Charles Fahey, John Lack and Liza Dale-Hallett* | Resurrecting the Sunshine Harvester Works: Re-presenting and Reinterpreting the Experience of Industrial Work in Twentieth-Century Australia | Labour History, 85

Resurrecting the Sunshine Harvester Works: Re-presenting and Reinterpreting the Experience of Industrial Work in Twentieth-Century Australia

Charles Fahey, John Lack and Liza Dale-Hallett^*

The Sunshine Harvester Works, occupying the same site from 1906 until 1987, was unquestionably one of the more significant workplaces in the history of industrial relations in twentieth-century Australia. Here Justice H.B. Higgins formed his judgement in the famous Harvester case of 1907; here H.V. McKay and his successors, opponents of unionism and collective bargaining, deskilled the workforce, introduced piecework and time and motion regimens, and pioneered mass production methods. However, when manufacturing ceased in the late 1980s, the Sunshine Harvester Works was stripped of its machinery; in the 1990s the buildings were replaced by a welfare office, a shopping centre and a cinema complex. How was it that the workplace significance of Sunshine came to be so completely disregarded? In the absence of the physical fabric of the Harvester Works, what can be recovered of the work experience? This article suggests that it is possible, using the outstanding documentary collections in the University of Melbourne Archives and at Museum Victoria, and employing the latest technologies, to re-present the work experience at Sunshine.

Introduction

One day in October 1907 Justice Henry Bourne Higgins, President of the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration, left his city chambers and travelled through Melbourne's industrial western suburbs onto the plains beyond Footscray where there stood at the Braybrook railway junction a raw corrugated iron factory — the soon-to-be famous Sunshine Harvester Works of H.V. McKay. Called upon to determine what were 'fair and reasonable' wages in the agricultural implement industry, Higgins had selected McKay from some 122 applicants for tariff protection, because his factory was among the largest, with the greatest variety of employees. The Harvester Judgement, handed down a month later, became a landmark in the history of industrial relations in Australia. Higgins assumed that the provision for fair and reasonable remuneration was 'obviously designed for the benefit of the employees in the industry; and it must be meant to secure to them something that they cannot get by the ordinary system of individual bargaining with employers'. He concluded that that 'something' had to answer to 'the normal needs of the average employee regarded as a human being living in a civilized community'.¹ For a labourer, a fair and reasonable wage was one that would provide 'a condition of frugal comfort estimated by current human standards'.²

McKay's confidence of meeting the Justice's standards, and of being exempted from paying excise duties, proved misplaced, for Higgins determined that the 6 shillings per day paid at Sunshine were not fair and reasonable, as the wage would not support a labourer, his wife and family. Higgins settled for 7 shillings per day, which he called 'The Excise Tariff Standard', and went on to award higher rates, or what later became margins, for skilled workers. As most students of Australian labour history know, the legislation that gave rise to this decision was overturned by the High Court. However, Higgins used the concept of a base wage for a labourer and margins for skill in his subsequent cases, and this concept, formalised in 1923, remained the bedrock of wage determination until 1965.³ While Higgins's decision undoubtedly gave the plant an important place in Australian labour history, the Sunshine Harvester Works is important for reasons other than its association with the definition of the basic wage.

Higgins's visit to Sunshine left him with no doubt that the factory was a special place, indeed 'a marvel of enterprise, energy, and pluck':

I understand that without training in any mechanical trade, or in finance, or in factory organisation, this gentleman [H.V. McKay], the son of a farmer, seeing what farmers required, has invented special machines, has produced them in great numbers, has established, and manages, a huge factory with numerous and complicated handicrafts, and has sold his machines throughout Australia, but also — in competition with the world — in the Argentine, in Chili [sic], and elsewhere. The factory bears every sign of business-like management, of devices of economy in labour, of devices for keeping employees at high pressure. The work is minutely subdivided; the pace of the men increased by 'repetition' work; and all the latest labour saving devices are adopted.⁴

Higgins's admiration was, then, tempered by McKay's efforts to deskill the workforce and by McKay's hostile attitudes towards improvers — 'they defy definition - they defy classification', Higgins lamented⁵— and these reservations influenced his later judgments, most notably in the Engineers case of 1921. McKay was unquestionably one of the great entrepreneurs of the early Commonwealth and his drive and ambition was to transform his factory into one of first mass production works in Australia. In order to understand how the Sunshine Harvester Works became one of the most significant workplaces in the history of industrial labour in twentieth-century Australia, and therefore a key site for the recovery and interpretation of working-class experience, one must understand something of the history of farming technology, of colonial agricultural implement and machine manufacture, and of H.V. McKay and his successors at Sunshine.

Agricultural Implement Making and the Sunshine Harvester Works

From the 1860s successive liberal Victorian governments employed selection acts to promote land settlement and agriculture, and tariff acts to stimulate local manufacturing. After 1870, when the agricultural frontier moved across the Great Dividing Range, the northern plains were brought under the plough, making Victoria by the 1880s an exporter of wheat. Repairers of imported agricultural implements moved into manufacture, firstly of simple tillage implements adapted to local conditions, and then to the manufacture of complex machines, such as reapers and mowers, and finally Australian strippers and winnowers suitable for the drier northern plains. Small workshops, with a dozen or a score of workers, grew into implement and machinery makers employing over 100 men, and those who were producing standard products in some volume introduced piecework and the subdivision of labour. Only a minority of workers in the implement trade earned wages on a par with jobbing engineers; in the 1880s the standard rate for an implements fitter was 48 shillings as against 60 shillings in engineering. Heightened foreign competition was another element: imported reapers and binders began challenging local reapers.⁶

