like other printing factories in Europe and North America in the 1970s and 1980s, the Gov was an anxious place. The changes to printing technologies – outlined in the Introduction and in the chapters that follow – transformed the factory into a site of rumour, dysfunction and multiple, conflicting mini-worlds. A room of new typesetting computers was set up next to a room full of still-operational hot-metal casting equipment. Skilled print-workers feared for their livelihoods and many were keen to be retrained. Industrial disputes and strikes were common in the 1970s, which meant that the boundaries of the Gov were regularly picketed. The PKIU was spurred into action by changes at Fairfax, a major newspaper employer for compositors and printers in Australia. Between 1976 and 1978, the PKIU organised mass picketing in response to Fairfax’s lack of assurances about printers’ job security following the publication of their new Automation Plan.42 The Gov’s printers went on strike in support of their Fairfax comrades (although some later resented this, feeling that the support was not reciprocated when their own jobs were on the line in the late 1980s). In this climate, the doorways, driveways and despatch areas at the Gov took on completely different significance.43 Some doorways were even fictional, as the following example explains. Also in the 1980s, the NSW state government was pushing a progressive agenda in regards to built-environment accessibility for people with disabilities. As workers Sandra Elisabeth Stringer and Neil Lewis separately

The Gov building, showing the ramp to nowhere, 1985.

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Image, space, voice recalled, in the 1980s the Gov attempted to install a wheelchair ramp along the side of the factory building. The ramp was a ‘botched job’ that ultimately came to symbolise all that was wrong with the assumed inefficiencies and dull-headedness of the government public service. According to an oft-told anecdote, the ramp contractors installed the accessibility ramp on the wrong side of the building, where there was no doorway entrance, only a massive brick wall. Sandra explains: I always remember the Mad Man’s Exit, when they put in the disability ramp on the wrong side of the building. It’s still there I think. There’s a ramp that goes up there. Somehow the contractors came along and had the plan upside down; you can go have a look at it, the ramp goes nowhere! One of the guys from the night engineers went down there with a tub of paint and he painted a door on the outside, and above it he wrote ‘Mad Man’s Exit’. 44

Neil Lewis also remembered this prank, associating it specifically with the long-term eccentric ‘characters’ working at the Gov: ‘I always remember on the outside … someone had painted like a little doorway, just three lines, and it just said ‘Mad Men Only’. And it used to make me laugh every time I seen it, because I thought, oh, that’s quite appropriate.’45 Subsequent examination of archival photographs has confirmed that Neil and Sandra’s recollections are based on fact; up until the renovation of the building in 2012, there was indeed a ramp leading to a blank wall and a drawn-on door on the wall, with the words ‘Mad Men Only’ (faintly visible in figure 16). This offers an example of how oral history anecdotes can be confirmed by the existence of archival photographs. We may not know the precise circumstances surrounding how and why the ramp was installed incorrectly, but in many senses that does not matter. What matters is the way in which the building’s foibles came to be seen as the embodiment of the Gov’s dysfunction and also its loveability. There was a paradoxical relationship that workers had with their institution; their workplace was the subject of derision (and so was the building); the Gov’s walls enclosed a world of complaint and discontent; and yet the factory building was another form of ‘home’.

Bouncing on woodblock floors Pallasmaa has noted the significance of the horizontal plane on architectural memory, noting that the floor is the ‘most potent element of architecture’.46 In calling for attention to the lived experience of architecture, Pallasmaa suggests we attend to ‘primary architectural experiences’, such as the ‘floorness’ of the floor, the ‘roofness’ of the roof.47 The ‘floorness’ of the floor was certainly something that drew the attention of the Gov’s employees. The floors were endgrain woodblock, covering over 18,581 square metres, at the time reported as ‘probably the largest area of endgrain wood block flooring of any building in Australia’48 (figure 17).

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The sheer quantity of endgrain woodblocks must have been remarkable to observe, particularly in the early years. Alan Leishman enthused: The floors were the amazing things. Those wooden block floors. They were made out of what’s the timber? Very soft timber. Yellowy soft timber. They’d be stuck down with things and there’d be a bloke working around the room all day with a tar-pot, a boiling tar-pot, dipping these in and putting ’em down. Then they’d sand it, then they’d varnish it. The floors were the thing that really caught my attention.49

John Lumley (right) and another worker lay the woodblock floors at the Government Printing Office, c. 1958.

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Image, space, voice Later on, the woodblocks became discoloured, dented from dropped chases, stained with ink, swelled and buckled from water spills. The problem-prone nature of expanding woodblocks was regularly described. Lithographic dot-etcher Graeme Murray took this approach: One point in the building design, which wasn’t good: all the floors were done in wooden blocks, like bricks. It was beautifully laid out … but the problem was that water and bricks don’t mix … if we had sinks overflow, all the bricks would swell up, so you’d have a sort of mound, the floor would go up. They’d have to take all the bricks up and relay them.50

The aforementioned Norm Rigney launched into a long story about similar problems with the flooring. His story is quoted at length because of the way in which it interweaves aspects of working life, apprentice experience, material culture and the experience of play at work: One night, now it must have been about 1968, I think. Friday night … He [Government Printer V.C.N. Blight] come in showing some of his Mason cronies around the place, and they got to the first floor, and they’re wandering around having a look at everything, and one of the guys apparently was sick. He went over and he hurked in a basin … and he turned a tap on to allow everything to go down the drain, but what happened was – we used to have a flat bit of rubber, you know a rubber stereo, that we used to cut to make a plug, because the plugs’d go missing everywhere. Anyway, this plug, floated over and blocked the drain. This guy was so drunk, he left the tap running. So – over the course of the weekend, this tap kept running, it overflowed the basin, and it flooded the first floor … The floor was made up of wooden blocks, Oregon wooden blocks, which would take the weight and the movement and everything, and it would stop the reverberation and everything that would go on in the place. But water – they were set in tar – so this water flooded the manufactured stationery section … It flooded that … It flooded the photo section. These blocks swelled in the flood. I went in – I was very privileged you know – I went in. The floor was floatin’ and you could jump around on the floor like a trampoline, it was waves of wooden blocks, and where the wooden blocks had come to a stop, they pyramided. They were pyramided six foot high! There were machines tipped, there were rolls of paper that had soaked up the water. They were ruined! … It got to the basement. It ruined paper rolls – big reels of paper! … I came to work on the Monday morning, and I’m walking along Harris Street … and there was water drippin’ out of the building … Anyway, we got up into the ground floor, and there, you know, everything is … So we got off at the first floor … we were bouncing through! Oh, it was terrific. Billy Bright was there, he was the superintendent, and he was runnin’ around saying,   ‘Get outta here, you kids! Get outta here!’51

Norm is a natural storyteller and his interview was filled with anecdotes similar to this one. The story may well have been embellished over the years, but it is Norm’s sense of pride and the acknowledgement of ‘privilege’ that is particularly meaningful. For Norm, access to the Gov was something to cherish. In addition, we can see how this tale traces a path

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spatially through the factory building. The smooth, assuring solidity of the modern building had been disrupted overnight, transformed into an undulating, pyramiding landscape of technical dysfunction – a space where the apprentices (who were, after all, teenagers) could temporarily transform their workplace into a site of diversion and exploration.

Architecture and rumour The histories of architecture and design need not always centre upon facts. Sometimes the more revelatory elements can be how people thought the design process occurred. Rumour and anecdote have a significant role in collective design knowledge, as the following example demonstrates. One piece of information that I frequently encountered in my interviews with print-workers was that the Gov’s building was originally based on plans for a hospital. Seven interview participants discussed the hospital idea, although the matter was consigned to conjecture. Neil Lewis said, ‘I believe it was designed as a hospital’52 while designer George Woods was more specific, stating, ‘They wanted a quick plan, so they took it off the dental hospital.’53 Don West narrated the story further, ‘It had been designed as a hospital … I only know this from reading some records of the Printing Office I found in the place. Public Works pulled out a drawer, found a building that had enough floor space, which turned out to be a hospital, and put it up on that site.’54 Notwithstanding this anecdotal evidence, official documentation and media reports related to the Gov always describe the building as being purpose-built as a printing factory designed by Parkes.55 There may still be some merit to the hospital rumour. There are obvious formal connections with European modernist institutional design, including the use of strip windows, high ceilings, central corridors and the provision of light and air. Archival research reveals that in 1938, while Parkes was in hospital recovering from a hernia operation, he read in the Sydney Morning Herald that the Minister for Health, Lt Herbert Fitzsimons, would be undertaking a world tour to study hospital development. Furthermore, Parkes was surprised to read that he, as government architect, would accompany Fitzsimons to study hospital design.56 In July 1939, Parkes and Fitzsimons left Australia on the maiden voyage of the RMS Orcades, and their (badly timed) grand tour covered France, the UK, Scandinavia, Holland, Belgium, Germany and the USA, visiting hospitals in major cities.57 As a result of the tour, a publication was produced, featuring Parkes’ architectural drawings of European and American hospitals.58 These modern buildings had novel amenities, such as fluorescent lighting, sparse and spacious interiors, large glass windows, easy-to-clean skirting boards and wide corridors. Spaces were compartmentalised and separated, with rooms leading off large central corridors. Rooms were open and bright, with internal windows spanning the upper half of the corridor walls.

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Image, space, voice Archival research did not turn up any conclusive evidence that the Gov was a direct copy of any particular European hospital, although it can be said that the 1939 tour was influential in a number of NSW Public Works’ post-war buildings in Sydney. Other tours were taken by relevant authorities after the Second World War, specifically to examine modern printing establishments in the UK and the USA, so it may not be helpful to overemphasise the influence of hospital design on the printing factory.59 What is more significant is the way in which the same principles of cleanliness, efficiency, transparency and compartmentalisation applied equally to health as to industry in the post-war period. Moreover, it is worth observing how notions such as ‘it was a hospital’ can circulate in oral history participants’ spoken recollections; these are architectural rumours, embellished and oft-repeated, gaining and losing complexity with the passing of time. The hospital concept has become embedded in the mnemonic spatial projections and workplace folklore of the factory. This rumour, in and of itself, is arguably just as integral to the history of the printing office building as are other more factually assured aspects.

Mapping factory stories As my interviews continued I began to develop my own fragmentary mental snapshots of the factory building in the years between 1959 and 1989. I can see the hanging fluorescent lights, the large glass windows and the regular pattern of load-bearing pillars. Building upon the stories I have been told, I imagine that the base of the lift wells in this building might still be filled with pieces of metal type; the result of many accidents where ‘galley trucks’ hit a bump on the way out of the lift. An upturned galley truck resulted in smashed up formes all over the floor, destroying the made-up pages and sending metal slugs and individual letters tumbling down the lift well (an apprentice’s nightmare).60 I can see how the afternoon sun from the west cast parallel lines of light through the Venetian blinds in the Main pressroom. In the bookbinding section on the second floor, I see large tables stacked with law books bound in cream and red ‘half-calf’ leather and the gleaming edges of new guillotines. All this is to say that in my mind’s eye I came to see the Gov in section, and I became aware that many of the oral history participants had a similar way of expressing their spatial memories of their workplace. Polish sociologist Radosław Poczykowski uses Alfred Schutz’s concept of lebenswelt (lifeworld) to discuss how people can reconstruct their lifeworld on paper, in ‘graphic equivalents to oral history’.61 Without being asked, Bob Law felt compelled to draw, from memory, a plan of the Linotype room (figure 18). Likewise, George Woods picked up a pencil during our interview. In describing the factory building, he found

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Plan of the Linotype room, drawn from memory, 2013.

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From when I started until intro of new technology, section sketch of the Government Printing Office, 2012.

19

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20 Spatial mapping of oral history stories, sketch by the author, watercolour on paper, 2013.

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it useful to sketch a section drawing of it. George’s sketch (figure 19). details how the trade zones are specifically delineated. In both of these examples, memories of working at the Gov are articulated in a manner that is thoroughly, and almost systematically, spatial. Within this spatial system, the former workers remember and reconstruct their own zone in immense detail. Again, it is important to reiterate that their memories are not lofty, airy things that take place outside of space and three-dimensionality; just as Halbwachs observed in the mid-twentieth century, their recollections are grounded, deeply connected to the embodied experience of space and architecture. This notion of a mnemonic spatial projection – well described   by Pallasmaa and informed by the earlier spatial memory theories of Halbwachs, Bachelard and Ricœur – eventually led me to produce my own mnemonic architectural drawings. Figure 20 is a speculative representation of the factory building in section. It is a synthesis of oral histories and archival photographs, demonstrating a way of pulling together stories into a spatial system – an illustrative rendering of oral histories. The illustration compiles a variety of anecdotal and historical details that emerged from interviews and photographs. For example, I have marked out where you climb onto the roof and sunbake on slabs of Masonite or crouch above the BBQ deck area and throw little wet pieces of cotton wool onto the administrative staff while they are gathered for a function. I have indicated the water tanks on the roof, the scandalous location where, in the 1960s, some young women went swimming. I have marked out the original lithographic area, where ‘Bluey’ (Graham Smith) got his arm stuck in a press. When the Darling Harbour railway was still operating, if you stood out on the roof with an ice-cream, it would become speckled with black soot. While my drawing is a subjective interpretation of oral history stories, it attempts to provide some visual indication of the spatial situatedness of many of the narratives that emerged through interviews. This, in turn, lends a more nuanced understanding of the history of this industrial-office hybrid building.

Conclusion After the closure of the Gov in 1989, the building temporarily became another ‘modern ruin’, a familiar relic in deindustrialising global cities. Following a period of disuse, the building was refurbished and it is now a ‘cloud computing’ centre run by a data management company. In 2012, I was taken on a tour through the building. Inside, I found very little that recognisably connected to the Gov. Whole rooms were filled with servers and cables, whirring with digital activity; workers were scarce. Nevertheless, there was some continuity in the building’s use as a repository for information, except information was no longer held in formes of metal

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Image, space, voice type and rows of bound volumes. Rather, information exists as ungraspable digital data in computer servers, and it is controlled privately, not as a public service. This chapter demonstrates some of the ways in which memories of working life persist in spatial and architectural terms. Noticing these patterns requires an awareness of how details can be reconstructed and co-constructed through discursive interaction in the interview process and through the interpretation of transcripts, photographs and sketches made during interviews. The extensive refurbishment means that much of the built heritage of this particular factory is concealed and mute. Oral histories, photographs and archives are the chief sources through which a rich understanding of the spatial and architectural elements of working life can emerge. There is a great deal more to be said about so-called ordinary buildings when we shift away from purely aesthetic or technical interpretations, moving towards a position that takes into account social, labour and embodied experiences of design. This building continues to be deeply embedded within the former print-workers’ identities and memories of working life. The institution, and the bulky modernist building that housed it, were one and the same. The print-workers’ experiences were not merely technological or social, they were experienced within and through space and design, and they continue to mentally map their experiences, in the present, as they speak.

Notes 1 See for example L. Sandino and M. Partington (eds), Oral History in the Visual Arts (London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2013) and the ‘Lost in conversation’ themed issue of Fabrications 24:2 (2014). 2 The ‘materiality of memory’ has been the subject of analysis by design historians. The focus here, however, is often on the memory of objects, not of space. See for example M. Kwint, C. Breward and J. Aynsley (eds), Material Memories (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1999). 3 See for example J. Peter, The Oral History of Modern Architecture: Interviews with the Greatest Architects of the Twentieth Century (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1994); R. Proctor, ‘The architect’s intention: interpreting post-war modernism through the architect interview’, Journal of Design History 19:4 (2006), 295–307. 4 G. Brooks & Assoc., Heritage Assessment: Government Printing Office and AML&F Site (Sydney: City West Development Corporation, 1998), pp. 35–6. 5 State Library of New South Wales (hereafter SLNSW), MLMSS 8622 Box 1, Cobden Parkes, ‘Unpublished memoirs’, 1973, p. 192; ‘Modern Government Printing Office Nearing Completion’, Sydney Morning Herald (7 January 1958), p. 11. 6 R. C. Peck, NSW Government Printers and Inspectors of Stamps (Sydney: selfpublished, 2001), pp. 9, 23; G. Powell, ‘Tickets by the hundred million’, Sydney Morning Herald (28 June 1958), p. 7; W. A. Gullick, History of the Government Printing Office (Sydney: NSW Government Printing Office, 1916), pp. 3–5. 7 Gullick, History of the Government Printing Office, pp. 3–5; ‘Government Printing Office – Inadequate and Ill-ventilated’, Sydney Morning Herald (15 September 1911), p. 5.

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8 George Larden, interview with author, 14 March 2013. 9 Victor Gunther, interview with author, 15 August 2012. 10 Ibid.; Ray Utick, interview with author, 13 November 2012; George Larden, interview with author, 14 March 2013. 11 Peck, NSW Government Printers, pp. 43, 47; ‘Government Printing Office – Inadequate and Ill-ventilated’; NSW State Records (hereafter NSWSR), Sydney, GPO General Correspondence Files 18/2051, NSW Government Printing Office Annual Reports to the Public Service Board, 1949–59. 12 Parkes, ‘Unpublished memoirs’, p. 150. 13 Casey & Lowe Assoc., Archaeological Assessment: GPO/AML&F Sites, Harris and Pyrmont Streets, Ultimo (Sydney: City West Development Corporation, 1998), p. 13. 14 George Bryant, interview with author, 28 September 2012. 15 A. H. Pettifer, New Government Printing Office New South Wales, promotional pamphlet (Sydney: NSW Government Printing Office, 1957). 16 City of Sydney Archives, Sydney (hereafter CSA) 390–422 Harris St Ultimo file no. 0034/51; CSA, 390–422 Harris St Ultimo file no. 337/56, Letter from C. E. Jenkins to the County Clerk, Cumberland City Council, 26 April 1956. 17 Pettifer, New Government Printing Office, p. 8; ‘New printing office cost £2.5m’, Sydney Morning Herald (24 February 1959), p. 25; P. Tyler, Humble and Obedient Servants: The Administration of New South Wales, vol. 2 (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press and NSWSR, 2006), p. 202; P. Reynolds, ‘Parkes, Cobden (1892–1978)’, in Australian Dictionary of Biography (Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 2000), http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/ parkes-cobden-11342/text20257, accessed 26 June 2012. As Government Architect, Parkes was also known to give free rein to staff architect E. H. Rembert. Collaborative work and anonymity was the lot of a government architect. 18 ‘Ceramic veneer facing’, Sydney Morning Herald (24 February 1959), p. 25. 19 Ray Utick, interview with author, 13 November 2012. 20 Government Printer Blight wrote to the Secretary of Public Works complaining that the building was, in fact, still incomplete. NSWSR, B Files, series 4351, item B1596/3, file no. 10/3030, 3 May 1960. 21 ‘Premier opens printing office’, Sydney Morning Herald (24 February 1959), p. 11; ‘Office is 118 years old’, Sydney Morning Herald (24 February 1959), p. 27; ‘Service for citizen’s lifetime’, Sydney Morning Herald (24 February 1959), p. 26; ‘No hitches in big removal’, Sydney Morning Herald (24 February 1959), p. 26; ‘New Plant Cuts Costs’, Sydney Morning Herald (24 February 1959), p. 26. 22 Alan Leishman, interview with author, 28 October 2011. 23 G. Bachelard, La Poétique de l’Espace (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1994 [1958]), pp. 3–7. 24 M. Halbwachs, Space and the Collective Memory, trans. F. J. Ditter Jr. & V. Y. Ditter (New York: Harper & Row, 1980 [1950]), pp. 128–56; Paul Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 147–53; Bachelard, La Poétique de l’Espace, pp. 3–10. 25 J. M. Malnar and F. Vodvarka, ‘Spatial constructs’, in Sensory Design (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. 3. 26 J. Pallasmaa, ‘Space, place, memory and imagination: the temporal dimension of existential space’, in M. Treib (ed.), Spatial Recall: Memory in Architecture and Landscape (New York and London: Routledge, 2009), p. 17. 27 Halbwachs, Space and the Collective Memory. 28 Ibid., p. 140. 29 Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting, pp. 148–53. 30 Ibid., p. 150–3. 31 Ibid.

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Image, space, voice 2 Pallasmaa, ‘Space, place, memory’, p. 27. 3 33 ‘New Printing Office Cost £2.5m’, p. 25. 34 Bob Law, interview with author, 27 February 2012. 35 Terry Hagenhofer, interview with author, 5 December 2011. 36 Sandra Elisabeth Stringer, interview with author, 17 October 2012. 37 Philip James, personal communication with author, 1 October 2013. 38 NSWSR, B Files, Series 4351, item B1596/3, file no. 10/3030, letter from R. A. Johnson, Printing Industry Employees’ Union of Australia (PIEUA), to the Under Secretary and Comptroller of Accounts, NSW Treasury, 30 November 1959. 39 Lindsay Somerville, interview with author, 15 December 2011. 40 Norm Rigney, interview with author, 30 January 2012. 41 B. Kingston, A History of New South Wales (Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 214–5. 42 T. O’Lincoln, Years of Rage: Social Conflicts in the Fraser Era (Melbourne: Bookmarks Australia, 1993), www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/interventions/years/5trenches.htm, accessed 25 June 2015. 43 See for example ‘Printers stay on strike’, Sydney Morning Herald (29 September 1978), p. 13; ‘Strike row as ballot papers are moved’, Sydney Morning Herald (2 October 1978), p. 2. 44 Sandra Elisabeth Stringer, interview with author, 17 October 2012. 45 Neil Lewis, interview with author, 17 January 2012. 46 Pallasmaa, ‘Space, place, memory’, p. 28. 47 Ibid., p. 36. 48 ‘Printers’ office paved in blocks’, Sydney Morning Herald (1 September 1958), p. 39. 49 Alan Leishman, interview with author, 28 October 2011. 50 Graeme Murray, interview with author, 9 September 2011. 51 Norm Rigney, interview with author, 30 January 2012. Hurked is slang for vomited. 52 Neil Lewis, interview with author, 17 January 2012. 53 George Woods, interview with author, 21 February 2012. 54 Don West, interview with author, 12 September 2012. 55 ‘Sydney improved, says Government Architect’, Sydney Morning Herald (1 August 1958), p. 5. 56 Parkes, ‘Unpublished memoirs’, p. 162; ‘NSW minister’s tour’, Sydney Morning Herald (22 December 1938), p. 11. 57 Parkes and Fitzsimons visited Hamburg, Berlin, Potsdam and Dresden in 1939, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. 58 H. P. Fitzsimons, Report of Inquiries and Investigations Made into Health and Hospital Administration During a Visit to the United Kingdom, Europe, Canada and the United States of America (Sydney: NSW Ministry for Health, 1940). 59 NSWSR, GPO General Correspondence Files 18/2051, NSW GPO Annual Report to the Public Service Board, 1947. 60 See Terms and Abbreviations for explanations of printing terminology. 61 R. Poczykowski, ‘Hand-drawn memory – how to read a mental map?’, in W. Kalaga and M. Kubisz (eds). Cartographies of Culture: Memory, Space, Representation (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 42–5.

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PA RT I I Technological transitions

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4 The continuity of craft masculinities: from letterpress to offset-lithography

I could still get on there and operate that, you know.1 – Norm Rigney, former letterpress-machinist

Letterpress printing has traditional associations with craftsmanship and masculinity, where a press-machinist’s technologies, tools and manual skill were powerful indicators of identity and social status. But what happened to letterpress-machinists between the 1960s and the 1980s, when the printing industry underwent dramatic technological change? Letterpress had been the dominant form of text-based printing since the fifteenth century, but by the second half of the twentieth century it came to be seen as redundant in mainstream printing. For large-format printing, letterpress was often replaced by offset-lithography; a faster and lighter method, preferred by employers because of its substantial productivity gains.2 Many letterpress-machinists retrained in offset-lithography, moving from a heavy, manual and time-consuming technology to a faster method that was less physically taxing. While letterpress technology was imbued with long-established patriarchal associations – due in part to its material characteristics – the gender and skill associations pertaining to offset-lithography were not yet fixed. It was a very different technology; offset-lithography used lightweight metal plates rather than unwieldy formes filled with heavy metal type. How did press-machinists experience this transition? Rather than emerging as a trade with connotations of ‘deskilling’, the newly dominant trade of offset-lithography was absorbed in the 1970s into prior associations of craft masculinity. This contrasted starkly with the better-known side of the printing process, compositing (typesetting). As we shall see in Chapter 5, the composing trade was widely interpreted in the 1970s and 1980s as having been deskilled and ‘feminised’ with the phasing-out of hot-metal techniques and the introduction of computerised

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Technological transitions phototypesetting.3 In press-machining, however, ‘men remained men’, and even though the machines surrounding them were replaced, a strong connection to technology endured. This chapter examines the transitional processes involved in the switch from a long-established technology to a socially disruptive one. It does so by focusing on the relationships that existed between skilled workers (press-machinists) and their printing technologies (large-format letterpress and lithographic presses). Building upon existing studies of gender and the labour process in the fields of sociology, the history of technology and labour history, we engage here with the complex and intertwining relationships between design, gender identities and the labour process. Charting the printing industry’s transition from letterpress to offset-lithography is significant for historians of design, material culture and technology; it opens a window of understanding into the associative impact of large-scale technical machinery on the shop floor, and relates this back to the reinforcement of craft masculinity ideals in a late twentiethcentury context. As briefly noted in the Introduction, in the second half of the twentieth century the printing industry – which had long been seen as a stalwart bastion of craft control – was confronted by the need to engage with increasingly automated (and later computerised) technologies. Long after many other manufacturing industries had undergone various forms of automation, printing industry employers gradually began to introduce offset-lithography, electronic phototypesetting and automated binding, in order to speed up production and lower labour costs (transitions that often involved contentious industrial relations disputes). The introduction of newer technologies in typesetting, press-machining and bookbinding resulted in the swift disappearance of specific printing trades and associated job losses, particularly in the period between the 1960s and the 1980s.4 In the Main pressroom, heavy iron letterpresses – some of which were still based on nineteenth-century techniques – were dismantled and sold as scrap metal, to be replaced by high-speed offset-lithographic equipment. As this chapter will demonstrate, however, just because a machine was designed to be ‘high speed’, this did not necessarily dictate how it would be used. Further on we will encounter an example of how early offset-lithographic presses were altered so that they became more like their letterpress predecessors. Until now, little has been said about how the press-machinists’ experience of technological change might have differed from that of the compositors.5 Academic analysis of technological change in press-machining in the 1970s sometimes dismissed the transition as a minor adjustment.6 But this change represented a profound shift in mark-making technologies and it led to job losses. It also created new positions in the industry, and many letterpress-machinists retrained. Importantly, this technological change

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was not generally experienced as emasculating for press-machinists, nor as a dramatic experience of deskilling, unlike that of their compositor counterparts. Many letterpress-machinists retrained willingly, successfully incorporating the newer technology into their identity. They achieved this by reinforcing their (gendered) status as craftsmen, rather than becoming emasculated or alienated by the new technology. The question begs: how was this continuity achieved? The move from letterpress to offset-lithography involved the development of new practices, altered social relations of production and, crucially, the continued enactment of masculine craft identities.  Intrinsic to this experience of technological transformation was a masculine embodiment that was attuned to and shaped by the materiality, design and aesthetics of printing technologies. This embodied dynamic enabled some pressmachinists to maintain their employment, dignity and control over their work. Ultimately it demonstrated how masculine craft identities did not rely exclusively on skill-based mastery of traditional technologies, but were also related to other dimensions of technology, such as aesthetics, design, embodied ‘know-how’ and the physical presence of large-scale machinery on the shop floor. The press itself, however, whether it was letterpress or lithographic, was vital to the continuity of particular gender and labour identities. As outlined in the Introduction, the Gov was an example of a staunchly letterpress printing factory in the process of technological transition, and it allows us to see how traditional practices and identities are sometimes maintained and reinvigorated when a long-standing institution is threatened with change. The Gov was one of the last remaining large-scale printing factories in developed capitalist nations to maintain the use of letterpress, hot-metal typesetting and hand-binding. Between the late 1970s and the early 1980s – at a time when many commercial printeries had already made the shift – the Gov’s management finally began introducing offset-lithographic machinery into the Main pressroom.7 From 1977, letterpress-machinists at the Gov gradually relinquished their hand-skills in letterpress and retrained. The change was met with some union resistance and controversy on the shop floor, as well as with adaptive measures to accord with labour demarcation restrictions.8 This will be explained in more detail in the section concerning the introduction of the Heidelberg Speedmasters, the first offset-lithographic presses to be introduced into the Main pressroom. The important point here is that the technological transition did not drastically destabilise or erode the well-established and socially constructed labour identity of the craftsman printer. When I began this research, one of the first matters that piqued my interest was that some of the press-machinists I spoke with did not express much concern or regret about the transition from letterpress to offsetlithography, and the change was not always described in negative terms;

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Technological transitions there was little suggestion that it emasculated or degraded these workers. Indeed, press-machinists acknowledged the comparative simplicity of lithographic printing: ‘Litho was easy, no worry!’9 Why, I wondered, did these printers – who often expressed great pride in having been trained in letterpress – so easily let go of their ‘hard-won craft skills’ and take up work on machinery that was more automated and could potentially result in labour-force reduction? Despite this apparent lessening of a hand skill, many male press-machinists maintained their identity as skilled craftsmen. The compositors’ experience provides a significant contrast.

Existing studies focus on typesetting and compositors Existing historical and sociological studies of the printing industry in the mid- to late-twentieth century tend to emphasise how changes to typesetting technologies dramatically altered perceptions of skill and gender in the printing labour process. In the 1980s and 1990s, the focus of this analysis was often on compositors, that is, on the shift from hot-metal typesetting to electronic phototypesetting. Through hallmark studies by Cynthia Cockburn (among others), we saw how the discontinuation of hot-metal typesetting fundamentally dissolved compositors’ identities as skilled craftsmen. Multiple accounts described how compositors’ labour practice transformed from what was traditionally perceived as a highly skilled craft, securely placed within the domain of hegemonic masculinity, into the supposedly feminised practice of typing at a qwerty keyboard.10 To change a compositor’s tools and machinery of work was to challenge the very basis of his self-definition as a skilled craftsman. Before the compositing trade disappeared entirely in the mid to late 1980s, compositing was seen as an utterly transformed trade – from a masculine, skilled craft, into a feminised (and thus undervalued) clerical role.11 This will be explored in more detail in the following chapter. Some other contextual positioning is also significant here; at the same time as offset-lithography was replacing letterpress printing, the rise of second- and third-wave feminism were altering the long-standing traditional divisions of labour. Accordingly, we need not assume that all pressmachinists were men, although the vast majority were. Although women at the Gov entered the trades of bookbinding and compositing in reasonably large numbers, press-machining remained a male-dominated enclave, both at the Gov and elsewhere. The performance of a masculine culture of craft operated to exclude and discriminate against the few women who undertook press-machining as a trade (see Chapter 6). In the face of technological change and the increasing participation of women in non-traditional printing trades, the male press-machinists’ experience often featured the reaffirmation of an idealised masculine craft identity, rather than the dissolution of a craft in the face of increasing

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Staff meeting at the canteen hall, c. 1960s.

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automation. The continued presence of large-scale printing machinery (albeit more automated than letterpress) enabled press-machinists to recycle and transform older notions of craft masculinity, adding detailed technical knowledge about high-speed machinery into the craftsmen’s repertoire, while maintaining the elements of embodied control and workers’ ‘ownership’ of individual presses.

Letterpress and offset-lithography Letterpress is a process by which a raised surface is covered in ink, and paper is pressed onto it to produce a printed image. This printing principle can be traced to Chinese printmaking in the second century ce, using methods of relief and impression. Letterpress was not used in Western European culture until Johannes Gutenberg’s production of moveable type between 1434 and 1450. With moveable type, letterpress eventually had the capacity to become a mass-production process, and it became the dominant method of printing from the fifteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Over this period, the essential principle of relief and impression remained, but faster and more automated presses were gradually introduced. Wooden screw-presses were updated with the iron Stanhope press in Britain around 1800, followed by other iron platen

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Technological transitions presses. The early nineteenth century saw the introduction of steam power into press machinery, and by the second-half of the nineteenth century, mechanical replacements were being found for the hand-feeding of paper. By the beginning of the twentieth century, electrical powering options gradually became available. Until the mid-twentieth century, letterpress – in its various forms – had maintained a five-hundred year dominance in the industry, resulting in deeply entrenched practices, values and identities that at first proved hard to shift.12 Hence we can see that letterpress had undergone significant technological shifts in previous centuries, but, crucially, a letterpress-machinist’s labour process remained somewhat ‘hands-on’ throughout this period. This was chiefly because the process of setting up the press remained highly labour-intensive, and because printing presses endured as autonomous units, usually under the control of a single machinist13 (figure 22). The operation of all industrialised printing presses – regardless of whether they were run with heavy letterpress formes or lightweight lithographic plates – required a detailed series of steps to set up the machine before printing began. The process of setting up a letterpress machine was traditionally known as a ‘makeready’. Paper was loaded, ink levels were tested

22

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Press-machinist Shong Babbog operating a Heidelberg cylinder letterpress machine, 1966.

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and modified, pressure refined and proofs run. Much of this process was subject to the individual judgement of the press-machinist. It involved locking a letterpress forme – comprising multiple pages of composed metal type – onto the press, and testing for the quality of the impression. When making-ready, the letterpress-machinist ensured the printing surface was perfectly flat, so that the printed impression was unified, with no areas imprinted too lightly or heavily. This typically involved padding out parts of the cylinder or flatbed with layers of blankets or damp paper patches.14 Even in the 1960s and 1970s on electronic letterpresses, the process of a makeready could take several hours, or sometimes a whole day of work, during which the press was in use only to run proofs. Press-machinists will happily describe the makeready process in immense detail. The aforementioned press-machinist Victor Gunther launched into this description of the makeready process after being asked about his recollections of apprenticeship: Well, when I started on the machines after twelve months, from then on I was offsiding on the machines, and the tradesmen’d tell you what to do and you’d do it. … You’d help them makeready. See, you put the formes on the machine, with all the type and blocks, and you’d take a proof of it, and you’d find there’s all weak spots and heavy spots. So the makeready is cutting out the heavy parts and patching it up with tissue paper in the light spots, to bring it all level … and when you took your next proof, you’d find most of it is all even.15

Press-machinist Glenn MacKellar, apprenticed at the Gov much later, in 1973, described the letterpress makeready process in a reverent tone: It was a very dark environment in these machines. Very dark, cumbersome sort of machine. To set it up … you’d have to do what’s known as a ‘makeready’. That was just varying amounts of paper in the packaging, to get it to all print evenly. … A real good printer, of top skill, would be able to do all of that and it would be so nice … He had it just right, and it could take hours to get right.16

Importantly, the makeready meant that a letterpress-machinist retained considerable control over the pace of their output, and this was the part of the labour process that press-machinists tended to discuss in detail. The specific hand-skills required in the makeready gave these press-machinists an edge, a golden chip for union bargaining, and a strong sense of accomplished craft skill. Compared to the heavy, painstaking makeready work undertaken by a letterpress-machinist, the set-up process for offsetlithography was less physically demanding and faster-paced; it involved placing a relatively lightweight plate onto the press, rather than an unwieldy letterpress forme, and the testing stages were usually swifter than for letterpress. Printing historian Dennis Bryans observed that the history of printing is in fact two separate histories, with lithography often forgotten while letterpress history received more attention. Bryans – along with historian

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Technological transitions Michael Twyman – emphasised that the history of lithography is not exclusively a twentieth-century story.17 Lithography dates back to an invention by playwright and actor Alois Senefelder in Munich in 1799, which made use of the chemical separation of oil and water. The lithographic process prints from a flat surface rather than from a raised one, and originally it involved producing an image using a stone and greasy ink. The grease attracted the ink, while the other areas of the stone were wet, repelling ink. In terms of mechanical developments, however, it was not until the first half of the nineteenth century that a powered lithographic press was engineered. Printing from stone was cumbersome and could not be easily adapted for rotary printing, but from the late nineteenth-century experiments began using tin plates. From the mid-twentieth century, lithography increasingly used light-sensitised, metal plates (often aluminium), making the method more affordable and easily adapted to mass-production. In the early twentieth century, offset-lithography was developed in both the UK and the USA; the process involved the transfer of the image from a metal plate onto another surface – usually a cylinder – and from there the image was offset onto paper. By the middle of the century, web-fed offset-lithography began to be seen as cheaper, faster and capable of much larger outputs than letterpress. Offset-lithography was first i­ntroduced by large corporate employers in newspaper and magazine printing; it was favoured because it theoretically required fewer workers and paired images with text relatively easily. This method corresponded with contemporaneous developments in electronic typesetting technologies, hastening its popularity. By the 1970s, offset-lithography had become the mainstream form of commercial printing in wealthy capitalist economies, with letterpress increasingly relegated to specialist embellishments such as embossing and foil stamping.18

Lithography infiltrates the Main pressroom While many press-machinists were prepared to embrace the change to offset-lithography, the identity-affirming closeness with machinery remained a major factor throughout this transition. The process of learning new machinery – grasping it in detail – was a theme that the interviewees consistently returned to. George Larden (figure 9) began working as a letterpress-machinist at the Gov in 1932. During the Second World War he worked in the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF), chiefly as an instructor in technical training for military aircraft, after which he returned to the Gov. He summarised his experience – in both printing and the RAAF – in specific terms of technical knowledge. For George, both press-machining and RAAF instruction were processes of learning specific machinery in detail:

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Altogether I enjoyed all my working days. I think I had an engineering mind in the first place. And when I seen the automatic machinery in the printing, I think the machinery got me in. … [The RAAF] kept me as an instructor. We had to set the syllabus for the Beaufort Bomber. They only had one set of manuals and that was at the factory. So I used to have to go down there and study it to get enough knowledge to set the syllabus. And then when the Mosquito came along I did the same again. I think I spent all my working days learning.19

Here we can see how the process of shifting onto new machinery was not necessarily perceived as deskilling or loss; it could also function to reinforce a sense of technical mastery. This dynamic opens up a way to see how, in a factory context, management could manipulate messages about why workers had to retrain: if retraining was associated with skill acquisition, masculinity and craft tradition, then the shift from one type of machinery to another was less likely to cause embittered and resistant reactions from workers.

