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John has a brief post on the Snowy Mountains Scheme - as with some recent posts here, part historical-, part biographic-archival, those intersections of intimate, political, cultural … that strain against the definition of each of these as discretely lived experiences and analytical categories. The Snowy Mountains Scheme not only signaled, as John points out, the emergence of multiculturalism in Australia, but also industrialisation - a shift from mining and agriculture to manufacturing, or at least its infrastructural precondition, electricity. Industralisation and multiculturalism are, in this instance, inseperable, and both shaped the sensibilities of Melbourne more than any other city in Australia.

This indicated a very particular nexus of corporativism, progressivism and technology that would simultaneously unfold toward, and be recalibrated by, the wildcat strike by mostly migrant workers at the Ford plant in Broadmeadows in 1973. On May 18th, 1973, as this article outlines,

4000 workers spontaneously voted to start striking then and there. When the leadership attempted to steer workers away from this course of action scuffles and fights broke out between workers and union marshals. Left with no choice the union was forced to endorse the strike in the hope that things in time would simmer down.

The strike went on until early June, when union officials called for a return to work, only to have to be rushed from the stage before they got bashed by the rank and file. Things escalated from there:

On the next day, Monday June 13th, things really took off. From 7-30am around 1000 workers, mainly from the assembly plant, began to meet at the work gate to hassle out management and anyone returning to work. Workers chanted in various languages “Don’t Work” to those inside and attempted to block entrances. When the few police present tried to snatch a popular shop steward the crowd surged forward bringing a seven foot wall crashing down. A fire hose was then turned on some staff and office equipment, including an early computer, before workers invaded the plant. Cars belonging to management were smashed and offices trashed.

By 10 am over 100 police had moved in and secured the small area where the wall had been knocked down. There was little more they could do since, hopelessly outnumbered, they were repelled over and over by a shower of bricks and bottles. In the meantime strikers continued to wreck property attempting to tear down a ten foot wire fence and hijacking a fruit truck before hurling fruit, carrots and tomatoes at the police.

The feeling on site was one of jubilation, as Marks described, “They were enjoying themselves, demonstrating that they were free- a celebration of defiance!” One worker was seen dancing around crying out “We must smash Ford!” At 4-15 pm Ford decided to close the plant for the foreseeable future and locked out the few workers who had chosen to remain on the job. With the factory forced to a standstill and $10 000 damage done the strikers declared victory and dispersed. Remarkably no one had been arrested. Later that night millions around Australia watched dumbfounded at the TV news replayed the scenes of carnage.

While I recall watching the news, I don’t remember it as carnage - or perhaps this is why I enjoy zombie films quite so. I remember people in the neighbourhood, kids at school, with wide, mischievous grins that day and for some time to come.

Australia’s industrialisation, unlike that which occurred in the US, didn’t occur until after WWII. By the early 1970s, the critical element of Fordism - ie, the humanisation of the male line-worker (founded upon the unpaid domestic labour of women) - had seriously unraveled due to speed-ups and a decreasing wage (since local Ford workers were increasingly not anglo and so relegated to a percentage), all with the support or acquiescence of a predominantly anglo, governmentalised trade union ‘movement’.

And, because of that percentage, very few women of a certain strata did not also work in factories, if in textile and footwear rather than car production, and with a very similar experience of unions as extensions of factory discipline.

The Ford Strike in Broadmedows, of course, occurred at the same time as the emergence of the Sharps. And, just as I was nurturing a fascination with them, my parents were sending me to deliver food to neighbours who were on strike. These are dim, but obviously constitutive, recollections.

In any case, this was my early and simple experience of the complexities of racism, line-production, the ‘family wage’ and trade unionism tightening around and pulling against eachother in a brief, but most urgent, of moments.

For those unfamiliar with the reference in the title of the post, Lenin - paying homage to Henry Ford and line-production - remarked somewhere that, for him, communism meant ‘Socialism Plus Electrification’. So, while the Yalta Agreement had already served to cleave European communists (and hence many of those who would end up working at Ford) from official communist parties, the experience of the Ford strike proliferated and recharged all these tensions across the local conjunctures of multiculturalism, trade unionism and a grid-patterned city.