Changes in farming practices and technology, and the consequent growth of agriculture, transformed the industry from the late 1890s. The key machines were the combines: stripper-harvesters that both stripped and winnowed the crop, and seed and fertiliser drills that sowed and fertilised in one action. The first drills were imported from the United States, but stripper harvesters were a local invention. By the late 1890s local manufacturers were copying US drills, and North American manufacturers were replicating Australian stripper-harvesters. The new technology fostered a massive expansion of the wheat frontier on previously marginal lands in southern New South Wales and in the Victorian and South Australian mallee, and in the 1900s and 1910s assisted the opening up of the Western Australian wheat belt. H.V. McKay (with his Sunshine stripper-harvester), and John Mitchell (of stripper and seed drill fame) were among the manufacturer entrepreneurs who exploited the new opportunities. McKay set up the Sunshine Harvester Works, firstly in Ballarat, before moving to Braybrook Junction in 1906; Mitchell moved his cramped North Melbourne plant to a broad acre site at West Footscray in 1907. Their battle against North American imports led directly to the Excise Tariff Act and the famous Harvester case. This battle also saw Australian manufacturers competing by becoming more productive themselves. As Higgins noted, McKay was experimenting with modern machinery and the subdivision of labour. Between 1907 and 1910–11, McKay's workforce expanded from just over 400 to around 1500. The Harvester case, as we have argued elsewhere,⁷ was as much about skilled wages as the famous 7 shillings per day. McKay's victory in the High Court enabled him to continue paying wages for designations, such as fitters and blacksmiths, below rates prevailing in the engineering shops. McKay's drive to modernise brought him into conflict with the unions. In 1911 his attempt to introduce piecework led to a three-month strike. McKay won, and introduced piecework and a well-developed system of personnel monitoring. The Agricultural Implement and Machine Makers' Union, under severe financial strain from fighting the Harvester case and supporting the strike, was not in a position to return to the Federal arbitration court until 1925. In that year Justice Sir John Quick agreed with management that work had been de-skilled and he approved of the use of piecework. Only in the mid 1930s did Justice George Beeby give skilled implement workers wage parity with engineering tradesmen. However, keen to promote manufacturing, Beeby also approved the use of piecework.⁸

To promote local manufacturing and to compete with imported machinery, McKay became an ardent supporter of the Australian Industries Protection League, a body that lobbied politicians and brought evidence before the Tariff Board. Its motto was: 'My Country First — Protect its Industries — Buy its Goods — Be Australian'.⁹ McKay also studied management methods from the United States and regularly sent managers on study tours to industrial plants in the United States. This resulted in the importation of modern machine tools, and the development of detailed accounting systems to control materials and production. McKay was also a pioneer in the development of personnel monitoring. During the 1920s elaborate piecework systems were developed, and most production jobs were studied and timed. A personnel department was also established long before this became fashionable in Australia.¹⁰ This department kept the detailed records on employees and argued the firm's case before the Arbitration Court. The firm also experimented with internal labour markets to promote willing workers and to retain loyal staff. A welfare fund was established to fund pensions. And shares in the Sunshine Employees Trust were offered to loyal employees.¹¹

By the beginning of the 1920s the Sunshine Harvester plant was one of the few manufacturing enterprises in Australia employing mass production methods. In 1921 the firm was reorganised as a proprietary company with the majority of the shares in the hands of the McKay family, and after H.V.McKay's death in 1926 the firm remained in family control. In 1930 a merger with the Australian interests of the Canadian firm of Massey Harris gave the Australian firm (now designated H.V. McKay Massey Harris Pty Ltd) access to Ferguson tractors. During the 1920s profits were high, but demand for machines collapsed in the early 1930s. Almost two thirds of the workforce was laid off and many workers experienced prolonged unemployment. Recovery from the late 1930s was helped during wartime by the securing of guaranteed markets in the United Kingdom and the establishment of a munitions annex at Sunshine. By the end of the war Sunshine, like most manufacturing plants, faced a tight labour market with high turnover rates. When management locked out workers during the 1946 metal workers dispute, workers simply went elsewhere.¹² The firm, facing years of chronic labour shortages, turned to migrant labour. Sunshine became the point at which thousands of post-war migrants entered the Australian workforce; they built their homes in Sunshine and the suburbs that mushroomed west of the factory. This continued a process inaugurated by McKay in the 1910s and 1920s, when he first subdivided land near his factory and created the nucleus of Sunshine.

Welding a Tank Section in the Munitions Workshop, 1942
Source: Museum Victoria

In the early 1950s profits were extremely high and the McKay family, who held half of the share capital, paid out very generous dividends at the expense of plant maintenance. In 1956 when the agreement with Massey Harris expired, the McKays sold out to their Canadian partners. The company was re-named (Massey Ferguson Australia Pty Ltd), re-financed, and under new management the tool room was rebuilt, the factory layout redesigned, and a new foundry added. By the late 1960s Australia had become a mature market for overseas agricultural implements. Dry conditions from late 1969 led to a decline in local sales and profits, and the retrenchment of employees. Profits and employment recovered in the mid-1970s but contracted thereafter. In 1986 the factory ceased production after 80 years of manufacture at Sunshine.¹³

The Battle for Sunshine: The Living Museum of the West versus Australia ICOMOS

The Sunshine Harvester Works industrial site was undoubtedly a key site for the recovery and interpretation of Australian twentieth-century working-class experience. Yet today, approaching the centenary of the famous Harvester Judgment, nothing of the factory survives, except a token clock tower and a pair of relocated factory gates, and, more by chance than design, the bulk store. No section of the manufacturing side of the works survives. McKay's original offices, together with the more expansive block that supplanted it in the late 1920s, still exists, as does a footbridge across the Bendigo railway line to the McKay Gardens, Presbyterian Church and McKay subdivisions and housing beyond. But the heart of Sunshine —the factory itself — has been almost totally ripped out. Why was this allowed to happen? How, in a decade of rising interest in the preservation of Australia's built heritage, could this major site have been allowed to fall so readily to the designs of the developer, the myopia of local historians, the work of the wreckers?

'The nation's manufacturing industries', as engineering historian Peter Milner lamented in 1992, 'are not well represented in the Register of the National Estate ... you will not find many factories there and you will search in vain for a foundry or an engineering workshop'.¹⁴ Industrial buildings and sites offer some of the greatest challenges to conservationists of our built heritage. They can be architecturally nondescript, an eyesore when in a state of decay, and a depressant of surrounding property values, though attractive if they offer broad sites in desirable locations. And they readily fail the ultimate test for survival — the finding of a viable alternative use consistent with both commercial imperatives and heritage sensibilities.¹⁵ Hence twentieth-century urban industrial complexes have been the poor cousins in the heritage family. Although the first classification of an industrial building by the National Trust (Victoria) came only two years after the formation of the Trust in 1956, most of the following industrial places to be identified and listed were small, rural, colonial-era structures rather than large urban complexes.¹⁶ The manageable and the picturesque prevailed over sprawling and daunting city engineering works and assembly plants. The Trust protected, where it could, bridges, powder magazines, flourmills and bakeries, smithies and saw mills, breweries and wineries. Only in the 1980s did conservationists' attention turn to large urban industrial complexes; only then were professional industrial surveys undertaken. Acting as an advocate at the quasi-judicial panels of the Victorian Historic Buildings Council, the Trust had notable successes at Spotswood and Geelong, and turned its attention too, to rail and tramways and wharves. The support of like-minded locals who valued their heritage was often vital to the marshalling of evidence, intelligence and political clout. But often there was also considerable resistance to conservation and preservation.