Press-machinists and engineers pose with a brand new Heidelberg ZP102 ‘Speedmaster’ l­ithographic press, 1977.

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Technological transitions The introduction of offset-lithography into the Main pressroom required negotiation with the PKIU and involved a redefinition of trade ­demarcations. The gradual incursion of offset-lithography resulted in a peculiar array of workplace practices, including decisions that to an outsider might seem illogical. In 1977, the Gov acquired two offset-lithographic Heidelberg ZP102 Speedmasters, the first offset-lithographic presses to be installed in the letterpress section (figure 23). The PKIU’s demarcation rules initially meant that the Speedmasters were ‘off-limits’ to all letterpress-machinists.20 Technologies are not always used to their full capacity, nor are they used in the way their designers may intend. That a technological system may be newer and faster in theory does not guarantee efficiency or improvement in practice. New machinery is often modified to suit existing cultural conventions and emergent social practices build up around disruptive objects. The disruptive and untouchable quality of the Speedmasters stemmed from the fact that they represented the new world of offset-lithography, a trade that the letterpress-machinists did not have demarcation allowance to access, at least not at first. In a response to the perceived threat of offset-lithography, the Speedmasters were initially rebuilt so that they could handle letterpress plates, using a process known as ‘dry-offset’. The process used a printing plate with a raised surface, meaning that letterpress principles and work practices remained.21 In effect, the Gov retrograded two brand new presses. The use of dry-offset was an unusual adaptation, particularly because it resulted in poorer printing quality; however, it meant the Speedmasters could be operated by letterpress-machinists.22 It did not seem to matter that the printing quality suffered; the PKIU demanded the adjustment because it protected letterpress-machinists’ jobs, and management complied.23 In 1977, when the new Speedmasters first arrived, they remained disruptive objects, with an unclear status in terms of who ought to be allied with them.24 By 1980, an industrial agreement between the state government and the PKIU simplified trade demarcations, enabling letterpressmachinists to use lithographic presses, and, in theory, vice versa. Existing letterpress-machinists were reclassified ‘Printing Machinist Classification A’, and, perhaps in a hint of the Gov’s letterpress bias, existing lithographers were reclassified as ‘Printing Machinist Classification B, Grade I’.25 Old ownerships of machinery began to disintegrate and reformulate. The changing of the award distinctions, and the retrograding of the Speedmasters into pseudo-letterpress machines, made these machines safe and allowed the machines to enrol others.26 Eventually, the Speedmasters’ presence on the shop floor became less controversial. Press-machinists who were specifically allied to the Speedmasters had a positive experience of this period. Glenn MacKellar (figure 23, second from left) was of a younger generation than some of the other printers interviewed in this research. His perception was that the transition from

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letterpress to offset-lithography was not a major problem for the workers: ‘There wasn’t a lot of resistance from most of the rank and file; they saw it as something different. It made a big difference in terms of speed.’27 When Glenn commenced his letterpress-machining apprenticeship in 1973, he already had some lithographic knowledge from previous technical education. This combination of skills meant that by 1980, when the new industrial agreement between the state government and the PKIU came into force, Glenn was easily able to switch between the two methods. When interviewed, he explained: The union wouldn’t allow [the Speedmasters] to operate as lithographic printing machines … we used to put letterpress printing plates on them, and run them as letterpress machines, or dry-offset, as we call it. We did that until about 1980 when we were allowed to convert them over to litho. So, into the cupboard we went, and got all the litho printing bits that had to get on them, and bolted ’em all on … They were just litho printing machines after that. The modernisation just continued from then on.28

Here, Glenn situates the dry-offset adjustment as central to the narrative of the arrival of the Speedmasters, a story he frames around the notion of technological ‘modernisation’. Again, the press itself is central to Glenn’s interpretation of his working history. The Speedmaster that I got – it was just a beautiful piece of equipment. It just ran and ran like a Swiss watch. The one next to it – everyone that went on it – it just used to stop all the time. It just wasn’t the same. People used to say,   ‘Oh that Glenn MacKellar, he’s a good printer, look, his machine’s runnin’ beautiful.’ … It’s just like cars, you know there’s something about them? … They all had their own little behavioural characteristics.29

Notwithstanding his characteristic Australian desire not to boast, this anecdote still indicates how Glenn’s thorough, embodied knowledge of one particular printing press lent legitimacy to his identity as a skilled printer, regardless of which printing method was in use.

Craft masculinities Identity is a concept that refers to the social process of bringing people into being as subjects who are individually and/or collectively distinct from others. It is a process that throws up barriers to, and opportunities for, individual and collective action. It establishes pathways for what is possible and not possible in practice. A masculine identity is one that permits individual men or groups of men to pursue particular paths of action, at the same time as excluding others. It is relational insofar as it usually involves differentiation from women and the feminine. Masculine craft identities are also inextricably embodied through their embeddedness in practice, and they are indivisibly connected to the technology that ‘craftsmen’ have authority over.

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Ray Utick with apprentice Dennis O’Loughlin and a Methodist minister in the Main pressroom, 1966.

None of this is to say that press-machinists experienced this techno­ logy in the same way; they did not all have the same reaction to the change. Nor is there a single form of craft masculinity. As sociologist R. W. Connell established, there are multiple masculinities and masculine identities are relational, always in flux.30 The nature of industrial relations and the provision of retraining programs at the Gov would have provided a secure environment for change, but this does not give us the full picture. Importantly, the acceptance of offset-lithography by the majority of letterpress-machinists must be understood in relation to existing hegemonic masculinities (e.g. the ideal of the skilled craftsman), and in reference to the material presence of machinery on the shop floor. Masculine identities permit individuals and groups of men to pursue particular paths of action at the same time as excluding others. Masculine identity is also inextricably embodied through its embeddedness in practice. It is this embeddedness that helps us understand the continuity of craft masculinity, even after the craft itself seems to have disappeared. Craft-based masculinity is identifiable through what the interview participants and other sources disclosed (through what they said or showed) about themselves and their paths of action, specifically in relation to their

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‘craft’ and the technologies they used in the process. There is evidence of this process across the two technologies. In oral history interviews, printing machinery was often mentioned very early in the interview, without prompting. Lithographer Ken Duffey, who was apprenticed at the Gov in 1958, began by explaining: I was the first apprentice into the new Government Printing Office in Harris Street … When the machinery came over, it was all English machinery, basically machines called Crabtrees. They were a quad-crown machine, which is a 30” by 40” sheet. And they had a small machine called a Solar, which was a Swedish machine … and they had a lot of small offset machines, like Multiliths.31

Similarly, press-machinist Ray Utick (figure 24) – apprenticed at the Gov in 1955 – explained his apprenticeship experience specifically in terms of the different machinery to which he was assigned: They put me with an English chap on a Victoria Platen. That was a pretty solid one. Dangerous things, too. Especially when the safety guards don’t work properly. I was on that for ages, because the boss didn’t like me much … Then I went onto another, on my own – an Albert Automat – which very few people worked. I just graduated up to different machinery.32

At first it might seem banal that these printers recount specific details about particular machines. But to dismiss this focus on machinery as natural or boring would be to miss the point that these printers’ pride and sense of craft masculinity is expressed through their intimate knowledge of printing machinery. There is nothing natural about the way in which these men’s identities are simultaneously constructed around notions of craft skill and technological mastery, and an awareness of this dynamic allows us to see how printing presses are (and were) active agents, and how their presence and use is (and was) intimately tied to press-machinists’ sense of professional identity and masculinity. It helps to understand the printing press as possessing material and social agency in the continuity and transformation of craft masculinity. This notion of material agency can of course be connected to the field of Actor Network Theory (ANT). In response to the dichotomous gulf between technological determinism (‘technologies cause change’) and social constructionism (‘technologies are shaped by and mirror society’), ANT theorists such as Bruno Latour called for a close consideration of the heterogeneous influence of ‘non-human’ actors (such as technologies, tools and systems) in complex social and technological entanglements.33 My use of the term ‘material agency’ has echoes in political theorist Jane Bennett’s understanding of the ‘recalcitrance or vitality in things’, a position that argues for the ‘possibility that attentiveness to (non-human) things and their powers can have a laudable effect on humans’.34 Similarly, science and technology sociologist Andrew Pickering describes how

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Technological transitions material agency emerges not via material things having some magical capacity of their own, but through the combination of entangled material and human realms.35 Such entanglements can also be understood another way: as a complex and conflicted muddle of gender normative identities, forming and reforming. The idea of the continuity and remaking of craft masculinity on the shop floor also recalls historians Steven Maynard’s and Stephen Meyer’s respective analyses of changes to working-class masculinity in the face of automation and deskilling, research that focused on the automotive industry.36 Maynard emphasised how a worker – whose labour process is potentially degraded by technological change – may still preserve the ideological pretence that their work constituted skilled ‘craftsmanship’. Essentially, Maynard saw that this process of reassurance and re-emphasis on craft skill was a fundamentally gendered activity.37 Meyer identified a multiplicity of shop-floor masculinities, a combination of ‘rough’ and ‘respectable’ ideals that existed in the twentieth-century automotive industry. ‘Rough’ masculinity emerged, says Meyer, from a brutal world of the unskilled labourer, while ‘respectable’ manhood emerged from the social pride, skill and security of the craft tradition.38 Both Meyer and Maynard speak of how the industrial revolution produced two crises: that of industrialism and that of masculinity.39 The increasing mechanisation of industrial labour not only left workers exploited by capital, it also emasculated them and stripped them of their various working-class male identities.40 One response to this ‘crisis of masculinity’ was to rebuild modified forms of masculinity in the new, mechanised shop floors. Meyer explains how ‘the dual crises of industrialism and masculinity prompted working-class (and other) men to re-masculinise their work and identities.’41 Strategies for doing this included an increasing social display of masculine bravado. This notion of a performed, re-emphasised masculinity is also a feature of labour historian Paul Thompson’s analysis of how deskilled a ­ utoworkers were merely ‘playing at being skilled men’.42 Defensively aware of a decline in the perceived need of their skilled labour, Coventry autoworkers enacted their gender identity through increased masculine rituals and rites of passage, through larking off, fights and sexual boasting. Here, Thompson’s interpretation of ‘skill’ is construed in fairly traditional terms. Given that it is now broadly established that ‘the concept of skill itself is gender bound’, and its value is more or less socially constituted, it is possible to see how Thompson’s notion of skill remained rather limited and masculinist when he wrote ‘Playing at being skilled men’ in 1988.43 But Thompson’s point about a re-emphasis on craft masculinity remains useful. In Thompson’s view, as workers found themselves deskilled and threatened with redundancy, their only recourse to power was through a performance of masculinity: through reinvigorating mythical notions of craft prowess.

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When examining apprenticeship in early twentieth-century metal trades in Australia, labour historian John Shields came to the conclusion that the ‘masculine culture of craft’ has not disappeared during this period, despite major transformations in technology. In reference to the degradation of the labour process and the decline of skill thesis put forward first by political economist Harry Braverman in 1974,44 Shields argues, ‘this scenario of decline has seriously underestimated the historical r­esilience of the craftsman … and his culture’.45 While Shields appears keen to affirm the authenticity and continuity of the craftsman, and he does not interrogate craft masculinity as a social construct, Thompson explains that craft masculinity came to be performed.46 Notably, however, Shields observed that the apprenticeship system was the tool through which this ‘fraternal and sectional; labourist and masculinist’ culture of craft was maintained.47 Through apprenticeships, the ‘customary rites and rituals’ of nineteenthcentury craft labour were replicated and reinforced, initiating boys into a constructed ideal of ‘skilled manhood’.48 Apprenticeship located machinery as one key measure by which an apprentice gradually became a ‘master craftsman’.49 This learned form of craft masculinity was characterised by a sense of artisan dignity and a perception of one’s moral worth. Since apprenticed trades continued to be explicitly related to concepts of medieval tradition, the mystique of craft culture was emphasised, imbuing the mechanised factory domain with the notion that a certain class of men was innately meant to be associated with skills that were both technological and manual.50 Although Shields was writing about Australia in the first half of the twentieth century, his point can extend to the second half. Unlike the USA, the apprenticeship system remained the prevailing labour-training system in the Australian printing industry (among other manufacturing industries).51 Even in the 1980s, in union strongholds such as the Gov, a pressmachinists’ labour process was still structured by a union shop known as a chapel, and the union-elected liaison between the workers and management was known as the father of the chapel. Apprenticeships and access to employment was managed and tightly controlled through the unions, particularly the PKIU, which restricted apprentice intakes. Like other printing trades, press-machining apprenticeships took between five to seven years. Once indentured, apprentice press-machinists were generally paired with a tradesman for their first years, before being allowed to use presses independently. Press-machinists thus linked their personal perception of craft skill to a particular understanding of growing into manhood, and this form of masculinity was something that was learned, emulated and passed on from tradesman to apprentice.52 This background enables us to understand why apprentices tended to measure their progress by the machines to which they were assigned. The reward for ‘growing up’ was being independently assigned to a press, thus deeply linking concepts of skill, manhood and machinery.

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Technological transitions In this way, the hierarchy of the shop floor was closely connected to machinery and tools. The relationship between apprentices and more senior workers was not always a caring one; it could feature brutal initiations, for example. While initiations were a collective cultural practice that brought an individual into a group, it is important to acknowledge such practices could also be violent, abusive and humiliating. People who were smaller, weaker or frail were frequently the butt of jokes, and until the introduction of female apprentices, boy apprentices were often given initiations involving sexual humiliation. This was part of a process of enculturation and an intergenerational replication of social values. Former compositor Geoff Hawes recalled: They used to do this thing where we used to work with this thing called wooden ‘furniture’, which is all around the pages … you’d get them in lengths like this, and cut ’em down to what you need … You’d be bendin’ over, pickin’ up a galley and then someone would come up and whack you on the bum with it, as hard as they could. You know? Or you’d be trying to hold a page of type, right? And you’d try not to drop it, and then someone would go and put out a cigarette on your arm … You couldn’t drop it. You’re in agony. … They used to put Indian ink on parts of your body where you didn’t want Indian ink, and then iron filings out of the saw box. Because when you cut the type filings would go there. They put that on top as well. It used to take two or three weeks to wear off … that was just part of the initiation process.53

A more basic mistreatment for a new apprentice was to be picked up, covered in some kind of waste material (sometimes offset powder), bundled inside a large waste-paper basket, with something heavy placed on top to prevent the victim’s escape. Apprentices would later find they got in trouble for leaving their machinery unattended. Again, the practices were grounded in the material and physical specificity of the printing trade.

Embodied experience and aesthetics for press-machinists Although workers generally may be reticent about discussing their working life in detail, these former Gov employees found other ways to communicate what was important to them. Ray Utick maintained an amateur photographic and filmmaking practice while he worked at the Gov. Originally a letterpress-machinist, he retrained in offset-lithography, and claims he had little difficulty adapting to the new method. Ray began taking photographs at the Gov as an apprentice, and when asked about what he took photographs of, he replied obliquely: ‘Oh, just machines and people on the machines. Just average things.’54 Significantly, the main theme of Ray’s photographs was close-up images of presses (figure 25). When interviewed, Ray methodically went through the photographs and named each press aloud:

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This is the Albert Automat, a small letterpress machine. This is a Heidelberg platen. This one is Warwick Richardson working on the Centurion. These are two small Wharfdale machines in the pressroom on the third floor, western side. This is the pressroom, third floor, eastern side, with the Miehle Perfecta. These are the Heidelberg Cylinders in the new building.55

This almost singular focus on machinery was not simply something Ray developed later in life. In 1966, Ray shot and edited an 8 mm silent film, entitled Letterpress Machines of the Government Printing Office, showing a variety of letterpress machines in use at the Gov56 (figure 26). It was shot on the sly, during working hours: ‘That was one Saturday. I should’ve been

The bus-ticket machine in the Revenue room, no date.

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25

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Selected film stills from Ray Utick’s Letterpress Machines of the New South Wales Government Printing Office, 1966, 8 mm film, six minutes.

watching my machine all the time. But I started it going, made sure there was plenty of ink in it, and then I used to run around … and do the film.’57 When interviewed, Ray explained how he had digitised his 8 mm film in 2012, and he played it back on his television. He expressed pleasure in having digitised the film successfully, which suggested that Ray’s pride in technical skill was something that had mutated almost seamlessly from letterpress technics to digital electronics. Ray proudly beckoned me to take a look at the back of his television, where a myriad of cables and wires were neatly and successfully connected: DVD, VHS, cable, satellite, etc. Most frames in Letterpress Machines are shots of machinery, filmed at close range. Few people appear in the film, and it is hard to catch a glimpse of the whole pressroom, owing to the focus on the moving machinery. As we watched Letterpress Machines, our discussion of technics returned to the letterpress era, and Ray described how he removed the safety guards from one press to get a better camera angle. Again, Ray named each press aloud. When one man appeared in the frame, Ray said, ‘Get outta the way!’ As the title suggests, Letterpress Machines of the Government

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Printing Office places the presses as the central characters in a story of technological action. Ray’s photographs and films – like the detailed descriptions of presses given by other press-machinists – tell us much more than factual matter as to which press is which. The unstated but implicit value here is that being a press-machinist is about a craftsman’s skill and knowledge; it is about the aesthetics of printing, not its aesthetics on paper. It is about the movement, rhythm and form of presses in action. It is about the sensual absorption and pleasures to be found in the smooth and efficient running of large technical artefacts. Of course, the end result mattered (that’s what made you a good printer), but a press-machinist’s focus was almost completely on the presses themselves. It was about the hard work and craft of the makeready, all satisfyingly coming to fruition once the press was turned on. Everything is captured and named; a certain repossession taking place. This is a quiet reclaiming of satisfaction in working life, a methodical listing of machinery, as if to affirm its significance in the narrative of the skilled craftsman printer.

The exception: those who maintained letterpress loyalty Only a few letterpress-machinists at the Gov viewed the introduction of offset-lithography as the ‘death knell’ of their trade; most were keen to retrain. Norm Rigney, apprenticed at the Gov in 1964, explained that although he undertook training in offset-lithography in the late 1970s, he had no desire to work in that trade. Once letterpress was phased out, he took a position in scheduling. In the following extended passage, Norm gradually explains his feelings about letterpress and why he did not want to retrain: We had a job for life, you know, and you were lucky. Lucky. We chose to go to the Government Printing Office, because in those days you could choose to go anywhere. I chose to be a letterpress printer. But that’s what I wanted to do. I thought that it was in my blood, but I really don’t know. I think history is more in my blood than anything. But, oh, the blokes and everybody, I loved ’em. I really did … All great. We respected each other and helped each other. They taught you to drink, they taught you to, you know, taught you everything. It was great … I never ever thought that letterpress would finish, I don’t suppose. I really had no interest. And if you’ve got no interest, you really don’t want to be retrained in that. And it was my job … I didn’t want to retrain, I really didn’t … I had no interest in it. You had to be interested in it … I liked the old-fashioned way of doing things. I liked the old mechanics. It was the mechanical side of things that I loved. It was the feel of the old presses and the smells and the feel of what you were doing. You’ve got more of a satisfaction out of being a letterpress printer, than what you did, being a litho printer. It was satisfaction for me, because I loved it, I really did love it. That was why … It was an absolute pleasure, as I say.58

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Technological transitions Crucially, Norm’s attachment to letterpress is tied both to his specific commitment to the Gov and to the aesthetic and mechanical qualities of letterpress: My beloved Government Printing Office. I used to think of it as my own, as did a lot of the fellows that worked there. We were absolutely, you know, Government Printing Office through and through. And we were long term … I was a Grade 1 machinist and I loved printing, the old-fashioned style of printing. We had beautiful machines. It was an absolute privilege for me to work there and I worked there for twenty-five years.59

Put another way, Norm’s dedication to the materiality of letterpress printing differed from many of the other press-machinists because it was intertwined with his devotion to the Government Printing Office as an institution. This, in turn, was connected to his sense of masculinity and his social standing with his male peers. Norm still sees himself as being in a privileged social position that was inherited from his ancestor, George Howe, who was the second Government Printer of the colony of NSW in 1800.

27

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The Mechanical room at the old Government Printing Office at Phillip and Bent streets, 1891.

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It is not unusual to find that press-machinists come from families of printers, or families of Government Printing Office men. Ray Utick is another example. His great-grandfather, Edward John Davis, worked as an engineer-fitter at the Government Printing Office, retiring in 1917 (figure 27). Ray’s grandfather, Ernest Alfred Davis, also worked there as a clerk, and his position enabled Ray’s admittance into an apprenticeship in press-machining. Losing a connection to letterpress could, in some cases, mean denying heritage and ancestry. This shows us that the patriarchal notion of inherited social standing and craft skill was in existence well into the twentieth century; it was not simply a nineteenth-century cultural relic.

Conclusion As noted earlier, evidently there isn’t a singular kind of craft masculinity; there are valences and varieties of experience and identification.60 There are commonalities, however, and through this research the connection that revealed itself was the workers’ continued focus on their machinery. It was the Cylinder Heidelbergs, the GMA Vikings, the Miehle Perfectas, the Rolands, the Heidelberg Speedmasters and so on that habitually emerged as the vector through which press-machinists articulated their memories. The knowledge that press-machinists maintained about these large, high-powered machines enabled a continuity and transformation of masculine craft culture from a hands-on manual craft to the expert control of high-speed equipment. Here, a printers’ sense of craft skill involved the possession of mechanical knowledge, knowing the quirks of your machine so well that you could ‘almost run it blindfolded’. The material, aesthetic and embodied qualities of printing machinery (often regardless of whether it was letterpress or lithographic printing) enabled press-machinists to maintain and reinscribe masculine craft identities, even when their labour process had been augmented and made easier through the introduction of new machinery. The key to understanding this issue lies in the relationship between the press-machinists and their presses. The oral history interviews used in this research – in addition to photographs and amateur film made by press-machinists themselves – provide evidence that male press-machinists continued (and continue) to interpret their working lives and identities in almost constant relation to the presses they used. Press-machinists’ attachment to machinery took the form of embodied knowledge (an understanding of technology experienced through practice), as well as an aesthetic and pleasurable appreciation of presses as smooth-running autonomous objects. What was printed was rarely of interest; it is the machines themselves that appear constantly in press-machinists’ stories. This observation allows us to observe the significance of the machinery

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Technological transitions itself to the way in which productive relations of work were reconfigured and settled with technological change. The technology involved in the processes of industrial transformation does not operate as a neutral force. Technologies demand variations not simply in the kinds of skills among workers but also in their degree or level of sophistication. In the case of the shift from letterpress to offset-lithography, the new technology demanded skills that differed from its predecessor but required comparable levels of perceived mastery. The work was widely regarded as ‘easier’, but it still enabled a press-machinist to feel a level of control and ownership over their machine. A press-machinist commanded that machine as an individual and could maintain his or her authority over the technology. Here was a case where the increasing automation of the production process did not lead to a perceived degradation of craft tradition in the labour process. Assuming the mantle of technical specialists, pressmachinists were able to assert control over newer lithographic technologies, and in the process they reoriented their craft skill towards new machinery.61 For these press-machinists, their shared values, symbols and artefacts were centred around both technical mastery and historical connection to the past. This duality enabled the traditional and patriarchal notion of craft masculinity to coexist with the effects of technological change. The shift from letterpress to offset-lithography shows us how other dimensions of the technology – such as the aesthetics, historical tradition, machine ownership and embodied practice – are as important as workers’ perceptions of their own skill, offering dignity and control on the job.

Notes 1 Norm Rigney, interview with author, 30 January 2012. 2 The period of transition from letterpress to offset-lithography differs somewhat from country to country. Broadly speaking, the transition from letterpress to offsetlithography took place earlier in the USA and parts of Europe such as Germany, and later in the UK and Australia. F. Robertson, Print Culture: From Steam Press to Ebook (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 98; M. Twyman, Breaking the Mould: The First Hundred Years of Lithography (London: The British Library, 2001), p. 173. 3 See for example A. Zimbalist (ed.) ‘Technology and the labor process in the printing industry’. Case Studies on the Labor Process (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), pp. 103–26; M. Wallace and A. L. Kalleberg, ‘Industrial transformation and the decline of craft: the decomposition of skill in the printing industry, 1931–1978’, American Sociological Review 47:3 (1982), 307–24. 4 C. Cockburn, ‘The material of male power’, in D. MacKenzie and J. Wajcman (eds), The Social Shaping of Technology (Maidenhead and New York: Open University Press, 1999), pp. 177–98, originally published in Feminist Review 9 (1981), 41–58; Cockburn, Brothers, pp. 14–22. 5 While lithography has received less attention in print history, there are some exceptions: E. F. Baker, Printers and Technology (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1974); Twyman, Breaking the Mould; M. Twyman, Printing 1770–1970 (London: Eyre

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& Spottiswoode, 1970); D. Bryans, ‘The double invention of printing’, Journal of Design History 13:4 (2000), 287–300. 6 Zimbalist, ‘Technology and the labor process’. 7 G. F. Smith, ‘Attitudes towards technological change at the NSW Government Printing Office’ (Masters thesis, University of New South Wales, 1979), p. 2. 8 E. C. Bennett, New Technology and the Australian Printing Industry (Sydney: Printing and Kindred Industries Union, 1979). 9 Ray Utick, interview with author, 13 November 2012. 10 The gender and skill impacts of the transition from hot-metal typesetting to electronic phototypesetting has been addressed in: Cockburn, ‘The material of male power’; Cockburn, Brothers; R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Sydney and Oxford: Allen & Unwin, 1995), pp. 55–6; Frances, The Politics of Work; Reed, ‘From hot metal to cold type’; R. Reed, ‘Making newspapers pay: employment of women’s skills in newspaper production’, Journal of Industrial Relations 29:1 (1987), 25–40. 1 1 Cockburn, Brothers, pp. 95–100. 12 R. Dunn, R. Hester and A. Readman, ‘From letterpress to offset lithography’, in B. Cope and D. Kalantzis (eds), Print and Electronic Text Convergence (Champaign, Illinois: Common Ground, 2001), pp. 83–5; Twyman, Printing 1770–1970, pp. 51–5. 13 Press-machinists sometimes had an assistant known as an offsider. 14 Zimbalist, ‘Technology and the labor process’, p. 114. 15 Victor Gunther, interview with author, 15 August 2012. 16 Glenn MacKellar, interview with author, 1 December 2011. 17 Bryans, ‘The double invention of printing’; Twyman, Printing 1770–1970; Twyman, Breaking the Mould. 18 Dunn, Hester and Readman, ‘From letterpress to offset lithography’, p. 83. 19 George Larden, interview with author, 14 March 2013. Italics indicate speaker’s emphasis. 20 Smith, ‘Attitudes towards technological change’, p. 3. 21 ‘Nyloprint, a versatile new process’, NSW Government Printing Office Staff News (March 1977), p. 3. 22 Smith, ‘Attitudes towards technological change’, p. 3. 2 3 Ibid. 24 L. Winner, ‘Upon opening the black box and finding it empty: social constructivism and the philosophy of technology’, Science, Technology and Human Values 18:3 (1993), 365; B. Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987), p. 258. 25 NSWSR, GPO General Correspondence Files 18/2091, ‘Agreement No. 2268 of 1980: between the Public Service Board of the State of NSW and the Printing and Kindred Industries Union’ (21 March 1980); D. West, ‘Printing Staff A ­ greement’, Staff Circular, 47 (1 May 1980). Distinct compositor demarcations – hand-­ compositor, Monotype operator, Linotype operator, copy-marker – were also simplified as ‘Compositor’. 26 C. Cockburn, ‘The circuit of technology: gender, identity and power’, in R. ­Silverstone and E. Hirsch (eds), Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 34. 27 Glenn MacKellar, interview with author, 1 December 2011. 2 8 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Connell, Masculinities. 31 Ken Duffey, interview with author, 11 February 2012. 32 Ray Utick, interview with author, 13 November 2012. 33 B. Latour, ‘“Where are the missing masses?” The sociology of a few mundane

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Technological transitions artifacts’, in W. E. Bijker and J. Law (eds), Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 225–58. 34 J. Bennett, ‘The force of things: steps toward an ecology of matter’, Political Theory 32 (2004), 348. 3 5 A. Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 50–4. 36 S. Maynard, ‘Rough work and rugged men: the social construction of masculinity in working class history’, Labour/Le Travail, 23 (1989), 159–69; S. Meyer, ‘Work, play, and power: masculine culture on the automotive shop floor, 1930–1960’, in R. Horowitz (ed.), Boys and Their Toys? Masculinity, Technology and Class in America (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 13–32. 37 Maynard, ‘Rough work’, p. 164 38 Meyer, ‘Work, play, and power’, pp. 13–6. 3 9 Ibid., 17; See also Maynard, ‘Rough work’, p. 160. 40 Meyer, ‘Work, play, and power’, p. 16. 4 1 Ibid., p. 17. 42 P. Thompson, ‘Playing at being skilled men: factory culture and pride in work skills among Coventry car workers’, Social History 13:1 (1988), 45–69. 4 3 A. Baron, Work Engendered, p. 14. See also: Reed, ‘Making newspapers pay’, pp. 27–8; J. Shields, ‘Deskilling revisited: continuity and change in craft work and apprenticeship’, Labour History 68 (1995), 1–29. 4 4 H. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977). 45 J. Shields, ‘Craftsmen in the making: the memory and meaning of apprenticeship in Sydney between the Great War and the Great Depression’, in J. Shields (ed.), All Our Labours: Oral Histories of Working Life in Twentieth Century Sydney (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1992), p. 90. Shields notes that it depends on the industry as to whether ‘craft strongholds’ were retained. Carpentry, joinery, masonry, metal, bricklaying, painting and printing industries were trades that tended to maintain craft-worker agency. 46 Thompson, ‘Playing at being skilled men’. 4 7 Shields, All Our Labours, p. 88. 4 8 Ibid., p. 89. 49 Baron, ‘An “other” side of gender antagonism’, p. 50. 50 See R. Oldenziel, ‘Boys and their toys: the Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild, 1930–1968, and the making of a male technical domain’, in Horowitz (ed.), Boys and Their Toys?, pp. 139–68, for another example of the way in which medieval ‘craft’ symbols and mystique were mobilised in a way that socialised boys into a particular understanding of their skill. 51 Baron, ‘An “other” side of gender antagonism at work’; Shields, ‘Deskilling revisited’. 52 Oldenziel, ‘Boys and their toys’. 53 Geoff Hawes, interview with author, 16 February 2012. 54 Ray Utick, interview with author, 13 November 2012. 5 5 Ibid. 56 This six-minute film was originally silent, although in more recent years Utick added a musical background: the Sorcerer’s Apprentice by Paul Dukas. 57 Ray Utick, interview with author, 13 November 2012. 58 Norm Rigney, interview with author, 30 January 2012. Italics indicate speaker’s emphasis. 5 9 Ibid. 60 While Connell explains that hegemonic masculinity is associated with concepts

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of technical skill, both Connell and Judy Wajcman acknowledge that there is no singular ‘hegemonic masculinity’; the concept is not immutable, and is subject to transformation over time. R. W. Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics (Sydney and Cambridge: Allen & Unwin, Polity, 1987); Connell, Masculinities; J. Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991), pp. 143, 151, 159. 61 This dynamic is not dissimilar to the way in which hand compositors in the 1890s faced the introduction of the Linotype machine. As Shields writes, compositors were able to ‘preserve the regime of social exclusion’ and take up control over the new technologies, ‘leaving a substantial area of traditional craft work in tact’. Shields, ‘Deskilling revisited’, p. 8.

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5 ‘Going with the technology’: the final generation of hot-metal compositors

Introduction All of them today are employed in light, modern offices, where the loudest noise is the background hum of air conditioning. They see no ink, handle no lead, lift no heavy weights. Their materials are paper and film. And into their labour process, the terrain of control contested by management and the trade union, has entered a new organising principle: the computer.1 – Cynthia Cockburn

When sociologist Cynthia Cockburn published the polemical text Brothers in 1983, London’s Fleet Street compositors had undergone the disruptive shift from hot-metal typesetting to the computerised ‘cold composition’ of the mid- to late 1970s. The Linotype operators and hand-compositors had given up their metal tools and iron machinery and many had learned to type using little qwerty keyboards on computerised devices, or to perform page layout using ‘cut and paste’ and light boxes. During this same period in Sydney, however, the compositors at the Government Printing Office remained entrenched in letterpress and hot-metal typesetting. Newly arrived apprentices were instructed in handcomposing techniques with strict solemnity. While rudimentary attempts at retraining compositors began at the Gov in 1981, it was not until 1984 that computerised typesetting was properly introduced. This chapter is about this ‘final generation’ of compositors: those who found themselves in a trade that had already ‘expired’ in so many other organisations. Many of the former compositors whom I interviewed had become apprentices in the 1960s and 1970s. When they started at the Gov, their future working lives seemed to be on a predictable and comfortable course. While their wages were somewhat lower than the private sector, the job security of the public service seemed reassuringly stable. But instead of a ‘job for life’, these compositors experienced years of uncertainty about if

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and when their trade was going to disappear and what would happen to them once computers had seemingly overtaken their craft. The Gov’s compositors had an experience that was quite different to the crisis that Cockburn described, particularly in terms of gender, technology and social acceptance. This was because of the historical shifts between the 1970s and the 1980s with regard to both computerisation and genderlabour relations. By the 1980s, computers were increasingly acceptable as devices at work for both men and women.2 At the Gov, women were invited to apply for compositing apprenticeships from 1974, signalling that the trade had made some minor attempts to dismantle hundreds of years of patriarchal dominance. These are some of the reasons why the Gov’s compositors had a different experience from the narrative provided by Cockburn. In Brothers, Cockburn did not engage with what happened next for these compositors (indeed she could not; she was writing at the moment it was happening). Today we have the benefit of moving from a sociological perspective to a historical one. Through history, we can see these compositors’ stories through a broader lens, with the benefit of hindsight, and in the context of their whole working lives. As noted in the introductory chapter, the transition from hot-metal typesetting to computerised phototypesetting is both representative of, and part of, broader economic shifts in Australia and in the global north; the move away from protectionist manufacturing structures towards neoliberal service economies geared towards international markets. This shift has been well documented in the disciplines of political economy and history, but what happened to the workers who were pulled along with this transition? How important was the material and embodied nature of traditional typesetting in this loss of a trade? It is these questions that this chapter is most concerned with. For this final generation of hot-metal compositors, the introduction of computers into their labour process resulted in a profound loss of control and the only way to regain that control did not appear, to many of the workers, to be in the collective security of unions, nor in the identity and craft skills built up from a life of work in printing. With what (or whom) should they forge new alliances, to ensure their survival? The labour climate of the 1980s encouraged workers to take personal responsibility for their own financial security. Individual initiative was rewarded and collective organisation was increasingly reviled by business and government. The divided opinion among union leaders over whether to resist the new technologies or to aim for the retraining of members added to the compositors’ confusion. While management provided some retraining at the Gov, in many cases, individuals were implicitly expected to train themselves, in order to ‘shape up’ for the coming digital century. Those who did not retrain were left in an even more tenuous position than their computer-literate colleagues. While some of the Gov’s compositors retired

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Technological transitions or left the printing trade, the majority retrained and embraced computer typesetting, ultimately finding positions in fields such as computer programming, graphic design, desktop editing, document management and book production. Nonetheless, it is evident that these compositors lost their traditional craft and that this loss of craft culture, materiality and manual skill was bitterly missed. They also lost a secure collective group to provide bargaining power when future industrial issues arose. That said, some ex-compositors also speak of how they thrived in the wake of technological change, and they did so by focusing on individual self-development, albeit to the detriment of collective identities and practices. The technological change experienced by the printing industry was not merely a case of processes becoming faster or more automated, nor was it simply a story of compositors losing their jobs. It was also a situation where the culture of neoliberalism – a culture that demanded that workers adapt, retrain and be ‘flexible’ – had permeated all aspects of workers’ lives. The emerging social and economic regime profoundly changed these compositors’ identities, as well as their attitudes to technology, skill and collectivity. Those who thrived in the new technologies did so as individuals, while those who only grudgingly retrained wistfully described the hot-metal days as the best time of their working lives. By way of providing context, this chapter first refutes some persistent myths about technological change in the printing industry, and then introduces the reader to the (no longer familiar) shift from hot-metal typesetting to computer phototypesetting, known as ‘hot metal to cold type’. We explore how this shift related to the complex perceived gendering of technologies and tasks. The chapter focuses on the final generation of compositors who underwent this shift at the Gov; those who embraced computerisation and those who resisted it. It concludes with a closer consideration of the importance of design and material specificity for compositors; the primacy of embodied practice led to the subtle lingering of obsolete objects and traditional practices.

