Building jobs

As a student in the 50's and early 60's, I often supplemented my meager income by working as a labourer in the holidays. I was fit and strong, which was useful. Back then, there was practically full employment, so the approx. 1\% unemployed reflected (in my opinion) the constant level of the unemployable, which still holds today. When it goes up, politicians like to pretend that they are all lazy and need prodding into getting jobs, which at such times don't exist, but it's convenient for the politicians, so that they don't have to grant unemplyment benefits. I think it was Frazer who popularised the phrase "dole bludgers". At that time, if I wanted a job, all I had to do was to get up very early, like 5 am, buy a newspaper to look for vacancies, and go to the nearest site. Usually I was the first there or one of the first, and got a job.

At this one, I was one of about four, not the first to arrive, on a cold winter morning. We sat around a fire, and one of the blokes looked at the partially demolished house, and remarked ``Demo job''. We agreed. Another one commented, that the boss didn't fucking know what he's doin, they were demolishing from the bottom, instead of from the top. When the boss arrived later we were all taken on. I got given a crow bar and told to remove pipes and other fittings inside the house, which was fun work. I did this on and off for a couple of weeks. It got to me; one night, at Sandy's parents' place, I was idly looking at wall fittings in their lounge room, and thinking how I would attack them with my crow bar. I didn't have it with me, so the fittings were safe.

At about 11 am, one of the blokes burst out ``I've fuckn had this!'' and went to the boss and resigned. He got his pay for the hours he had worked and left. One of the others smirked and told us that that's all he wanted, enough money to go and buy drinks for the day, bloody derelict.

Another job we got put to was cleaning bricks. They had mortar still on them and we got given tomahawks to clean them with, a pleasant and rewarding job. One the blokes had his own, that he had prepared really well. He had sawn or ground a slit in the cutting edge of a tomahawk and inserted a reactangle cut out of a saw blade in that, so he had a very nifty tool for scraping off the mortar. I envied him this lovely tool.

We stacked the cleaned bricks, and later put them up on a truck, throwing them up to the bloke on top of it. We got given leather gloves for this. One of the old blokes told us that in the old days they never got gloves for this, and the bricks wore away the skin on the fingers, making what he called birds' eyes on the finger tips, a drop of blood. This same bloke got a rip in his shirt, and said, ``Aw shit, me missus will go crook at me!''. Nice old bugger.

A memorable couple of weeks' work.

One job I got was on top of the bottom level of a building under construction. We had to receive wheel barrows filled with concrete coming up to us on a lift, and we had to wheel it along planks and pour it out. This was fairly hard for lightweight me, even though I was pretty strong, and it was touch and go not to tip the barrow on the way. One of the other blokes was a short stocky Maori, who revelled in his strength. At one time he called to the people filling his wheelbarrow down below, ``Fill mine right up!''. This was what I didn't want for mine. I learned a Maori word from him. He saw a woman some distance away, and called out to us ''Tekeh!'' which I understood to mean a woman's very private body part.

Another job I got was at Rose Bay, where they were starting on a large multistory building. I was in on the foundation part, again wheelbarrowing concrete until late the first day. The building was built up from a level quite a lot lower than the road next to it, and I got the job of carrying some railway sleepers that were stacked up on the foot path at the top. I was paired with a strong young bloke, short and wide, and we took one end each down the stairs. This took a couple of hours and the time went quickly. Meanwhile, down at the foundation, other blokes were cleaning rocks and other stuff from between reo (reinforcement) mesh, which was an irritating and boring job, standing inside a calf-high reo mesh, bending over to pick up the bits. We felt lucky. Later, I got paired with another bloke, moving the sleepers from one place to another. This bloke had worked in an office before and couldn't even lift up his end of the sleepers, and I had to pick them up, put them on my shoulder, so that he could get his shoulder under one end. Pathetic, I thought.

One lunch time, we were sitting eating with the bosses, and I heard one of them tell the other, that there had been some blokes looking for a job. They were uni students, he said, and he sent them off quick smart. I didn't say anything. Some days later, he suggested that they get me trained as a crane chaser (the bloke who hooks up and unhooks stuff to be hoisted by the crane) commenting ``We'll make a good labourer out of you, Pete'' (they couldn't handle Dieter and called me that instead). I had to admit that was a uni student, but by then this didn't matter any more.

This same boss, at another lunch break, commented on a team of Finns who were building extensive form work for more concreting, ``There they go, jabbering away in their own lingo, but they seem to get on alright''. Funny. He was not a bad bloke, despite his various prejudices.

I went back to the same site a year later, and it was now a raw building, with different jobs to do. The blokes didn't work very hard, especially if the bosses weren't in sight. I noticed that, like the Maori, a lot of them were quite obsessed with the mere sight of women nearby, staring at them. Anyway, one day the boss gave me some job, and I finished it quickly. I went to him in his office and told him I was finished. He got a bit flustered, not expecting this so soon. He looked around him, and after some seconds he said ``This office is a mess. Tidy it up a bit'', which I did. After that it was knock-off time.

At this job, which was in a hot summer, I learned to appreciate a cold beer afterwards, drinking a whole schooner. But only on hot days. Normally I don't like it so cold.

Steelworks

When I started studying, the first summer holidays I stayed at home at Oak Flats and wanted a job. Papa took me with him to the Port Kembla Steel Works where he worked and I got an interview with one of his supervisors. He got me a job in the rolling mill, telling me to work well and not give him a bad name. The milling started at one end of a big hall, where thick steel billets (from memory, about 15 cm square and 5 m long) were heated to red heat and sent through a set of rollers, set to the desired cross section. This might be 2" rounds, or flat strips etc. They were sent down the hall to be cut up at powerful shears, and on to be bundled up with wires. The shearing was controlled by young blokes operating the gears, where the steel bars were stopped, cut and released to the bundling bays. That's where I worked, leaning over bundles of hot bars and bundling them with wires. These were about a metre long, doubled up, and we had to push them under the bars, bend them around and twist them together with a bundling pin. Hot work - the thicker sections came down to us still glowing red. I worked there for 2-3 months several years, and every time lost a fair few kilos.

We all had a break when they changed the rollers to a new cross section, which might take a few hours, or a whole shift. We had to keep working of course but some hid in various places, and the supervisors found them, but they had trouble finding work for us to do. The usual thing was to prepare a lot of wires, which came in large rolls and had to be cut into lengths and straightened out into the lengths we used, so we had a good supply when the mills started again.

I also got a go at the gears, which needed a bit of skill, which I learned - stop the bars, throw the toggle that activated the shears, open the gate to let the bars move on, close the gate for the next lot.

There were some interesting characters working there. I got friendly with a young Elvis fan. He was also a police suspect because he favoured "carno" - sex with under age girls. He was hated by an old Scot whom we called Scottie, which he hated. This old bloke loved opera and went to Sydney frequently to attend these. My friend one day, to Scottie's (and us others') surprise, burst out with an aria out of some opera, with a competent tenor voice, and he knew the words. There was also a New Zealander called, of course, Kiwi. He was not Maori, but frequently demonstrated the Haka. Come on Kiwi, give us a Haka, and he was usually willing to do it.

As with the later building job, the work was strenuous and hot but easy to do well. Most of the blokes tried to avoid work but I just did my job and was therefore one the best workers there, and when I applied at the employment office next holiday, they remembered me and I got the job again every time. But one day I was put to help the single bloke at the front end. He had to send the big billets into the ovens and let them out again hot to push into the mills. This bloke worked like a demon, the whole shift. No lagging for him.