Large industrial sites can exert a magnetic attraction for developers as locations for shopping complexes and housing schemes. The unimaginative, lazy and philistine developer, craving a flat site, commonly views 'heritage considerations' as a threat rather than an opportunity. And former employees, especially those recently retrenched, can be indifferent, even hostile, to sites associated in the collective memory with bad management, worker exploitation and economic downturn. A closed factory can be an unwelcome reminder of when times turned bad (and, in the case of Sunshine, stayed bad). Developers and even workers, then, may share an antipathy to preservation that obstructs 'Progress'. Unless, that is, enlightened locals can see the possibilities in a measure of heritage protection and, accentuating the positives, raise the sights of the local community. Intriguingly, this did not happen in Sunshine in the 1980s. On the contrary, local and regional historical bodies, endorsing the wishes of local government and a developer, facilitated, and may be said to have even ensured, the obliteration of the Sunshine Harvester Works. Despite the clear local, regional, state and national significance of the Sunshine Harvester Works, when manufacturing ceased on the site, there quickly developed massive political, corporate and developmental pressures against conservation.

By the mid-1980s Massey Ferguson (Australia) had transformed itself into an importing, assembling and distributing enterprise. Its (mis)fortunes were emblematic of what was befalling the metals and machinery sector (and especially farm implements and machinery) across the country in the face of savage tariff cuts and the deepening rural crisis (declining commodity prices, worsening drought, and deteriorating exchange rates). Under an energetic new manager, determined on survival, the company had erected a modern spare parts store and assembly plant on a new site, and was anxious to divest itself of the superannuated plant machinery and land. Though evincing a pride in its history, the Company was in no mood to be sentimental about the past. The income from the sale of the site was important to the Company's viability. The Sunshine City Council eyed the prime 54-hectare former Sunshine Harvester Works site — slap bang as it was in the heart of commercial and residential Sunshine, which had grown up around the Works — as the location for a Sunshine District Centre whose commercial, professional and civic functions would breathe new life into a depressed local economy and community. When George Herscu's Hersfield Developments Corporation was attracted, both Victoria's Ministry of Planning and Environment and the Melbourne Metropolitan Board of Works (MMBW) Planning Branch made encouraging noises.

The heritage of the site was not to be entirely overlooked, but acknowledged only in a severely truncated way. The City of Sunshine wanted

the identification [sic] of the clock tower and water tower; the identification and recording of significant social history of the site; important elements or works on the redevelopment [ie site] which should be recorded or relocated; and important elements or works on that part of the site not subject to redevelopment which should be retained or recorded.¹⁷

On these provisos, funding was provided by Sunshine Council and through the Regional Action Programme for a heritage study to be undertaken by the Melbourne's Living Museum of the West. This Museum, established in 1984 under the patronage of the Cain Labor Government, was intended as an innovative project to involve the people of Melbourne's western region in presenting 'social and cultural history in a different way ... [reflecting] the essentially working class society of the West' through travelling exhibitions, oral history projects, and the like, with a view to giving people in the West 'a greater sense of the significance of their own history, culture and surroundings'.¹⁸ The Museum, drawing on European models, especially the French eco-museum and the work of the Swede writer Sven Lindquist,¹⁹ began its work enthusiastically. The early results were worthy, if somewhat unsophisticated,²⁰ but the mix of enthusiasm and inexperience, combined with an anxiety to secure commissions and a reluctance to offend powerful political and developer players, was to prove fatal for the McKay/Massey Ferguson industrial site.

In November 1985 the Museum became anxious to commence work on its commission, lest demolition commence over the New Year. Evidently they wanted to document work in situ before the machinery salesmen and the building wreckers moved in. When the Sunshine City planner became alarmed by the Museum's proposal to include 'A preliminary statement on suggestions [sic] concerning how the site's past might be made accessible to future visitors to the site through the retention of particular features and their incorporation into the designs for the new complex',²¹ the Museum quickly wrote to assuage his fears: the study emphasis would be on 'those who worked there.' Further:

We believe the site is of great significance in the history of Sunshine and Australia, and that the contribution of those who worked there has not been adequately documented. We will be offering suggestions as to how that significance can be commemorated [sic — authors' emphasis] in the proposed new developments on that site. Our main concern is with the living history, the memories, knowledge and skills of the workers.²²

The Museum, readily accepting that the physical fabric of the factory was doomed, effectively offered to record worker memories as obsequies for the funeral. Reassured, the City planner confirmed that Council would fund one half of the first stage of the study, subject to the condition that 'the study brief shall require that any proposals for retention of buildings, machinery or other features on the land to be developed by Hersfield Developments Corporation Pty Ltd shall be to the satisfaction of that company, Massey Ferguson (Australia) Ltd and the Council'. The Council and the Company had the power of veto, and clearly intended to use it, and the Museum had no problem in accepting this condition. The Living Museum of the West had fashioned for itself the role of Trojan Horse in the shaping battle for the Sunshine Harvester Works.

The Museum's rushed draft report of December 1985 became available in February 1986, and dutifully contained nothing to alarm the Council, the Company or the prospective developers. While extolling the significance of the factory and its history on all levels — local, national and international — the 'Draft Statement of Cultural Significance' dismissed the structures on the site as

significant for their scale and 'degree of intactness', but the architecture is 'nondescript'. There is greater cultural significance in the site's representation of past activities on a huge and varied scale — worker histories, swiftly disappearing labour skills, products and tools of trade.

On issues of building conservation, the report was as silent, appropriately enough, as the grave it was digging.