Hot metal and technological determinism The outlay of new technologies into industrial contexts is often accompanied by a gamut of myths and positivist explanations. In popular media and everyday parlance, a dominant historical narrative about change in the printing industry prevails; it says that a major technological rupture occurred between the 1960s and the 1980s. This transformation is often presented in a technologically determinist sense, that is, computers are perceived to have ‘taken over’ typesetting, as if by their own volition. In this view of technological change, anything that happened to workers or to production is framed as ‘inevitable’; computers arrived, hot-metal typesetting and letterpress printing were rendered obsolete, end of story.

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The claim that ‘inevitable technological innovation improves working conditions’ has been consistently used throughout the twentieth century – and into the present – to justify the introduction of technologies that speed up the production process, thus enabling management to have more control over labour.3 Since the 1970s, these perceived benefits of automation have been the subject of critique by sociologists and labour historians. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Harry Braverman influentially argued in 1974 that automation and technological innovation on the shop floor led to ‘deskilling’ and the degradation of craft labour in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.4 While many subsequent studies have argued that Braverman idealised the craftsman, that his definition of skill was bound by traditional notions about masculinity, and that he did not sufficiently account for worker resistance, his studies still have a significant place in interpretations of this period.5 Despite academic critiques, technologically determinist interpretations still prevail in mainstream and workplace discussions about technological change. Let us consider this phenomenon at the Gov. In a press release in 1985, the Government Printing Office described the introduction of computerised technologies at the factory thus: ‘An important aspect of the technological change was the level of support given by employees … They have realised that emerging technologies, which are the main forces causing change, must be recognised and incorporated into traditional work procedures.’6 The framing of technologies as the ‘main forces causing change’ reveals a technologically determinist view about how evolving networks of technologies and people operate throughout history. Technologically determinist views such as this ignore the role of capital and the relations of production, obscuring the changing power dynamics that evolve between technologies, workers, managers, resources and bureaucracy.7 This view also overlooks the way in which workers’ experience of the labour process may be degraded and undermined by newer machinery, which can be deployed in a way that makes specialist skill redundant. The notion that computers ‘took over’ the composing side of the printing industry also overlooks the way in which technologies operate socially. The computer’s introduction into the socio-technical world of printing profoundly altered long-established perceptions of class, camaraderie and technical expertise, as well as transforming everyday experiences of material culture and working life. It essentially transformed substantial parts of the factory into offices, and the ramifications of that transition go well beyond surface indicators such as the introduction of workstation cubicles and desktop computers. The change also produced another kind of worker: an individual operator who took responsibility for his or her own technical training; a technological expert, and one who found him or herself involved in increasingly precarious work situations.

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Technological transitions

From hot metal to cold type As a usable technology, moveable type had a lengthy lifespan: almost 500 years. From the invention of moveable type in Germany in the mid-fifteenth century, compositors learned to set each letter of a publication nimbly by hand, placing metal or wooden characters, letter by letter (in mirror image), or line by line, using a tool known as a composing stick (figures 28, 36). From there, the type was placed into a galley (unformatted printer’s proof). Once the compositor had typeset the page, it was tied up tightly using

28

Apprentice compositor Les Davies, hand-setting type, 1967, photographed for apprentice ­recruitment.

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metal and wooden furniture (small spacing pieces). After proof-reading, a number of pages (often eight or sixteen) would be arranged carefully on a large flat slab to make up a forme. In a process known as imposition, a compositor would ensure that the pages were assembled in a way  that allowed accurate directional flow for paper folding and cutting (figure 29). Once the proofs were approved, galleys would be locked together in a heavy chase (or frame), ready for the makeready process on a press (as discussed in the previous chapter). This is a simplified description of typesetting and letterpress pre-press, and it is provided to indicate how labour-intensive the typesetting process was. It also indicates how much manual control compositors could have over their work. The handcrafted nature of the printing process led sociologist Robert Blauner to conclude, in an oft-quoted line from 1964, that the printer was ‘almost the prototype of the non-alienated worker in modern industry’.8 Printers had the sense that they were building up skills throughout their lifetimes and this sense of constant, ongoing learning enabled them to maintain high self-esteem, as well as pleasure and gratification through their work.9 This pride was often reinforced by strong collective control, mobilised through rigorous trade unionism and restrictions over apprenticeship numbers.

Compositors Robert Garside, Bob Bonnano, Ray Bannon and Chris Shay pose at the imposition slab, 1981.

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Technological transitions The compositor’s hand skill offered palpable rewards, among them the ability to see and touch the results of their labour.10 In oral history interviews, the Gov’s compositors regularly spoke of the material pleasures of typesetting labour. Former compositor Geoff Hawes, who was apprenticed in hand-and-machine composing in 1967, spoke of the will to work: Geoff: It was not something you did because you had to do it. You had to want to do it … We did the trade because we wanted to do it and we enjoyed it. Jesse: What was satisfying about it? Geoff: Oh, I think it was because it was so manual. At the end of the day you see something and it’s on the machine getting printed, and you think,     ‘Gee, I put that together!’ … I just liked the whole thing with working with type. I loved it. I loved the ink on my hands, you know?11

The materiality and physical nature of the work was a crucial part of a compositor’s collective identity and sense of masculine mastery. Before the introduction of computer typesetting in the 1970s, the compositor’s labour process underwent one other dramatic technological change. This occurred in the late nineteenth century, and it involved the introduction of typesetting machines, such as Linotype and Monotype.12 The German-born inventor Ottmar Mergenthaler acquired a US patent for his new mechanical typesetting machine in 1886, known as the Linotype machine. By 1900 there were 4000 Mergenthaler Linotypes in the USA and the Linotype arrived in Australia in 1894.13 The Linotype is a large mechanical typesetting machine used by an individual operator. It has an angled keyboard with more than ninety keys, a melting pot and a casting mechanism. It produces lines of type (known as slugs) and is individually operated (figures 30, 34). Other mechanical typesetting equipment (such as the Monotype, Intertype and Ludlow machines) soon followed, but the Linotype remained the most popular typesetting machinery well into the twentieth century, especially in fastpaced newspaper production.

30

Pieces (slugs) of metal type, Monotype and Linotype.

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The Linotype sped up production and enabled employers to extract more productive capacity from fewer skilled tradesmen. These new hot-metal composing machines represented the partial mechanisation of the compositor’s craft, reason enough for late nineteenth-century compositors to fear for their employment security. In Australia and the UK, compositors’ unions retained reasonably tight control over the new typesetting technology and demanded that Linotype and Monotype machinery be available only to (male) printers who were already indentured as compositors in printing craft unions.14 The noisy, mechanical nature of Linotype technology was relatively easily absorbed into the traditional atmosphere of the late nineteenth-century printing house, and lost little, if any, of its traditional masculine culture. The material specificity of Linotype added to these gendered associations. As argued by Cockburn: ‘To many of the men, the clatter and the clunk of the Linotype … enhanced the manly qualities of the occupation. In turn the craft contributed something to our conceptions of masculinity.’15 Likewise, labour historian John Shields observed that the nineteenth-century compositors ‘assumed the mantle of skilled specialists’, which allowed them to maintain exclusive access to the new technology. This served to ‘reorient rather than fragment hand skill’, and Linotype operators emerged as an elite group, rather than finding their positions degraded by the introduction of new technologies.16 In the late twentieth century the final generation of c­ ompositors were not as successful as their nineteenth-century counterparts in co-opting new technologies for their exclusive use. With the introduction of computer typesetting in the 1970s and 1980s, some compositors were able to ‘assume the mantle’ of skilled specialists. Their positions, however, were increasingly insecure due to the swift pace of technological change and to the deregulated nature of late capitalist employment. Their precarious situation was also a result of the declining power and influence of the printing union movement, as it was squeezed by amalgamations and anti-union legislation, and compromised by new technologies that absorbed its members’ skill base.17 The arrival of computer technologies in the 1970s and 1980s meant that compositors were not merely deskilled but wholly undermined, eventually becoming entirely redundant in the printing process. While this shift was a decisive disruption, it would be inaccurate to treat the introduction of computerised photocomposition as a sudden rupture. The change occurred at different rates in different locations, and hot metal was replaced by a complex variety of changing technologies. To date there have been several generations of electronic and computer typesetting: from TTS (teletypesetting) in the USA in the mid-1950s, to electronic phototypesetting in the 1960s and 1970s, to computerised typesetting by the late 1970s and 1980s. The latter employed qwerty keyboards and VDTs (video display terminals), allowing text to be edited and formatted on screen. Later generations are harder to divide (and based more on differ-

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Technological transitions ences in software), but ultimately the shift was towards desktop publishing programs and computer-direct-to-press printing. The rollout of new typesetting technologies was not uniform across all developed capitalist nations. By 1974, almost all major daily newspapers in the USA had moved to some form of electronic typesetting; the transition happened somewhat later in Europe and later still in the UK and Australia.18 Robust trade unionism – combined with the high expense of importing new computer technologies from the USA, Japan or Europe – meant that Australia was comparatively slow in its uptake of computer typesetting. This ‘delay’ enables today’s historians more direct access to former hot-metal workers’ stories: many of them are still alive and in the workforce. Prior to the arrival of ‘cold type’, printing unions such as the PKIU maintained control through a process known as ‘capturing the first keystroke’.19 Although typists (such as stenographers and secretaries) could produce typed material, this copy always had to be re-keyed by compositors, if it was undergoing large-run printing. It was this control over the first keystroke that the unions wanted to retain, particularly as developments in computerised typesetting loomed large on the horizon. The danger for the unions was that non-printing enterprises would utilise newer technologies (such as word processors and photocopiers) to produce printed documents, bypassing the compositors entirely. In Australia, the first large company to introduce electronic phototypesetting was the long-established newspaper publisher John Fairfax & Sons, in 1975. The new technology enabled journalists and typists to input copy directly on a VDT. In 1976 the PKIU undertook an eight-week strike (in which the Gov’s employees participated), and its demands included the guarantee of no job losses as a result of the new technology.20 The dispute led to arbitration before the Industrial Commission of NSW, and in a decision by Justice John Cahill in 1977 it was determined that the printers did not have control over the first keystroke.21 This meant that copy could be keyed in by advertising salespeople and journalists, and the PKIU’s compositors lost exclusive control.22 The Cahill decision represented the beginning of the end for compositors in Australia and for the PKIU’s membership base.23 The Gov’s compositors – still steeped in hot metal – were well aware of the Fairfax events, which were only a stroll down the road in Sydney’s Ultimo. By the mid-1980s, electronic typesetting systems were growing in sophistication, pairing with computer operating systems and early desktop publishing software. For large corporate publishers, adopting these new technologies had the benefit of shedding their highly paid craftworkers in favour of a smaller number of non-indentured workers (often women), on lower pay.24 Realising that a complete resistance to new technologies was an unworkable strategy, unions such as the PKIU eventually negotiated to

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have some of their compositors retrained, rather than retrenched.25 This strategy did not always work, as we saw with the Fairfax dispute. It was an effective strategy at the Gov, however, because government positions had traditionally offered employees more security.26 Consequently, the Gov did not formally retrench any compositors due to technological change (although when older compositors retired, they were not replaced). A large number of the Gov’s Linotype operators and hand-compositors were retrained, with many having to learn to type on a qwerty keyboard. The designed nature of the keyboard looms large in this story of technological upheaval, as the following section will reveal.

Hot metal, cold type and gender More than three decades after it was written, Cockburn’s Brothers remains powerfully evocative of the pain caused by technological change and management decisions. Her language is infused with a rich materiality so suitable to discussions about printing and design. It is for these reasons that I have chosen to bring Brothers back to our attention. Cockburn demonstrated not only that technological change must be understood in terms of class and the relations of production, but that gender, too, is a major consideration. The introduction of electronic typesetting was not simply a story of ‘deskilling’ traditional craftsmen; it was also a major challenge to hegemonic masculinity, irrevocably disrupting the gender relations of the printing industry. Furthermore, Brothers made a crucial link between patriarchal gender relations and the materiality of matter: bodies, gestures, machines and tools.27 It was not merely the jobs that came to be gendered, it was the things, too. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the unionised craftsmen of the printing industry traditionally resisted allowing women to be trained to use their tools and technologies.28 This was part of an effort to keep the men’s wages high (women would have been paid less for the same work) and to reinforce the notion that their work was ‘skilled’. Union strategy had been to maintain control over new technologies by restricting access to them: machines became untouchable, except to an elite indentured few. This strategy faltered in the 1970s and 1980s, when newer technologies resulted in a labour process that was seen to resemble that of a secretary.29 Social scientists and historians have explained in differing ways how the act of typing was historically understood to be women’s work.30 The qwerty keyboard itself was gendered, associated with lowly paid and ‘feminised’ labour. As design historian Paul Atkinson observed: ‘The office computer had … maintained a physical form which presented itself as little more than an advanced electronic typewriter. Regardless of what it could be used to achieve, the only way of operating it remained the then

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Technological transitions feminised act of typing.’31 On a design level, this meant that anything with a design form similar to a typewriter or a word-processor held associations with feminised and unskilled work, which produced resistance when deployed into an office full of former printing tradesmen. Operating a Linotype keyboard carried associations of skill and the ‘expert craftsman’. The keyboard had a letter system known as ‘e-t-a-o-i-n / s-h-r-d-l-u’, rather than the familiar ‘q-w-e-r-t-y’ layout. The operation of a Linotype machine was regarded as a masculine activity; it involved the casting of molten metal, it required mechanical knowledge and some degree of physical strength to operate. For compositors in the 1970s and 1980s, moving from a Linotype to a qwerty keyboard was a source of much frustration. As Cockburn first noted, the transition to using computerised typesetting equipment was not only experienced as a debilitating process of ‘deskilling’, it also left some compositors feeling emasculated by their little moulded plastic keyboards and their clean, bright, office workspaces. With the end of hot metal, compositors lost the very thing that defined their identities as craftsmen: the embodied manipulation of heavy lead type and cast-iron machinery. This was also a design shift to a form of machinery that most compositors did not understand. With Linotype, the mechanics of the machine were visible: its mechanisms were exposed and legible, the operators could see the machine functioning before them. Not only did compositors possess knowledge about graphic design, text layout and literacy; their understanding of the mechanism itself was a key part of their sense of skill. Linotype operators knew the precise sounds, surfaces and timbre of their machine. With the opacity and technical illegibility of computer typesetting equipment, this embodied technical knowledge was lost. Compositors were faced with small, mysterious monitors, clad in smooth, beige plastic cases – sealed and unknowable. No longer was the physical design of their typesetting machine an indicator of how the machine functioned. Data from the plastic monitors was transmitted – via discs or cables – into a larger processor at the Gov, which, resembling an IBM mainframe computer from the 1960s, looked out-of-date by the mid-1980s. Reader’s assistant Phillip Morehouse, who started at the Gov in 1963, reflected on his work in the hot metal days, running back and forth between the Linotype operators, the proof-readers and the hand-compositors, ensuring that corrections were inserted into the final copy. He described the new computer system as mystifying: They got rid of all the hot metal and had the computer … that actually made everything worse. ’Cos if I wanted to get a proof corrected with the hot metal, it was only a matter of whippin’ next door … and they’d re-set the line and you’d take the hot lead slug in your hand and take it down to the Composing room. But with the computer … you couldn’t do all that. It was like a sausage machine, it’d be all fed in and you had to wait.32

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Note how Phillip specifically mentions holding the corrected lead slug in your hand. The loss of that material connection was experienced as a palpable loss of control over the correction process. With the solidity of hot metal came a sense of confidence, assurance and predictability. Convincing compositors in the 1970s to give up their machinery and embrace computerisation clearly invoked apprehension. By the 1980s, however, the computer gradually became less emasculating. Atkinson argued that the increasing prevalence of the computer mouse – in desktop computers from 1984 onwards – was a significant factor in the genderneutralisation of computers.33 A mouse enabled an active engagement with computer form, rather than the perceived passivity and femininity of typing.34 By the mid-1980s, personal computers were also increasingly prevalent in a variety of contexts: domestic, educational, industrial and business. Gaming was increasing in popularity and a culture of DIY computer tinkerers continued to evolve.35 Gradually, computers came to be accepted within the domain of a skilled male, technical class; these were machines for whole families to use and an emergent expert identity formed: professionalised, male and middle class. The issue of the sexual division of labour has been a focus for feminist scholars since the 1970s, and this matter frequently boils down to the question of skill: why is it that women’s labour is regarded as ‘unskilled’ while men’s work is routinely interpreted as ‘skilled’?36 While many analysts of the hot-metal decline follow Braverman,37 tending to regard the retrained compositors as purely ‘deskilled’, it was not until the 1990s that analysts began to unpick the concept of skill.38 The issue has subsequently become the subject of major debates in labour history and the social sciences. Shields summarises the discourse well, noting that there are two distinct approaches: the technicist and the social constructionist.39 The technicist view regards skill as objective – something measurable and developed through exposure to work and technology. This sense of skill encompasses things such as problem solving, manual dexterity, knowledge, speed, precision and competence.40 The social constructionist view interprets skill as a socially shaped concept – a label that is given to some activities and not to others.41 This interpretation explains the way certain occupations (e.g. Linotype operation) remained closed to different social groups and it explains the way in which a female typist’s labour process is undervalued compared to the (arguably similar) work of a Linotype operator. The social construction position can be broken down into two further strands.42 One view asserts that skill is purely socially constructed, no matter the actual content of the work itself. Another view – which seems the most workable of these approaches – understands ‘skill’ to encompass both objectively measurable aspects as well as conventions that shape a worker’s social status, influencing whether their work is regarded as skilled.

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Technological transitions The compositors at the Gov have had conflicting views about whether the change to the work process had a positive or negative impact on their careers. What can be said, however, is that the end of hot metal profoundly disrupted the stability of their working lives. It left these ex-compositors in a vulnerable position, always having to keep up with new computing technologies, forever finding their system overtaken by the latest technological ‘breakthrough’.

The introduction of computer typesetting at the Gov We’d heard little bits and pieces. That’s when the nerves start to give. What was gonna happen? Because these rumours were increasing each day and things were being heard. What’s gonna happen? … We didn’t know what the impact it was going to be on any of us … Then they just come in one day and said, ‘Right, we’re gonna change over, we’re gonna retrain youse’.43 – Geoff Hawes, former compositor.

By the mid-1970s, compositors at the Gov were well aware of the impending obsolescence of hot metal.44 On 30 June 1976, the PKIU screened a film at the Gov, The New World of ITU, produced by the International Typographical Union of America. In his introduction, the Federal Secretary of the PKIU, E. C. Bennett, said the arrival of the new technologies was ‘inevitable’ and emphasised the importance of keeping the first keystroke in the hands of the compositors.45 Compositors were unsure about whether to stay at the Gov, given how slow their workplace was to take on new technologies. Many knew, however, that they did not have the computer skills that would be needed elsewhere, which left them feeling stuck. Government Printer Don West reflected on this problem in 1983: Employees … quickly became aware of the increasing gap between their wages and the private sector, and the ever-widening gap between the … technology rapidly developing in the private sector and the obsolete letterpress technology retained at the Printing Office. It appears that employees were badly trained, badly equipped and badly supervised … By the early 1970s the Office was seething with discontent and was best described as a time-bomb.46

The Government Printer, no doubt, was keen to justify his own management of the Gov and he described the two decades before his arrival in 1973 as the ‘lost years’.47 Nonetheless, he identified a problem: the Gov’s clients – government departments – had begun to use their own employees for in-house typesetting on word processors. He stated: ‘At present, any government department which has an electronic typewriter or word-processing machine considers that it has a typesetting ability … huge quantities of information that would normally be typeset using the typographical skills of a craftsman … are now being produced using some form of duplicating processing.’48 The Government Printer could see that this situation could potentially render his Printing Office, as an institution,

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(From left) Stuart Lincolne, Minister for Services Eric Bedford, and Government Printer Don West open the new computer area at the Government Printing Office, 1985.

31

The Monotype room at the Gov, 1965.

32

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Former hot-metal compositors undertake retraining on Comp-Edit machines, 1981. Former Linotype operator Alan Holten is on the far right.

obsolete. He was determined to avert this course. Don West pushed hard for the funds to introduce computer typesetting, in order to finally ‘take ourselves into the twentieth century’.49 New computerised typesetting technologies were introduced incrementally between 1981 and 1989, in two major strands: ‘Comp-Edit’ in 1981 and ‘Penta’, a full-scale system, in 1984.50 To assist with this transition, a number of new managers were appointed – technical experts in computer systems, including Stuart Lincolne (figure 31). and Len Boughal. The new hires were of a different breed to the managers that the Gov’s employees had come to expect. They were not apprenticed in the printing industry and their presence disrupted established social structures in terms of class and perceptions of skill. These new managers felt little attachment to the old crafts of the Composing room and saw hot metal as dangerous, i­ nefficient and expensive to maintain. On these counts, nobody could effectively disagree. As noted in Chapter 2, the Monotype room was closed down in April 198451 (figure 32). Linotype was phased out slowly, although it continued to be used as a ‘backup’ right up to 1989.52 Negotiations between the NSW Public Service Board, the PKIU and the Printing Office drew to a close in late 1985. A new agreement changed compositors’ job classifications to acknowledge their new status as ‘keyboard operators’ and ‘computer operators’ and it ensured no compositors were sacked. However, the

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agreement also allowed non-union workers to operate computer typesetting equipment.53 In 1981, nine Linotype pieceworkers and eight Monotype operators were the first to be retrained54 (figure 33). Former Linotype operator Bob Law recalled: ‘Well, for me … it was full-on, because it was totally alien to anything we’d ever had before … you couldn’t see what you were actually doing … It just happens. Whereas, all my working life, whatever I did, I could actually see the process. I wasn’t the only one that was having trouble with that.’55 Bob was both a pieceworker and a timehand (depending on which shift he was doing). Pieceworkers were the employees who stood to lose the most financially, because the shift to computer typesetting involved the removal of that remnant of Taylorism, piecework rates.56 Without piecework, former Linotype operators were less motivated to work productively and, added to this, they had lost the need for their original craft skills. Bob was adamant that it was typing that he hated most about the technological change: The relearning to type was pretty difficult … But from a Linotype operator’s point of view, the two keyboards were totally different … that was hard. Before it all started … they gave me, as the guinea pig, a qwerty keyboard … I hated the sight of it, it was just a qwerty keyboard and you were trying to do with forty keys, the same that you could do with ninety. I found it hard. It was a case of fingers up and down, like typists do these days whereas with a Linotype operator’s keyboard it was at a big angle and you could sort of spread your hands out … I found it hard, but you got used to it … The one machine would do what five people used to do before … It was a big change for everybody. That was when the place, as far as I’m concerned, started to go down the drain.57

Here, Bob links the decline of the Gov very firmly to the introduction of computers. In his view, the new technology took away jobs, degraded the labour process and caused pain for skilled compositors who found themselves forced to retrain. Geoff Hawes also admitted that he had difficulty learning to type on a qwerty keyboard and he was appointed as supervisor of the Linotype room. His explanation vacillates from his personal story to observations of those he supervised: I used to use the Linotype, but I just couldn’t pick up the qwerty keyboard for the life of me. You know? Yeah, it was just something I couldn’t pick up. I tried. It was something completely new. It took all of their concentration and all their efforts to do it right. Once they got it mastered it sort of flowed fairly easily. But you know, I mean, a lot of the guys, as I said, the older people, they resented it … They said, ‘There’s no skill in it now.’58

Again, this was an instance where the design of machinery – the keyboard – resulted in complex industrial problems. The Monotype operators, on the other hand, had less difficulty using a qwerty keyboard on a computer, because the Monotype keyboard already used a qwerty layout.

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Apprentice compositor Gary Wilson training to use a Linotype machine, 1978.

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Between 1982 and 1985, more than 150 compositors were given some form of retraining. For most of the 1980s, it was necessary to operate both old and new technologies at the same time, particularly while the retraining of compositors and managers took place.59 Some compositors (more often the younger ones) were impatient for this training; rather than being afraid that the new computer systems would deskill or emasculate them, the apprentices feared that their training in hot metal left them out of date. In 1983, an unnamed group of ‘concerned apprentices’ wrote: ‘Apprentices here, at the Government Printing Office, do not have much to do with new methods until third or fourth year, even then they don’t spend much time … as there are so many of us to be educated … It is very noticeable at [Technical College] that we lack the experience and knowledge compared to students who work at commercial printeries.’60 Former compositor Stephen Noyes (figure 35), who began his compositing apprenticeship in 1978, also expressed his frustration at the difference between his on-the-job training in hot metal at the Gov and his concurrent education in phototypesetting at technical college: The first year, for me, was pretty easy because we basically learned how it used to be done. Which is what we were still doing at the Government Printing Office! But most of the other students were using new technology … But as I went further into the next couple of years, in second and third year … I basically struggled with the new technology … I’d do that one day a week, then I’d go back to the Gov and use me setting stick, back to the old ways.61

Former compositors Neil Lewis and Barry Skewes had similar concerns. Neil commenced as an apprentice compositor in 1977 and Barry started the following year. Neil was a Monotype operator, and Barry a Grade 2 proofreader. They were both impatient to be retrained in computer typesetting: Neil: Back in the early days of my apprenticeship, you knew change was coming and what we’re learning at Tech, and you thought, ‘Well, it’s gonna be years before they bring it into the Printing Office’, so it was sorta like, behind the times. Barry: We could probably never leave and get a job somewhere else, because we were always so far behind.62

Both men eventually retrained. After the Gov closed down, Barry went on to run his own graphic design business and Neil left the trade entirely, becoming a casual storeman. Another factor was that once electronic typesetting came in to practice, the compositing trade was seen as more ‘appropriate’ for women to enter and many did.63 This had complicated results: it meant that although the pre-press trades welcomed women, the perceived feminisation of compositing changed public perceptions about the skilled nature of typesetting.64 By the 1980s, the proportion of female compositors at the Gov was increasing.65 While the following chapter examines the women’s

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Apprentice compositor Stephen Noyes, 1978.

experience in more detail, the important point for now is that the influx of women into the Composing section in the 1970s meant that by the 1980s compositors were less inclined to see their trade as a purely masculine stronghold. This is not to suggest that gender was absent from workplace discourse, however. The near simultaneous arrival of computer keyboards and female apprentices was often regarded as a ‘natural’ confluence of

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events. In Bob Law’s description of the retraining period, he suggests that the younger and female compositors were perceived as a threat, because of their assumed competence at computers and typing: It was pretty hard to get used to, and I was although I started the whole [retraining] thing first, there is always someone coming up behind you, who is a bit younger and can grasp it easier … There was always these younger people. By this time there was a lot of girls working there, and they could understand it a lot easier than what we found it.66

Bob’s statement is telling because of his use of a collective pronoun, specifically separating the traditional compositor tradesmen from others, namely, newly apprenticed women and younger men. The workplace divisions were felt not just in terms of gender, but also along generational lines and for a workplace perceived as ‘late’ to take up new technologies, workers sometimes choose to ally themselves actively with new machinery, even though that machinery may have undermined their original apprenticed skill.

Individualised approaches to technological retraining While not all the compositors I interviewed were positive about the introduction of computers, it was often experienced as a necessary but regrettable ‘loss of character’ in the industry. Ultimately, compositors had to decide whether to ‘go with the technology’ or leave the trade entirely. As a response to this impending technical transition, many acted individually to save themselves from technical redundancy. At their own initiative, they took steps to ensure their survival, aligning themselves with particular skill sets and technologies. This involved self-initiated education, often in addition to the retraining provided by their employer. For example, some bought typewriters or rudimentary computers, while others sought help from their family members in order to learn to type. Former Monotype operator Lindsay Somerville explained that some compositors took steps as early as the 1960s to ensure their readiness: ‘I went and did this course … to learn how to type. That was in the old school of … Secretarial Studies, and … they did this Typewriting for Compositors course … It was run by a Monotype operator … he got the course together, and there were other guys there – Linotype operators – who could see the technology changing.’67 Former compositor Tim Guy also taught himself to type on a qwerty keyboard, benefiting from his wife’s work as a typing teacher: ‘Luckily my wife … she taught typing. Just once or twice a week … she just taught a couple of nights a week to get some extra money … I just went in and sat there. I got bored one night and I thought, “I’ll take the cover off this machine and I’ll have a go.” It was good.’68 In 1972 Tim was apprenticed at the Gov in hand-and-machine compositing and, as we shall

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Technological transitions see further on, he embraced the change to computer typesetting, enjoying the challenge of each new computer system he encountered. Another former compositor, Rudi Kolbach, was apprenticed as a hand-and-machine compositor at the Gov in 1957 and worked briefly as a Linotype operator, before moving into sales. He explained: ‘I myself went to an auction, and bought myself a typewriter, so I could learn the typewriter keyboard.’69 In some cases the Gov’s management explicitly relied on its employees’ privately gained technical competence. For example, the retraining program did not provide formatting training. ‘We must rely on people who have done this on other machines’, reads a meeting minute from April 1984.70 To help prompt this private initiative, Don West instituted a ‘Computer Interest Group’ and staff were encouraged to play with a Wang VS–50 computer during their lunch-break. The stated aim of the group was to provide a ‘forum for self-development’.71 He reflected on this process: Quite a few people sort of moved from what had been an old technology life to a new technology life, and some of them adapted very quickly and very well, it was quite surprising. One young guy sticks in my mind … He really had no career opportunity … But to get people thinking the right way we bought a couple of Apple computers. … We set them up in the Boardroom and let the staff play with them and do what they like. This young guy took off, and he came in one day with a disc and said, ‘I want you to play this’, … and he’d written the software for a coloured steam engine! [It] ran and blew steam and made noises and whatever. It was fantastic. He did that on his own bat at home, without any instruction, just by reading the manuals … that was a great turn-around.72

This is one example of how individually driven training and self-directed computer competence were overtly encouraged. It was also a form of unofficial creative expression and playful tinkering, as will be explored in Chapter 7. Of course, it was in the Government Printer’s interest to present his management of the Gov as fortuitously smooth and positive: The thing I feel most satisfied about was lifting the status of the people working in the Printing Office. They were pretty downtrodden when I went there. And come the ’80s, when we really started the retraining programs … they became different sort of people. It lifted their spirits and their morale … a lot of them became far more advanced than anybody ever envisaged they would … Some went to university. I think it just changed them.73

Significantly, Don West frames the success of this technological change around concepts such as morale, self-education and, however obliquely, class. The tradespeople at the Gov were well aware that the arrival of computers into their technical milieu also signalled the decline of workingclass employment. In this way, the objects and technologies that surrounded the workers were not only gendered, but they were also grounded in concepts of class and social status.

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On being ‘in the technology’ Staff were not retrained in a uniform manner. The traditionally ‘high-status’ Monotype and Linotype operators were given priority, while Monotype casters and camera operators, for example, had less access to retraining. Having the benefit of institutional retraining, Barry Skewes saw himself and the other younger compositors as being ‘in the technology’, while others were left out: ‘It probably affected other sections more than us, because we were in the technology, so we sort of embraced it and went along with it, but probably didn’t see what it was doing to a lot of other sections, I suppose.’74 This was a significant perspective because Barry didn’t focus on the compositors as victims of the change. Tim Guy was also ‘in the technology’; he enthusiastically took up whatever computer system was deployed at the time. Learning the computer programming language was a key part of Tim’s ability to carve out a new career for himself. He said: Computerwise, I didn’t have a problem … whatever they threw at us was good. ‘Give me something else.’ … So, Penta’s one language. IBM’s another language. Macintosh … there’s another system to learn. Then there was the Sun system … Unix … So I had to try and do all that. So it was great. Whatever they brought out, you soon got the hang of it. It was just a different way of doin’ things. 75

Tim also explained how he and a former Linotype operator, Alan Holten (figure 33), survived the transition by specialising in particular elements of electronic typesetting, such as programming. By showing their individual capabilities, they attempted to ensure their career survival. Not only that, but as this quote suggests, they enjoyed the challenge: It was fun. There was a fellow there called Alan Holten. He came from the Linotype. He was a pieceworker … He had a fairly easy transition … going all through different levels … But he managed to do it. Not as fast, he couldn’t do the speed … But he was quite good … So he programmed each job. He’d do the program, but he couldn’t pick up where he’d made mistakes in the program. And that’s where they got me. ‘Tim, can you give us a hand, we can’t find out what we’ve done wrong?’ … I got the programming side of it, and then yes, it was good.76

Former compositor John Lee was similarly comfortable with learning newer technologies. John joined the public service as a fully indentured compositor in 1962. His career took him from composing into document reproduction, then into scheduling, desktop editing and computerised page layout. Like Tim, John eagerly focused on learning each new technology that he encountered: ‘I was an habitual learner, so it was a lot easier for me to get stuck into things like photocomposition and computers than it was for some of the old fellas, or the young blokes, they just didn’t like it. So it, technological change, didn’t concern me at all.’77 Note here how

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Technological transitions John’s emphasis was on his individual capacity, as opposed to the collective terminology used by the more traditional compositors. The language of both these men speaks of an individualised labour experience, with less emphasis on the collective identity of being ‘one of the comps’. These men allied themselves with computer technologies and harnessed particular specialised skill sets, as a (sometimes unconscious) strategy of survival in this new regime of public sector job insecurity. Neil and Barry also spoke of the on-the-job discoveries they made in computer coding. The times that they spent ‘playing’ with the computers led them to learn about how these new machines functioned: Barry: Remember those things we used to make? Neil: Oh we used to make letterheads, compliments slips, business cards… Barry: I built a car! Remember, it was like a car, made out of blocks and things. Because you’d have to put in, like, ‘machine go to this spot here and draw a line’. And he’d put that code in. ‘Do this’ … and eventually I drew a whole car. I printed it out, you know? Neil: Oh, yeah. ‘Foreign orders’ were always an interesting sideline. You know, someone wanted something made up and printed.78 Barry: You’d have to get to know the machines inside out, so you did little things like that, just to see if they could be done and to see if you could break it. Neil: Oh, we were pretty good, we didn’t break too many.79

The compositors’ attitudes to those graceless beige boxes indicate a com­­­­­plex and paradoxical relationship with technological change. On the one hand, these bland, opaque plastic devices replaced machinery whose workings they thoroughly understood. The computer’s functions were seen to threaten livelihoods, careers, hard-won skills and a craftsman’s status. On the other hand, the arrival of computers was also experienced as exciting; it signalled supposed progress, efficiency and ease. It meant the Gov was finally ‘catching up’, inspiring confidence and hopes for future job prospects. At the same time as neoliberal economic policy was bringing the Government Printing Office’s existence into question, the workers themselves were increasingly favouring individual interests over collective practice. The acquisition of technology – and the attempted control of technological knowledge – were two key strategies that both employers and workers used to attempt to save themselves from redundancy. In this way, the workplace values and attitudes moved from collective practices towards self-interested actions. The computer was the ultimate tool of individual survival.

