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BOOK REVIEW
| Richard G. Hartley, River of Steel: A History of the Western Australian Goldfields and Agricultural Water Supply, Access Press, Bassendean, WA, 2007. pp. 522. $45.95 paper.
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The year 2003 marked the centenary of one of the world's greatest engineering feats: the construction of a water pipeline from Mundaring Weir in the hills east of Perth to the Eastern Goldfields centres of Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie. The statistics are impressive. The scheme to carry water to the arid Goldfields involved building at Mundaring what was then the highest dam in the southern hemisphere; constructing the world's first major steel pipeline and creating 'by far the longest water supply pipeline in the world' – the latter a feat which apparently has only recently been surpassed. In the words of its historian (Introduction),
In terms of technological innovation the Goldfields pipeline was the equivalent of I.K. Brunel's ship The Great Britain, the world's first iron ship, or of the Firth of Forth railway bridge in Scotland, which was the world's first large bridge to be built of steel.
All this was achieved against the background of a gold boom that had seen Western Australia's population rise from around 50,000 in 1890 to 300,000 in 1910. Add to this, the scandals surrounding the project, which resulted in the Chief Engineer, C.Y. O'Connor, taking his own life before the scheme was completed, and you would expect to find a fascinating story. |
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While The River of Steel is painstakingly researched and technically accurate as far as this reviewer is able to judge, Hartley's engineering background has prevailed and what we have is very much an engineer's account of the Scheme. Much of the social history is disappointingly confined to text boxes holding excerpts from interviews undertaken over several years in a massive oral history program, but there are some interesting glimpses into the lives of the people who kept this massive enterprise functioning. |
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A series of pumping stations was built along the pipeline, each staffed by an engineer-in-charge and small work force. Many of these men were married and some had children. Providing adequate housing for families and an education for these children are some of the issues discussed (pp. 194–99). While the pumping stations were little communities in their own right, the more itinerant workers, such as the 'length runners' whose job was to inspect and maintain sections of the pipe, faced many hardships and appalling working conditions. Hartley writes (p. 154):
Length runners fared little better than the maintenance gangs as far as accommodation and working conditions were concerned. Each length to be patrolled was between seven and ten miles and initially was covered by one man only. It must have been a lonely life. Often camping in the centre of his section the length runner cycled one way in the morning and the other way in the afternoon, probably meeting both the neighbouring patrols to boil a billy.
The cycling length runners operated until the 1960s, being replaced by 'fully motorised' maintenance men who, by the 1980s, had vehicles equipped with electric welders and radios so that they could quickly gain assistance in the case of a bad break (p. 438). |
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Originally, the pipeline was buried and leaks were usually spotted when pressurised water spouted to the surface. This meant a great deal of digging before the pipe was uncovered and in winter the workers were forced to work half submerged in freezing water. As length runner Harry Jordan commented, 'We must have been bloody tough in those days' (p. 153). Yet, the only mention of militant trade union activity in the entire book concerns a dispute about daily pay rates that resulted in a strike on the weir site in 1898. There is also a reference to pumping station engineers belonging to the Amalgamated Engineering Union, but that membership was 'voluntary' (p. 270). Many of the workers along the pipeline would have fallen within the catch all of the Australian Workers Union, which covered rural workers, labourers, miners and many others. |
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The workforce was, as to be expected, a totally male one, with the exception of typists (p. 309) – even the clerks were men. Women's voices, therefore, are limited to the wives and children of the workers and those who came into contact with them, such as the teachers who taught at the Pumping Station schools. A highlight for this reader was the story of the romance between one young teacher, Frank Kingston, and the daughter of William Stump, the engineer-in-charge at Yerbillon Station in 1915 (pp. 197–99). Kingston had ingeniously got around the problem of a difficult parent by appointing the oldest Stump daughter as a sewing mistress at the school, and from there a romance blossomed that survived Kingston's period in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) during the First World War. |
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There is a brief mention, too, of Indigenous workers on the pipeline. Hartley points to the scarcity of information about Indigenous people in the reminiscences of those interviewed for the history, but mentions Indigenous children attending the school at Gilgai Pumping Station, and the presence of Indigenous men in construction gangs from the 1960s. Prior to this, their presence appears to have been limited to work as camel handlers on some of the camel teams, including a photograph on p. 303, showing a man whose appearance is Indigenous, holding a camel whip. One of the most interesting chapters, the raising of the height of the Mundaring Weir after World War II, with labour provided largely by European refugees, is discussed in chapter 8, with detailed diagrams of the process by which the old wall and the new wall were bonded together. |
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Unfortunately, although the book is of good appearance and printed on high quality paper (which contributes to its weight), it has been poorly edited. In chapter one, alone, there are: factual errors such as 5,500 convicts sent to Western Australia (p. 1) when the number was close to 10,000; two different figures for the steel tonnage (70,000 in the Introduction and 76,000 on p. 21); numerous typographical errors, ('aretesia' instead of 'artesian' on p. 4; 'pose' instead of 'posed' one p. 6), and question marks left in the text, instead of a page number (p. 24). |
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In summary, engineers and others who are interested in construction techniques, processes and statistics will enjoy this book, but social and labour historians will find less of interest to them. |
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| Curtin University |
BOBBIE OLIVER | |
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