Employees Leaving the Sunshine Factory from the Russell Street Exit at 5.00 pm, 17 September 1941
Source: Museum Victoria

Sunshine Council was not opposed to the retention of the clock tower and factory gates, if they were relocated. But the Heritage Branch responded by warning Council that significant heritage issues remained. Specifically, it was desirable to retain not only the clock tower and the Russell Street gates, but also as much of Russell Street itself as was necessary to give the gates meaning. The magnificent crane way might be incorporated into the proposed atrium of the new development.²³ These were minimalist proposals, and the Heritage Branch evidently thought that the developers would respond imaginatively and sympathetically to them. Three months later Council informed the Ministry that there had been no response from the developers, who simply ignored the suggestions in their November 1986 application for rezoning to facilitate their plans.²⁴ The Sunshine City Planner offered the Living Museum a large collection of photographs held by the Company, and advised that an auction of equipment would be held on the site on 3/4 December 1986: 'some historic machinery will be offered for sale'. Council and Company, preparing to clear the site for the developers, thus thanked the Museum for its invaluable role, and offered materials for the second stage of the study that Council had now agreed to fund.²⁵ At this moment, however, an historian at the University of Melbourne made an application for heritage listing. The Heritage Branch, clearly concerned at the lack of response to their suggestions on heritage, and worried about demolition plans, moved to bring the site before a hearing of the Classifications Committee of the Historic Buildings Council. An Interim Preservation Order (IPO) was imposed pending that hearing. For its part, the National Trust of Australia (Victoria) had advocated broader consideration of the site: 'The Trust finds it disturbing that there appears to have been no effort to incorporate any feature evocative of the monumental impact made by H.V. McKay and his firm on a local, state and national level.'²⁶

Sunshine Council reacted with outrage to the IPO.²⁷ '[T]his precipitate [sic] action,' their planner wrote to the Minister, '... may threaten the proposed $130 million development of the site for the District Centre'. Rather naively, he pointed out that the Living Museum's study had been funded only on the condition that no buildings were to be retained on the part of the site earmarked for redevelopment, and that 'the flavour of [the Museum's] recommendations was interpretation rather than wholesale retention. And the most minor incorporation of the factory theme and building elements was suggested'. There was something absurd about this position: Sunshine Council had precluded recommendations involving retention of buildings, and the obliging Museum had not recommended any significant retention. Council and the developer thus exonerated themselves for failing to respond to Heritage Branch concerns about adequate consideration of the Sunshine Harvester Works fabric. 'Interpretation' (Living Museum-style) was to precede and provide the rationale for demolition.

The Heritage Branch invited both the Sunshine and District Historical Society and the Living Museum to present their views at the Historic Buildings Council (HBC) hearing. The Historical Society declined to be present, but wrote that it was 'not overly concerned with the preservation of [the] buildings', though it would value 'a permanent display in the new shopping complex' on the site.²⁸ The Living Museum submission, simply adumbrating the position it had taken in the Stage 2 Report of January 1987, was a marvel of obfuscation:

Very careful consideration should be given to the question of how best the site can be commemorated and interpreted. The Museum's Stage 2 Report includes recommendations which might incorporate the theme of the Harvester Works in the planning and design and layout of the proposed new complex. These would assist recognition of the size and scale of the factory in its heyday and give some indication of key features of the site. Retention or reconstruction of individual items needs to be considered in relation to the total context which gives them meaning. It is not easy on so complex a site with such a range of diverse activities to do justice to the people, processes and products of the factory ... Obviously, the Museum is not in a position to make decisions on retention or demolition of particular sections, but can assist in documenting and interpreting.²⁹

Of course, the Museum was not being asked to make 'decisions', just to offer advice. As the Director, Olwen Ford, later admitted, she 'did not oppose the demolition', a position 'upheld by a majority decision of the Living Museum's Committee of Management'.³⁰ The Museum washed its hands of the preservation issue, but clearly envisaged for itself a large role in the 'interpretive commemoration' of the site, subsequent to demolition.³¹

At the hearing before the Classifications Committee of the Historic Buildings Council, Director Ford, for the Living Museum of the West, reiterated her position that recordings of interviews and photograph displays were an acceptable alternative to preservation of the fabric beyond the token clock tower and gates. The National Trust, up against an array of expert witnesses marshaled by the Company and the Council (architectural historians, town planners, museum experts, and no less than a member of the McKay family itself), bravely championed key elements of the site, warning that the Living Museum of the West's equation of 'interpretation' with display threatened to undermine basic ICOMOS principles.³²

In the event, Sunshine Council, the developers and the Living Museum of the West were to have their way, but only after George Herscu's empire collapsed, and with it the Hersfield Developments' proposal for the Sunshine District Centre. The collapse of the property and building boom took with it the Cain Labor government, but the Living Museum, still enjoying powerful political patronage in the west, had secured its funding within the museum world for the foreseeable future ensconced in its heritage-listed former slaughterhouse and meatpacking plant near the Maribyrnong River. And what of the Sunshine Harvester Works? Sunshine Council eventually acquired the site, and proceeded to develop it in a piecemeal fashion. Ironically, the first building to go up, on the very site occupied by H.V. McKay when he came to Sunshine in 1907, was a social welfare office. The demolition of sizeable sections of the factory deemed unsightly and dangerous was permitted (most of the factory except two brick buildings, the bulk store and the power house) and Council now even affected an interest in incorporating these into a civic development. Only the store was retained when, in the 1990s, young activist members of the Sunshine Historical Society mounted a preservation campaign with union backing. The bulk store now stands, restored at immense cost, but forlorn and abandoned, in the middle of a new mixed development. The McKay office complex, the railway footbridge and the McKay Gardens are also registered, but the factory that gave them being, purpose and significance is almost totally gone. There is a small 'interpretive centre', a room in the new library. Historical markers dot the precinct, informing passers-by of former glories, largely of what was once there.³³

Rebuilding the Sunshine Harvester Works Through a Living Collection

The Living Museum position that the work experience at Sunshine could be captured adequately by interviews and photographs without the preservation of a significant element of the physical fabric to inform that experience was, and remains, fallacious. No simulation and no display can ever adequately compensate for the built fabric once it has been lost. Likewise, recreations, displays and exhibitions demand the support of a substantial and rich archive. Predictably, once the projected Sunshine District Centre lapsed, and once the factory buildings had been razed, Sunshine Council lost interest in the Living Museum's bold plans for commemorative displays. The interpretive centre (read 'room in a library') has proved to be a poor apology for the plans boldly advanced during 1987, when the Historic Buildings Council hearing was in progress, as handy window dressing for the Council, the Company and developers. Once the physical fabric had disappeared, the survival of the company and employee records became even more critical. It was fortuitous, however, that professional archivists, historian and museologists were able to address themselves to company records that had been undisturbed by Living Museum's frenetic and amateurish scramble to satisfy its masters. What was required was the construction of a company archive in dependable hands with the long-term public interest at heart. A beginning had already been made, in the H.V. McKay Archives at Museum Victoria.