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Lingering material memories of hot metal From the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, the compositors saw their old machinery dismantled and sold off. These decommissioned machines were visible remnants of the end of hot metal; tangible reminders of the end of their apprenticed trade. The presence of those redundant objects could be powerful shapers of workplace culture and morale. They were also linked to perceptions of skill. When I asked Geoff Hawes whether he felt he gained or lost skill, leaving hot metal, he said: ‘Ah losing. We were all sad, because we could actually see things disappearing. We had a Ludlow machine. That went. Then all these other things went. They brought in photocopiers. It was quite daunting … One minute we’re doing hot metal and the next minute, it’s gone!’80 While hot-metal typesetting came to be seen as ‘dead’, it lingered on, through entrenched workplace practices, through disused machines taking up space in the factory and through memory. Like the ‘phantom intermediaries’ described in Maggie Mort and Mike Michael’s study of technological and worker redundancy in the nuclear submarine industry, there was a phantom presence of hot metal in the printing industry.81 Mort and Michael focused on a workplace similar to the Gov, a late twentieth-century enterprise facing the prospect of closure. According to their definition, phantom intermediaries haunt workplaces that are in the process of change and such intermediaries continue to play a role in the relations that unravel in those sites. Phantom intermediaries may come in the form of redundant technologies, not yet discarded, pushed to the side of the shop floor. (We have seen one example of the presence of such ‘phantom’ objects in Chapter 2, where Bob Day pretends to type on a decommissioned Monotype machine.) Phantom intermediaries may also come in the form of craftspeople who are unwilling or unable to retrain (and yet who remain employed, at least in the short term). These intermediaries also linger in the form of entrenched and habitual labour practices, notwithstanding new technologies that render such actions unnecessary. The phantom intermediaries of hot metal also haunted the printing industry in the form of professional skills and terminology that compositors learned during their apprenticeships. Their apprenticeship experiences left these compositors with a firm belief in the superiority of their skills. The compositors I interviewed generally bemoaned the contemporary state of graphic design, understanding their skills to be based in foundational knowledge. They spoke of how their grounding in hot metal gave them unparalleled skills in graphic design, typography, visual acuity and literacy, and some felt that these capacities carried over into their professional practice with computers and graphic design. A sense of pride is also conveyed through compositors’ mementoes – the objects and documents that they have kept since their a ­ pprenticeships.

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Stephen Noyes’ composing tools.

Many  compositors presented their indenture certificates during their oral history interview and almost all could remember the exact date of their apprenticeship commencement. Composing sticks were also frequently kept, perhaps as evidence of the skill they had attained in hand-setting individual letters of type. Unprompted, Stephen Noyes photographed his composing tools and sent me the image (figure 36). I later enquired about   them.

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Stephen  said: ‘I’ve still got ’em. Composing stick and me type gauge and the original knife that I used to use. I don’t know, I’ve always kept ’em and thought maybe somebody might ask me what this is one day, or I might be able to show me grandkids (if I ever get any), that this is what I used to do.’82 It was not only tools, but the entire physical nature of the printing factory, that had strong associative resonance for the compositors. There were those who clearly linked the decline of the Government Printing Office with the introduction of computers. Bob Law explained the pain of this technological and social transition in relation to the ‘atmosphere’ and ‘guts’ of the factory: I was employed as a Linotype operator in the pre-press area … For me, in those days, the Government Printing Office was an absolute joy. Then, along came computerised typesetting and the beginning of the end of the printing industry … The atmosphere changed, along with the guts of the building, which was transformed to accommodate the computers; big, clumsy, clunky things by today’s standards, but state-of-the-art back then … Several of the senior people in the organisation were swept aside to make way for what we now call ‘tech heads’ … The death of the Printing Office took five years, starting with the introduction of computerised typesetting in 1984, until the government of the day … closed the office down in July 1989.83

Bob’s statement here suggests a dramatic clash of cultures: traditional, craft-based, working-class labourers versus a rising, technicist middle class. The former group may have been patriarchal and prejudiced in its dealings with those who were not skilled, white and male, but the leaders of the new technological class were not part of any collective or community. They operated as individuals; allying themselves not so much with their colleagues as with the new technologies and with service industry ideals such as efficiency and profitability.

Conclusion As we have seen, in the nine-year period before the Gov closed down in 1989, it brought computers into its domain. By 1989 the Penta system was ‘showing its age’, and the impending obsolescence of this expensive system was becoming obvious.84 Would the government pay for major improvements to the Gov’s computer typesetting systems, to bring this service into the 1990s? As desktop publishing became a viable option for individuals on home and office computers, the Gov’s precarious position was becoming clear to its employees. Now that anyone with a computer was able to typeset his or her own work, the very existence of a Government Printing Office – in its centralised, traditional form – came to seem less viable. While many former compositors succeeded in staying employed through­­out this transitional period, the distinctive culture of the hot-metal Composing room was irrevocably lost and along with it, whole sets of

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Technological transitions practices, traditions and ways of working all but disappeared. Although it must be acknowledged that traditional printing culture was patriarchal and exclusive, what it provided for printers was a powerful and proud sense of having a clear occupation, a specialised hand skill, a craft. I do not say this to romanticise hot-metal typesetting; rather, it can be said that with the introduction of computer technologies, ex-compositors were aware that they were no longer experts. Their children seemed more adept at computers than they were. These workers became unsure what to call themselves in their new technology jobs: keyboard operators? systems managers? desktop publishing experts? technical assistants? data-entry personnel? Not only was the internal mechanical functioning of the new computer technology opaque and impossible to fathom, the workers also had difficulty defining themselves. The qualities of a ‘good compositor’ were no longer easy to measure. This chapter acknowledges that some of the compositors welcomed the introduction of computers; they were very willing to retrain and accepted the challenge. But in many senses, this was still a decision made out of fear. If they did not stay ‘in the technology’, where would they end up? While public service employment had once seemed the most secure job one could find, this dynamic was changing in the 1980s, as state and federal governments increasingly closed down service departments and outsourced their labour to the private sector (and overseas). Although blue-collar workers were first affected by this shift, managerial staff soon felt the impacts of public sector restructuring and ‘rationalisation’.85 Most compositors had only high-school education and their manual skills were almost all related to traditional printing processes. Keeping up with swiftly changing desktop publishing technologies was never easy. What replaced hot-metal typesetting was not permanent; rather, the increasingly computerised technologies that immediately replaced hot metal themselves became swiftly outmoded.86 Starting in the 1980s, people working in computer typesetting and desktop publishing were faced with successive waves of new computer technologies to learn, every few years. As a consequence, a 500-year-old tradition was lost and what has replaced it is ephemeral, intangible and swiftly obsolete. As sociologist Richard Sennett has observed, the new, computerised service work was (and is) felt to lack the character or depth of meaning associated with having a life’s work, or a craft skill.87 By the late 1980s, the hot-metal compositors who retrained in computer technologies found themselves transformed from craftsmen and craftswomen on the factory floor into technical experts, systems managers and data-entry personnel working in offices. While this transition might be glibly interpreted as a gain for the workers – moving them from so-called blue-collar work to white-collar work – it would be a simplification to suggest that this situation was always experienced as a boon. The

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compositors’ story is but one episode in the move away from a protected manufacturing industry towards a culture of neoliberalism, deindustrialisation and a growing service economy. This case also demonstrates what can be lost in such a move: camaraderie, communal identity, collectivity, steady commitment to a singular job task and the bespoke quality that accompanies the embodied experience of a manual craft.88 This is not to say that the computerisation of the printing industry was wholly a disastrous affair. Retraining was clearly a positive step for some workers, contributing as it did to survival, self-esteem, adaptive technical ability and a multi-skilled career path. The increasing drive towards occupational and technological ‘flexibility’, however, does not always require organisations to be flexible. Rather, it requires individual workers to do the bending.89 Not all former craftspeople were prepared to take this path, and those who retrained found themselves in a new world that lacked the commitment, collective values, physical quality and legibility of traditional printing industry culture.

Notes 1 C. Cockburn, Brothers: Male Dominance and Technological Change (London: Pluto, 1983), p. 14. 2 P. Atkinson, ‘The best laid plans of mice and men: the computer mouse in the history of computing’, Design Issues 23:3 (2007): 60; J. A. Stein, ‘Domesticity, gender and the 1977 Apple II personal computer’, Design and Culture 3:2 (2011), 193–216. 3 R. Frances, The Politics of Work: Gender and Labour in Victoria 1880–1939 (Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 1–3 4 H. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998 [1974]). 5 See for example Frances, The Politics of Work, pp. 1–4; R. Reed, ‘From hot metal to cold type printing technology’, in E. Willis (ed.), Technology and the Labour Process: Australasian Case Studies (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988), p. 33. 6 NSWSR, GPO General Correspondence Files 18/2105, ‘New technology at the Government Printing Office’ (1985), press release. 7 D. MacKenzie and J. Wajcman (eds), The Social Shaping of Technology (Maidenhead and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999), pp. 141–50; L. Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 20–1. 8 R. Blauner, Alienation and Freedom: The Factory Worker and his Industry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), p. 57. 9 J. Murphy, ‘Work in a time of plenty: narratives of men’s work in post-war Australia’, Labour History 88 (2005), 225. 10 Cockburn, Brothers, pp. 49, 51. 11 Geoff Hawes, interview with author, 16 February 2012. 12 A. Marshall, Changing the Word: The Printing Industry in Transition (London: Comedia, 1983), p. 23. 13 A. Zimbalist, ‘Technology and the labor process in the printing industry’, in Zimbalist (ed.), Case Studies on the Labor Process (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), p. 106; J. Shields, ‘Deskilling revisited: continuity and change in craft work and apprenticeship in late nineteenth century New South Wales’, Labour History, 68 (1995), 8.

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Technological transitions 14 Ibid., p. 21. 15 Cockburn, Brothers, p. 31. 16 Shields, ‘Deskilling revisited’, p. 8. The success was not experienced by all compositors: there were job layoffs as a result of the Linotype, and newspapers reduced their number of tradesmen, sometimes by up to two thirds. See Frances, The Politics of Work, pp. 60–1. 17 M. Webber and S. Weller, ‘Producing Australia, restructuring Australia’, in Refashioning the Rag Trade: Internationalising Australia’s Textiles, Clothing and Footwear Industries (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2001), pp. 27–31. 18 E. C. Bennett, New Technology and the Australian Printing Industry (Sydney: Printing and Kindred Industries Union, 1979). 19 R. Reed, ‘From hot metal to cold type’, p. 34; Cockburn, Brothers, p. 81. 20 J. W. Shaw, ‘Mr Murdoch’s industrial relations’, The Australian Quarterly 61:2 (1989), 301. Some of the Gov’s PKIU members complained that Fairfax members were provided some financial support for their wages lost while striking, while striking members from the Gov remained unsupported. 21 J. Cahill, John Fairfax & Sons Limited Demarcation AR (NSW) 1977 (arbitration decision). 22 R. Reed, ‘Making newspapers pay: employment of women’s skills in newspaper production’, Journal of Industrial Relations 29:1 (1987), 29. 23 The drying up of union members – such as that experienced by the PKIU – led to many union amalgamations, such as the amalgamation into the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union in 1995. 24 R. Frances, ‘Marginal matters: gender, skill, unions and the Commonwealth Arbitration Court – A case study of the Australian printing industry 1925–1937’, Labour History, 61 (1992), 19. 25 Bennett, New Technology, pp. 9–10. 26 L. Colley, ‘How secure was that public service job? Redundancy in the Queensland Public Service’, Labour History 89 (2005), 141–2. 27 C. Cockburn, ‘On the machinery of dominance: women, men, and technical know-how’, Women’s Studies Quarterly 37:1 and 2 (2009), 269–73. 28 Frances, The Politics of Work, pp. 169–79; J. Hagan, ‘Craft power’, Labour History 24 (1973), 159–75. 29 Cockburn, Brothers, pp. 103–4. 30 R. Reed, ‘Journalism and technology practice since the Second World War’, in A. Curthoys and J. Schultz (eds), Journalism: Print, Politics and Popular Culture (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1999), p. 219; J. Webster, ‘From the word processor to the micro: gender issues in the development of information technology in the office’, in E. Green, J. Owen and D. Pain (eds), Gendered by Design?: Information Technology and Office Systems (London and Washington, DC: Taylor & Francis, 1993), pp. 111–23; E. Lupton, Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office (New York: Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and Princeton Architectural Press, 1993); J. Wajcman, ‘The feminisation of work in the information age’, in D. G. Johnson and J. M. Wetmore (eds) Technology and Society: Building Our Sociotechnical Future (London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), pp. 459–74. 31 Atkinson, ‘The best laid plans’, p. 60. 32 Phillip Morehouse, interview with author, 21 October 2011. 33 Atkinson, ‘The best laid plans’, p. 60. 34 Stein, ‘Domesticity, gender and the 1977 Apple II personal computer’. 35 Atkinson, Computer, pp. 82–4. 36 Frances, ‘Marginal matters’, p. 17. 37 For example M. Wallace and A. L. Kalleberg, ‘Industrial transformation and the

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decline of craft: the decomposition of skill in the printing industry, 1931–1978’, American Sociological Review 47:3 (1982), 307–24. 38 Frances, ‘Marginal matters’, p. 17; Reed, ‘From hot metal to cold type’. 39 Sheilds, ‘Deskilling revisited’, p. 2; 4 0 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 4 2 Ibid., pp. 2–3. 43 Geoff Hawes, interview with author, 16 February 2012. 44 ‘Technological change in industry’, Staff News (Sydney: NSW Government Printing Office, 1976), p. 11. 45 E. C. Bennett, ‘Technological change in industry’, Staff News (Sydney: NSW Government Printing Office, 1976), p. 11. 46 NSWSR, GPO General Correspondence Files 18/2105, D. West ‘Review of Government Printing Office’, internal document, 1983, p. 2. 4 7 Ibid. 4 8 Ibid., p. 3. 4 9 Ibid. 50 NSWSR, GPO General Correspondence Files 18/2101, Legislative Assembly Question on Notice #724, question from Gary McIlwaine, Member for Ryde, 8 November 1984. 51 ‘M*O*N*O’, special issue of The Graphic, 8.1 (Government Printing Office staff journal, 1984), 1. 52 NSWSR, GPO General Correspondence Files 18/2105, ‘New Technology in the Government Printing Office’, meeting minutes, 22 February 1983. 53 West, ‘Review of Government Printing Office’, pp. 1–2. 54 NSWSR, GPO General Correspondence Files 18/2092, ‘Applications for training as word processing operators’, Staff Circular, internal document, 30 July 1982. 55 Bob Law, interview with author, 27 February 2012. 56 NSWSR, GPO General Correspondence Files 18/2100, H. Whiting ‘Implementation of Computer Typesetting’, internal document, 16 May 1984. 57 Bob Law, interview with author, 27 February 2012. 58 Geoff Hawes, interview with author, 16 February 2012. 59 Legislative Assembly Question on Notice #724. 60 Concerned apprentices, ‘Apprentices view to new technology’, The Graphic, 7:1 (1983), 1. 61 Stephen Noyes, interview with author, 20 February 2012. 62 Barry Skewes and Neil Lewis, interview with author, 17 January 2012. 63 R. Reed and J. Mander-Jones, Women in Printing: Employers’ Attitudes to Women in Trades (Canberra: Women’s Bureau, Department of Employment, Education and Training, 1993), pp. 25–40. 64 Reed, ‘Journalism and technology practice’, pp. 220–1. 6 5 H. Ferguson, Report on the Equal Employment Opportunity Project at the NSW Government Printing Office (Sydney: NSW Government Printing Office, Sydney, 1981). 66 Bob Law, interview with author, 27 February 2012. 67 Lindsay Somerville, interview with author, 15 December 2011. 68 Tim Guy, interview with author, 24 July 2013. 6 9 Ibid. 70 NSWSR, GPO General Correspondence Files 18/2100, ‘Introduction of Computer Phototypesetting’ (1984), meeting minutes, 11 April 1984. 71 NSWSR, GPO General Correspondence Files 18/2092, ‘Computers Interest Group’, Staff Circular, 22 April 1983. 72 Don West, interview with author, 12 September 2012.

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Technological transitions 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

Ibid. Barry Skewes, interview with author, 17 January 2012. Tim Guy, interview with author, 24 July 2013. Ibid. John Lee, interview with author, 2 August 2012. See Chapter 7 for detail on ‘foreign orders’. Barry Skewes and Neil Lewis, interview with author, 17 January 2012. Geoff Hawes, interview with author, 16 February 2012. M. Mort and M. Michael, ‘Human and technological ‘redundancy’: phantom intermediaries in a nuclear submarine industry’, Social Studies of Science 28:3 (1998), 355–400. See also M. Mort, Building the Trident Network: A Study of the Enrollment of People, Knowledge, and Machines (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2002). 82 Stephen Noyes, interview with author, 20 February 2012. 83 Bob Law, printed statement, 24 November 2011, received by author prior to oral history interview. 84 Tim Guy, interview with author, 24 July 2013. 85 Colley, ‘How secure was that public service job?’, p. 143. 86 Cockburn, Brothers, p. 84. 87 R. Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998), p. 68. 88 R. Sennett, The Craftsman (London and New York: Penguin, 2008), p. 31. 89 Sennett, The Corrosion of Character, p. 46.

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PA RT I I I Challenges and creative resilience

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6 (Re)making spaces and ‘working out ways’: women in the printing industry

Introduction The previous chapters in Hot Metal have focused on the experiences of the majority group in the printing industry, that is, the men. We have scrutinised the dominant constructions surrounding craft masculinity and its relationship to technology. However, to examine men’s ­experience without acknowledging women workers would be remiss, as their respective working experiences differed greatly.1 While women were in the minority at the Gov (and the printing industry in general), there were a number of different paths that female employees could take, along with a diversity of experiences. In the focus case of the Gov, the occupational and gender dynamics altered substantially in the period between the 1960s and the 1980s, as second- and third-wave feminists waged a fight to transform gender/labour conventions and social attitudes. This was a period of dynamic flux, featuring new opportunities for women, as well as reinvigorated opposition to their changing roles. To provide an interpretative framework, this chapter first outlines the historical background to women’s labour in the printing industry. This history is packed with contentious issues related to gendered technologies, access to technical knowledge and shifting perceptions of skill. The chapter then explores three distinct experiences by looking at the stories of three women: Gita Hromadka, Anna Lyons and Pamela Pearce. Gita was a post-war European migrant employed as a ‘tablehand’ and general assistant in the Gov’s Main pressroom. Anna was one of the first female apprentices to be indentured in the staunchly patriarchal trade of pressmachining, commencing in the late 1970s. Pamela was a senior executive manager, the only woman at this level at the Gov. While I do not claim that these three women’s experiences are the only loci for stories about female print-workers, these examples demonstrate the diversity of challenges

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Challenges and creative resilience faced by women working within a traditional printing institution at a time when the gendered division of labour was being reformulated in a broader social context. An important thread that holds these three stories together is the presence of design and embodied experience; each of these narratives speaks of something made, designed or physically manipulated, be it spatial, environmental or technological. The active remaking of spaces and the forming of embodied knowledge about machinery were two strategies that women workers mobilised. While some theorists have warned against an undue emphasis on women’s bodies in labour history and sociology,

37

A bookbinding assistant binding Australian Museum material at the Gov, 1965.

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here we are focused not on embodiment in terms of women’s physical difference.2 Rather, I seek to move past generalisations about women’s perceived bodily disadvantages by showing what they were actually capable of and the active strategies they undertook to carve out their own terrain in a male-dominated industrial context. One of the compelling things about the Gov is that it was a contradictory context for women’s employment. On the one hand it was a traditional, male-dominated factory. On the other, given this institution’s adoption of a progressive stance on female apprentice recruitment in the mid-1970s, it was an early experiment in providing trade qualifications for women in non-traditional arenas. Like many other printing establishments during this period, the Gov inherited the sexist prejudices and practices of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was an industry with a history of restricting women’s access to skilled printing trades, lest their presence dilute the strength of male craft unionism. Not only did traditional prejudices shape workplace practices but, as new technologies were introduced, different and emergent divisions of labour were generated, sometimes along gender lines.3 Historically, the patriarchal and masculinist culture of the printing industry excluded women on a number of grounds, bolstered particularly by claims that the work was too heavy, dirty, dangerous, complex and ‘skilled’ for women to handle.4 The challenge for feminists and proponents of equal employment opportunity (EEO) was to campaign for people to be admitted into all spheres of work on equal pay, regardless of gender (or other points of difference). Prior to the mid-1970s, women in industrial factories were generally employed in non-apprenticed positions, which were usually seen to be low-skill roles. They worked as tablehands, machine-feeders, general assistants, clerical workers, nurses, cleaners and so on (figure 37). They were not remunerated well but – in the case of the Gov – if they were appointed as permanent members of the NSW Public Service, their positions were relatively secure and provided the promise of an old-age pension upon retirement. Some of the older women at the Gov, such as Gita Hromadka, had been long-serving employees and were perceived as motherly figures, well-liked by staff. As long as they did not attempt to play the part of men and instead acted as caring supporters of higherearning tradesmen, the prevailing gender regime was confirmed and women’s presence was comfortably accepted. The spaces they inhabited, however, were undeniably designed by men for other men to inhabit.5 This was a dominant pattern for women’s involvement in Western industrial labour for the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries. As this chapter will demonstrate, there were particular ways in which non-tradeswomen asserted their independence and enacted subtle resistance to the patriarchal social order. For Gita, her resourceful transformation of space allowed a creative outlet, a separate realm and a source of pride.

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Challenges and creative resilience At the Gov, the traditional status quo was disrupted in the mid-1970s when management (in agreement with unions) gradually began admitting women into printing apprenticeships on pay equal to their male counterparts. This occurred four years before the Gov was legally obliged to admit female apprentices and, from 1974, women began to be indentured as apprentices in composition, bookbinding, graphic reproduction and a few years later as press-machinists. By the late 1970s, there was no longer any industrial demarcation between the type of work carried out by male and female workers.6 It appeared that the Gov had, perhaps unexpectedly, caught the wave of progressive social policy emerging in Australia in the mid-1970s. Once these young women were brought into industry, however, they were not always well supported. There was often a stark contrast between discourse and practice. Anti-discrimination language encouraged female would-be apprentices to apply, and yet their day-to-day experiences on the shop floor were at times highly problematic. There remained strong masculine subcultures in the printing industry that operated to exclude, discriminate and harass these newly admitted women. Even though the policy and language converted to a discourse of anti-discrimination by the 1980s, entrenched prejudices remained on the shop floor for much longer.7 Anna Lyons, the second woman to be featured in this chapter, was an apprentice in press-machining. Anna’s experience as an apprentice (and then as a fully qualified press-machinist) exemplifies how the issue of heavy lifting was used as justification for press-machining work to be perceived as inappropriate for women. Yet, as this chapter will demonstrate, the workplace rhetoric surrounding heavy lifting did not reflect the reality of physical, embodied practice, as dictated by the design of the objects press-machinists used. In practice, press-machinists ‘worked out ways’ to manage the weightiness of their work, regardless of gender. The appointment in 1985 of Pamela Pearce as chief of division, marketing, was a surprise to the more conservative forces at the Gov; they did not support the nomination of anyone outside of the printing industry, let alone a woman. One of Pamela’s strategies was to (sometimes literally) ‘make space’ for her point of view, actively renewing parts of the Gov in terms of design. Design became a core part of the ‘marketing’ of this printing factory. For example, she transformed the appearance of the building’s front entrance and shop and injected stronger design agendas into some of the Gov’s publications. This chapter also explores Pamela’s experience in relation to the growing culture of individualism and c­ orporatisation in public sector management. Individual action was a core part of Pamela’s success; as an educated woman in an industrial factory, she had little recourse to collective solidarity as a way to ensure her survival.

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Historical background: women and the printing industry Historically, the overwhelming experience of women in the printing industry in developed capitalist economies was that of marginalisation, low pay, union hostility and exclusion from apprenticeships in the printing trades. As explored in Chapter 4, the apprenticeship system was one of the ways in which printing craftsmen restricted access to their trade and reproduced a masculinist culture of craft over generations. Work that was classed as skilled was to be performed by appropriately indentured apprentices or fully qualified union tradesmen, to the exclusion of all others. Factory work that did not require a qualified tradesperson – no matter the content of the labour itself – tended to be regarded as unskilled and deserving of less pay, and therefore more appropriate for women workers (and other non-indentured labourers). Typographical and bookbinding unions consistently acted to restrict women from entering printing apprenticeships. In the nineteenth century and for most of the twentieth, women received significantly lower rates of pay than their male counterparts. Employers favoured unskilled ‘girl’ labour because it was cheap, so much so that the employment of women in labour-intensive roles was sometimes preferred to investment in faster, new machinery.8 The hostility of printing unions towards the presence of women in their trades cannot be explained simply in terms of fear that the women’s low wages would bring the tradesmen’s rates of pay down. As Cynthia Cockburn observed, ‘had nothing but class interest been at stake, the men would have fought wholeheartedly for equal pay for women’.9 Women’s presence in the printing industry was perceived by mainstream printing unions as dangerous not merely because it represented the watering down of wages; it also threatened the masculine culture of craft. In nineteenth-century Britain and Australia, while most skilled industrial trades were closed to women, there were isolated cases where women began their own printing houses, or campaigned to be properly trained as typesetters and bookbinders.10 In 1860, Emily Faithful, of the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, set up a printing shop in London. One year later she founded the Caledonian Press in Edinburgh, where she arranged for women to be trained as compositors.11 At that time, trade demarcation separated the composition process into a number of categories: one worker deftly handled the type (‘type-snatching’) while another worker undertook page layout and imposition, which involved lifting heavy pages and formes. This demarcation division meant that working in the typesetting trade did not necessarily involve hefty work, which left typesetters open to the suggestion that their labour was a light or effeminate trade.12 It also opened a window for women to access this form of employment. Faithful’s influence in Edinburgh was significant and during a major strike by the unionised male printers in 1872, female ­typesetters

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Challenges and creative resilience were trained and used by employers.13 By the end of the nineteenth century there were approximately 750 female typesetters in Edinburgh, operating in competition with male compositors.14 By the twentieth century the demarcation distinctions in composing were condensed so that male craft unions could more easily argue that the work was accessible only to physically capable and indentured men. In late nineteenth-century Australia, women were forbidden to work in factories during the night shift. This usually precluded them from employment in newspaper printeries, which made up the majority of Australia’s printing factories.15 The NSW compositors union – the NSW Typographical Association (NSWTA) – was formed in 1880 and its initial industrial actions were cautious and conservative. However, when the publishers of Words of Grace employed four young women as compositors in 1888, the NSWTA’s members initiated a strike and the union successfully negotiated with the Words of Grace employers to sack the women.16 The pattern of NSW printing trade unions actively strategising against female employees was set. As a result of such union resistance to female compositors, women seeking entry into the printing industry sometimes turned to radical feminist and communist groups.17 Suffragette movements sought to have women trained as typesetters. In Sydney in 1888, Louisa Lawson set up the progressive journal The Dawn, a publication for furthering the interests of women. Lawson’s plan was to have a publication that was written, typeset and printed by women for women readers.18 The NSWTA was highly displeased with Lawson’s project. Its stated objection was that Lawson paid her female typesetters 25s. a week, when the male compositor’s weekly salary was around £3 [60s.].19 The NSWTA did not acknowledge that Lawson’s activity in producing an activist newspaper – that was actively critical of the dominant social relations – was unlikely to generate profits in the same manner that a commercial newspaper could. In other words, in working for The Dawn, Lawson’s female compositors were working for a publication designed to communicate a progressive social message, not necessarily to turn a profit. This was in contradistinction to the majority of the male compositors, who worked for large newspapers. In this sense, the income disparity was to some extent justifiable. Nonetheless, Lawson’s tactics pushed the unionised compositors to act on the matter of female compositors. In 1890, the NSWTA voted on whether to admit females as members and to be paid an equal wage to men. The proposal was defeated by a wide margin, with the women’s cause receiving only four votes.20 In 1911, the NSW Printing Trade Women and Girls Union was formed and it obtained its first award rate in 1912. The rate was a­ dmittedly disappointing (35s. a week, about half of what was paid to a male hand-­ compositor) and it did little to raise women’s wages in the printing

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industry. It was not until 1916 that women were admitted into the NSWTA and then it was only into a distinct ‘women and girls’ section for lowly paid menial labour.21 While a few female union organisers existed in Australia at this time, their influence and voting rights were limited, and by 1921 there were only two female trade union officials in Sydney, across all industries.22 In addition, the NSWTA’s Board of Management reserved the right to exclude women from voting in general ballots. As a result of this hostility and discrimination, women in the printing industry were disinclined to support their male counterparts in industrial action, as they did not feel the support would be reciprocated if and when they should call for better pay and conditions. Although the twentieth century of course saw the feminist movement grow in strength, the place of women in the printing industry did not shift a great deal until their admission as fully indentured printing apprentices in the mid-1970s. By 1918, Australia’s centralised wage-fixing system had set the working wage for women at 30s. a week (regardless of whether or not they had dependants) and at £3 a week for men (again, regardless of whether they truly required a ‘breadwinner’ wage).23 Legally, the lowest paid workers in Sydney’s factories were teenage girls.24 For example, in 1918, a twentyone-year-old female letterpress feeder working at a printery in Sydney might be paid 30s. per week, while a fourteen-year-old female printworker could receive as little as 12s.6d.25 At this time, very few men took up the call for a rise in the standard minimum wage for women although, notably, the socialist William Lane reasoned that if the unions wanted to call for equal pay for male and female print-workers, they would likely find large and energetic industrial support from women factory workers as a whole.26 Lane’s arguments were regarded as dangerously radical and were unheeded by Australian and international compositors’ unions. As we have seen, merely gaining entry into composing was a difficult battle for women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bookbinding was another matter. By the 1880s and 1890s, women were commonly employed as menial labour in bookbinding and stationery manufacture.27 As labour historian Rae Frances emphasised, while technological changes in composing machinery were minimal between the 1890s and 1930s, this was not the case in bookbinding. As demand for books and printed matter increased between the 1880s and 1930s, a large number of binding and finishing machines were introduced into the printing industry, increasing the rate of production. There were new machines for gluing, stapling, stitching, folding, collating, numbering, case-making and cutting. This meant that ‘machine-feeders’ were increasingly required by printing employers, and the cheapest machine-feeders that employers could legally hire were young women.28 In the late nineteenth century, wage inequity in bookbinding existed starkly along gender lines. The distinction in this particular trade between

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Challenges and creative resilience ‘skilled’ (male) and ‘unskilled’ (female) work was arbitrary; it was merely a social construction brought about through negotiation between employers, bookbinders’ unions and industrial judges.29 As Frances has argued, this demarcation division between the kind of bookbinding work that was considered ‘skilled’ and the kind of work that untrained labourers could do was frequently redrawn; employers would attempt to hire more low-paid women to do the work of the higher-paid ‘skilled’ bookbinders, and the bookbinders’ unions would resist this push. Generally, men undertook the backing, covering, finishing and guillotining, while women were more commonly employed for collating, sewing, folding, counting, wrapping and using the stitching machines. Sometimes women were permitted to use bookbinding machinery; at other times the demarcation line was drawn so that only indentured bookbinders could work the machinery. Similarly, at times women were permitted to make leather blotting pads and bind quarter-bound books; at other times this work was reserved for the (male) indentured bookbinders.30 It is here that the fraught relationship between machinery, products and the distribution of labourers’ bodies is most stark and contentious. Access to machinery meant very different things to different groups. To employers, it meant speeding up production. For craftsmen, machines represented jobs (or the potential loss thereof); but machines were also grasped as things that needed to be mastered and to be claimed squarely as part of the skilled workers’ domain. For women, while machinery was associated with the drudgery of low-paid work, the challenge of mastering machinery also represented an opportunity to prove their worth as workers with skills and capacities equal to the men. Although female bookbinders had no formal union representation in the nineteenth century, by the first half of the twentieth century they were included in the Printing Industries Employees Union of Australia (PIEUA). The union, however, treated their concerns differently from those of the men.31 The concerns and interests of female members were often not made a priority.32 In 1927, the Sydney-based Militant Women’s Group attempted to challenge women’s treatment in factories, particularly in terms of wages and conditions, and a decade later the Council of Action for Equal Pay was formed. By the outbreak of the Second World War, the emphasis had shifted to the Manpower movement. Working women were placed in ‘essential’ positions, such as in munitions factories. The experience of working in traditionally male jobs increased women’s collective confidence when it came to making claims about competence and equality.33 The history of women and the printing industry should not be interpreted solely as a story about passive victims of patriarchal bias and employer manipulation. As this historical background suggests, women were active in attempting to improve their working conditions and status. At times this involved working with unions; at other times it necessitated

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separation from men’s industrial strongholds. As the twentieth century progressed, women working in Sydney factories were increasingly unionised, sometimes striking without the permission of the (almost exclusively male) union officials.34 As this history indicates, deeply entrenched practices and concerns about defending craft strongholds shaped the way in which men reacted to women’s presence in the printing industry. Bringing women into the printing industry on equal terms with men was never going to be achieved simply by progressive policy change in the mid-1970s; the cogs of culture can be slow to shift. Before looking to female apprentices and managers in the 1970s and 1980s, it is important to describe the work of the women who preceded them. The following section considers the experiences of non-tradeswomen whose employment began in the mid-twentieth century under inequitable employment conditions, and who continued to work in traditional ‘women’s’ roles.

