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| Skills that sustained wage earners in once-thriving manufacturing industries are now of little use in more recent economic conditions on Victoria's basalt plain. |
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| Digital composite created by Csaba Szamosy for Imagine The Future Inc, 1996, from photographs by Mike Martin (Victoria University), Carmen Stewart (ITF) and Merrill Findlay (ITF), with historic images contributed by Melbourne's Living Museum of the West. |
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| A worker in a munitions factory during World War II. Many women entered the paid workforce during the war years but lost their jobs and their economic independence when the men returned from overseas service. |
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| Photo contributed by Melbourne's Living Museum of the West. Photographer unknown. |
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Before Victoria's basalt plain was colonised by Europeans, the first peoples provided for all their material and non-material needs in ways that integrated their productive activity with all other dimensions of their lives, including their spirituality.
They did not exchange goods or labour for money, but had their own sophisticated economic systems in which the concepts of 'work' and 'non-work' were unknown. These two concepts, however, are central to the way non-indigenous societies have organised their lives on the plain over the last two hundred years or more.
Nineteenth-century migrants of European descent inherited a rich working-class tradition which has been vigorously expressed in work places and trade unions all over the plain. Working life has changed radically since the mid-nineteenth century, especially since women's labour has been more fully acknowledged and affirmed in law, and since many manual jobs have been automated, or transferred overseas where labour costs are lower.
Like workers all over the industrialised world, people on Victoria's basalt plain are now adjusting to the profound changes associated with 'restructuring', globalisation, deregulation, and information technologies. 'Blue collar' workers in the traditional working-class suburbs of western Melbourne and Geelong have felt the impact of these changes more than many other groups. In a number of suburbs, including Footscray and Sunshine, up to 60% of children were living below the Australian poverty line in the final years of the twentieth century. People in regional towns are also suffering as local economies contract and unemployment levels increase. Most new jobs on the plain are in the service and information sectors, rather than in traditional manufacturing industries.
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| Workers in one of the many clothing factories that once employed hundreds of people in Melbourne's West and in Geelong. |
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| Photo contributed by Melbourne's Living Museum of the West. Date and photographer unknown. |
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While federal and state governments have been slow to respond to the needs of regional centres, and indeed, have often exacerbated the economic decline, many local communities are themselves recognising the need for change, and are finding creative ways of re-inventing themselves so they can prosper in a post-industrial world.
What are your stories about working (or not working) on Victoria's basalt plain? And how do you define 'work'?
Copyright Imagine The Future Inc 2002.
Text by Merrill Findlay.
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