The McKay Archives originated in a relationship between the McKay family and the Science Museum extending back to H.V. McKay's lifetime. As explained elsewhere, the Museum, as the champion of McKay's claim to fame as the inventor of the Australian stripper-harvester, had come to be the custodian of the legend of McKay and the repository of the McKay smithy, the shrine to the immaculate conception of the one true harvester.³⁴ From the early years, when McKay and his company donated models of Sunshine farm implements and machinery to the Museum, until as recently as 1984 when the Museum mounted an exhibition commemorating the putative centenary of McKay's 'invention of the harvester', the relationship was a close one. But the kernel of the archive, consisting of McKay's somewhat sparse personal and business papers, and a rather larger library of cuttings and historical accounts extolling McKay as inventor, was first listed for McKay's son and heir, Cecil McKay, by Frank Strahan, foundation archivist at the University of Melbourne. The collection, however, passed to the Museum rather than the Melbourne University Archives, and subsequently a considerable collection of trade and technical literature was added.

In the early 1990s, visiting the offices of AGCO Australia (successors to Massey Ferguson Australia) to inspect the Guard Book photograph albums, John Lack and Liza Dale-Hallett discovered a collection of business papers, legal and financial records, slides and moving film, advertising and technical literature, house journals and, above all, the personnel records of the McKay/Massey Ferguson workforce extending back to the 1910s. This remarkable collection had been saved by two alert employees of the company.

Ken Porter, a former Transport Manager at Massey Ferguson, recalled in 2002 how collecting McKay records began for him when he rescued a wooden box from a dump master in 1991. He thought the box might have been of some use to him at home, but noticed that a square of cardboard had been nailed to it reading, 'The plaster cast of H.V. McKay. Not to be opened until another one needed', and signed Cecil McKay:

I rushed upstairs and asked where this box had come from and was told the very large cupboard on the back wall ... it contained what appeared to be the history of the Company from when [McKay] first arrived in Braybrook Junction (now Sunshine) 1906–1911 ... At this stage the Directors' garage was not being used. It had a room with lots of shelves, a steel door and a padlock. [We] moved all the contents of that cupboard into this room after working hours at night. We both agreed to keep an eye out for any more throw outs.The next was a four-drawer filing cabinet in a scrap bin. In it were the staff and payroll employment history cards. On asking around we found a further eleven cabinets were to go so again another after work move. We kept this up, finding old account keeping books with bound covers and lots of photos. We gathered a rather large collection over the next two years.³⁵

Realising the profound historical significance of these materials, Ken and his colleagues determined to secure their survival. The company, under manager Ardri Verhagen, a long-term employee with a pride in its history, was receptive to the idea of a transfer of records to appropriate archives. The collection proved to be so large and in need of so much work that the decision was taken to divide it between the Museum and the University of Melbourne Archives along functional lines, the Museum taking the trade and technical literature in order to serve collectors and students of farming technology, the Archives accepting the corporate and employee records. Pictorial material, including the many thousands of photographs, slides and moving films, went to the Museum; the personnel files went to the Archives. Both sections challenged these institutions' capacities for storage, processing and documentation, but the pictorial material provided Museum Victoria with perhaps the greatest challenge.

After the transfer of the collection to Museum Victoria in 1996, Ken Porter gathered together a team of 23 volunteers to assist in identification and cataloguing. Twenty of these volunteers were ex-employees, some retrenched on more than one occasion, but all had a passionate interest in piecing together the history of the company. Their company involvement covers 1936 to 1996, their work spans the breadth of the enterprise (engineering, sales, parts, tool design, etc.) and equates to over 800 years of experience. The team includes many people who have been instrumental in the development of important innovations in agriculture, for example: Jack Douglas and Jack Zagorski (design engineers for the cane harvester), and Howard Taylor (engineer, and son of the famous Headlie Taylor, the inventor of the header-harvester).

The contribution of the McKay volunteers to the collection was recognized in 2002 when they received a Museum Industry Recognition Award for the 'most outstanding volunteer project in the Victorian museum sector'. After six years and over 5,000 hours of volunteer work, the McKay team has catalogued and provided expert analysis of 13,000 images, 750 films, a large collection of objects and over 5,000 trade publications. In addition to cataloguing the collection the team has developed an extensive database documenting 90 factory departments from across the 54-hectare Sunshine Harvester Works site, and describing the operations, key staff and working conditions in each. Another database documents the hundreds of types of equipment manufactured by the company. To date, nearly 300 products have been described in terms of their technical features, history and significance.

The work being undertaken at Museum Victoria in documenting the factory departments and the equipment manufactured at the Sunshine Harvester Works is an important interpretative resource and links directly to the collections of images, moving footage, illustrated trade literature and farm equipment. In the absence of any significant built heritage this survey is a key avenue to understanding the physical nature of factory life. It describes the work processes, tools and equipment, and the sounds, smells, temperatures, and spatial details within the factory.

This volunteer team is continuing to enhance the collection and is now actively networking across Australia with over 50 ex-employees who are able to assist in providing further material and information about the history and operations of the company. In retracing their own histories and that of the company, these volunteers are enhancing the significance and potential of this collection. They have also been important in maintaining a close the relationship between Museum Victoria and the current company, AGCO, which still holds a considerable amount of valuable heritage material. The McKay volunteer team's expertise has also been fundamental in the development of the Sunshine Harvester website [www.museum.vic.gov.au/sunshine] that was launched in 2001. The website provides the first public insight into the photographic collection and an accessible means for interpreting the McKay story.

Oral and documentary material is being collected by Museum Victoria that covers: the processes of innovation, involvement in export markets, the experience of the Massey Ferguson takeover in 1956, marketing strategies, the migrant experience, industrial relations and the downsizing of the company and its operations, the social life of workers, the diversification of products, and plant improvements and restructures. The diversity of stories and the power of the visual material attracts many users from across Australia and overseas.³⁶ The Sunshine Harvester Works site may have been lost, but the McKay Archives Collection remains through archival records, photographs, publications, motion pictures and volunteers, a vital and living source for interpreting working lives and industrial and farming technology in twentieth-century Australia.