Women doing ‘women’s work’ There were a number of older women employed at the Gov in the 1950s and 1960s, and by the late 1970s and 1980s they were much-loved members of the Gov’s community. Letterpress-machinist Victor Gunther explained what the ‘ladies’ did: We had ladies workin’ with us. Tablehands and feeders … They used to feed the machines. You’d get a ream of paper and you’d fan it out and the lady would sit there, that’s the machine, and she’d pick that sheet up and she’d feed it into the machine, and it’d take it round and print it and bring it out the other side and she’d sit there and do that all day.35

In printing (as in other industries), women’s factory work could be very repetitive, but the managers did not always recognise the value that particular labour processes had for some of the female workers. Former senior manager Alan Leishman recalled: I got into serious trouble with the ladies from the Revenue section when State Lotteries changed over to their electronic ticketing. I had taken their job away from them. That’s how they looked at it. They had sat there for years with bunches of lottery tickets going ‘61, 62, 63, 64, 65,’ all day, checking lottery numbers … They had a lot pride in that and that was the only thing they knew and they saw their life disappearing in front of them.36

While Alan’s comment does suggest some awareness of the impact of technological change, the statement also confirms the widespread social assumption that boring work was somehow appropriate for them. As these two quotes subtly indicate, the men sometimes professed a sense of amazement that the women could happily sit and undertake a mundane task all day. This amazement suggests: ‘Are these women so simple-minded that

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38

Gita Hromadka and Lillian Taylor in the third-floor women’s bathroom, 1979. Photograph by Jackie Kitney,

they don’t object to this work? We wouldn’t put up with that.’ However, as history shows us, women in this industry were not always well represented by their unions compared to the men and they often had no choice but to accept these menial, repetitive jobs. Additionally, their exclusion from skilled training in the printing industry made them particularly vulnerable to technological change. With the post-war arrival of European migrants, the Gov employed men and women from all over Europe, often in positions not requiring apprenticeships. Gita Hromadka came from Czechoslovakia and she began working at the Gov in 1951 as an assistant and machine-feeder in the letterpress section. She also managed the staff library and her husband worked in the letterpress area as an offsider.37 While women’s amenities at the Gov were limited in the mid-twentieth century, by the 1970s there was a women’s bathroom on the northern end of the building’s third floor. In about 1974, Gita noticed the particular environmental qualities of this space. It offered a northern aspect, bright, filtered light and ready provision of water (figure 38). She began to bring in pot plants and cuttings.38 By 1979 the women’s bathroom was comprehensively filled with pot plants, hanging vines and creepers. Gita also began distributing and caring for plants throughout other parts of the Gov, from the ground-floor foyer up to the canteen on the fifth floor. While such

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a seemingly mundane activity may often be ignored in labour history – or even in the study of material culture – what Gita was doing was not only creative, it was a clever and responsive engagement with the spatial and environmental conditions of her workplace. The industrial context of the ‘rest room’ or bathroom has long served as a refuge from factory life.39 Anna Lyons described Gita’s plant-filled bathroom as a refuge: ‘It was actually a little bit of a sanctuary, in a way. It was the only space you had.’40 In transforming a space, Gita was able to create a place that offered respite from the male-dominated domain of the Main pressroom. When Anna faced difficulties being accepted as one of the few female press-machinists, Gita offered her support. Anna recounts: Because she was quite forward in her way of thinking too, because she knew that I was having a few problems, and I said to her … ‘Oh, so-and-so said’ (I didn’t tell too much to her, because her husband was sometimes my offsider.) … But I says, ‘Oh, I’m having a bit of trouble with – whoever,’ and she says,   ‘Don’t you listen! Don’t you let them! Just snub your nose at him!’ … The way she just gave me a little bit more support, in a way. And because she was so much older, she was already in her fifties – or something – they never bothered her.41

Because Gita had not openly and publicly challenged the existing status quo, her presence was more or less accepted by the male printers, some of whom were quietly interested in the secret plant-filled space of the women’s bathrooms. Press-machinist Ray Utick described a moment when the letterpress overseer, ‘Black Mac’ (Alex McLachlan), had asked Ray if he’d accompany him, sneaking in to see the plants. Ray said: Gita! She decorated the women’s toilet, shower area. There was plants hanging down from the top of everywhere, it was beautiful in there. The reason I know it was nice: Black Mac come to me one overtime, when there was no women working. He said, ‘Ray, I wanna go in there and check up on something, will you come with me?’ He didn’t want to go by himself because there might’a been someone there from a different floor, you know? … There used to be all these vines, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon type-a-thing.42

Linotype operator Bob Law remembered one night when a group of men were ‘brave’ enough to sneak in to see the women’s bathroom: These plants in the ladies’ toilets: everyone knew about them, but none of the guys were game enough to go in there. But we all braved it one night and went in and it was a sight to behold! There was climbing plants all over the tops of the cubicles, and on the washbasins they were hanging down to the floor, it was just like a forest, it was magnificent! Yeah, the old ladies’ toilet, it was unbelievable … It was part of the social aura of the place, that was in the early days. It was just the way everyone looked after it, you know? … All that sort of thing was happening, you know, the ladies toilets, all decked out. But it did die. But it was part of their day’s work. They’d go in and spend the first two hours watering their plants. 43

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Challenges and creative resilience Bob’s recollections indicate that other staff members also joined in, collectively producing a radically different environment in the women’s toilets. Gita’s production of a space – and her triggering of collective activity to improve and develop the physical environment of the workplace – were ultimately accepted into the culture of the Gov, rather than resisted as eccentric or militant women’s activity. Labour historian Lucy Taksa’s aforementioned analysis of the Eveleigh Railway Workshops in Sydney offers a useful parallel in relation to workers’ active roles in shaping the uses and meanings of their work environment.44 As noted in the Introduction, Taksa argued that material artefacts, architecture and social stories should always be examined in relation to one another, not in isolation. In criticising a heritage strategy now employed at the old railyards in the Sydney suburb of Eveleigh, Taksa emphasised the interconnected ‘relationship between the site’s material culture, its workforce and the social fabric of everyday life’.45 She charted the spatial character of worker resistance at the Eveleigh workshops, explaining how certain spaces and carriages were reappropriated for union meetings, games and socialising. She saw these strategies as ‘spatial struggles of resistance’ and explained that they were, by their very nature, temporary and discontinuous, depending upon the ability of management to control and regulate workspaces.46 The worker-led creation of plant-filled space at the Gov is an active response to certain conditions of production. As a response to the maledominated culture of the third floor, such a space encouraged collective practices, with a number of workers voluntarily joining in the project. These activities took place in work time and thus appropriated time for the workers’ own ends, not for the employer’s. However, as Taksa suggested, by their very nature such spaces of quiet resistance are ephemeral. By 1985 Gita had passed away and her plants were past their heyday. Sandra Elisabeth Stringer’s recollections of the plants in the bathrooms differed from other interviewees. By the mid-1980s, when she was commencing as an apprentice in the Graphic Reproduction section, Sandra remembered the plants were not as lush or numerous as in earlier years. Her experience of women’s spaces at the Gov was not expressed in terms of a sanctuary or privacy: Even though we had our own space, the guys sometimes would just sorta violate that. Like, if you were on night shift, you know, and there weren’t women around, they’d just go and trash things. Your lockers’d sorta be vandalised … as a woman, as far as the locker spaces went, you just had to be happy to share your locker sometimes. One between three, you know. But that wasn’t necessarily bad planning, I think it was just that things evolved and they had to accommodate it as it was evolving.47

While Sandra is forgiving of the Gov’s lack of amenities for women (such as lockers and showers), what this quote points to is that, notwithstanding the

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admittance of female apprentices, the women faced challenges additional to those of gaining entry into what had been an exclusively male trade. Sandra also spoke of how the safety equipment – such as acid-resistant gloves – were always several sizes too big, and she would ‘end up with more acid inside the gloves than what I would on the outside!’48 These spatial and physical arrangements were mostly subtle (although occasionally overt) indicators of the women’s marginal status.

Equal employment opportunity and anti-discrimination law During the 1970s and 1980s, a number of historic legal changes came into force to improve the status of women in New South Wales. NSW state and federal anti-discrimination legislation and the Apprenticeship Program for Girls offered working-class women entry into the higher-paid, traditionally male trades.49 This disrupted the ‘male breadwinner’ norm that maintained patriarchal hiring systems and supported traditional masculine identities.50 The NSW Anti-Discrimination Act in 1977 prohibited discrimination in employment on the grounds of race, sex and marital status.51 Other significant transitions included the Australian (federal) lifting of the marriage bar in 196652 and the introduction of EEO and affirmative action requirements in 1977, 1980 and 1981.53 In 1980 the NSW Anti-Discrimination Act was amended to require NSW government departments and statutory authorities to prepare EEO management plans.54 Despite this, many employment sectors with an ingrained culture of prejudice and an underlying traditional gender regime found reform difficult to bring about. Change in these areas was described by senior public servant Peter Wilenski as ‘so slow as to be almost imperceptible’.55 The reforms followed on the heels of a strengthening civil rights movement in Western capitalist nations. The USA’s Civil Rights Act 1964, which outlawed employment discrimination on the basis of gender, race and religion, was later strengthened to include EEO measures. In the UK, the Sex Discrimination Act was passed in 1975. South Australia was the first Australian state to legislate in this area, passing the Prohibition of Discrimination Act in 1966 and the Sex Discrimination Act in 1976. In her analysis of the ‘gender regime’ in NSW public sector institutions, Raewyn Connell found that public sector workplaces followed a trend towards performed workplace gender neutrality through the application of anti-discrimination and EEO policy.56 As she noted, only lip service was paid to gender neutrality, that is, gender neutrality was enacted through policy objectives and written workplace language, but inequitable gender regimes continued to prevail, particularly those that were systematised within particular management styles and job-role identities. Here we are talking about indirect or systematic discrimination, which is the outcome of policies, rules and workplace practices that on the surface appear neutral

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Challenges and creative resilience but in reality leave particular groups at a disadvantage.57 One example of this is inflexible working hours; another is the demand that women must be ‘one of the boys’ if they want to be accepted as ‘equal’.58 Weight-lifting limits can function as indirect forms of workplace discrimination, as this chapter will explore.

Female apprentices at the Government Printing Office The first female apprentice at the Gov was Janet Rainbow, recruited in late 1973 in bookbinding. A small but growing number of women joined her in the years that followed. These apprentices were typically workingclass or middle-class teenagers who had interests in technical training, machinery, design, art, photography or computing. Another bookbinder, Kim Cooper, spoke of how her interest in motorcycles had impressed the hiring committee, while other women saw themselves as ‘tomboys’, or were not interested in ‘feminised’ roles, such as clerical work. In an interview for the Sydney Morning Herald in 1973, Janet obliquely warned other women who might be interested in the trade: ‘they must be prepared to be treated just like the boys.’59 This statement should not be read too literally. In view of the existing research on female apprentice experience in non-traditional trades, it is well established that women were treated quite differently from their male counterparts, once they

39

One of the first female press-machinists at the Gov, 1981.

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entered a heretofore male-dominated occupational area.60 Put simply, it was tough. A female apprentice’s actions, intentions and behaviours were under constant scrutiny. Being treated ‘like the boys’ did not mean equality in practice; the phrase is more likely code that women should expect harassment, bullying and a lack of support. In the late 1970s and 1980s, the Gov was admitting an unusually high number of women apprentices, particularly into composing and bookbinding, and by the late 1970s had also admitted two or three women as press-machinists (figure 39). By 1986, women made up 25 per cent of the apprentices hired at the Gov, and a year later, 43 per cent of the total recruits.61 By 1984 in Australia as a whole, females made up 12 per cent of printing apprentices, but in male-dominated trades, such as press-machining, only 2 per cent of recruits were women.62 This pattern remained well into the 1990s.63 As one of the few women to be apprenticed in press-machining, Anna Lyons experienced workplace discrimination, bullying and sexism on a regular basis, but she also spoke of the strong friendships she formed with other printers. As explored in Chapter 4, the Main pressroom at the Gov maintained a traditional, patriarchal culture that was resistant to change. Anna explained: Well, it was very difficult with me being the only female, as you can imagine. Especially the print room, the print room was very male dominant type and so unionised and never really wanted any change … But if you say anything, then you really cop it. You cop it on the floor, you see. When you start up your machine, some would whistle with a condescending whistle.64

Anna described how her daily work involved enduring ‘death stares’, unnecessary visits from people in other sections and prank phone-calls involving heavy breathing on the end of the line. She alleged that occasionally some printers deliberately sabotaged the presses she was assigned to, and that some members of management were unsupportive, including taking bets about whether or not she would ‘stick it out’. Anna reflected: ‘I think at the Government Printing Office, I had worse experiences there … verbal abuse and intimidation. You walk in there, and it’s all blokes, and they look at you, and you know what they’re thinking. Just the way that they speak to you, there was a bit of attitude.’65 Anna’s interview was filled with contradictory statements about her experience: ‘It was difficult, in a lot of ways. But then I had great times too. Don’t get me wrong. Yeah. I’d never do it again though. In hindsight … No, look, it was good fun. But it was difficult … look it was good and it was challenging, and it was all sorts of things. It was hard in those days.’66 This seemingly inconsistent position is useful to observe; contradictions are often indicators of tension and unresolved concerns. Anna’s position as a press-machinist was never fully accepted in the patri-

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Challenges and creative resilience archal enclave of the Main pressroom. Yet, in reconstructing this story through memory, she was quick to emphasise positive experiences and did not wish to cast herself as a passive victim of discrimination. There was a tension between the results of progressive social policy and the existing social context; the latter was well known for its traditional gender divisions of labour. Some employees were acutely conscious of this inconsistency and they adopted a range of attitudes in relation to female apprentices. In a close reading of the following exchange between two male compositors and the author, a discrepancy between language and practice is discernible. Both men are somewhat reflective about the experiences that female apprentices endured. Compositors Barry Skewes and Neil Lewis spoke frankly with me about their attitudes to female apprentices and how they were treated and they offer subtly different positions. Neil was more open to acknowledging value changes over time, while Barry put the responsibility back on the women to be able to cope: Neil: You know, you’d probably call it ‘sexual harassment’ now. Barry: There was probably a couple of timid ones there, that were shy and I think it would offend them … But some of them were quite strong personalities, and they’d just cope with it and move on. Neil: But these days it’s not the done thing, for any sexism. Oh, some, some didn’t mind it. Others sort of got upset and they soon learned, like, ‘Oh, I’ll leave that one alone’ … because it was a trade it wasn’t a normal thing that a lot of women thought of doing, and the girls that started there, and the ones that worked there, they were mentally probably a lot stronger … Barry: They’d know what to expect. Neil: … They were quite even though they were feminine, they still had a tough side to ’em, to cope with the … I wouldn’t say harassment, but the way males were treating women apprentices back then. It was quite an interesting time, over those spread of years, the number of women getting into trade did increase. I think the fact that it went from a heavy, dirty industry to a cleaner environment had a lot to do with it as well.67

This passage provides insight into these workers’ awareness of what the women were experiencing, while at the same time acknowledging that they themselves might have contributed to that unequal work situation. Neil made the more traditional assumption that because composition became ‘cleaner’ and ‘lighter’ with new technologies, it was therefore more appropriate for women.68 This duality between an awareness of sexism and its continuation regardless is regularly present in gender discussions from this period and this is indicative of just how deeply entrenched particular practices and beliefs can be. The following section will look in more detail at how one particular issue – heavy lifting – was structured in a similarly contradictory manner; that is, how the workplace discourse surrounding heavy lifting had little to do with actual physical work in practice.

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Weighty matters The simple movement of objects in a space can be a deeply political matter. It can become bound up with the identities of men and women and with the collective work culture of an organisation. A bureaucratic and legal emphasis on heavy work produced a contentious politics of lifting at the Gov. This focus on lifting was often a discussion had by men about women. At the same time as women were entering non-traditional printing trades, the industry was increasingly shifting to offset-lithography, as we have seen in Chapter 4. The move from letterpress to lithography had the unrealised potential to unseat the dominant gendering of presses as ‘men’s machines’. Again as we have seen in Chapter 4, lithography, unlike letterpress, did not involve lifting a heavy letterpress forme (frame holding metal type), thereby negating the long-standing argument that women were not strong enough for the work. For centuries, letterpresses and formes retained a traditional design: a large cast-iron chase (frame) that held multiple pages of tied-up metal type. In the letterpress process, press-machinists’ tasks included lifting a weighty prepared chase and sliding it onto the press. Often there were two chases, of four pages each, that sat side-by-side on a letterpress flatbed. The weighty nature of letterpress labour was seen to exclude certain groups of people, on the apparent grounds of safety and presumed physical incapacity.69 In addition, the work was perceived as dirty and dangerous – two other reasons regularly given for why printing was ‘inappropriate’ for women. It is true that letterpress formes were extremely heavy and often required two people (usually a printer and an offsider) to move. Arguably, however, the weightiness of presswork was not an unavoidable phenomenon. The design of the forme evolved over a specific set of cultural and technological circumstances, which precluded people with smaller or weaker bodies from being involved in the process. Hoists and trolleys, for example, could have been used more extensively.70 But the avoidance of lifting tools enabled indentured letterpress-machinists to maintain their exclusive claim to the work. In contrast to letterpress, the plates for offset-lithography were often thin lightweight sheets of aluminium. In theory, this technology meant printers could no longer claim that presswork was beyond women’s assumed physical capacity and press-machining as a trade could open up. But this did not occur. Notwithstanding significant technological changes, the trade remained a ‘man’s job’.71 The pressroom stayed the preserve of men and the few women who entered the press-machining trade in the 1970s and 1980s faced considerable challenges.72 This dynamic emerged through deeply entrenched prejudices about the appropriateness of ‘men’s work’ for women, which produced ideological barriers to women entering the press-machining trade, even though they were entitled to

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Challenges and creative resilience do so. Meanwhile, heavy lifting was not actually the primary challenge facing female apprentices. This is where embodied workplace practice and mainstream workplace discourse were at odds. While the matter of physical strength became something of a moot point with the increasing proliferation of offset-lithography, this did not overcome the dominant gender regime of press-machining. Even proponents of EEO tended to leave the press-machining trade to the men, and women were directed towards more ‘suitable’ trades, such as composing and bookbinding.73 As noted in Chapter 5, there was an assumption that women had an ‘affinity’ for typesetting, partly because it involved the feminised act of typing, whereas the mechanical work of the press-machinist was seen as anathema to women’s presumed ‘natural’ tendencies. Sexist and prejudiced attitudes (and their consequences) existed at managerial levels as well as on the shop floor. Such attitudes were often unconsciously held, even by employers using the language of anti-discrimination and EEO.74 The issue of heavy lifting was at the forefront of people’s objections to the presence of female apprentices at the Gov. In 1981 the EEO coordinator, Helen Ferguson, reported that there was a hostile reaction to the employment of women as apprentices. The key issues ‘related to the fact that “girls cannot lift the same weights as boys”, and “it is a waste of time employing girls as apprentices as they only marry and leave the trade”’.75 The following quotes were taken from an anonymous EEO survey of employees at the Gov that same year. The survey results revealed a considerable number of statements related to female apprentices and heavy lifting. Here are a few examples: We receive the same money, but males have to do the heavy lifting. (No gender specified)   Girl apprentices get far too much advantage over male apprentices … The male gets stereotyped into doing the heavy work, whereas the female gets lighter and more interesting work. (Male)   Females ask for equality, yet they are not allowed to lift weights as heavy as a man and get all the easy jobs. (Male)   Some males think we aren’t strong. (Female)   Unfortunately, I am still treated as one of the fairer sex. When I came into this trade we were told the physical work is hard, but still the men seem to put us down. They say we are weak and just can’t do the job. (Female)76

These quotes suggest that the generalised workplace discourse focused on ‘heavy lifting’ as one of the reasons for exclusion and inequity, rather than taking into account prejudice and the changing nature of the labour process. Another factor must be taken into consideration; in NSW in the 1980s, weight-lifting provisions limited the mass that women and minors were legally permitted to lift. During this period, the maximum weight that

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women could lift was determined by the NSW Factories, Shops and Industries Act 1962 (No. 43). Women working in factories were limited to lifting 16 kg, while there was no restriction for adult men. Until 1991, females over sixteen but under eighteen (i.e., many apprentices) were limited to lifting 11.5 kg, while males over sixteen and under eighteen could lift no more than 18 kg. The law was intended to protect workers from injury, an important part of reforming the health and safety conditions of industrial workplaces, which had for so long been dangerous and under-regulated.77 Paradoxically, such weight-lifting limits essentially confirmed and gave authority to traditional presumptions about the right of men to dominate the printing trade.78 This issue of ‘heavy’ and ‘light’ work was a theme in the manufacturing industry as a whole and it shaped perceptions about appropriate work along gendered lines. Connell has described a scenario in a NSW public sector worksite where lifting equipment was installed, making it possible for women to undertake the work without any problems. However, Connell explains, ‘the lifting machine was chosen and mainly operated by a man’, thus illustrating that a technological change in the labour process did not succeed in transforming the traditional division of labour even though it could have.79 In many industries – such as clothing and textiles – women lifted weights above the legal limit, when it suited management.80 Furthermore – and this is a key distinction – lifting was not specifically a ‘women’s issue’. In the matter of lifting, what was at stake was masculinity, as sociologists Ann Game and Rosemary Pringle explain: ‘We were told that this is “light work that men won’t do”. A very telling statement which implies that the distinction has less to do with the physical capabilities of women than with men’s sense of what kind of work is appropriate for them.’81 Some of the men I interviewed spoke of situations where they did not like to watch women lifting and went to great lengths to intervene and help out.82 It is arguable, however, that the discomfort the men felt was not necessarily a concern for the women’s welfare, but a sense of uneasy disturbance to their own sense of masculinity and to the traditional ‘way things should be’. In 1978 the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board called for the removal of gender-specific weight-lifting provisions, on the grounds that they had the effect of discriminating against people on the basis of sex, regardless of the actual nature of work. Section 36 of the Factories, Shops and Industries Act was repealed in 1991, resulting in a new regulation that had no gender-based restrictions.83

The realities of embodied practice in press-machining In contrast to this workplace concern about heavy lifting, my interview with Anna Lyons indicated that she did not see lifting as the primary issue to be overcome. For Anna, the main problems were harassment, insults

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Challenges and creative resilience and inappropriate attention. Compositors and press-machinists (gender notwithstanding) both experienced the challenge of lifting heavy letterpress formes, but in practice, tradespeople found ways to adapt. Anna explained how in practical terms, lifting was a challenge that could be shared: Now, well, the letterpress formes, they are heavier. That’s a heavier type of printing. Definitely! But there’s ways around that too. I never had much of a problem. I used to do the milk-run with Dad, so I was already fairly strong and fit anyway. I was in my early twenties and I considered myself fairly strong in my arms. I found that whenever we did a big forme from the letterpress, I just grabbed the offsider and said, ‘Give us a hand with this’ and he’d grab the other end … And of course then you’ve gotta place it [the forme] on the bed and I found that when you’re using a special key thing to tighten it up all around the place, that can get a little bit physical. But you’re leaning down into it, not going up above your shoulder. I found anything up above your shoulder quite hard, but when you’re leaning down, you’re just leaning onto the machine. Then usually your offsider is around on the other side, he’s actually helping, even though they’re not supposed to, but they do. You’d be there for hours, getting it all set up. You end up having a chat on either side of the flatbed together, while you’re doing your work. So it wasn’t actually that bad, but it was definitely heavier and the machines were old style.84

While Anna acknowledged that letterpress was ‘heavier’ than lithography, the heftiness of the work was something that could be easily managed because it was shared. Having an offsider also made the work more social. Although lifting limitations were a significant factor in rationalising sexist and unequal opportunity, the workplace focus on lifting failed to account for the variety of physical movements performed by printers. Anna described how she overcame any ‘bodily disadvantage’ by working out different physical techniques for engaging with presses: The Roland [litho press] was quite difficult. You’re tightening up rows of bolts above your shoulder. Sometimes you’d kill it, you’d feel physically strong. Other days you’re not 100 per cent. I’d be up on my tip-toes, that’s how big it is. You’re reaching up, doing a line of bolts. I worked out a way of getting around it. I ended up crawling up on half the inkwell. I did find it difficult and I’m sure the guys did too, because they’re doing the same, but they do have a bit more upper strength. But I ended up crawling half way up the bottom ink well, so I was kind of crouching, so I could reach better. You work out ways.85

Crucially, the physicality of press-operation was not restricted to lifting. It required a wide variety of physical actions, instances of ‘working out ways’: crouching, crawling, climbing, pushing, pulling, tightening, observing, standing and waiting. A large three-dimensional press required a full bodily interaction with the machine; mere shoulder muscles and biceps paled in importance compared to a complete embodied understanding of the machine and of human capacity.

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Bookbinder Kim Cooper also explained her ways of adapting to the physical challenges of her job. This was another form of physically ‘working out ways’ with the objects around you: When they’d put you on something like guillotine operating, where you’d carry a full ream of paper … you’re talking about that size! So to carry that and put it into the guillotine, cut it and put it all up … now I couldn’t do a full ream at one time. Some of the guys, like, most guys, they could do a full ream at a time, but I could only do half a ream at a time. But you worked twice as fast – so you still got it done as quick, if not quicker, at the end of the day. You always had to be up there, never behind in your work.86

Kim’s commitment to excellence reminds us that one of the ways that women in non-traditional trades coped was to focus on the quality of their work, on getting it ‘just right’. The only way to gain proficiency at this work was prolonged exposure to it, and some printers were anxious to spend more time on a variety of machines, so that they didn’t lose the ‘knack’ – that manual, pre-reflective, embodied knowledge of using a machine. Anna explained that sometimes she was left on an ‘easier’ machine (such as a small-offset machine) for long periods. Her concern was not so much that she had been given easier work, but, she said, ‘if you don’t operate certain machines for a little while, you just lose it a bit’.87 Industrial lifting limits for women were not only discriminatory, they also represented something of a misinterpretation of the physical nature of work in the pressroom. The use of large presses involved a whole gamut of physical movements and embodied ‘ways of knowing’. Despite the rhetoric of the day – as evidenced in archival materials, interviews and EEO reports – the matter was never as simple as ‘how much can you lift?’ Even with lithographic presses the associative power of letterpress weighed heavy in the hearts and minds of printers. Although the demarcation distinctions that had divided letterpress and lithographic printers dissolved by the mid-1980s, for some the gendered politics of printing remained highly compartmentalised and steeped in tradition. Right at the moment that letterpress technology was losing its dominance in the printing industry, male press-machinists increasingly valorised muscular masculinity and physical strength.88 They did this in defensiveness, as they saw those particular qualities waning in relevance. The emphasis on the heavy nature of press-operation was one way in which printers protected the last printing trade to remain a male preserve. Notwithstanding the lightness of lithographic plates, there was nothing easy about female printers’ experiences during this transitional period. The following section engages with a very different type of female worker at the Gov; a senior manager appointed in the mid-1980s. Despite the differences in the experiences of Gita, Anna and Pamela, what they had in common was the creative and adaptive engagement with technologies and/or space.

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A senior manager’s experience Traditionally the process for becoming a senior manager at the Gov had been an incremental one. Apprentices who served their full indenture became tradesmen; a few tradesmen advanced to leading hands, some of those leading hands advanced to foremen and overseers. Only a few were eventually appointed to the ‘God Floor’, the fifth-floor management area. In the 1970s this traditional promotional path was replaced by a more strategic approach under Don West. After his appointment as NSW Government Printer in 1973, he began a slow restructuring of the senior executive staff (figure 40). In the mid-1980s, under pressure to make the Gov more profitable, he created a marketing division, advertised for a chief of division – marketing, and in 1986, Pamela Pearce got the job, the first woman to be appointed as a senior executive at the Gov. The appointment of women to senior management roles is one of the most obvious ways that an organisation can publicly demonstrate its achievement of EEO targets. This approach, however, can have the effect of leaving those appointed open to the charge that they were selected not on merit, but only as a token gesture.89 It can open up resentment and distrust between colleagues, sentiments that can be reflected and reproduced both within the physical workplace and in subtle workplace practices. In NSW during the 1980s, the number of women appointed at senior public service levels improved gradually. The public service, however, increasingly looked to the private sector for models of public administration, introducing performance targets, audits, profit measures, marketing and corporate communication methods.90 The resulting increase in ‘corporate management’ methods may have unintentionally skewed appointments towards men, as technocratic and corporate governance methods can favour more masculine styles of management. This suggests that the women who succeeded during this period often did so not through so-called soft, collective and consultative administration practices, but as tough, self-directed individuals. Unlike the tradesmen interviewed in this research project, Pamela Pearce did not have a community or readymade collective identity with which to ally herself. In order to survive and flourish, she had carefully cultivated and controlled her career path as a manager and businesswoman. Prior to her arrival at the Gov, Pamela’s background was in marketing in the museum sector and she had a strategic interest in joining the Gov because it offered her experience in handling industrial relations in a highly unionised work environment. While Pamela acknowledged that she had support from some of her own staff, in general her introduction to the Gov as an executive manager had its difficulties:

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40

I think it was an absolute total shock to have somebody who wasn’t from a printing background, but I think [what was] more of a concern to people … was that I was a woman. I think it was a very misogynistic environment … the culture was, I was tolerated. That’s not totally true. My own people, my own team … were very, very supportive of the changes and I couldn’t have asked for more … But the culture was totally, dominantly male.91

In explaining how her seniority sometimes went unrecognised, Pamela describes a simple matter involving office space: Alan Fisher was in an office and then Stuart [Lincolne] had an office and then someone else there had a big office, so you had a [government] printer, the two chiefs and the other guy there. Don West wouldn’t allow me to move into that office, for a long time. I actually pushed it because I understood at the time that it was really critical. So I was stuck in this little side office, even though I was chief of division.92

Pamela recognised that the spatial placement of offices in this hierarchical organisation was not merely a practical matter, it was deeply symbolic, a visual display of authority that was necessary to ensure respect from managers and employees. As with the fiddly insignia that appeared on government publications, Pamela understood that the appearance of authority and power mattered and she fought to have her position recognised spatially.

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Challenges and creative resilience The very creation of a marketing division pointed to a transition in the Gov’s emphasis away from a government service, towards a government agency that (attempted to) produce goods efficiently and rationally, for profit. To achieve this, the Gov’s public image was key and Pamela recognised the significance of a visual language of self-promotion and corporate identity. This new focus on aesthetics was channelled into interior office and workfloor design, as well as into graphic design. Pamela believed that if this institution was to present itself as an efficient, competitive, profitmaking enterprise, it had to look more like a company. Pamela orchestrated the renewal of the Gov’s front entrance, shop and client liaison sections. The front entrance was renovated to include large

41

The new Gov front door, 1986.

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glass doors, fashionable (at the time) glass bricks and a wall-sized mural displaying a historical photograph (figure 41). Here, Pamela oriented the Gov to clients and consumers. Her strategies were directed outwards, rather than inwards to internal politics. She undertook the same strategies in renovating the Gov’s small bookshop. In what must have seemed an extravagance to more traditional printing managers, Pamela arranged for a refit of the shop, hiring an architect to transform the shop’s interior, making it ‘bright, airy, and much larger’.93 The 1985–86 Annual Report boasted that shop sales were immediately boosted by 30 per cent.94 Another strategy employed by Pamela was to make greater use of the human resources already available at the Gov; what she saw as the undervalued design skills that many of the staff possessed. Well, I was a marketer … and also you’re in an environment where you can print anything … I was also trying to change the culture a bit. So we did a special competition for a modest prize: ‘How are your design skills?’ We had designers in the place. The other reason I would have done that – knowing the way I work – is that it is also a culture-breaker … That worked quite well. There are many ways of getting around cultural challenges, you know.95

Pamela arranged for graphic design competitions to redesign seemingly mundane government documents, such as annual reports and the list of recently issued legislation. Such competitions were open to all staff, regardless of their trade or skill level. It is easy to see how Pamela’s decisions here were strategic; she consciously set out to transform the traditional culture and practices at the Gov. Changing those practices involved design transformations and recognising the creative and enterprising skills that many of the staff possessed. Being what Pamela calls a ‘culture-breaker’ took its toll and she chose to leave the Gov after two-and-a-half years. While these subtle workplace design changes might seem minor contributions to industrial history, what they represent is the significant and symbolic role of material culture and space in the changing value system of an organisation. Pamela’s design changes visually and physically performed the shift from a collective craft institution towards a client-focused profitable enterprise. The Gov never quite achieved the latter, being closed down before the transformation could fully take place. The three main examples given in this chapter are indeed divergent. Gita, Anna and Pamela came from dramatically different social, economic and educational contexts. They did, however − and continue to − have something in common. Their active transformation of space – and/or their adaptive physical negotiation of machinery – demonstrates how they strategically made a place for themselves in a male-dominated industrial environment. Factory spaces are not static and bound by maps and diagrams; they are social and are continually contested. Subtle ‘spatial practices of resistance’ can be uncovered through oral histories and archival

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Challenges and creative resilience photographs, allowing us to see the social and gendered complexity that may be negotiated through the simple placement of a few plants or the renovation of a public building’s foyer. Likewise, forming a clearer understanding of tradeswomen’s experience in the 1970s and 1980s involved developing some understanding of the technologies of letterpress and lithography – especially the awareness that formes are heavy and plates are light – and an open mind towards women’s adaptive bodily capacities in industrial contexts. Here, once again, is a history where gender, physical and material worlds and the trappings of prejudice and tradition are tangled together in a story of labour and technological change. The combination of these stories also reminds us of the broader societal and political transition bubbling away in the late twentieth century: the move away from collective, community activity towards more individually driven and profit-focused strategies in the 1980s and beyond.

Notes 1 I must acknowledge that this book – focusing as it does on technology, design and gender – has not attended in detail to the experiences of minorities other than women, such as migrants, people with disabilities and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. Each of these groups were indeed represented at the Gov and broadly in the printing industry. By the 1980s an emerging progressive interest in antidiscrimination and EEO had, to a small extent, brought their concerns out into the open. Even today, however, we are a long way from providing minority groups a thoroughly equal footing in the workplace. Further information: H. Ferguson, Report on the Equal Employment Opportunity Project at the NSW Government Printing Office (Sydney: NSW Government Printing Office, 1981). 2 A. Baron, ‘Masculinity, the embodied male worker, and the historian’s gaze’, International Labor and Working-Class History 69 (2006), 143–60. 3 R. W. Connell, ‘Glass ceilings or gendered institutions? Mapping the gender regimes of public sector worksites’, Public Administration Review (2006), 841. 4 A. Game and R. Pringle, Gender at Work (Sydney, London and Boston, MA: Allen & Unwin, 1983), pp. 28–31. 5 MATRIX (J. B., F. Bradshaw, J. Darke, B. Foo, et. al.), Making space: Women and the Man-made Environment (Sydney and London: Pluto, 1984). 6 H. Younie, ‘Departmental spokeswoman’, Staff News (Sydney: NSW Government Printing Office, 1979), p. 5. 7 R. Reed, ‘Anti-discrimination language and discriminatory outcomes: employers’ discourse on women in printing and allied trades’, Labour and Industry 6:1 (1994), 89–105. 8 R. Frances, The Politics of Work: Gender and Labour in Victoria 1880–1939 (Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 9 C. Cockburn, Brothers: Male Dominance and Technological Change (London: Pluto, 1983), p. 151. 10 G. Patmore, Australian Labour History (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1991), p. 167. 11 J. Hagan, ‘An incident at The Dawn’, Labour History 8 (1965), 19. 12 Frances, The Politics of Work, p. 67. 13 Hagan, ‘An incident’, pp. 19–21.

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14 Cockburn, Brothers, p. 153. 15 Frances, The Politics of Work, p. 60. 16 J. Hagan, Printers and Politics: A History of Australian Printing Unions 1850–1950 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1966), p. 74. 17 P. J. Hilden, ‘Women and the labour movement in France, 1869–1914’, The Historical Journal 29:4 (1986), 829–30. 18 Louisa Lawson used the pen-name Dora Falconer. 19 Hagan, ‘An incident’, p. 21. 1 pound is 20 shillings, so the female typesetters’ wage was 41 per cent of the men’s in this instance. 20 Ibid. 21 Hagan, Printers and Politics, pp. 202–3. 22 Ibid., p. 203. 23 P. Spearritt, ‘Women in Sydney factories c. 1920–50’, in A. Curthoys, S. Eade and Spearritt (eds), Women at Work (Canberra: Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, 1975), pp. 31–2. 24 Employers paid illegal low wages to other disadvantaged populations, for example Aboriginal people, migrants and children. 25 P. Spearritt, ‘Women in Sydney factories’, pp. 31–3. 26 Frances, The Politics of Work, p. 66. 27 R. Frances, L. Kealey and J. Sangster, ‘Women and wage labour in Australia and Canada, 1880–1980’, Labour History 71 (1996), 54–89. 28 R. Frances, ‘Marginal matters: gender, skill, unions and the Commonwealth Arbitration Court – a case study of the Australian printing industry 1925–1937’, Labour History 61 (1991), 18–9; Hagan, Printers and Politics, p. 204. 29 Frances, The Politics of Work, pp. 59–61. 30 Ibid., p. 60. 31 Frances, The Politics of Work, p. 170. 32 Ibid., p. 171. 33 J. Hagan, ‘Craft power’, Labour History 24 (1973), 162. 34 P. Spearritt, ‘Women in Sydney factories’, p. 45. 35 Victor Gunther, interview with author, 15 August 2012. 36 Alan Leishman, interview with author, 28 October 2011. 37 ‘Vale Gita Hromadka’ (1985), The Graphic, NSW Government Printing Office Staff Journal, December, p. 12; ‘Staff library’ (1977) Staff News, NSW Government Printing Office Staff Journal, June, p. 2. 38 P. Parsons (1979), ‘A hanging garden in the shower room’, Staff News, NSW Government Printing Office, Sydney, August, p. 5. 39 S. Meyer, ‘Work, play, and power: masculine culture on the automotive shop floor, 1930–1960’, in R. Horowitz (ed.), Boys and their Toys? Masculinity, Technology and Class in America (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), p. 19. 40 Anna Lyons, interview with author, 28 February 2012. 41 Ibid. 42 Ray Utick, interview with author, 13 November 2012. 43 Bob Law, interview with author, 21 February 2012. 44 L. Taksa, ‘The material culture of an industrial artifact: Interpreting control, defiance, and the everyday’, Historical Archaeology 39:3 (2005), 8–27. 45 Ibid., pp. 8–9. 46 Ibid., p. 17. 47 Sandra Elisabeth Stringer, interview with author, 17 October 2012. 48 Ibid. 49 The relevant state and federal legislation is the Anti-Discrimination Act 1977 (NSW); the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Commonwealth); the Affirmative Action (Equal

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Challenges and creative resilience Employment Opportunity for Women) Act 1986 (Commonwealth); the Equal Employment Opportunity (Commonwealth Authorities) Act 1987 (Commonwealth). 50 Reed, ‘Anti-discrimination language’, p. 90; P. Wilenski, Directions for Change: Review of New South Wales Government Administration – Interim Report (Sydney: NSW Government, 1977), p. 179. 5 1 H. Ferguson, Report on the Equal Employment Opportunity Project at the NSW Government Printing Office (Sydney: NSW Government Printing Office, 1981), p. 2. 52 Until 1966, women working in the Australian Public Service were required to resign from permanent positions when they married. 53 Part 9A of the NSW Anti-Discrimination Act requires all public sector agencies to implement EEO programs. 54 NSWSR, GPO General Correspondence Files 18/2095, ‘Equal Employment Opportunity Policy’, internal document, 1987. 5 5 Wilenski, Directions for Change, p. 180. 56 Connell, ‘Glass ceilings?’, pp. 837–49. 5 7 Wilenski, Directions for Change, pp. 180–1. 58 Ferguson, Report on Equal Employment Opportunity, p. 9. 59 ‘More girls finding their way into a man’s world’, Sydney Morning Herald (14 October 1974), p. 12. 60 M. Braundy, Men & Women and Tools: Bridging the Divide (Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2011); C. Cockburn, ‘Caught in the wheels: the high cost of being a female cog in the male machinery of engineering’, Marxism Today 27 (1983), 16–20; D. Deacon, ‘The employment of women in the Commonwealth Public Service: the creation and reproduction of the dual labour market’, in M. Simms (ed.), Australian Women and the Political System (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1984), pp. 132–50; Game and Pringle, Gender at Work; S. L. Hacker, Doing it the Hard Way: Investigations of Gender and Technology (Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1990); M. Johnston, Jobs for the Girls (Melbourne: William Heinemann, 1989); R. Reed and J. Mander-Jones, Women in Printing: Employers’ Attitudes to Women in Trades (Canberra: Women’s Bureau, Australian Federal Department of Employment, Education and Training, 1993). 61 NSW Government Printing Office, Annual Report 1986–87 (Sydney: NSW Government), p. 16. 62 Reed, ‘Anti-discrimination language’, p. 91. 63 Ibid. 64 Anna Lyons, interview with author, 28 February 2012. ‘Cop it’ is slang for suffering punishment. This participant sometimes spoke of herself as the only female pressmachinist, although this was not strictly the case, as there were a small number of other female apprentice press-machinists at the Gov (at times a maximum of three). There may have been many times, however, when she was the only female tradeswoman in a particular section or work area. 65 Anna Lyons, interview with author, 28 February 2012. 66 Ibid. 67 Barry Skewes and Neil Lewis, interview with author, 17 January 2012. 68 Game and Pringle, Gender at Work, pp. 28–35. 69 C. Cockburn, ‘The material of male power’, in D. MacKenzie and J. Wajcman (eds), The Social Shaping of Technology, second edn (Maidenhead and New York: Open University Press, 1999), p. 189, originally published in Feminist Review, 9 (1981), 41–58; Reed and Mander-Jones, Women in Printing, p. 29. 70 Cockburn, ‘The material of male power’, p. 198. 71 Reed, ‘Anti-discrimination language’, p. 98. 72 Reed and Mander-Jones, Women in Printing.

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3 Ibid., p. 13. 7 74 Ibid., p. 19. 75 H. Ferguson, Report on Equal Employment Opportunity, p. 51. 76 Ibid. 77 Thank you to Professor Judy Wajcman for this observation, April 2012. 78 Game and Pringle, Gender at Work, p. 30. 79 Connell, ‘Glass ceilings or gendered institutions?’, p. 841. 80 Game and Pringle, Gender at Work, p. 29. 81 Ibid., p. 30. 82 Geoff Hawes, interview with author, 16 February 2012. 83 With grateful thanks to Chris Ronalds S.C. for her clarification on this matter. 84 Anna Lyons, interview with author, 28 February 2012. Italics indicate speaker’s emphasis. 85 Ibid. ‘Kill it’: colloquial for doing a really proper job. 86 Kim Cooper, interview with author, 29 November 2011. 87 Anna Lyons, interview with author, 28 February 2012. 88 Baron, ‘Masculinity, the embodied male worker’, p. 147. 89 Connell, ‘Glass ceilings or gendered institutions?’, p. 843. 90 L. Bryson, ‘Women and management in the public sector’, Australian Journal of Public Administration 46:3 (1987), 259–60. 91 Pamela Pearce, interview with author, 23 January 2012. 92 Ibid. Italics indicate speaker’s emphasis. 93 ‘New look sales centre’, The Graphic (Government Printing Office staff journal, 1986), p. 3. 94 NSW Government Printing Office, Annual Report 1985–86 (Sydney: NSW Government, 1986), p. 4. 95 Pamela Pearce, interview with author, 23 January 2012.

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7 Making things on the side: creativity at a time of institutional decline

Introduction Oh, there was a lot of foreign orders, there’s no two ways about it.1 – Sandra Elisabeth Stringer, Graphic Reproduction section

A ‘foreign order’ is an Australian colloquialism used in factory contexts. It refers to a practice whereby workers design and produce objects in their workplace, using factory materials and work time, without official authorisation. The objects tend to be made with skill and care. They are personal and form part of a moral economy of exchanged goods and favours. Foreign orders are sometimes gifted to friends, family or colleagues and rarely sold for profit. The activity is by no means limited to Australia and it has many names (as will be explored further on). Foreign orders are an underexplored but widespread activity that has received some attention in sociology and social history, most notably by Michel Anteby, whose studies of ‘side productions’ at a French aeronautic factory explore moral and organisational complexities.2 Although it is a historical phenomenon – social historians have traced it to pre-industrial practices of the commons3 – manifestations of the practice persist in the present, in a variety of labour contexts. Some of the most revealing instances of foreign orders occurred in deindustrialising contexts in the second half of the twentieth century, when craft skills were increasingly perceived as redundant. Despite the material and designed basis of foreign orders, the practice is yet to receive much attention in design history. Recent years, however, have seen design history move into an expanded field, well beyond appraisals of individual designers, design form and connoisseurship.4 Design historian D. J. Huppatz contends that design history should not be conceived as a ‘singular and separate’ entity; it is drawn from and is inherently related to other disciplines, including (but not limited to) labour and manufacturing histories, social history, colonial and trading histories and

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the history of technology.5 Understanding the practice of making foreign orders (and the broader social context surrounding that practice), therefore, is as much a concern of design history as the objects themselves. Recent design history has also featured an increased awareness of amateur practices, enthusiasm and ‘unsanctioned knowledge’.6 Design historians sometimes take it for granted that the objects under consideration were ‘officially’ designed and produced, in one way or another. But this may unwittingly leave out whole swathes of design and production discreetly taking place in factories. In some instances, foreign orders demonstrate the continuation of manual crafts in the face of automation and computerisation, while other examples attest to the social power of objects in relation to collective workplace identities and customs. Understanding these concealed and coded design practices – how and why foreign orders are made, how they are distributed, how such objects are valued – enriches our appreciation of the material culture of work and opens up awareness to the persistence of craft practices and collective customs, particularly at times of technological upheaval. From a design perspective, the Gov’s output might at first appear unremarkable; the documents it produced were tied to eighteenth and nineteenth-century governmental traditions. Standard forms, government reports, the electoral roll and school exercise books were some of the staple products made at the Gov. Such bureaucratic printed objects did not allow a great deal of opportunity for workers to exercise creativity. Yet the Gov’s employees possessed manual skill and visual acuity and they put those skills to use opportunistically. When the Overseer wasn’t looking (or had turned a ‘blind eye’), the Gov’s compositors, bookbinders and pressmachinists (among others) discreetly produced objects such as comics, posters, hot-metal trinkets and photographs. As explored in Chapter 5, the Gov finally introduced computerised phototypesetting in 1984. Initially there were problems in replicating the traditional appearance of government documents. For a period of time, annotations and convoluted legislation numbering could more easily be achieved in hot metal, before the typesetting software was programmed to handle such formatting complexity. As we have seen in previous chapters, this was a frustrating transition for skilled craftspeople. Letterpress operators learned to use faster lithographic presses, and Linotype operators relearned to type; a process that could be emasculating and demoralising. As this book’s Introduction describes, this period was also marked by significant political turmoil, with the rising popularity of economic rationalism in state and federal governance, with the attendant loss of tariff protections, the opening up of trade with Asia and the consequent decline of local manufacturing. Beset by negative predictions for the health of the state economy, the new state Liberal government under Nick Greiner (elected in 1988) planned to raise revenue from the sale of government

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Challenges and creative resilience assets: power stations, coal mines, railway infrastructure and printing offices.7 Workers were not oblivious to these transitions, and, rather than radicalising them, the disappearance of manufacturing often produced in them polarised and individualised responses; they sought merely to survive, not necessarily to overthrow the system.8 The making of foreign orders enabled subtle subversions, rather than loud political actions. While the term ‘foreign order’ was used in the Australian state of New South Wales, ‘foreigners’ was used in Western Australia and Queensland. In South Australia ‘foreignies’ and ‘homers’ were recorded.9 In the USA the terms include ‘homers’ and ‘government jobs’, and in France the continued practice has various names, including perruques, bricoles, bousilles, pindilles and pinailles.10 In Britain the more familiar terms were ‘idling’ or ‘pilfering’ (although these terms also mean simply stealing). Foreign orders can be linked to the British workplace practice of ‘fiddling’ or ‘playing the fiddle’ (work limitation) and the customary taking of perquisites (‘perks’ or in-kind payments).11 While scholarly analysis of foreign orders is fairly limited in English-language publications,12 pilfering and ‘fiddling’ has attracted attention in the fields of social history and sociology, as will be outlined in the following section. The existence of foreign orders demonstrates how the realms of work, culture and materiality are densely intertwined. Folklore historian Graham Seal has argued that foreign orders are material evidence of the ‘hidden’ folklore of the workplace.13 As Seal points out, the production of foreign orders is not limited to industrial scenarios; they were (and are) a feature of office contexts.14 In other manufacturing contexts, such as metalwork and railways, recorded foreign orders include tools, toys, domestic objects, ‘billies’ for cooking lunch and gifts for departing colleagues.15 Such items usually had to be small enough to smuggle out of the factory, but workers also went to great lengths to remove concealed items in pieces. Some foreign orders required a number of workers to collaborate – often from different sections – while others were produced alone.16 Labour historians have charted the long-standing existence of playful workplace antics in twentieth-century shop-floor contexts.17 It is nearly impossible to draw a strict definitional line between pranks, foreign orders and shop-floor play; such practices blur and overlap. Twentieth-century industrial workplaces often featured a culture dominated by teasing, jousting, games, practical jokes and the initiation of apprentices. Certainly, working life at the Gov was marked by all of these characteristics and workplace pranks involved the careful creation of props, contraptions, visual tricks and physical tomfoolery. This playful culture emerged out of the myriad of clever and sometimes cruel ways in which workers designed and manipulated the materials around them, so as to play tricks on their supervisors, colleagues and apprentices. In this way, the culture of pranks was fundamentally material and embodied.

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As this chapter will discuss, the making of foreign orders became more overt and politicised over time at the Gov, as print-workers faced increasing employment insecurity. At a time when employment options for skilled tradespeople were disappearing, the crafting of foreign orders allowed for the maintenance and reinforcement of desirable occupational identities.18 Making ‘on the side’ enabled in print-workers a degree of agency and the ability to narrativise their own plight. This chapter will first outline the existing scholarship on foreign orders and perquisites, before examining unofficial creative activities at the Gov. Finally, we zoom in on a particular artefact: a satirical booklet made by a print-worker in the final days before the Gov’s closure. This was a foreign order with distinctly political overtones; it provides insights into the way in which craftworkers coped with their impending precariousness in the face of technological and political upheaval.

Existing studies: perquisites, la perruque and playing the fiddle French theorist Michel de Certeau celebrated the subversive yet ordinary nature of foreign orders in The Practice of Everyday Life. He used the term la perruque (‘the wig’), defining it as a subtle form of resistance, where ‘order is tricked by an art’.19 De Certeau described la perruque as a popular and rebellious tactic that could be deployed by any worker who wished to maintain resistance to a dominant capitalist order.20 He described la perruque as a form of free and creative diversion: ‘La perruque is the worker’s own work disguised as work for his employer. It differs from pilfering in that nothing of material value is stolen … The worker who indulges in la perruque actually diverts time (not goods, since he uses only scraps) from the factory for work that is free, creative and precisely not directed towards profit.’21 Although de Certeau’s definition is the most popular and well-known interpretation, it may be somewhat idealistic and prescriptive. Workers did, at times, use ‘new’ materials for foreign orders, not just scraps, and in rare instances foreign orders were sold for profit. Of the industrial worker who practices la perruque, de Certeau claimed: ‘He cunningly takes pleasure in finding a way to create gratuitous products whose sole purpose is to signify his own capabilities through his work, and to confirm his solidarity with other workers.’22 Here we can see that foreign orders are understood as a social practice, founded on interactions between workers and enhancing their collective identity. Although de Certeau noted that la perruque emerged when workers replicated tactics from a pre-industrial past, he was oblique in connecting la perruque to ‘peasant’ practices. As noted earlier, this has been explored in more detail in sociology and social history. Sociologist Jason Ditton examined the historical antecedents to the ‘invisible wage system’ of twentieth-century factories, which featured

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Challenges and creative resilience practices of pilferage and fiddling.23 Drawing on British social history, Ditton traced the practices of pilfering and in-kind payment back to English feudal customary rights and the commons. Seventeenth-century customary rights included the taking of perquisites and the gifting of ‘vails’.24 For example, the common of estover was the ‘right of common to take wood from the Lord’s lands and forests’ and the common of turbary was the ‘right to cut peat and turf for fuel’.25 Perquisites could be surplus food from the larder, scrapings, tailings, scraps, wastage and other favours offered by the ruling class to rural labourers and servants. Social historians such as E. P. Thompson and Peter Linebaugh (among others) have observed how, in eighteenth-century Britain, the loss of common rights (and their replacement with legal rights) led to an increasing state of legal ambiguity in relation to workers’ privileges.26 With the growth of industrialisation, and as rural lands were increasingly reclassified as ‘private’ by ruling elites, the customary taking of in-kind perquisites began to be redefined as theft.27 The eighteenth century thus witnessed a change whereby workers were increasingly paid in the form of monetary wages, and the perquisites to which they were accustomed were privatised. This frequently resulted in the reframing of labourers as thieves, part of a newly defined criminal underclass. Historian Adrian Randall has explored how the line between embezzlement and perquisites was arbitrary and ever-changing in England’s eighteenth-century manufacturing industry, where the act of collecting scrapings was seen by workers as ‘sanctified by custom’ in order to supplement their low wages.28 By the nineteenth century the practice was essentially criminalised, although the taking of perquisites continued nonetheless.29 As Ditton has observed, interpreting this historical background of perquisites and pilferage as a ‘lingering vestige of the annexation of customary rights by the ruling class’ allows us to better understand why such behaviours emerge, rather than falling back on assumptions that the working class is simply criminal and amoral.30 In relation to twentieth-century workplaces, sociologists have examined the prevalence of pilfering and fiddling in a variety of situations; such practices have sometimes been defined in judgemental terms such as ‘workplace deviance’.31 In 1970, Donald Horning examined pilfering at an American electronics plant. While the study now functions better as a primary resource, some use can be made of Horning’s observations about objects.32 Horning observed that things in the factory had a variety of ownership ideas associated with them. There was property that was owned by the company, personal property owned by the workers and property of ‘uncertain ownership’.33 This ambiguous final category was seen as fair game by the workers; pilfering these items was something about which workers need not be ashamed (even if they still went to efforts to conceal their bounty). Workers subscribed to a moral code where they

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felt they could knowingly break the law because they did not define their own actions as morally problematic.34 For analysts of design and material culture, the more interesting implication of Horning’s research relates to the ambiguous status of objects and materials in a factory, that is, how a space filled with things can have complex and contradictory notions of ownership, value and use, and how this can be bound up within a mutable moral code. The lingering presence of ambiguous objects can prompt workers to act in this way, particularly if they are bored, underpaid and dissatisfied with their work and conditions. Notwithstanding some workers’ collective belief in the moral acceptability of pilfering and foreign orders, it is often difficult to persuade people to talk about such practices, for fear of reprisals and concerns about breaking a code of silence. Anteby has explored why this practice remains elusive and marginal. He described how workers at an aeronautics plant created useful domestic objects (such as key chains and toys) and yet most were extremely reticent to discuss them. Retired workers tended to be more forthcoming, having less to fear in terms of reprisals.35 Anteby’s work focused on the complex moralities that develop within workplaces, for example, ‘authentic’ homer-making is contingent upon social codes that are not easily understood by outsiders. Significantly, Anteby observed how foreign orders fall outside traditional labour history and corporate history narratives, as homers and side productions are not ‘respectable’ forms of work practice, nor are they examples of strong, collective industrial action (since they operate only by ‘diverting flows’ and are therefore a form of adaptation in contexts featuring ‘already lost battles’).36 He reasoned that because foreign orders do not easily fit within existing historical frameworks – and because workers are often unwilling to talk about them – such practices are little known and sometimes misunderstood. Returning to the Gov, many participants were likewise reluctant to give details of practices that they knew to be technically illegal (albeit taking place at a factory that closed in 1989). There were concerns about reputation and solidarity. As with Anteby’s interviewees, some perhaps subscribed to the notion that foreign orders were something that you simply did not talk about with outsiders. Not all workers felt this way. Former Linotype operator Bob Law did not consider foreign orders to be off-limits, but told me how he encountered caginess when talking to his colleagues: ‘I went to a reunion for some of the old Gov employees and … asked around about … foreign orders and to my surprise, no one was forthcoming.’37 Only a few workers were extremely proud of their foreign orders and happy to be identified with them, as we shall see later in this chapter. Other than Anteby, a small number of labour historians and curators have engaged with this phenomenon, by examining the production of ‘foreigners’ in a Western Australian context. A broad-ranging history

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Challenges and creative resilience project on the Midland Government Railway Workshops in Western Australia, led by labour historians Patrick Bertola and Bobbie Oliver, resulted in the publication of The Workshops, a cultural and labour examination of the railway workshops.38 In it, the making of ‘foreigners’ was highlighted: it was a widespread practice at this workshop, despite being strictly against the rules. Foreigners included key-rings, tools, ashtrays, boxes, doorstoppers and even a car trailer. The objects were often made as gifts for weddings, retirements and birthdays.39 In a follow-up project, academic and curator Jennifer Harris produced an exhibition entitled ‘Foreigners: Secret Artefacts of Industrialism’, presenting a series of artefacts made by Midland Workshop workers.40 Like the Gov, the Midland workshops were government owned (and closed in 1994). Harris expressed concern that curatorial and analytic approaches often enthuse about working-class activities uniformly in terms of ‘resistance’.41 She argued that cultural studies’ tendency to describe so many everyday actions as forms of resistance ‘emphasises [resistance] to a degree which is unsustainable’.42 While a worker’s diversion of goods towards private gain is certainly an act of insubordination in the workplace, Harris explained that there are other motivations at play, above and beyond the workers’ (possible) desire to struggle against the relations of production. Other reasons for the production of foreign orders include the desire to improve one’s skill, the custom of making gifts, apprentice training, casual opportunism, instrumental purposes such as making tools and the alleviation of boredom.43 How, then, can we get past the obvious in discussing foreign orders? One way is to consider the specificities of each labour context and historical period. As sociologist Michael Burawoy observed, it is problematic to regard the industrial worker as merely ‘resigned to the inherent deprivation of working’.44 Rather, he argued, ‘workers go to great lengths to compensate for, or to minimise, the deprivations they experience’.45 The realities of work necessarily lead to ‘deprivations’ (such as boredom, tiredness and injury), yet this prompts workers to seek ‘relative satisfactions’.46 Such satisfactions can take the form of games and play. One question that has plagued labour sociologists such as Burawoy, however, is the degree to which these games are a challenge to the prevailing authority, or to which they constitute a passive capitulation, a mere diversion that conceals the reality of exploitation. In Burawoy’s analysis, when employers support and encourage the playing of games, it can assist them in obscuring the true relations of production. Conversely, management-sanctioned competitive games can cause the workers to become individualised, thus separating them from the collective practices and group cohesion of the unions.47 If, however, game-playing is the ‘spontaneous, autonomous, malevolent creation of workers’, then such practices can operate as forms of resistance to existing power structures.48 Foreign orders fit into the latter camp,

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precisely because the practice is spontaneous, worker-led and done in quiet solidarity with other workers. As mentioned in Chapter 4, historian Paul Thompson offered explanations for the way in which twentieth-century car-manufacturing workers responded to automation at a factory in Coventry, England. One method for coping with the degradation of the labour process was to ‘accept it, but to put one’s heart elsewhere’.49 While his example is quite specific, Thompson’s notion of ‘putting one’s heart elsewhere’ can be interpreted in a slightly different way. It offers a speculative theorisation of how and why the Gov’s employees generated creative activity ‘on the side’ and it helps to explain the prevalence of workplace play, pranks and irreverent attitudes. Unofficial creative production was another way of ‘putting one’s heart elsewhere’. The following section engages with what this might look like in practice and also considers the issue of boredom and its material results at the Gov.

Unauthorised creative production at the Gov Barry: Foreign orders [all laugh] Neil: Yeah, a lot of that went on. A lot of the fancier sort. Barry: Cost ya two beers!50

The first time I encountered the term ‘foreign order’ was during the fourth interview for the NSW Government Printing Office Oral History Project. Graeme Murray, a former lithographic dot-etcher, explained: ‘A foreign order is a pretty standard practice … It’d be done unofficially, on a sort of tit-for-tat basis. You’d do something for them, they’d … say, “Do you want anything done?”’51 Graeme explained the practice in relation to a social contract. While individuals produced foreign orders for themselves, the practice was very often a collaborative one; it was part of a social agreement and certain supervisors would quietly tolerate the practice, or themselves ask for items to be made. Workers might leave their work area to seek out another employee whom they trusted to finish a job. In this way, the practice of foreign orders – as with practical jokes and pranks – was fundamentally a social activity and part of a collective culture. We tend not to think of government employees as creative people, but many at the Gov were and they found themselves working in a bureaucratic labour system that did not always value their abilities, creative intelligence and interests. Print-workers sometimes told me that they chose to undertake apprenticeships in the printing industry because it was the closest thing they could find to working in art or design. Most workers had undertaken apprenticeships from the age of sixteen, and so it was at the Gov that they received the majority of their technical and design education. For example, compositors undertook a five- to six-year apprenticeship involving in-depth learning in typography, metallurgy, design

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Challenges and creative resilience fundamentals, proof-reading, hand-and-machine compositing and imposition. Those in Graphic Reproduction were trained in a broad variety of analogue and digital technologies, from camera operation to acid etching and engraving, technical drawing, small offset and desktop publishing, among other skills. For workers who were design literate, being tasked with typesetting or printing government publications (such as annual reports and volumes of regulations) could be a tedious affair. The typographical choices were minimal, the print was usually black on white, the page layout was text heavy and the rules for document layout were strict and formulaic, leaving little space to exercise independent design decisions. Workers tended to see only their stage of the production process; the copy was prepared by government and submitted for copy processing, the compositors set the type and pages, the proof-readers checked for errors, the pressmachinists produced the prints, the bookbinders guillotined and bound the volumes and the despatch handled the delivery. The pace of work was largely dictated by parliamentary sitting times, which resulted in sporadic patterns of rush and calm. With materials and time at their disposal, the collective culture at the Gov silently endorsed the creation of extra printed products on the side. As mentioned, foreign orders at the Gov took many forms; they were objects and printed publications made for private use, often for friends, family or private clubs. Former compositor Geoff Hawes explained: ‘Foreign orders, they were a daily occurrence at the Gov. Wedding invitations, business cards, invoice books and so on.’52 Such items were not usually made for profit, although producing them at work meant that one did not have to purchase external printing services. Cartoons and comics – produced by and distributed to staff – were quite common, as were graphic posters. Other unofficial objects had more practical purposes in the workplace, such as handmade tools and wire cages to make machinery safer. Some foreign orders were tacitly endorsed by overseers, particularly if they were used to improve apprentice skills, or if managers also wanted something printed on the side. Nonetheless, the penalties for getting caught could be steep and managers did not officially condone such practices. Former Monotype operator Lindsay Somerville recollected that the making of foreign orders was done with care and, moreover, was motivated by care: We were doing Christmas cards for members of parliament. The cards were very classy compared with the normal ones … So [we] got some for ourselves with our parents’ names printed regally. I set the names on the Ludlow in Coronet … others printed them on the letterpress Heidelberg platen. Amazing how there were no overs when the job was completed! … We took great care not to damage any when doing the makeready for the press, so we could get as many cards as possible for all of us.53

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This indicates that sometimes workers had fairly benign intentions and foreign orders could be done in such a way that they did not overuse materials intended for official jobs. In this case, the making of foreign orders did not even involve a separate labour process; both official and unofficial production took place in the same act. The most controversial foreign order incident at the Gov involved the production (and attempted selling on) of fishing sinkers made from the lead alloy used in hot-metal typesetting. This metal was, at the time, quite expensive. While no participants spoke in detail to me about this particular story, one former employee acknowledged: ‘There were some guys that were making sinkers for fishing from the metal we used to make our type from. It was so big … the police were called in.’54 Not all workers supported the making of foreign orders. In interviews, some complained that foreign orders contributed to an inefficient work environment and added fuel to external claims that the Gov was a ‘waste of taxpayers’ money’. Former compositor and designer George Woods said: ‘Unfortunately I’d find that the guys would’ve been doing a foreign order on equipment that was worth millions of dollars. It’s a shame … some people wouldn’t want to admit that.’55 Likewise, former compositor John Lee saw it this way: ‘They used to help themselves to anything they wanted. You know, that was considered part of the job. Foreign orders and jobs for sporting clubs or whatever, were considered a necessity.’56 He later added: ‘You said gilding the lily? With the foreign orders that went on there, they were gilding quite a bit more than the lily and with gold leaf, that was even expensive back then.’57 We can identify a number of different motivations for practising foreign orders. This includes resistance, but foreign orders also had the social purpose of encouraging collective solidarity and loyalty (for those workers who were party to the practice; evidently not all were). Foreign orders were sometimes generated for apprentice training, or simply for the pleasure of making things using manual skills. They were also produced for practical needs on the shop floor and were part of the ongoing reproduction of workplace folk culture. Boredom was another significant motivation for some of the Gov’s employees. Interview testimony suggests that some workers did not feel that their skills and capacities were valued by management, while others sensed that the work was beginning to ‘dry up’, as more jobs were contracted to the private sector in the 1980s. The work-ticket system was also a factor here. This was a common Taylorist factory time-management method that allocated amounts of time for particular tasks. At the Gov, however, the unions ensured that the time allowances were so reasonable, sometimes to the point of being unnecessarily long – some workers found they could complete their tasks in half the allocated time. Working ‘too fast’ could get one in trouble with the PKIU, but it also allowed plenty of free time to engage in foreign orders,

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Challenges and creative resilience games and pranks. Print-worker Sandra Elisabeth Stringer spoke of how, by the late 1980s, there was only a small amount of work going through the Graphic Reproduction section. She felt that this section was full of talented people who were undervalued and consequently they found other creative outlets to fill their time: It blew out to the point where you ended up … with a lot of time left at the end of it. Nothing to do. Technically, if you were a good, hard worker, sometimes you could get your work done by morning tea … Anything, even like lawnmower repairs, people just used to look for anything to do. It was that bad.58

Understanding the work-ticket system enables us to see that in making foreign orders and in executing elaborate pranks, the Gov’s employees were not necessarily being ‘lazy’ or putting off important government work. Doing more than their allocated workload could produce tensions with union representatives and many employees did not want to ‘rock the boat’ in that manner. Tony Cliffe, also from Graphic Reproduction, described how this section of the Gov was filled with extracurricular activities. Tony brought his own machinery in from outside, including an antique typewriter fondly known as ‘The Enigma’. He even brought in a washing machine that he had purchased second-hand, to check whether it worked. When questioned by his boss, Tony explained that he had washed all of the rags, aprons, dustcoats and tea towels.59 Other workers constructed a ‘Bat-Mobile’ (costumes included) from cardboard and other scrap materials. In the Main pressroom, press-operators fashioned cardboard boxes into a realistic lifesize piano, while the bookbinders built their own pool table and conducted tournaments. Pranks and practical jokes were rife. None of this is unusual. As stated previously, pranks have been a longstanding part of industrial labour in Western capitalist industrial factories, with the best tricks repeated, year after year, usually targeted at unwitting first year apprentices, as noted in Chapter 4. Such pranks included telling a hapless apprentice to find a supervisor and ask for a ‘long weight’, or to find a ‘left-handed screwdriver’. The most interesting pranks at the Gov were grounded in the material specificity of the printing house. Apprentices were asked to fetch some ‘red type’, or mix some ‘striped ink’. Others fell victim to the ‘radioactive highlight dots’ ruse, involving layers of protective clothing and small fluorescent stickers. The amalgamated collection of machinery, tools, bodies and printed materials offered constant stimulus for these entrenched cultural practices. In other words, the specificities of workplace culture were embedded in the material context of the factory. Bob Law recalled a well-known compositors’ prank: changing a person’s details on the electoral roll. In this period, the electoral roll still listed a person’s occupation.

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We used to have a bit of fun with the occupations. Just change ’em and see how long it took before it went through the process to be fixed … One printer spotted Ian Adamson’s name. Ian was the controller of printing … Well, the operator stopped the press, took out the line with ‘Addo’s’ name on it, raced to the Linotype section, had it re-set with his occupation changed from ‘printer’ to ‘dogcatcher’.60

Other print-workers relayed similar anecdotes about changing occupation listings on the electoral roll. Members of the public were also victims of this ruse. A popular radio DJ had his occupation changed to ‘Confederate soldier’. No one would admit to more defamatory occupation changes, but the possibilities were seemingly endless. Given the electoral roll is an official state document, the penalties could have been quite severe. Here it is worthwhile remembering the tangibility of government information; each voter’s name and occupation was recorded in physical form, in metal Linotype slugs, stored in ‘standing formes’ in the basement. The name of every registered voter existed in physical form, in the factory’s basement. Citizenship and the democratic process were literally embodied in tangible form. Thus the fundamental basis of these practical jokes was dependent upon the object itself.

Foreign orders in the final days of the factory We have seen how the practice of foreign orders was secretive, designed to operate not as an overt industrial action, but as a subtle undercutting, carving out small moments of autonomy in a mundane workplace. But what happened when that world of work was profoundly disrupted and drew to a close? At the point when the very existence of the Gov seemed on the cusp of collapse, the practice of foreign orders (as well as pilfering) experienced a change. It became more political, more overt and more widespread. In the Graphic Reproduction section, workers sometimes collaborated on photographic and hand-drawn collages, often featuring satirical representations of their workplace, for example representing the Gov as an over-crowded pirate ship (figure 42). The graphic style of these illustrations can be connected to the 1970s and 1980s DIY aesthetic of fanzines. DIY zine production often featured low-resolution, collaged or appropriated imagery, deliberately low-tech and handmade in appearance. This graphic style was associated with punk and other anti-establishment subcultures; it rejected the ideological drivers that lay behind high-production value commercial image making.61 A similarly hacked-up collage aesthetic is visible in many examples from the Gov (despite the fact that the pieces would have taken time and care to produce). In this case, however, the DIY aesthetic rejoinder is not specifically a rejection of mainstream culture. Instead, this playful drive to collage

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Pirate ship depicting members of the Gov, 1985, and the farewell poster, They Say Rats are Always the First to Desert a Sinking Ship, 1988.

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imagery is arguably a rejection of the rigid traditions of government printing, and, more importantly, a rejection of the false assurances of job security that the workers heard from their government. In the increasingly negative atmosphere of the late 1980s, employee attitudes sometimes shifted towards gallows humour, a sense that the ship was already sinking; it was a matter of how and when – not if – the Gov was going to close.62 Some employees pre-emptively sought work elsewhere, including the aforementioned Sandra Elisabeth Stringer. Her colleagues cheerfully farewelled her with a printed illustration that reads, ‘They say rats are always the first to desert a sinking ship’ (figure 42). The Gov’s foreign orders of the late 1980s are best exemplified by the graphic works of Tony Cliffe, whose illustrated satirical stories were presented to me by a number of interview participants. In the first half of 1989, Tony produced a large ‘under the sea’ poster, combining handdrawn and photographic elements, satirising the impending demise of the Gov (figure 43). The poster is large (about 1 metre wide) and printed on archival quality paper. The former employees who amass such ephemera

Tony Cliffe, Untitled (Aquatic scene of imminent danger), 1989.

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Tony Cliffe, selected pages from A Paradise Lost, 12-page foreign order booklet, 1989.

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now treat this poster as a rare collector’s item. The image is a visual chronicle of the Gov, filled with looming threats. The Government Printer is depicted as King Neptune, regally assuring everyone that everything is going to be OK while ‘Kermit’ (the State Premier, Nick Greiner) is standing behind him wielding a knife. The management fish blames the union, while the union fish blames management. The sense that computerisation was partly to blame for the decline of the Gov is also referenced, with the ‘Optimus’ computer system depicted as a giant predatory octopus attacking ‘HMAS Gov’.63 Also in 1989, Tony Cliffe produced a twelve-page illustrated satirical booklet, clumsily typed in capital letters using the aforementioned ‘Enigma’ typewriter. The Government Printing Office: A Paradise Lost is purportedly written by the aptly named ‘Ivor Gottnowerk’64 (figure 44). The booklet is a simple, stapled, black-and-white paper publication and yet its significance became clear through the way in which former employees handled it with care and boasted that they owned an ‘original’. Although professional typesetting computers were available at the Gov in 1989, Tony’s decision to use the antique, half-broken Enigma is intriguing. Likewise, the booklet was not typeset traditionally – in hot metal – but instead used the technology that clerical staff would have used in the mid-twentieth century. The deliberate use of capital letters could perhaps be seen as consciously amateur styling. As a skilled tradesman in graphic reproduction, Tony would have had the design skills to develop a much more refined design. Further investigation revealed that this version of the publication was meant to be a rough draft. Tony explained that, coincidentally, the closure of the Gov was announced while he was working on the booklet, so he rushed to complete it before the factory shut its doors.65 A Paradise Lost tells the story of the Gov, explaining the reasons for the institution’s decline. The booklet starts: Once upon a time (about 1975) in a far off universe on a planet called Earth, was … a place called the Government Printing Office. About 1200 people worked at this place. Approx 20 of them were bosses, five were cleaners, 1153 were productive staff, leaving about 10 people who were thought to be doing nothing at all.66

A Paradise Lost lists many of the reforms made by management in the later years, including the creation of new departments, the appointment of more managers and the painting of yellow safety lines around machinery. The booklet presents the claim that the Gov grew ‘top heavy’ with management and drowned in inefficient bureaucracy. In the booklet’s line illustrations of the Gov, the factory building is frequently represented in section (figure 44). It is treated as a container within which politics and hierarchies are represented and literally played out. Technologies are also implicated as symbols of ‘old’ and ‘new’ worlds of work: ‘Slowly the presses ground to a halt, there was no one to operate them … Immediately a new section

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Challenges and creative resilience was formed to implement the installation of a computer, along with a section to retrain the staff as computer operators. Everyone was happy for a while, they had a new toy.’67 In a somewhat predictable development of the storyline, the booklet reminds the reader that ‘computers didn’t save the Govt Printing Office’.68 A Paradise Lost goes on to describe how the Gov ‘became so unproductive and uneconomical that it was decided to close the place down’.69 The question of ideology versus economic reality is key here. In many senses, the claims made in A Paradise Lost have merit; although the Gov introduced computer typesetting in order to ‘catch up’ with the rest of the printing industry, this embrace of new technologies did not save the institution from the results of neoliberal policy and the broader economic impacts of global markets. A Paradise Lost nonetheless offers valuable insights into the relatively sophisticated way in which workers understood their fate. The former employees tended to present Tony Cliffe’s work as evidence of ‘how things really were’ at the Gov; this was their version of an institutional history. While Tony is humble about the purpose of these satirical renderings, his work provides an important critical perspective from an employee, offering a view of how the workers themselves understood their place in the narrative of deindustrialisation. After the announcement on 27 June 1989 that the Gov was to close in four weeks, printed copies of A Paradise Lost were openly distributed to staff. Here we have a foreign order that moved from the quiet fringes of labour into collective awareness. It became a fatalistic telling of a story in which everyone had a part. A Paradise Lost operated within a world that was broken and it sought to explain the loss of that world to those who were most affected by it. It narrates the workers’ experience in their own terms and it does so in an irreverent manner. While the state government gave the workers a glossy photographic book when they left the factory, it was A Paradise Lost that became the prized keepsake. The fact that workers identified with Tony Cliffe’s illustrations and presented it in their interviews is important; it is partly what gives his work meaning.