Recovering the Past: Creating Living History from a Living Archive

The archival records of the Sunshine Harvester Works and its successor companies are among the more important records for interpreting work in Australia. Covering almost a century of work, they allow us to follow an enterprise and its workforce from small workshop production through the development of mass production methods. The workforce changed profoundly over this period, from being largely Australian-born and Anglo-Celtic workers to being predominantly migrant and Southern European. Work at the Sunshine plant has been subjected to detailed investigation at a number of critical points: during the 1907 Harvester case, at the 1925 and 1926 arbitration hearings, when the Implement Makers Union sought to establish skilled rates for implement employees and a reduction in working hours, and again in 1927 when the Department of Labour responded to Melbourne Trades Hall Council objections to the employment of women in the metals industry.³⁷ Such hearings, however notable in these cases, are the familiar stuff of labour history. Perhaps the most important source relating to workers at Sunshine is found in the large collection of personnel papers. At the termination of the Harvester Strike of 1911, all returning workers were required to complete a work card detailing their name, age, occupation, length of time in the trade, address, marital status, and places of previous employment. The company subsequently recorded changes of occupation and remuneration within the firm, and any layoffs or dismissals. Records were also kept of illnesses, injuries and war service. With the advent of mass post-war migration the forms recorded the migrant's place of birth, nationality and date of naturalisation. These detailed and carefully maintained personnel cards can be supplemented from other sources. For the years surrounding the Harvester Case —1906–09 — there is also a register of employees; during the 1950s there existed company returns to the Bureau of Statistics giving individual earnings. These records of individual employment are further supplemented by ledgers detailing labour turnover, earnings and hours. Although these employment records throw considerable light on such subjects as labour turnover during the post-war boom and the workings of internal labour markets, they are also an invaluable tool for understanding the experience of post war migration. Locked away in the tens of thousands of employment cards are details of the engagement of migrants with the Melbourne labour market.

The McKay/Massey Ferguson personnel records offer a powerful data source for re-presenting and interpreting working class life. They continually confront the aggregating and generalising social and economic historian with the texture of actual working lives. Consider the example of Martin Douglas Steele.

Employee's Engagement Form of Martin Douglas Steele
University of Melbourne Archives

Born in 1900, Martin Steele like many country lads left his father's farm and in 1923 journeyed to Melbourne and took up a job at the Deer Park explosives factory. His first job lasted only six weeks, for he made his way down Ballarat Road to the Sunshine Harvester Works where he started as a labourer. H.V. McKay, intent on turning his works into a modern manufacturing enterprise, was equipping his factory with modern machine tools that could be operated by men trained on the job. Steele took advantage of the chance to 'up-skill' and within a year of joining the Sunshine harvester plant he was working as a machine moulder, turning out the thousands of metal parts used to make headers and other mass-produced machines. Yet this work was seasonal and after seasonal rushes Steele returned to unskilled labouring at Sunshine. For most of the 1920s he experienced steady work, but like thousands of other workmen he was laid off due to slackness of trade in December 1930 and was not re-employed until October 1932. From then on, Steele's employment was steady and he experienced only minor periods of unemployment; both in 1946, caused by a brief bout of illness and a minor layoff during the metal workers' strike. When he retired in 1965, Steele was a leading hand moulder. The evidence of Martin Steele's working life poses many questions. After a brief period of insecure employment and despite long-term unemployment in the 1930s, Steele worked for the same firm for almost 40 years. Do historians focus overmuch on the colourful events such as depressions and strikes? Steele experienced both of these, but viewed over the long term his working life was one of steady work and modest mobility. As a leading hand during the 1950s and 1960s, Steele would have supervised migrant workers. The Sunshine records also allow us to the follow the careers of those who were then termed 'new Australians' and to ask questions about their work experience. Did they earn less than the Australian-born or hold their jobs for shorter periods? Was there differential labour turnover, based on birthplace? Preliminary research results suggest that the answers to both these questions are negative. Finally, Steele's personnel card shows that he remained a resident of the inner suburbs as late as 1965. In this he was atypical since the evidence from the employment cards suggests in general a geographically more mobile workforce. In the 1950s and 1960s, the workers at Sunshine appear to have been exchanging their pushbikes and railway tickets for automobiles. They abandoned Melbourne's inner suburbs and moved into the new western suburbs — St Albans, West Sunshine and Deer Park. McKay's tightly knit corporate town of the 1910 and 1920s was dissolving in the great post-war Melbourne sprawl.

The Sunshine archives also include an unparalleled photographic collection. From the late nineteenth century, implement making was a highly competitive industry, and early manufacturers knew the value of advertising. H.V. McKay from at least the time of his removal to Sunshine produced an extensive range of advertising pamphlets to illustrate his products and the modern machinery employed to make them, extolling to farmers the superiority of Sunshine machines and production methods over those of rival firms. The firm eventually directly employed artists, photographers and printers. Photography served more than just advertising purposes, many thousands of photos being stored in 'Guard Books', and these volumes were preserved as a permanent record of the machinery they purchased and the machines they produced. Work processes and production machines described in written accounts of the factory, such as arbitration transcripts, can be cross-referenced with these photographic records.³⁸

Miss Paulett, Mrs Robertson and Mrs Green Examine Partly-Processed Components in the Engine Works, 1950
Source: Museum of Victoria

Labour management processes are also recorded in photographs. From the 1940s the firm published the house journal Sunshine Review. In its pages management instructed employees on new company initiatives. Thus, the revival of formal apprenticeship training in the 1940s was proudly written up, and an article called on old employees to look after 'New Australians'. Both articles were illustrated. The report of the attempt to form a works council in the tight labour market of the 1940s was illustrated with photographs of the elected members. Finally, the journal printed work biographies of long-serving employees and published a great deal of social news about individuals and work force teams.³⁹

Surely, few Australian workplaces were photographed as extensively as Sunshine, and almost none have left us with moving images of the work process. For the Sunshine plant a number of advertising films exist from the 1920s through to the 1950s, detailing work in the factory and its products. Three stand out —Harvesting the Golden Grain (1929), Nation Builders (1944), and Sunshine the Harvest Works Presents 70 Years (1954). Harvesting the Golden Grain, produced as part of the patriotic 'Buy Australia' campaign, was a silent film, and the captions describing the workplace are sparse. However, the film was made shortly after two arbitration hearings and an investigation into the employment of women at the works. These hearings and investigations described in considerable detail the introduction of mass production methods, and the methods are clearly evident in the motion picture. Stills from this film, show a metal press and metal shaving machine. Both machines would have been operated by men recruited as unskilled labourers and trained on the job. The same film allows us to illustrate the modern electric crane introduced to expedite the movement of machinery and products through the works, and the paint dip which sped up the work of brushmen.