Conclusion Returning to Harris’ concern about the overuse of ‘resistance’ as a paradigm for understanding foreign orders, perhaps we should not discount entirely the possibility of foreign orders as a form of resistance. Using an early position advocated by historian Eric Hobsbawm, it could be argued that it does not necessarily matter what the workers’ stated motivations were; they did not need to make dramatic political claims about the purpose of their clandestine activities. As industrial workers, they can be said to have been acting on what Hobsbawm called a ‘pre-political discontent’.70 They found themselves working within social and labour systems that had

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particular conditions and opportunities, and the opportunity to produce extra products was an available option. The making of foreign orders was a discreet and subtly political collective practice that involved craft skill, humour and resourcefulness. Making ‘on the side’ was a coded social activity, part of collective workplace culture. It was sometimes motivated by care, it relieved boredom, it made use of traditional craft skills and it provided avenues for apprentice training. Regardless of a worker’s intention, creating a foreign order by its very nature implicitly, and no matter how subtly, undercuts the authority of the prevailing system. This undercutting may not occur on a large scale, but however small, it is a form of resistance to the status quo. This resistance is embedded in the foreign order as an object. How can we understand the broader implications of this example? First, it is important to reiterate that foreign orders are not limited to Australia; they are a diverse, global phenomenon. Popular cultural examples of the practice confirm this; Johnny Cash’s song ‘One Piece at a Time’ describes a car made from smuggled parts, and the 2010 film Made in Dagenham portrays women workers at a Ford factory in England making objects from car-seat leather. Arguably, the making of things ‘on the side’ persists in contemporary office and online scenarios, although the related complexities of precarious and/or unpaid digital labour fall beyond the scope of this publication. Throughout this chapter we have considered foreign orders as part of a broader set of playful industrial antics. We have seen how foreign orders are much more than amateur ‘folk art’ made by ‘non-designers’. They are an example of the creative disruption of surplus value by the labouring classes at the very end of a period when they had more tactile control of the production process than workers tend to have today. This attention to unauthorised factory practices – beyond ‘officially’ produced goods – broadens our understanding of design history in relation to production and the culture of labour. It makes us more aware of the relevance and significance of ‘amateur’ and/or ‘unsanctioned’ design practice, an important part of the maturation of design history. Finally, it is vital to remember that these findings emerged from conversations with print-workers. Many twentieth-century manufacturing workers are still alive today and they possess in-depth knowledge and understanding about past production practices. What else might we find, if we ventured to ask?

Notes 1 Sandra Elisabeth Stringer, interview with author, 17 October 2012. 2 M. Anteby, ‘The “moralities” of poaching: manufacturing personal artifacts on the factory floor’, Ethnography 4:2 (2003), 217–39; M. Anteby, ‘Factory “homers”: understanding a highly elusive, marginal, and illegal practice’, Sociologie du Travail 45 (2003), pp. 453–71. English translation M. Anteby, www.people.hbs.edu/manteby/

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Challenges and creative resilience SocioduTravail-English.pdf, accessed 23 March 2015; M. Anteby, Moral Gray Zones: Side Productions, Identity and Regulation in an Aeronautic Plant (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). 3 J. Ditton, ‘Perks, pilferage and the fiddle: the historical structure of invisible wages’, Theory and Society 4:1 (1977), 39–71; J. Ditton, Part-time Crime: An Ethnography of Fiddling and Pilferage (London: Macmillan, 1977); P. d’Sena, ‘Perquisites and casual labour on the London wharfside in the eighteenth century’, The London Journal 14:2 (1989), 130–47; A. J. Randall, ‘Peculiar perquisites and pernicious practices’, International Review of Social History 35:2 (1990), 193–219. 4 D. J. Huppatz, ‘Introduction: reframing Australian design history’, Journal of Design History 27:2 (2014), 205–23. 5 Ibid., p. 205. 6 P. Hazell and K. Fallan, ‘The enthusiast’s eye: the value of unsanctioned knowledge in design historical scholarship’, Design and Culture 7:1 (2015), 107–23. See also G. Beegan and P. Atkinson, ‘Professionalism, amateurism and the boundaries of design’, Journal of Design History 21:1 (2008), 305–13. 7 B. Kingston, A History of New South Wales (Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 232–3. 8 Burawoy expresses his surprise at this pattern in M. Burawoy, ‘Ethnographic fallacies: reflections on labour studies in the era of market fundamentalism’, Work, Employment and Society 27:3 (2013), 531. 9 B. Oliver, ‘Making foreigners at the Midland Government Railway Workshops’, in J. Harris (ed.), Foreigners: Secret Artefacts of Industrialism (Perth: Black Swan, 2009), p. 27. 10 Anteby, ‘The ‘moralities’ of poaching’, p. 219. 11 Ditton, ‘Perks, pilferage and the fiddle’, pp. 39–71. 12 The making of foreign orders is given specific attention in: M. Haraszti, A Worker in a Worker’s State: Piece-Rates in Hungary (New York: Universe Books, 1978); M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 1984); R. Kosmann, ‘La perruque ou le travail masqué’, Histoire 11 (1999), 20–7; Anteby, ‘The “moralities” of poaching’; Anteby, ‘Factory “homers”’; Anteby, Moral Grey Zones; Harris (ed.), Foreigners; P. Bertola and B. Oliver (eds), The Workshops: A History of the Midland Government Railway Workshops (Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2006). A similar but subtly different phenomenon was explored in Jean-Luc Moulène’s 24 Objets de Grève, a photographic archive that recorded objects created by French workers while on strike, between the 1970s and 1990s. These objects were designed for sale, to financially support the striking workers. See P. Magagnoli, ‘Moulène, Rancière and 24 objets de grève: productive ambivalence or reifying opacity?’, Philosophy of Photography 3:1 (2012), 155–71. 1 3 G. Seal, The Hidden Culture: Folklore in Australian Society (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 38; G. Seal, ‘Foreigners in workplace culture’, in Harris (ed.), Foreigners, pp. 38–47. 1 4 Seal, The Hidden Culture, pp. 128–9. 15 Oliver, ‘Making foreigners’, p. 35. 16 S. Smith, ‘Foreigners: “The forbidden artefact”’, in Harris (ed.), Foreigners, pp. 14–25. 17 P. Thompson, ‘Playing at being skilled men: factory culture and pride in work skills among Coventry car workers’, Social History 13:1 (1988), 45–69; S. Meyer, ‘Work, play, and power: Masculine culture on the automotive shopfloor, 1930–1960’, in R. Horowitz (ed.), Boys and Their Toys? Masculinity, Technology and Class in America (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 13–32.

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18 Anteby, Moral Gray Zones, p. 9. 19 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. 20 De Certeau described la perruque (the wig) as a disguise. In fact, the wig was a component of dress that was perceived as normal in eighteenth-century England and France. There was, however, the notion that the wig could conceal a multitude of sins. See P. McNeil, ‘“Beyond the horizon of hair”: masculinity, nationhood and fashion in the Anglo-French eighteenth century’, in D. Freist and F. Schmekel (eds), Hinter dem Horizont Band 2: Projektion und Distinktion ländicher Oberschichten im europäischen Vergleich 17.19 (Münster: Jahrhundert, 2013), pp. 79–90. 21 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 25. 2 2 Ibid., pp. 25–6. 23 Ditton, ‘Perks, pilferage and the fiddle’, pp. 39–71. 24 A ‘vail’ is an occasional profit, an addition to a salary or a gratuity, typically given to a servant. The term was used in seventeenth-century England. 25 Ditton, ‘Perks, pilferage and the fiddle’, p. 40. 26 E. P. Thompson, ‘Patrician society, plebian culture’, Journal of Social History 7:4 (1974), 382–405; E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters (London: Allen Lane, 1975); P. Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Verso, 2006). 27 Thompson, ‘Patrician society’, p. 384. 28 Randall, ‘Peculiar perquisites’, pp. 193–4. 29 d’Sena, ‘Perquisites and casual labour’, pp. 141–3. 30 Ditton, ‘Perks, pilferage and the fiddle’, p. 45. 31 D. N. M. Horning, ‘Blue-collar theft: conceptions of property, attitudes toward pilfering, and work group norms in a modern industrial plant’, in E. O. Smigel and H. L. Ross (eds), Crimes Against Bureaucracy (New York and London: Van NostrandReinhold, 1970), pp. 46–64; G. Mars, ‘Dock pilferage: a case study in occupational theft’, in P. Rock and M. McIntosh (eds), Deviance and Social Control (London: British Sociological Association, 1974), pp. 209–28; Ditton, Part-time Crime; Ditton, ‘Perks, pilferage and the fiddle’; S. Ackroyd and P. Thompson, Organisational Misbehaviour (London: Sage, 1999), pp. 31–52. 32 Horning, ‘Blue collar theft’. 3 3 Ibid., pp. 51–2. 34 Mars, ‘Dock pilferage’, p. 209; Ackroyd and Thompson, Organisational ­Misbehaviour, p. 38. 35 Anteby, ‘The “moralities” of poaching’, pp. 227–28; Anteby, ‘Factory “homers”’, p. e23; Anteby, Moral Gray Zones, pp. 153–54. 36 Anteby, ‘Factory “homers”’, p. e34. 37 Bob Law, personal communication with author, 15 November 2013. 38 Bertola and Oliver (eds), The Workshops. 39 R. McCracken, ‘The workforce cultures’, in ibid., pp. 209–12. 40 Despite the international prevalence of the practice in twentieth-century factories and offices, the only other specific exhibition of foreign orders that I have discovered was in 1984, involving ‘retirement homers’, held by the Labor Council of Snecma Evry-Corbeil in France; see Anteby, ‘Factory “homers”’, p. e26. 41 J. Harris, ‘Resistance? Foreigner Production in the Midland Railway Workshops’, in Harris (ed.), Foreigners, pp. 62–71. 4 2 Ibid., p. 62. 4 3 Ibid. 4 M. Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly 4 Capitalism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 77. 4 5 Ibid., p. 78.

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Challenges and creative resilience 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., p. 81. 48 Ibid., p. 85. 49 Thompson, ‘Playing at being skilled men’, p. 58. 50 Barry Skewes and Neil Lewis, interview with author, 17 January 2012. 51 Graeme Murray, interview with author, 9 September 2011. 52 Geoff Hawes, interview with author, 16 February 2012. 53 Lindsay Somerville, interview with author, 15 December 2011. 54 Anon., personal communication with author. 55 George Woods, interview with author, 21 February 2012. 56 John Lee, interview with author, 2 August 2012. 57 Ibid. 58 Sandra Elisabeth Stringer, interview with author, 17 October 2012. 59 Tony Cliffe, personal communication with author, 5 November 2013. 60 Bob Law, interview with author, 27 February 2012. 61 T. Triggs, ‘Scissors and glue: punk fanzines and the creation of a DIY aesthetic’, Journal of Design History 19:1 (2006), 69–83. 62 M. Moore, ‘Cuts feared at Govt Printer’, Sydney Morning Herald (27 June 1989), p.  8. 63 ‘Optimus’ was simply a computer database system for recording printing jobs, but the broad symbolism remains. 64 T. Cliffe, The Government Printing Office: A Paradise Lost, by Ivor Gottnowerk (Sydney: self-published at the NSW Government Printing Office, Sydney, 1989). For a digitised version see https://sites.google.com/site/nswgpoparadiselost, accessed 23 March 2015. 65 Tony Cliffe, personal communication with author, 5 November 2013. 66 Cliffe, A Paradise Lost, p. 2. 67 Ibid., p. 9 68 Ibid., p. 10. 69 Ibid. 70 E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movements in 19th and 20th Centuries (New York and Toronto: W. W. Norton & Company, 1959), p. 147.



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8 Conclusion: factory closures, material culture and loss

The closure of the Government Printing Office The axe fell swiftly, as it often does in factory closures. On 27 June 1989 a letter was issued to all employees of the Gov, advising them that ‘the Government has decided to close the Ultimo factory … effective four weeks from today’.1 More than 700 workers were made redundant.2 For a brief period, in the mid-1980s, it had seemed as if the Gov might make the leap into a new, reformed era, characterised by equal employment opportunity, a retrained workforce and updated technologies. As we saw in Chapters 4 and 5, emerging technologies were introduced throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, with many workers gradually acclimatising to the new systems. Letterpress printing was phased out and the dominant culture of the Main pressroom incorporated high-speed offsetlithography into its character. The last generation of hot-metal compositors finally retrained in computerised phototypesetting and, while many were saddened to see the termination of their craft, some became adept at complex programming. As explored in Chapter 6, women, having been employed in more professional capacities since 1974, found that by the late 1980s their presence was no longer perceived as novel (although they continued to face challenges). With renovations to the Gov’s public entrance – led by Pamela Pearce’s marketing team in the mid-1980s – the Gov looked to be facing the future from a more client-focused and commercially oriented position. The necessarily sporadic workload also allowed employees to develop and nurture their workplace culture, shaped by the material specificity of the printing trade, featuring an abundance of ‘extracurricular’ factory creativity. Notwithstanding the institution’s eventual transition to newer techno­ logies, other factors influenced the Gov’s fate. Inner Sydney’s land values, which had previously been very low in the former industrial slum of

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Challenges and creative resilience Ultimo, surged with the urban renewal of the adjacent Darling Harbour. The land on which the Government Printing Office stood became more valuable than the institution. In the late 1980s managers at the Gov were investigating options to move the factory to another site, but never had the chance to execute this transfer.3 By the end of July 1989, the Government Printing Office ceased to exist, abolished entirely by NSW Premier Nick Greiner’s state government. The Government Printer himself was stunned by the swiftness of the factory’s termination. Both Don West and the Combined Unions of the Government Printing Office felt the government had not adequately consulted them, and the abruptness of the government’s announcement came as a shock. Employees were offered standard redundancy packages and a small number of workers were redeployed in other parts of the NSW Public Service. A small agency, the NSW Government Printing Service (GPS), was established two months later. Its role was mainly as a print broker, putting out government tenders to the private sector.4 It was one year before the closure, in July 1988, that a German Bielomatik exercise-book machine was delivered to Australia for installation at the Gov.5 It remained in storage and never made it to Ultimo; the closure was announced before the machine was moved. This large machine-inlimbo held potent meaning for those concerned about the Gov’s imminent demise. A media report in June 1989 speculated that the Bielomatik’s indeterminate state was ‘a clear sign that the future for the operation was not good’.6 It took many months (after the closure) to sell this machine on to another purchaser; it was a large and expensive appliance with limited usefulness, given it was designed to produce school exercise books, which, by 1989, were being mass-produced in Asia. A combination of the loss of local tariff protections and the provision of cheap labour and paper in Asia effectively spelled the end of a viable printing industry in Australia in the 1990s, in both government and commercial sectors. The Bielomatik, as an object, became an unwieldy and niggling reminder of the precariousness of the Gov. In a broader sense, this homeless machine also signified the expensive and messy ruthlessness of industrial shutdowns that occur as a consequence of free-market capital. The rationale for the Gov’s closure was predictably explained in financial terms. In short, the cost of technological updates and relocation proved too expensive for the government to contemplate and the commercial market was viewed as more competitive. In the aforementioned letter to staff, the Gov was compared to commercial printeries.7 As Don West observed, a straight comparison with the private sector was hardly fair, because of the way in which the Gov – being a service department – was expected to prioritise parliament’s idiosyncratic demands and specialist needs. Many saw the closure as an outcome of neoconservative ideology, rather than rational decision making. The Labor Party’s Geoff Irwin, then

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opposition spokesman for Administrative Services, said: ‘The government is so hung up on ideology, it is set to privatise even the most profitable enterprises. The Government Printing Office is almost completely selffunding.’8 Always the pragmatist, Don West also rationalised the closure in political terms: Greiner was Premier. They made a declaration that the government was going to close down a number of government industrial operations … we were on that list … At the end of the day, when it came to 1989 and Greiner decided to pull the plug, they really had no understanding of what the Printing Office was doing, or what it was worth, or where it stood as a competitor in the industry … it was a political decision and that was the end of it.9

To some, the closure did not come as a complete surprise. The Gov had been the subject of public critique from the mid-1980s. Following the infamous 1985 theft of high-school examination papers from a security area, the institution faced media criticism and heightened government scrutiny.10 When Liberal leader Nick Greiner won the NSW state election in March 1988, the political climate turned increasingly towards policies of economic rationalism and it was widely known that government-run organisations were targets for potential closure.11 In 1988 an auditor was appointed to review the viability and efficiency of the Gov.12 He was given an office on the fifth floor and remained on site for eight weeks, on occasions leading a ‘working party’ through the building.13 For the staff, these strangers in suits wandering in the hallways seemed to be harbingers of the Gov’s impending demise.14 Recalling this precarious period, press-machinist Anna Lyons said: After a while I just didn’t enjoy it any more. I knew, we all kinda knew, that we were gonna become redundant, because Darling Harbour was being built at that stage … Then we heard murmurs. We had ‘suits’ going through the building … executives … I don’t know who they were. Every now and then you’d see them going through. Then the rumours did start … So we could see things were going to happen, about two years before it actually did [close] … It was just dragging on before it closed … the morale was bloody going lower and lower, you could see, everywhere. Everyone was just biding their time.15

In April 1989 the state government appointed Australian Consulting Partners (ACP) to undertake a second viability study of the Gov.16 The Combined Unions were informed in May 1989 that the ACP study would take three months. But on 27 June 1989 the workers were informed that the Gov was to close down in four weeks. Gordon Cooke, then NSW Secretary of the PKIU, was aghast at the announcement. Back in March 1988 Greiner, then Liberal Opposition leader, had written to Cooke assuring the PKIU that his party did not ‘propose any changes to the policies of the present administration with respect to the Government Printing Office’.17 These assurances had

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Challenges and creative resilience been communicated to workers, and were held up by the PKIU as a gross betrayal of trust. When it became clear that the government would not back-down on the closure decision, the PKIU undertook three strategies.18 First, they attempted to negotiate better redundancy packages for their workers, with some limited success.19 Second, the PKIU imposed bans on the printing of any government material, both within the Gov and in printeries around the state. The bans disrupted the printing of millions of transport tickets and school examination papers. Third, the PKIU – and other unions associated with the Gov – put their energy into finding job placements for the retrenched workers.20 Contemporaneous industrial closures in other trades produced more aggressive union action than the response by the PKIU to the closure of the Gov.21 This can partly be explained by broad attitudes to technological change specific to the printing industry. By the late 1980s many printing workers accepted the rhetoric of obsolescence and merely sought to survive the transition to fully computerised technology in any way they could. In this context, redundancy packages were welcome and the closure announcement provided some with a literal sense of ‘closure’ after a prolonged period of uncertainty. The union response to the abolition of the Gov must also be understood in a broader context of NSW industrial relations. Since coming to office in March 1988, the Greiner government had cut over 28,000 public sector jobs in areas such as electricity, coal-mining and education. Widespread industrial discontent was brewing, and the NSW Labor Council organised twenty-six unions to participate in a state-wide ‘Day of Outrage’ that would ‘shut down Sydney’ on 25 July 1989.22 The twenty-four-hour strike was intended to be profoundly disruptive, especially to the government. It was hoped that the majority of the state’s 310,000 public servants would go on strike. In the lead-up, the march was promoted as the largest rally since Sydney’s Vietnam War protests in the 1970s. This proved to be an unwise strategy in terms of expectation management. The day in question was cold, gusty and rainy. Protester numbers reached respectable 30,000, but it was hardly the impressive 100,000 that union leaders had predicted. The event was widely reported as a ‘fizzer’.23 When interviewed, most former Gov employees placed little emphasis on – or had no recollection of – the ‘Day of Outrage’. For many, there was a sense of bitter acceptance of their fate, rather than a resolve to fight. The phrase ‘the writing was on the wall’ was frequently used during interviews, usually without a great deal of explanation; it is a statement that is easy to say in retrospect. Some workers argued that the Gov was indeed inefficient and that it was a waste of taxpayers’ money. As per Tony Cliffe’s A Paradise Lost, others explained that the organisation had grown ‘top heavy’ with white-collar bureaucracy and this had complicated the simple (albeit authoritarian) systems that had existed at the Gov earlier

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in the century. Others rationalised the closure by asserting that Premier Greiner had a personal hatred for the Printing Office. Many used technologically deterministic arguments, claiming that computers ‘took over’ the printing industry and that the factory could not keep up with the relentless forward push of technology. All of these reasons contain elements of truth, yet none entirely explain the circumstances surrounding the Gov’s closure. Socio-political events such as factory closures – while often presented as a fait accompli – are nearly always complex and difficult to distil. Framing the closure as an inevitable outcome of technological change does disservice to the workers and managers who laboured at this institution. It also obscures the intermingled relation between society and technology. As technology theorist Langdon Winner influentially asserted in 1980, technologies remain political entities, and their interpenetration within society is driven by dominant values such as efficiency, individualism, profit and order.24 It is important to reiterate this argument as, in the context of the technology-saturated twenty-first century, we can easily forget the political nature of technological engagement, presenting, for example, the almost complete dissolution of manufacturing in the global north as natural and inevitable. In the case of the Gov, it can be said that the factory closure was the result of an ideological position, stemming from a neoliberal belief in the supremacy of markets over public management. In the 1980s, radical changes to global markets and computerisation made this decision appear easy to defend. This is the structure of political thought that continues to shape the worlds we live in today, where the logic of the market is seen as pre-given and unavoidable. But, as the example of the Gov shows, the closure of this factory was a shortsighted, poorly planned and expensive decision. Like many twentieth-century stories of deindustrialisation, the abolition of the Gov still causes pain to some and it destroyed a functioning community of craftworkers. The social, material and administrative consequences of the closure continue to impact on the way in which the Printing Office is remembered and discussed. During their interviews between 2011 and 2013, many former employees still expressed frustration, sadness and a sense of loss about the way in which the Gov closed down. These negative feelings sometimes coloured the participants’ statements. This emotive content is something I have taken into account when analysing and selecting quotations. It is also a valuable indicator of how significant the closure was for some former employees, particularly those who had worked there for several decades. The day of the closure remained a distinct memory for many interview participants. Small details are retained in the telling. Alan Leishman, who by 1989 was working in senior management, said:

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Challenges and creative resilience We knew it was hard. We didn’t know it was done for! Nobody really believed that they were just going to close the place down like that. I never had any feeling that the job there was in any way in danger … the day it happened was quite amazing. I was waiting to see the Government Printer and he didn’t come in … at 11 o’clock he came in and he had a ski jacket on. That was something he’d never done before … Always wore suits. Never seen him in anything like it. Came in and went into his office. At about 12 o’clock they called us in and said, ‘This is it, we’re closed in four weeks’.25

The long-term employees – who had undertaken apprenticeships as teenagers at the Gov in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s – felt betrayed by the institution to which they had been loyal for so long. Terry Hagenhofer (figure 45) spoke of his reaction to the closure: I was devastated. Yeah. The experience was just I suppose, you know, it was just out of the blue. We’d had assurances … there’d be no sackings at the Government Printing Office. It would be a natural attrition, as people left, ‘til they whittled it down to a more manageable staff rate … I can remember where I was sitting. I was doing some scheduling and a guy walked up and said, ‘Don’t even bother doin’ that mate, we’re closed in six weeks.’ I said, ‘What are you talkin’ about?’ and he said, ‘It’s just come though, we’re closing, they’ve closed the place down.’ I was just just sat there. Because I’d grown up there from when I was sixteen. I was there seventeen years.26

45

Ray Utick, screen ‘capture’ of television interview with Terry Hagenhofer, 1989.

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Press-machinist Norm Rigney felt similarly bereft: My heart. You’ve got no idea how I felt. I don’t know. Even now you know, twenty-odd years after, I really feel awful about that. The way everything went at the end … I cried when they closed the place down … After I got over it, I put my pen down and I couldn’t believe what had happened and I never picked it up again. I never picked it up.27

Kim Cooper, who at the time was working in production planning, remembered being shocked on the day: It was a sudden thing. One day they just said, ‘Everybody up to the canteen, there’s a meeting on.’ So we all went up … and they just said that they were closing it down. It was like, ‘What?!’ … There must have been three or four weeks after that date that the actual closure occurred. During that time, oh, the pilfering, it was absolutely terrible! Everything went out the door. One guy started a print business after that, I think he got everything! I think he even got a machine out, a print machine. He just took bits off. Got big bags, you know? Computers, everything went out … But you would expect that, I suppose.28

Press-machinist Glenn MacKellar also spoke of the protracted four weeks between the announcement and the actual closure of the factory. As with Kim’s statement, the imminence of material objects is ever-present in the verbal telling and again, as in Chapter 4, we see how the presses are centre stage in the workers’ stories. With nothing left to do, Glenn and his colleagues cleaned up their old machines, preparing them to be sold on: I don’t know why they decided to give people a month’s notice. Maybe there were some people tidying things up, but there was just nothing to do! There was no work to be done … a few of us got together and wiped the machines down, because we thought, ‘They’ll auction this equipment off. Hope it goes to a good home.’ So we just cleaned the equipment up and fiddled about. That was about it, really, but no one really did anything … Just nothing. Knocked everything off, mostly. Everything that wasn’t bolted down got nicked.29

During their interviews, many workers spoke of the pilfering and theft that took place after the closure was announced.30 As explored in Chapter 7, it is important to emphasise that these incidences of pilfering should not be judged simply as immoral or unethical. There was a generalised feeling that these workers had been cheated of job security and that their unions had not been consulted. No attempt at negotiation had taken place. In addition, workers had a fair idea that many items would be thrown away or sold off in lots. In mid-1989, in the prevailing moral economy of an abandoned government factory, the material remnants of this doomed organisation were fair game; such actions seemed justifiable and right. In a similar way to a family dealing with a deceased estate, fights broke out over particular objects, over who would take what. Norm Rigney spoke to me of the regret he felt, fighting with other workers over some of the weights from the gymnasium:

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Challenges and creative resilience We had a Staff Association meeting, and we sold off the gym equipment, for 10 cents a pound. I bought a heck of a lot of it, which I’ve still got. We took it home, in a mate’s trailer and I remember one of the fellows from the photo section who used to go up there, Terry Hagenhofer, used to go up to the gym. And he’s there and he’s, ‘Normy, what are you doin’, you’re takin’ all that?’ and I said, ‘I bought it!’ I’m fightin’ him off the trailer as the car’s backin’ out from the dock. I’m embarrassed about that, I really am embarrassed. (But I still have got the equipment that I bought.) … Even now you know, twenty-odd years after, I really feel awful about that. The way everything went at the end … I’m embarrassed because Terry and I were pretty good friends and everything, but I was fightin’ him off. It just got to be ‘dog-eat-dog’ in those It was dreadful.31

Disorganised environments can of course produce petty squabbles, but what is more significant is the way in which the workers seized the opportunity to take what they felt was rightfully theirs, as a way of compensating for the betrayal of trust by their employers. Objects were at the centre of this story of decline and industrial closure. It is not simply that objects became connected to memory. Entanglements with material culture stirred feelings, consoled the hurt and added a satisfying sense of rebellion for the powerless. The speed, ruthlessness and lack of planning with which the Gov was closed had serious impacts for some former employees and many government departments lost material that was in production.32 The abolition of the Gov was also mismanaged in the sense that the ‘clean up’, before the doors closed in late July 1989, was badly planned. Terminating a printing operation is never an easy affair – print machinery and paper can be extremely heavy – but the matter is made more complicated when it involves a factory that produces essential government documents. As with the familiar and sometimes overwhelming experience of moving house, the closure of a factory puts the tangible and disorderly presence of material objects at centre stage. This was a seven-storey building filled to the brim with machinery, tools, furniture, paper and materials. Here was an unruly abundance of objects, difficult and cumbersome relics of an industrial past. Workers took what they could and dispersed. Those who were left – a small core of employees who remained at the GPS in a variety of administrative tasks – faced the prospect of ‘dealing with all the stuff’. Alan Leishman expressed concern about the wastage and loss of materials: It was rather criminal … Nobody had any clear guidelines as to how we were to do it – we were just told: ‘Clean up the place’ … It was done in such a way that everything just sorta floated out … I do have to say that the only thing that I really did … during the windup: I got all the historic things to somewhere that was mindable. Because there was no plan whatsoever and that was the criminal part about it.33

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In those final four weeks, Alan ensured that historic materials (i.e. nine­­ teenth and early twentieth-century items) ended up in the hands of collecting institutions. When interviewed, he bemoaned the lack of planning: ‘The sheer amount of wastage. There was no planned closing, as far as I ever saw. Yes, they sold off all the materials, that sort of thing, what they could, but a lot of it had got to the stage, you know, you’d have something that had been printed, needed to be bound. There was no way of doing anything with it!’34 Former compositor Tim Guy explored the building after the closure. Employed by the newly created GPS, he was responsible for removing computer wiring from the building. He recalled: ‘It was a shockin’ ghost town. I was going through an area … it might’ve held eighty, ninety fellas, and you knew every one of them and it was just a ghost town, no one there. It was really eerie, really strange.’35 Like Tim, Terry Hagenhofer also remained at the GPS. For a short period following the closure, this small agency operated out of a space in the ground floor of the Gov’s building. Terry remembered walking through the empty factory, and in doing so he got a glimpse of what it might have been like for Norm Rigney in the 1966 flooded-woodblock-floor story (see Chapter 3): ‘I went in after, when it closed … and it had leaked … A lot of the parquetry had swelled … all the floors were buckled, because it had got all wet. It was a real mess … I’d go up, that was just eerie, it was just, everything gone … Oh yeah, it was sorta sad.’36 The transition to private printing arrangements was not a smooth one. By November 1989, there were shortages of transport tickets and the printing of essential government documents – such as the Government Gazette and Hansard – had been delayed for much longer periods than it had under the Gov.37 Up-to-date Bills and Acts were becoming difficult to find. Legal firms, judges, librarians and parliamentarians alike were increasingly frustrated by constant shortages and the general confusion over responsibilities for the printing and distribution of standard government material.38 Reports tabled in parliament were not accessible to MPs. Parliamentary papers were no longer printed with presses, instead they were reproduced on photocopiers run by parliamentary administrative staff. Low-paid administrative officers were said to be spending long hours reproducing parliamentary documents on basic photocopying e ­ quipment.39 Michael Rubacki, a former Gov employee who was working at the Parliamentary Counsel’s Office in 1989, remembered the challenge of producing the first few issues of the NSW Government Gazette after the closure. If one thought that the Gov sounded anachronistic and peculiar, what followed was even more ad hoc: The government didn’t really think this through … we bought two highspeed photocopiers … So instead of being a commercial printing p ­ roduction where every document is a printed original … it was seat-of-the-pants stuff  …

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Challenges and creative resilience Because    the Government Gazette is quite a complicated constellation of documents and it is fairly critical for the government in terms of timing … We actually did it with scissors and paste and glue … a bit rough and ready. It was just printed on the sly somewhere … I just delivered at 3 [o’clock] in the morning to a suburban address and the woman who was organising it came out in her brunch coat and slippers, and I said, ‘Here it is!’40

The aforementioned MP Geoff Irwin made the most of the disorganisation of the government’s printing matters when he addressed the NSW Legislative Assembly in November 1989: This is the degree to which standards have degenerated. The laws of this State are being printed out on a photocopier … We have not only ticket offices without tickets and schools without books and stationery, but also a Parliament without Acts, and committees and departments without reports as well as a Legislature without written legislation.41

We must remember that in 1989, data had not been digitised to the extent that it was easily accessible electronically. The sudden loss of the Gov was temporarily disabling for a state that required tangible printed matter to maintain itself as an efficient and functional entity. Almost three decades on, such concerns about the provision of printed paper may seem petty, but at the time, the lack of access to such material essentially meant a lack of access to information, which is arguably a cornerstone of democratic process. Irwin’s statement also infers that the quality of the printed material mattered; upholding the authority of a state required something more convincing than a pile of blotchy photocopied pages.

The auctions Deposed as the head of a now-redundant department, former Government Printer Don West remained employed for several months after the closure. In our interview he recalled: ‘They gave me a nice office up there [in the city] and a secretary and everything I wanted and nothing to do! I sat there for about a week and thought “this is bloody stupid”.’42 Exasperated, he offered to organise the final clean out of the building. Following the exodus of the workers at the end of July 1989, the factory remained as it was, still filled with remaining furnishings, machinery and office detritus. Auctioneers were engaged to sell the remaining material and equipment in the building, in two auctions. Items on sale included a wide-ranging selection of printing office mis­­­­cel­­­­lany, for example, large-format presses, computer equipment, telephones, chairs, work-boots and a wheelchair. Some of the objects up for sale retained significance for the workers. Gold-finisher John Neale, who had worked at the Gov for twenty-five years, explained that he would be ‘sad to lose the cabinet of hand-held brass embossing tools he had used to decorate the covers of special books over the past seventeen years’.43 He

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also wrote a handwritten letter to the auctioneers asking to purchase the Westinghouse refrigerator located in the binding room.44 Terry Hagenhofer attended an auction and saw that his camera had been sold: I just had to go in. That was my final sort of thing. Just have a squiz. I wasn’t buying any­­thing, but they were auctioning all sorts of machinery. A lot of it was already [sold]. My camera was already ‘my camera’ as I was saying. You were saying that before with ownership of things. Oh  yeah.’45

Every single item listed in these auctions is recorded in a printed register.46 For scholars of material culture and design, auction lot listings such as these are a potentially rich source of information about the designed world. The Gov’s lot listings include large items such as trucks and the ill-fated Bielomatik machine, and as small as a packet of paper clips. These lot listings would be great fodder for Actor Network theorists; the lots are heterogeneous, yet all are listed in exactly the same manner: packets of Post-it notes, envelopes and Wite-Out are itemised alongside hot-water urns and a Symphony Major upright piano. The auction registers also provide evidence that the Gov still had letterpress machinery on site in 1989. Punters could bid for a Ludlow machine or a Monotype keyboard, or buy a cheap setting stick or a compositor’s trimming saw. In the absence of physical remnants of an industrial past, what is left to work with? This question is relevant for labour historians and design historians alike. Labour historians Charles Fahey, John Lack and Liza DaleHallett have explored the challenge of piecing together palpable industrial histories when factory locations are no longer accessible. In the case of the Sunshine Harvester Works, these historians used photographs, film, archives and oral histories to give life to the institution’s heritage, notwithstanding the destruction of the Harvester Works themselves.47 In the case of the Gov, the auction lot listings provide a strikingly thorough capturing of the material contents of the building; an uncanny encapsulation of a printing house at a particular historical moment, in all its tangible detail, but without its workers. It is rendered there on paper as a list, frozen in time, everything for sale.

Final reflections Although the physicality of these remnant objects has been removed, the recorded presence of these things – in combination with oral history and archives – tells us something about the interconnectedness of people, objects, machinery and spaces. The decommissioning of the Gov involved a separating out of people from the things that they used at work and from the space in which they laboured. Everything and everyone was redistributed, rearranged and redefined. Thus we return to the central message of Hot Metal: history is not merely the movement of people through time, it is

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Challenges and creative resilience bound up with the ever-changing physical and spatial world. A bringingtogether of labour history with design and material culture studies, therefore seems not only appropriate but, in some cases, entirely necessary. Almost like the objects in the building, the workers, too, had to market or sell themselves (or face unemployment). For some this would become second nature in an increasingly service-oriented economy. For others, being tied to hot metal was more than just a case of anachronistic ­inflexibility. The materiality of their labour had been core to their identity, and the loss of that physical world was a marked rupture, an end to the ‘good times’. Moving from a working-class trade into an insecure servicesector position was also fraught with difficulty. As noted in Chapter 5, the newer technologies were constantly shifting, always themselves on the verge of obsolescence. The problems did not resolve over time, indeed, labour precarity and technological wastage has increased markedly over the past three decades. In this book we have seen how, in the insecure economic climate of the 1980s, workers attempted to take responsibility for their own survival, no longer trusting their employers or their union to ‘have their back’. Unions such as the PKIU found their membership base drying up, leading to further union amalgamations and considerably weakened bargaining power. For the workers, their manual skills – which had originally been so fundamental to their identity and job security – disappeared before them. The Gov was part of a world where governance and authority had been established and confirmed through physical form: paper-based printed matter. A government job was a ‘job for life’ and law was not law until it was printed. These certainties dissolved in the late 1980s and 1990s. This left some people in a bewildered state, with an indeterminate and unfixed professional identity and few certainties upon which to rely. Hot Metal has demonstrated the significant role that material culture, technology and spatial relations play in a very human story about adaptation, strategic survival and the ultimate decline of a nineteenth-centurystyle industrial establishment in the second half of the twentieth century. As we have seen, the prevailing social order underwent a dramatic shift away from a framework characterised by certainty, clear delineation, implicit hierarchy and tangible symbols of authority and modern governance. In its place emerged a social and economic order with fewer apparent rules, where markets dominated, long-established craft skills had little value and where loyalty to an organisation lost its meaning. Information was just beginning to experience an epistemological shift from paper to ephemeral data, disappearing into invisible yet all-encompassing digital realms. The once-entrenched high-status printing trades (such as compositor, bookbinder, press-machinist, stereotyper and so forth) were in the process of disintegrating, to be replaced by multi-skilled but vaguely expressed jobs such as ‘systems analyst’, ‘coder’, ‘administrator’ and ‘data-entry operator’.