Working at the Paint Dip, 1929
From Harvesting the Golden Grain, Museum Victoria

Missing from these stills, but clearly evident in the moving film, is the impression of men and women working at great pace to maximise their piecework earnings. The moving images of women in the same film are especially significant. Taken when the matter of women in the metal trades was still a contentious issue, the film made great efforts to illustrate women enjoying their work, in clean hygienic conditions. Harvesting the Golden Grain may be contrasted with the promotional film Nation Builders, which captured the factory in 1944, and was shown extensively in suburban and country cinemas across Australia. The 1954 promotional film, Sunshine the Harvest Works Presents 70 Years, reflects the changed labour market. Employees are shown at a company picnic, as well as at the workbench, and the film ends by issuing a call for labour and noting the availability of trains from central Melbourne.⁴⁰

In addition to these visual riches, the archives contains a series of factory floor plans, complied at regular intervals from the time McKay moved from Ballarat to Sunshine in 1906, continuing up to the 1950s. These very detailed plans record the major departments of the factory and any additions to the production and administrative processes. They allow an appreciation of the evolution of the factory from a blacksmiths' shop, a fitting and turning shop and a wood mill to a factory covering almost 17 hectares. Linked to the employment cards, these plans permit the historian to place individual workers in the overall production process; linked to pictorial materials, the plans are central to our understanding of the photographs and motion films.⁴¹

Making Nuts and Bolts 1929
From Harvesting the Golden Grain, Museum Victoria

Conclusion

Early in the twentieth-first century, the Sunshine Harvester site reflects the great structural changes that have occurred in employment in Australia since the early 1980s. Thirty years ago manufacturing was the backbone of employment in the western suburbs. Work was often dirty and monotonous but there was scope for skilled and semiskilled work. Through piece work and overtime, workingmen and women could take home earnings well above award wages. By the 1960s unions were an integral part of the workplace; they were recognised by management, and employees were encouraged to join a union. Labour turnover was high but long term work was available. The sprawling Sunshine Harvester Works was a symbol of the industrialisation of Melbourne. Today Sunshine and its adjacent suburbs are characterised by high levels of unemployment and the employment growth that has occurred has been in the service industries. The Sunshine site has been turned into a shopping mall, a symbol of post industrial Australia. The new workers are in the main casual shop assistants. The site also caters for the unemployed who can idle their time away in the mall or spend their meager welfare benefits at the Multiplex Cinema on the site. The only remnant of the once mighty industrial complex is the empty bulkstore, grudgingly maintained and stabilized by the developer. Yet the Sunshine Harvester Works remains a key site for interpreting Australian working class life. Through its pictorial, motion picture and documentary collection historians and museum curators have a unique resource for interpreting working life. And the McKay volunteers at Museum Victoria provide a direct link to Melbourne's industrial past.

The Sunshine Harvester Works site has suffered from a heritage process that separated the assessment of built heritage from the needs and potential of interpretation. The failure to retain any evocative and meaningful elements of the Sunshine Harvester Works site has undermined the possibilities for engaging the broader public with the vital place of Sunshine in the industrial history of Australia. However, it is significant that despite this a separate and informal rescue effort by a few employees with vision has ensured that this important aspect of Australian history has been saved. This vast and varied documentary, visual, oral and material culture collection is now the cornerstone to the resurrection of the Sunshine Harvester Works.

Endnotes

^*� We would like to thank the anonymous referees of our first draft for their helpful criticism and encouragement. The advice of David Moloney, National Trust (Victoria) Conservation Officer, has been most helpful. Views expressed in this article are, of course, our own.

^1.�Commonwealth Arbitration Reports, (hereafter CAR), vol. 2, 1907, p. 3.

^2.�Ibid., p. 4.

^3.� Feminist historians, of course, tend to lament the family wage concept enshrined in Higgins's Harvester Judgment, which consigned women to a dependant status, made explicit in Higgins's judgment in the fruit pickers case of 1912.

^4.�Ibid., p.17.

^5.� CAR, vol 2, p 15. For his attitude to improvers in the engineers' case see CAR 15 p. 325.

^6.� For competition in the implements industry see Ian Mclean, Rural Outputs, Inputs and Mechanization in Victoria, PhD thesis, Australian National University 1971, pp. 352–363. For wages in the implement industry see Hugh Lennon, Records Melbourne University Archives (MUA) and H.V. McKay Sunshine Harvester Records, Wage Book, 1906–1909. The structure of the implement industry in the early twentieth century was covered extensively in two investigations by the Commonwealth Parliament. See 'Reports of the Fiscal Inquiry Commission', Commonwealth of Australia Parliamentary Papers, 1906 vol 5, part 1, and 'Report from the Royal Commission on Stripper Harvesters and Drills', Commonwealth of Australia Parliamentary Papers, 1909, vol. 2. For the nineteenth century industry see T.G. Parsons, Some aspects of the Development of Manufacturing in Melbourne, PhD, Monash University 1970, especially pp. 372–415.

^7.� Charles Fahey and John Lack, '"A Kind of Elysium Where Nobody has Anything Difficult to Do": H.B. Higgins, H.V. McKay and the Agricultural Implement Makers, 1901–1926', Labour History, no. 80, May 2001, pp. 99–120.

^8.� We have dealt with this phase of the company in Charles Fahey and John Lack, 'We have to train men from labourers': The Agricultural Implement Trade 1918–1945, The Journal of Industrial Relations, vol. 42, no. 4, December 2000, pp. 551–572.

^9.� See Colin Forster, Industrial Development in Australia, 1920–1930, Australian National University Press, 1964, pp. 19–20.

^10.� For changes in personnel practices in the post-war period see Christopher Wright, The Management of Labour: A History of Australian Employers, Oxford University Press, Melbourne 1995. McKay's son, Cecil, began work experience at Sunshine as a 'clockie': see John Lack, 'Cecil Newton McKay (1899–1968)', Australian Dictionary of Biography vol. 15.

^11.� For the management philosophy at Sunshine see transcript of 'McKay Industry Award', Australian Archives series B1958, 1926/148, Box 13, in particular pp. 337–86 and pp. 424–510 for the evidence of Ralph McKay and Sam McKay. See also Company Minutes, MUA.

^12.� This description of the firm in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s is based on unpublished company minutes and accounts held by Melbourne University Archives. When we examined these volumes they did not have archival reference numbers.