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Between 1959 and 1989 this transformation in social and labour structures constituted a reordering of people and things on the once-staunchly demarcated space of the shop floor. Flexibility was the new mantra. Workers had to adapt and retrain or find themselves out of work. Machinery and spaces took on new associations and different types of workers became allied to them. As we have seen in Chapter 7, in the final years at the Gov, unofficial creative practices took on a more political and resistant tone, as workers sought to understand what was happening around them. This book has pulled together what it can from material and social vestiges: workers’ memories, photographs, objects, films and archives. In the research process, the source material I uncovered was rich with detail, stories, jokes, technical information and controversies. Space prevents me from including every marvellous anecdote shared in interviews. Likewise, the images presented in Hot Metal are but a tiny fragment of the enormous collection of photographs of the NSW Government Printing Office.48 Crucially, the photographs and industrial artefacts referenced in Hot Metal are used not merely for the aestheticisation of the industrial past. While the aesthetics of letterpress are experiencing a fashionable artisanal revival, to consider the history of a printing factory purely in aesthetic terms would be to miss the vital human and political elements of these industrial histories. Hot Metal reveals a way in which material culture and design can be drawn upon to enrich our analysis, as long as specific historical contexts remain in view. As Maggie Mort similarly asserted in her study of the UK’s Trident sub­­­marine program, this book does not present the history of an organisation.49 Hot Metal is a history following particular paths and, like Mort’s approach, it opens the door to the question of ‘what might have been’.50 As this book indicates, the workers who faced major technological and political change at the Gov showed themselves to be adaptable and resilient. Yet they were simultaneously entrenched within a localised and traditional culture of working life. These seemingly contradictory elements were balanced through the ways in which workers allied themselves with particular machinery, skill sets and/or concepts, and through independent expressions of creativity, outside of standard labour requirements. Observations such as these would not have been accessible without recourse to the interdisciplinary integration of labour history, oral history and material culture. While labour historians may object that the industrial controversies pertaining to this workplace have not been given as much detail as labour history normally provides, Hot Metal is not an industrial relations analysis of the Gov. I have focused instead on some of the everyday challenges and experiences for workers: technological change, shifting gender relations, worker-machine relations and a mounting sense of industrial decline, accompanied by the loss of the collective and the rise of the individual. A focus on working life has enabled us to learn of the

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Challenges and creative resilience unofficial creative pursuits and lively workplace culture that took shape in this demanding period. The story of the Gov is evidently part of a bigger picture relating to the deindustrialisation of the global north. As we have seen, this case also reflects the structural and cultural changes that Australia underwent over the twentieth century. Importantly, the story of the Gov should not be seen as an ‘inevitable’ result of economics and technological change. A simple nod to global market forces as causes of decline in manufacturing ignores specific local factors, and discounts the possibility that other paths could have been taken. As geographers Chris Gibson, Chantel Carr and Andrew Warren note, ‘we might do well to explore “economy” not as a set of global forces “out there” impinging on us, but as an internal question of how Australians access, use and value material resources as moral and social beings’.51 A neoliberal ideology of individualism and market supremacy ruptured this social system, with long-felt consequences for the workers who had been nurtured and then rejected by their employer (in this case the government). At the time of writing, Sydney’s former industrial slum of Ultimo is emerging as an inner-city ‘digital creative knowledge precinct’. It is a suburb characterised by global connectedness, media and technology firms, architectural and tourist attractions and a number of educational institutions. Ultimo epitomises Sydney’s shift from a protected manufacturing economy to a ‘global service city’. As noted in Chapter 3, the Gov’s old concrete building in Harris Street proved too solid and expensive to demolish. Once lauded as an embodiment of modern, democratic public process, in the 1990s it stood empty and decaying, a ‘modern ruin’ in a post-industrial landscape. In the early 2000s it was extensively refurbished and from 2002 it housed a computer data centre. Consequently the Gov’s building was filled once again, this time with whirring computer servers in high-security steel cages. Clients of the data centre now include government departments. In this sense, the building lives on as a vessel containing information about citizens. But this information – once solid and tangible – is now in a data ‘cloud’ maintained by a multi-national corporation. Government information is no longer paper or metal, nor is it in the public hands of a trained craftsperson. Instead, data exists in encrypted bits and bytes. It is ungraspable, invisible and under private management. The design and labour histories of the future will have to account for the increasingly ephemeral and slippery concepts ­associated with digital labour, digital design and the material culture of post-­industrial work.

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Notes 1 G. Messiter, ‘Letter to employees of the NSW Government Printing Office’, Secretary of the Department of Administrative Services (Sydney: NSW Government, 27 June 1989). 2 A small number of employees were redeployed in the NSW Public Service. 3 M. Laurence, ‘Golden fleece in historic woolstore’, Sydney Morning Herald (25 September 1985); NSWSR, GPO General Correspondence Files 18/2101, D. West, ‘Briefing notes in respect to proposal for the relocation of the Government Printing Office’, briefing note to the Minister of Administrative Services (29 August 1984). 4 The GPS was abolished in 2002 and replaced by Communications Management Solutions (CM Solutions). CM Solutions dissolved in 2005 and the responsibility for government publications (which were swiftly becoming digitised) was handed to the company Salmat Document Management Solutions. See NSW Public Service Notices (6 September 1989), p. 6; NSW Public Service Notices (13 September 1989), p. 4; NSW Government Gazette (1992), pp. 34–5; NSWSR administrative history note, http://investigator.records.nsw.gov.au/Entity.aspx?Path=%5CAgency%5C1154, accessed 16 September 2015. 5 Bielomatik Book Press Model P.15–90B. 6 M. Moore, ‘Cuts feared at Govt Printer’, Sydney Morning Herald (27 June 1989), p.  8. 7 Messiter, ‘Letter to employees’. 8 Moore, ‘Cuts feared at Govt Printer’. 9 Ibid. 10 P. Clark and M. Theobald, ‘HSC paper for sale, says Opposition’, Sydney Morning Herald (17 October 1985), p. 3; P. Totaro, ‘Call for modern security at Govt Printing Office’, Sydney Morning Herald (13 November 1985), p. 7. 11 M. Grealy, ‘“Shape up” warning to state chiefs’, Sydney Morning Herald (23 October 1988), p. 40. 12 The resulting report: NSWSR, GPO General Correspondence Files 18/2109, C.  Ailwood, The Future for Government Printing (Sydney: NSW Department of Administrative Services, 1988). 13 NSWSR, Government Printing Office General Correspondence Files 18/2109, Staff Circular, 22 August 1988. 14 NSWSR, Government Printing Office General Correspondence Files 18/2109, D. West, ‘Concern over staff morale at the Government Printing Office’, internal memo issued to the Minister of Administrative Services, December 1988. 15 Anna Lyons, interview with author, 28 February 2012. 16 NSWSR, Government Printing Office General Correspondence Files 18/2111, Minister Robert Webster (1989), ‘Appointment of consultants’, letter to the members of the Combined Government Printing Office Unions, 10 May. The resulting report: P. Collings and J. Wylie, Strategy Review of the New South Wales Government Printing Office (Sydney: Australian Consulting Partners for the NSW Government, 1989). 17 Gordon Cooke, personal communication with author, 7 December 2015; M. Moore, ‘Government axes 700 more jobs’, Sydney Morning Herald (28 June 1989), p. 3. 18 NSWSR, Government Printing Office General Correspondence Files 18/2111, NSW PKIU Secretary Gordon Cooke (1989), letter to Minister Robert Webster, 28 June; Minister Robert Webster (1989), response letter to NSW PKIU Secretary Gordon Cooke, 30 June; ‘Government Printing Office closed: for private profit not public need’, Red Tape (August 1989), pp. 1–2. 19 The Government finally offered workers an additional four weeks pay on top of the standard public service redundancy scheme. Gordon Cooke, personal communication with author, 7 December 2015.

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Challenges and creative resilience 20 A. Larriera, ‘Train disruption ahead as bans bite’, Sydney Morning Herald (18 July 1989), p. 2. 21 See for example L. Elliott, ‘“Derailed”: the closure of the Midland workshops’, in P. Bertola and B. Oliver (eds), The Workshops: A History of the Midland Government Railway Workshops (Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2006), pp. 235–58. 22 A. Catalano and G. Cantlon, ‘ “Day of outrage”: threat to shut down Sydney’, Sun Herald (9 July 1989), p. 3 23 A. Larriera, ‘Costly campaign aimed at rally crowd of 100,000’, Sydney Morning Herald (20 July 1989), p. 5; P. Fitzsimons, ‘The day of outrage that most barely noticed’, Sydney Morning Herald (26 July 1989), p. 2; A. Larriera, ‘Business as usual for most’, Sydney Morning Herald (26 July 1989), p. 2. 24 L. Winner, ‘Do artifacts have politics?’ Daedalus 109:1 (1980), 121–36. 25 Alan Leishman, interview with author, 28 October 2011. 26 Terry Hagenhofer, interview with author, 5 December 2011. 27 Norm Rigney, interview with author, 30 January 2012. 28 Kim Cooper, interview with author, 29 November 2011. 29 Glenn MacKellar, interview with author, 1 December 2011. 30 NSWSR, GPO General Correspondence Files 18/2115, ‘Removal of personal belongings’, Staff Circular, 13 July 1989. 31 Norm Rigney, interview with author, 30 January 2012. 32 The NSW Industrial Commission’s Justice Bauer was highly critical of the State Government’s treatment of the closure, stating that the government ignored social planning responsibilities and did not give enough notice. A. Larriera, ‘Sackings by Government anti-social, says Judge’, Sydney Morning Herald (12 July 1989), p. 5. 33 Alan Leishman, interview with author, 28 October 2011. 34 Ibid. 35 Tim Guy, interview with author, 24 July 2013. 36 Terry Hagenhofer, interview with author, 5 December 2011. 37 NSWSR, GPO General Correspondence Files 18/2112, Letter from General ­Secretary Allan Gibson, Public Service Association to Premier Nick Greiner, 25 October 1989. 38 NSWSR, GPO General Correspondence Files 18/2115, memo from G. J. Costelloe, ‘Debate following suspension of standing orders’, to G. Messiter, 22 November 1989. 39 P. Clark, ‘Parliamentary staff lose sleep over extra printing work’, Sydney Morning Herald (29 July 1989), p. 5; P. Whelan, Hansard, NSW Legislative Assembly (7 December 1989), col. 14664. 40 Michael Rubacki, interview with author, 17 May 2012. 41 G. Irwin, Debate following the Suspension of Standing Orders, Hansard, NSW Legislative Assembly, 22 November 1989, col. 13151. 42 Don West, interview with author, 12 September 2012. 43 C. Johnston, ‘Pressing clearance sale’, Sydney Morning Herald (30 October 1989), p. 3. 44 NSWSR, Government Printing Office General Correspondence Files 18/2112, J. Neale, Letter to auctioneers, 4 August 1989. 45 Terry Hagenhofer, interview with author, 5 December 2011. 46 NSWSR, Government Printing Office General Correspondence Files 18/2115. 47 C. Fahey, J. Lack and L. Dale-Hallett, ‘Resurrecting the Sunshine Harvester Works: re-presenting and reinterpreting the experience of industrial work in twentieth century Australia’, Labour History 85 (2003), 9–28. 48 See Chapter 2 for further details on the NSW Government Printing Office picture collection held with SLNSW.

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49 M. Mort, Building the Trident Network: A Study of the Enrollment of People, Knowledge, and Machines (Cambridge, MA, London: MIT Press, 2002), p. 183. 50 Ibid. 51 C. Gibson, C. Carr and A. Warren, ‘A country that makes things?’, Australian Geographer 43:2 (2012), 113.

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List of terms and abbreviations

AMWU Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union bookbinder A tradesperson fully indentured into the trade of bookbinding caster See Monotype caster chapel A branch of a trade union or guild chase A heavy metal frame upon which metal type and blocks were placed, held together and ready for the letterpress process cold composition The setting of type with the aid of computers and phototypesetting, not with the use of hot metal cold type See cold composition Comp-Edit An early program for phototypesetting (cold composition) using word processors at the NSW Government Printing Office, used from 1980 comp/comps Slang word for compositor/s composing stick A tool used by compositors to set lines of text from individual metal letters composition The process of producing and assembling moveable type into lines, pages and formes, ready for letterpress printing compositor A person who set the type prior to printing, in hot metal or by key­­­ boarding computer phototypesetting Electronic typesetting using a computer program CSA City of Sydney Archives diss The post-printing process of removing type from set pages and formes and replacing it into their typecases dry-offset A printing method that used photosetting principles to produce a printing plate with a raised surface, meaning that letterpress principles and work practices remained, but the printing could take place on a lithographic machine dustcoat Minimal protective clothing, particularly worn in the photographic and lithographic sections of the Government Printing Office in the 1960s and 1970s EEO Equal Employment Opportunity electrotyping The process of producing a printing plate made from a mould and coated with nickel or copper

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embossing A labour-intensive process that enables a printed surface to stand out in relief etaoin-shrdlu The top line of letters of a Linotype keyboard. The made-up words were used to signify the Linotype keyboard layout feeder See Machine-feeder flatbed press A letterpress printing machine where the printing plate lies flat on the bed and the impression cylinder and paper are rolled over it FoC Father of the Chapel: the full-time union official who represented the printers’ union branch or chapel font room The room in which supplies of loose type (made by Monotype machines) was maintained and used by hand-compositors to refill their typecases foreign orders Colloquial term for an object that is produced by an employee in the workplace – made from workplace materials and/or scrap, using in-house machinery – produced in an unauthorised manner. Known variously as homers, la perruque, and government jobs, among other terms foreigners Term used in Queensland and Western Australia for foreign orders foreignies Term used in South Australia for foreign orders forme A complete set of metal type, assembled in a chase for letterpress printing furniture Small pieces of wood wedged around the edge of a metal forme to keep the pages of type tight. Also used for blank spaces on a page galley A long metal tray holding text in metal type. Also used to mean ‘galley proof’ – see galley proof galley proof A proof in the form of a long piece of text, usually not divided into pages but printed on a long, continuous sheet of paper galley trucks A trolley with wheels used to transport galleys Gov, the Colloquial term for the NSW Government Printing Office Graphic Reproduction A section within the Government Printing Office that encompassed photographic reproduction, etching, engraving, camera operation and other forms of graphic rendering half-calf Also known as ‘half-leather’, a form of bookbinding where the corners and spine of the book were in very soft leather, and the rest of the binding was made of cloth hand-binding Bookbinding undertaken chiefly by hand, using hand tools, not mass-production machinery hand-compositor A compositor who worked in imposition, headers, layout, etc. in a composing room, assembling pieces of metal type, rather than using a hot-metal typesetting machine Heidelberg cylinder A cylinder letterpress machine manufactured by Heidelberg homers A term used in the USA for foreign orders hot-metal typesetting A method of type composition that involved casting molten metal into type forms and assembling it into pages and formes imposition The act of arranging pages of type, or films, so that when a large sheet was printed, each page was in the right order and the correct way up for cutting and folding. With metal type this took place on a large, flat imposing stone or ‘slab’. Once the pages were in the correct order they were locked into a chase for printing on a press imposition slab The large flat table or stone surface used for imposition (see imposition) la perruque The French term, popularised by Michel de Certeau, for foreign orders leading hand A senior tradesperson

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Terms and abbreviations letterpress The process by which a raised surface of metal or wooden type was covered in ink and paper pressed onto it to produce a printed image Linotype machine The most widely known type of hot-metal typesetting machine It was a linecasting machine used for producing single lines of type that were assembled by compositors to make a page. It came into widespread use in the late nineteenth century Linotype operator Tradesperson who operated a Linotype machine. This job was seen as a high-status role in the printing industry lithographic dot-etching The etching of an image through lithographic principles of oil and water to produce an image on a plate, which was then transferred to paper. This method dealt in making half tones darker or lighter, using hand etching to reduce or increase the size of the dots litho Slang for lithography lithography A method of printing in which ink adheres to greasy areas of heated metal, stone or film and then is transferred to paper. Originally using a stone plate, lithography was updated in the second half of the twentieth century for high-speed lithographic presses, using the same principle but with a metal plate. See also offset-lithography Ludlow machine A hot-metal composing machine used to make type in large point sizes, for tasks such as headings, invitations and titles machine-feeder An employee who fed paper into presses before machine-feeding presses were available. This role was usually given to low-paid non-tradespersons, often women makeready The act of getting a print machine ready for printing. It involved getting the plates set up and testing the alignment, the paper, the ink levels and the quality of the impression Masonic Lodge An organisational unit of Freemasonry – a fraternity with traditions tracing back to the stonemasons’ guilds in the sixteenth century Monotype casting machine A large casting machine that processed punched paper Monotype tape, in order to produce individual metal letters of type Monotype caster An indentured tradesperson who operated a Monotype casting machine Monotype machine A typesetting machine used to produce individual letters (rather than lines) of type. With a Monotype machine, the compositor typed on a keyboard, producing punched paper tape, which was then fed into a casting machine to generate individual letters Monotype operator An indentured tradesperson who operated a Monotype keyboard. This was seen as a high-status trade in the printing industry NSW The Australian state of New South Wales NSWSR New South Wales State Records NSWTA New South Wales Typographical Association offset-lithography The same principle of printing as lithography, except the image on the plate was transferred to an offset cylinder, and from there it was printed onto paper offsider The assistant to a printing tradesperson overseer The supervisor of a particular industrial section in a factory Penta The computer typesetting system in use at the NSW Government Printing Office from 1984 to 1989 perquisites Non-monetary benefits or privileges provided to workers. The taking of material in-kind perquisites was customary practice in feudal England

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and the rise of industrial capitalism and centralised legalistic order criminalised long-established customary practices, often redefining them as theft photo-engraving The process of preparing image-based letterpress plates for printing, usually from photographs or illustrations. photo-polymer plates A printing plate that had a layer of photosensitive plastic material bonded to a flexible metal (often aluminium) plate phototypesetting A method of typesetting that produced characters using a com­­­ puter and exposing light-sensitive film in front of a mask. This method superseded hot-metal typesetting piecework Labour that was/is paid at a set rate per unit produced PIEUA Printing Industries Employees’ Union of Australia (1916–66) PKIU Printing and Kindred Industries Union (1966–95) punter Australian colloquialism for ‘gambler’, also used to denote a bidder at an auction, a customer at a brothel, or a voter press-machinist The indentured tradesperson who operated press machinery reader’s assistant The assistant who read the original copy aloud to the proofreader, who checked the galley proof and marked up corrections qwerty The standard keyboard layout in English-speaking countries setting stick See composing stick slug A line of type, typically produced by a Linotype machine SLNSW State Library of New South Wales Speedmaster A model of Heidelberg lithographic press from the 1970s that could be modified to handle letterpress, through a process known as dry-offset stereotyping A type of printing plate developed in the late eighteenth century and used in letterpress runs. It involved making a mould or mat of papiermâché, and the dried mat was used to cast a stereotype from hot metal tablehand Low-paid general assistant in printing, composing and bookbinding, who undertook repetitive tasks not assigned to indentured tradespeople. At the Government Printing Office, tablehands were often women and/or migrants timehand This term was used to delineate between a pieceworker and a normal employee. Timehands were paid for the hours that they worked, not the amount they produced tradesperson An employee who has completed a full apprenticeship and is employed in his or her trade typecases The wooden containers that held individual metal pieces of type type stick See composing stick Unix A computer operating system first developed in the late 1970s

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Sandino, L. ‘Oral histories and design: objects and subjects’, Journal of Design History 19:4 (2006): 275–82. Sandino, L. and M. Partington (eds) Oral History in the Visual Arts. London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2013. Seal, G. The Hidden Culture: Folklore in Australian Society. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1989. Sennett, R. The Craftsman. London and New York: Penguin, 2008. Sennett, R. The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998. Shaw, J. W. ‘Mr Murdoch’s industrial relations’, The Australian Quarterly 61:2 (1989): 300–4. Shields, J. ‘A matter of skill: the rise of compulsory apprenticeship in early twentieth century New South Wales’, Journal of Industrial Relations 37:2 (1995): 236–62. Shields, J. ‘Deskilling revisited: continuity and change in craft work and apprenticeship in late nineteenth century New South Wales’, Labour History 68 (1995): 1–29. Shields, J. (ed.). All Our Labours: Oral Histories of Working Life in Twentieth Century Sydney. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1992. Sontag, S. On Photography. London and New York: Penguin Books, 1979. Stein, J. A. ‘Masculinity and material culture in technological transitions in the workplace: from letterpress to offset-lithography, 1960s 1980s’, Technology and Culture 57:1 (2016): 24–53. Stein, J. A. ‘Making “foreign orders”: Australian print-workers and clandestine creative production in the 1980s’, Journal of Design History 28:3 (2015): 275–92. Stein, J. A. ‘“That was a posed photo”: reflections on the process of combining oral histories with institutional photographs’, Oral History Association of Australia Journal 35 (2013): 49–57. Stein, J. A. ‘The co-construction of spatial memory: enriching architectural histories of “ordinary” buildings’, Fabrications 24:2 (2012): 37–41. Stein, J. A. ‘Domesticity, gender and the 1977 Apple II personal computer’, Design and Culture 3:2 (2011): 193–216. Stokes, E. ‘United we stand: a synthesis of oral and pictorial history’, Oral History Association of Australia Journal 5 (1982): 132–3. Taksa, L. ‘The material culture of an industrial artifact: interpreting control, defiance, and the everyday’, Historical Archaeology 39:3 (2005): 8–27. Taksa, L. ‘Machines and ghosts: politics, industrial heritage, and the history of working life at eveleigh workshops’, Labour History 85 (2003): 65–88. Taksa, L. ‘Retooling the class factory’, Labour History 82 (2002), 127–33. Taksa, L. ‘“Pumping the life-blood into politics and place”: labour culture and the Eveleigh Railway Workshop’, Labour History 79 (2000): 11–34. Taksa, L. ‘Like a bicycle, forever teetering between individualism and collectivism: considering the community in relation to labour history’, Labour History 78 (2000): 7–32. Thompson, E. P. ‘Patrician society, plebeian culture’, Journal of Social History 7:4 (1974): 382–405. Thompson, P. ‘Playing at being skilled men: factory culture and pride in work skills among coventry car workers’, Social History 13:1 (1988): 45–69. Thompson, P. The Voice of the Past: Oral History. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988 [1978].

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Note: page numbers in bold refer to illustrations. Actor Network Theory (ANT) 85, 191 Adamson, Ian 171 anti-discrimination 134, 143–6, 148, 149, 150, 156n.1 see also women, sexual harassment apprenticeship 5, 8, 12, 36, 38–9, 61, 63, 64, 79, 85, 86–8, 91, 93 for compositors 167–8 initiations 35, 88, 162 for women 10, 17–18, 36, 41, 77, 88 see also compositors; Linotype; women architecture factories 17, 54–6 history 8, 49 hospitals 63–4 labour and spatial organisation 17, 55–6 memory 49–50, 54–5, 67, 142 modernist 50 rumour and 63–4 see also architecture; compositors; The Gov; Linotype; photography; spatial memory; women Australian Bicentennial 29, 30 Babbog, Shong 78 Bannon, Ray 103 Bedford, Eric 111 Blight, Victor Charles Nathaniel 18, 19, 53, 62

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Bonnano, Bob 103 bookbinding 27, 74, 77, 133–4, 135, 137–8, 144, 145, 151, 168, 192 women 144–5 Bright, Bill (Billy) 19, 61 Bryant, George 51–2 Cahill, John Joseph 53 Cahill, John (Justice) 106 Carriageworks (Sydney) 7 clandestine/unofficial creative production see foreign orders Cliffe, Tony 170, 173, 174, 175, 176, 184 Clifford, Alan 27 Cloud computing 67–8, 194 Colbron, Peter 81 Collins, Ross 81 compositors apprentice enculturation 98 technical training 115 history 99, 100–7 hand-compositing 5, 6, 73–4, 98, 102–3, 104, 105, 112 identity 5, 120–3 imposition 103, 135, 168 manual skill 100, 104 paste-up 98 retraining 5, 12, 91, 98, 99–100, 105–14, 117–20 tools 121–2, 122 women 99, 114–17, 136–7, 145, 148

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Index computer typesetting 10–11, 99–107 Comp-Edit 112, 114 desktop publishing 5, 31, 100, 106, 109, 119, 123, 124, 168 see also typesetting computers, personal 4, 109, 123 Cooke, Gordon 183 Cooper, Kim 144, 151, 187 Council of Action for Equal Pay 138 craft culture 15, 17, 22 see also foreign orders; printing industry creative practice see foreign orders Cusack, John (photographer) 16, 20, 77 Darling Harbour (Sydney) 20, 21, 58, 182, 183 railway goods yard 21, 58, 67 Davies, Les 102 Davis, Edward John 92–3 Davis, Ernest Alfred 93 Day, Bob 42, 43–5, 121 deindustrialisation factory closure 37, 121, 185, 191 globally 6, 58–9, 67 impacts 7, 11, 21, 37, 67, 124–5, 160, 176, 185, 194 industrial heritage 7, 8, 142, 191 see also factories; manufacturing design history 19, 49 examining production 7 see also oral history; spatial memory Duffey, Ken 85 Duncan, Leo 81 economic rationalism see neoliberalism Edwards, Ray 28 equal employment opportunity 17, 133, 143–56 Eveleigh Railway Workshops (Sydney) 142 see also Carriageworks factories character 17, 18, 29, 34, 49, 54–6, 59, 75, 170 history 9, 87, 191 industrial politics in 4, 169–70 printing and 14, 135–7 Faithful, Emily 135–6

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Fitzsimons, (Lt) Herbert 63 foreign orders 4, 12, 14, 18, 33, 120, 160–77 passim Garside, Robert 103 gender identities 86 labour and 13, 17–18, 73, 77, 83, 99–100, 105, 107–9, 116–18, 123, 131–56 passim studies 13, 109, 131–3 see also women Gipps, (Governor) George 8 Gould, Graham 81 The Gov architecture 16–17 closure 7, 10, 21, 30, 39, 49, 67, 175, 181–94 passim managers 152–6, 182, 185–6 nature of 8–12, 14–15, 17, 19, 21, 51–4, 67, 92–3, 189–90 profitability 11, 19, 123, 152, 154–6, 160, 163 renovations 68, 154–6 technological change at 58–9, 98– 107 Ultimo premises 16, 21, 50–60 Composing room 56, 57 Confidential room 56 construction 9 fate of 15, 67, 194 film of 89–91 flooring at 60–2, 189 Font room 57 Graphic reproduction section 57 Linotype room 58, 64, 65 Main pressroom 64, 75, 80, 82, 84, 131, 141, 145–6, 170, 181 Monotype casting room 58 Monotype room 43 Parliamentary room 56 Proof-reading room 56 Revenue room 89 Stereotype room 56 unions at 182–4 see also deindustrialsation; photographs, collections; photographs, institutional; Printing and Kindred Industries Union (PKIU); women

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Index government printing 9, 11 HMSO (Her Majesty’s Stationery Office) 8 items manufactured 9, 14 Queen’s Printer, Canada 8, 37–8 South Africa 8 South Australia 3 United States 8 see also The Gov government jobs see foreign orders Government Printing Service (NSW) (post-1959) 45n.12, 182 graphic design 100, 108, 121, 154–5 graphic designer (profession) 5, 115 Greiner, (Premier) Nick 9, 20, 161, 175, 182, 183, 184–5 Gunther, Victor 37–8, 51, 79, 139 Guy, Tim 117–18, 119, 189 Hagenhofer, Terry 56–7, 186, 188, 191 Hampson, Sid 19 Hawes, Geoff 43, 57, 88, 104, 110, 113, 121, 168 Hawke, Robert, government 19 Hofmeyer, Grant 3, 21 Hansard 9, 189 History of technology 13, 74, 160–1 Holten, Alan 112 homers see foreign orders Howe, George 92 Hromadka, Gita 131, 133, 140, 140–2, 151, 155 industrial relations 4–5, 56, 58–9 initiations see apprenticeships Irwin, Geoff 182–3 James, Philip 57–8 John Fairfax & Sons Ltd 59, 106–7 Keating, Paul 19 Kolbach, Rudi 42, 118 labour (conditions) 4, 86, 99–100 see also craft; gender; masculinity labour history 4, 7–8, 13, 19, 74, 109, 132–3, 141, 142, 162, 165, 192–3 see also women Larden, George 32, 51, 80–1

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Law, Robert (Bob) 43, 56, 63 64, 113, 117, 123, 141, 165, 170–1 Lawson, Louisa 136 Layt, Fred 19 Lee, John 119–20, 169 Leishman, Alan 39, 40, 41, 44, 53–4, 61, 139, 185–6, 188–9 letterpress technologies final days 10–11, 17, 73 letterpress-machinist 27, 38, 73–88 passim, 91–4 craft practice 3, 5–6, 10, 14–15, 22, 25, 43, 93, 99–100, 101–12 passim, 120, 121, 123, 124–5 makeready 35, 78–9, 91, 103, 168 retraining 4–5, 12, 17, 59, 76, 91, 98–100, 107, 109, 110, 112, 113–14, 117–19, 124, 125 studies on 76–8 transition from 73–6 see also offset-lithography Lewis, Neil 35, 59, 114, 146 Lincolne, Stuart 111, 112, 153 Linotype history 6, 80, 104–7 Linotype operator 5, 13, 42–3, 98, 104–9, 112, 117–19 obsolescence 112, 123 pieceworker 113, 119 retraining 5, 12, 112, 161 status 105, 112–3, 119 technical knowledge 108 timehand 113 transition 10–11, 98, 112–16 see also Monotype literacy see skills lithography 79–80 see also offset-lithography Lumley, John 62 Lyons, Anna 131, 134, 141, 145, 149– 50, 183 MacKellar, Glenn 79, 81, 82–3, 187 McLachlan, Alex 141 manufacturing 5, 149, 177 in Australia 6, 11, 21, 87, 161–2 decline 6, 11, 13, 21, 99, 124–5, 161–2, 185, 194

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gender-labour 5, 149 global 6, 13, 21, 194 history 160, 164, 167 in Sydney 6, 21, 194 see also deindustrialisation; printing industry masculinity craft masculinity 10, 17, 73–4, 77–8, 81, 83–9, 92–4, 101, 105, 107, 149, 151 ‘feminisation’ of labour 5, 83, 99, 107–8 multiple masculinities 84–6 under threat 86–7, 117, 120, 135 working class masculinity 5, 86 see also apprenticeship masons (freemasons) 18 material culture 4, 12, 13, 21, 61, 74, 75, 92, 100–9 passim, 141, 155, 161, 162, 165, 181–9 passim definition 14–15 design history and 4, 7–8, 12, 74 labour history and 4, 6–8, 13, 21, 25, 44 oral history and 14–15, 25, 34–5 photography and 29, 30, 44 May, Granville 29, 30 Militant Women’s Group (Sydney) 138 modernist architecture see architecture Monotype history 104–7 Monotype operator 41–3, 98, 104, 114, 117 Monotype obsolescence 41–4, 112 retraining 12, 112–14, 117, 119 status 105, 113, 119 slow to phase out 10 transition 10–11, 113, 117–18 Morehouse, Phillip 108–9 Murray, Graeme 39–41, 54, 62, 167 neoliberalism in Australia 19, 20 closure of government services 10–11, 58–60, 120, 161–2, 185 economic rationalism 11, 19, 161, 183 globally 6, 99, 176, 194 printing industry 10–11, 20, 99–100, 120, 124, 185

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Noyes, Stephen 115, 116, 122–3 NSW Government Printing Office (pre-1959) 92 see also Government Printing Service; The Gov NSW Printing Trade Women and Girls Union 136 NSW Typographical Association 136 O’Loughlin, Dennis 84 offset-lithography craft masculinity and 83–8 defined 79–80, 147–8 dry-offset 82, 83 gender and 17, 73, 147–8, 150 at The Gov 56, 80–3, 85, 88–91, 181 retraining for 12, 17, 73, 88, 91 traditions 73, 74, 75 transition from letterpress 10–11, 17, 73–80, 82–4, 91–3, 156 see also letterpress; Linotype office technology 4–5 oral history and drawing 64–7 interviewing methods 31–3, 35–6, 45n.13 making meaning 15, 21, 25–6, 44–5 and photographs 25–6, 32–9 visual aspect 25, 31 see also design history; oral history; spatial memory Parkes, Cobden 49, 51, 53, 63 Pearce, Pamela 29–30, 131, 134, 152, 153, 154–5, 181 perruque, la see foreign orders photographs collections 15, 26–30 institutional 25–7, 30–1 meaning of 25–6, 29, 30–1, 36–9, 41–5, 55, 91 oral history and 25–6, 30–1, 32–9 pilfering 162–5, 171, 187 see also foreign orders political culture/climate 11, 19–21 printing industry apprenticeship 5, 87, 104 Australia 6, 10

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automation in 74 change in 3–7, 74 craft traditions 5, 6, 10, 14, 87, 93, 100, 103 creativity see foreign orders digitisation 3–6, 67–8, 99, 168, 192, 194 folklore 8, 14–15, 18, 34, 64, 162 gender-labour 5, 17, 99–100 globally 6, 11 history 78, 102–3 humour 12, 33, 44, 45, 173, 177 importance of objects 5, 121–2, 162, 170, 188 industrial relations 4–5 demarcation 5 collective bargaining 5 unionisation 104 jargon/slang 34 job losses 3–5 practical jokes/pranks 12, 32, 35, 60, 63, 88, 145, 162, 167, 169– 70, 171, 193 women in 135–43 unions in 87 see also manufacturing; women Printing and Kindred Industries Union (PKIU) 12, 43, 56, 59, 81–3, 87, 106–7, 110, 112, 169, 183–4, 192 prejudice see women, discrimination protectionism see manufacturing; neoliberalism public service ‘corporate management’ style 19, 152 pride 92 secure employment 6, 98, 124, 133 staff morale 118, 183 Public Service Association (PSA) 4, 5, 6, 11, 12 Public Works Department (NSW) 63–4 redundancy see technological change Richardson, Warwick 89 Rigney, Norm 58, 61–2, 73, 91–2, 187–8, 189 Robinson, David 27 Rubacki, Michael 189–90

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Shay, Chris 103 side productions see foreign orders Skewes, Barry 115, 119, 146 skill definitions 109, 137–8 deskilling 13, 81, 105, 107, 108, 109, 113, 115 maintaining traditional skills 12 and material culture 121–2, 138 and printing 103, 105, 108, 110, 115, 121–2, 124, 133 satisfaction in 104, 124 seeking new skills 12, 80–1, 117, 118, 125 and trade protection 105, 107, 135, 137–8 see also masculinity; typing Smith, Graham (Bluey) 67 sociology and automation 4 feminist 13, 132–3 and foreign orders 162, 163–4 and printing 13, 14 Somerville, Lindsay 42–3, 58, 117, 168 spatial memory 15–17, 34 drawing 49, 50 interviews 49–60 mapping 64–7 see also architecture Stringer, Sandra Elisabeth 41, 57, 59– 60, 142–3, 160, 170, 172, 173 Sydney deindustrialisation 6 manufacturing 6, 21 service city 58 see also Darling Harbour, Ultimo Taylor, Lillian 140 technological change manufacturing 3–7 printing industry 4–7, 12–13, 74 responses to 12, 18, 21, 86, 99, 120, 192 transition 4, 5, 6, 11–12, 17, 21, 36, 44, 73–4 see also compositors; Linotype; typesetting technological determinism 85, 100, 100–7

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Index Townsend, Alan 27 typing dislike of 113, 117 gendered act 5, 76, 107–8, 109, 117, 148 learning to type 5, 42, 113, 117–18 Linotype keyboard 5, 113 qwerty keyboard 5, 76, 98, 105, 107–8, 112–13, 117 skill of 44 see also Linotype; typesetting; skill typesetting cold type 100–3 computerised 6, 10–11, 17, 59, 73–4, 80, 108–17 hot metal 5, 10, 17, 42, 73–4, 76–8, 100–3 Linotype 10–11, 17 see also compositing; computer typesetting; gender; Linotype Ultimo (suburb of Sydney) 9, 50, 51, 52, 53, 106, 181–2, 194 unions 4–6, 12, 18, 56, 87, 99, 103, 105, 106, 134–40, 166, 169, 182–4, 192 and women 135–9 see also printing industry; Printing and Kindred Industries Union

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(PKIU); women Utick, Ray 32, 53, 78, 84, 85, 88–91, 92–3 West, Don 4, 19, 25, 31, 63, 110, 111, 112, 118, 152, 153, 182–3, 190 Whitlam, Gough 19 Wilson, Gary 114 women 7, 9, 10, 17–18, 78, 106, 107, 109, 135–43 bookbinders 77, 133, 134, 135, 137–8, 144, 145, 151 compositors 77, 99, 114, 116–17, 124 discrimination 17, 18, 77, 107, 133, 134, 137, 142–4, 145, 146, 147– 9, 156 managers 131, 134, 152–5 press-machinists 77, 132 printing apprenticeships 18, 99 sexual harassment 134, 145, 146, 149–50 tablehands 131, 133, 139 traditional roles 5 weight-lifting limitations 18, 134, 135, 143–4, 147–51, 156 see also Pearce, Pamela Woods, George 63, 64, 65, 67, 169 Wran, Neville 18–19

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