^13.� We are currently working on the 1950s and 1960s and can provide interested readers with an unpublished paper: Charles Fahey and John Lack, 'When labour was king: a case study of the recruitment and retention of labour in a Melbourne manufacturing enterprise, 1946–1960'.

^14.� Peter Milner, 'Researching Industrial Sites', in Celestina Sagazio (ed.), The National Trust Research Manual: Investigating Buildings, Gardens and Cultural Landscapes, Allen & Unwin 1992, p. 90. The situation appears to have altered little in the ensuing decade, and the Australian literature on approaches to industrial heritage continues sparse. An updated edition of the Trust's Research Manual is currently with the printers. Ivar Nelsen, Manager, Public Land Management — Historic Places, Department of Sustainability and Environment, is preparing a statement 'Creative Re-use of Industrial/Engineering Heritage' for Heritage Victoria's Industrial/Engineering Advisory Committee.

^15.� This brief list hardly exhausts the problems. See further Milner in Sagazio, ibid., pp. 90–93.

^16.� Here and in what follows we draw upon David Moloney and the [National Trust Victoria] Industrial History Committee, 'Industrial History', Trust News, December 1999, pp. 19–23.

^17.� Ian Walters, City Planner, City of Sunshine, to Hon. Jim Kennan, Minister for Planning and Environment, 24 December 1986, reiterating the recommendations contained in the Structure Plan prepared in October 1985 and endorsed by Sunshine Council: Heritage Victoria, File 600500, Part 1 [in Box 7617], 'Heritage/Massey Ferguson Complex/Devonshire Rd Sunshine'. Unless otherwise stated, all further quotations from correspondence have been taken from this file.

^18.� David Dunstan, quoting Premier Cain's words in1983: 'Heritage Conservation and Museum Development in Melbourne's Western Suburbs in the 1980s', Victorian Historical Journal, vol. 1, nos. 2 & 3, August 1990, p. 215.

^19.�Ibid.

^20.� With the notable exception of the oral history of workers at the Angliss meatworks, The Lifeblood of Footscray (1986), with interviews also available on cassette (1985). Participant Chris Healy later set down his views of the experience and of the politics of the Museum in 'Working for the Living Museum of the West', in John Rickard and Peter Spearritt, eds, Packaging the Past? Public Histories, special issue of Australian Historical Studies, vol. 24, no. 96, April 1991, pp 153–167.

^21.� Olwen Ford, Director, Living Museum of the West, to Roger Holloway, manager Western Suburbs Area, Ministry for Planning and Environment, 13 September 1985, enclosing the Museum's proposal for the study.

^22.� Jenny Mitchell, Assistant Director, Living Museum of the West, to Ian Walters, Sunshine City Council, 29 November 1985.

^23.� Boyce Pizzey, manager, Heritage Branch, to Ian Walters, Sunshine City Planning Department, 7 March 1986.

^24.� Walters to the regional manager, Ministry for Planning and Environment, 5 June 1986; Hersfield Developments Corporation Pty Ltd to the Ministry for Planning and Environment, 29 October 1986.

^25.� Ian Walters to the Director, Living Museum of the West, November 1986.

^26.� Douglas Hill, Administrator, National Trust of Australia (Victoria) to Boyce Pizzey, manager, Heritage Branch, 3 December 1986.

^27.�Age, 21 January 1987: (Business Age) 'History could shadow Sunshine development'.

^28.� R.E. Parsons, President, Sunshine and District Historical Society reply to the Heritage Branch. 31 March 1987.

^29.� 'Written Submission' received by Fax by the HBC on 5 March 1987.

^30.� Olwen Ford, 'On Missing the Point', Victorian Historical Journal, vol. 61, no. 4, December 1990, p. 303. This, the Director's response to criticism of her Museum in the previous issue of the Victorian Historical Journal, offers a revealing insight into the Living Museum mindset. The editor of the Victorian Historical Journal declined to publish John Lack's response.

^31.� See the range of suggestions made in Melbourne's Living Museum of the West Incorporated, Massey-Ferguson Site Study Stage 2 Report January 1987, pp. 147–52.

^32.� The Charter adopted by Australia ICOMOS on 19 August 1979 at Burra Burra (the 'Burra Charter') stressed conservation of places to retain cultural significance, preservation and maintenance of the fabric, contents and setting. Restoration and reconstruction were not to be confused with recreation or conjectural reconstruction, which were outside the scope of the Charter. Needless to say, activities subsequent to destruction, like the Living Museum of the West's 'commemoration' and 'interpretation', especially when offered as an acceptable alternative to conservation, preservation and maintenance, were, and remain, anathema to Australia ICOMOS. See Peter Marquis-Kyle and Meredith Walker, The Illustrated Burra Charter: Making good decisions about the care of important places: Australia ICOMOS, Australian Heritage Commission, 1992 (reprinted 1996).

^33.� For the fate of the site see Heritage Victoria File 600500, Part 1 [in Box 7617].

^34.� John Lack, 'The Legend of H.V. McKay', Victorian Historical Journal, vol. 61, nos. 2 & 3, August 1990, pp. 124–57.

^35.� Ken Porter, interviewed by Liza Dale (now Liza Dale-Hallett), Museum Victoria, 2002.

^36.� Users include: designers, TV, print and radio media, universities, students, family historians, artists, architects, museums, and restorers of heritage artefacts. Recent requests for use have included: correspondence from a descendant of the McKay team that went to Argentina in 1906; a historian of Rolls Royce in England pursuing information about H.V. McKay's cars; the ABC-TV and ABC-radio using moving footage for the Federation documentary in 2001, and a sculptor employing Sunshine equipment as reference material for an art installation.

^37.� The main collection of papers relating to the Sunshine Harvester Works is held in University of Melbourne Archives. Copies of arbitration transcripts are held in the Massey Ferguson Collection, Boxes 13 and 16.

^38.� The photographic collection is held by Museum Victoria.

^39.�Sunshine Review, No. 7, December 1949 and No. 6, September 1949. Copies of Sunshine Revieware held by Museum Victoria.

^40.� For women in the factory during the 1920s see Australian Metal Workers Union Records, Noel Butlin Archives Centre, Australian National University, Z102, box 282. The commissioning of films was discussed in company minutes see for example Company Minutes, 9 January 1946, MUA.

^41.� Factory Plans 1904–1953, Museum Victoria.

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