‘FORGING, AHEAD’: INDUSTRY AND ENVIRONMENTAL TRANSFORMATION IN A MELBOURNE SUBURB 1906–85

‘FORGING, AHEAD’: INDUSTRY ANDENVIRONMENTAL TRANSFORMATION IN

A MELBOURNE SUBURB 1906–85

By Dan MorrowUniversity of Otago

The trajectory of the suburb Sunshine in Western Melbourne (1906–85), from industrial powerhouse to repository of social problems,sheds light on the issues surrounding organic urban expansion. Forthe many Australians living on the fringes of large cities, a sense ofdeprivation – particularly inequality in services – undercut the pre-sumed comfort and stability of the post-war period. Unrest in outerareas deepened following the contraction of the ‘long boom’. Thearea’s pre-Second World War origins as a manufacturing suburbregulated by the industrialist Hugh V. McKay is starkly contrastedwith its later incarnation as a site of industrial and suburban sprawl.aehr_347 148..166

JEL categories: N60, N67, N97

Keywords: Australian, environment, industry, suburb

INTRODUCTION

This article explores the transformations that two distinct phases of urban-industrial expansion wrought upon Sunshine, on the outskirts of Melbourne,Australia’s second largest city. It examines the effects of manufacturing-drivensuburban growth on a single city suburb before and after the Second World Warand concludes that the unprecedented social comfort and stability widely associ-ated with mid-twentieth-century ‘full employment society’ proved chimerical forAustralians living on the under-serviced peripheries of capital cities.1 Many of themodest gains workers did make from stable employment during these years wouldbe revoked after 1970 by recession and economic restructuring. The erosion of

1 See Hudson, 1951–72, p. 504; White, Inventing Australia, pp. 163–5; Brown, Governing Prosperity,pp. 87–123; Bolton, (1996), pp. 228–9; Murphy, Imagining the Fifties, pp. 1–15.

Australian Economic History Review, Vol. 52, No. 2 July 2012ISSN 0004-8992 doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8446.2012.00347.x

bs_bs_banner

148 © 2012 The AuthorAustralian Economic History Review © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty Ltd and the Economic History

Society of Australia and New Zealand

Australian secondary industries, hastened by progressive dismantling of tariffprotection in the 1980s, fuelled resentment of a long-term spatial inequity stem-ming from the unmanaged growth of working class suburbs during the post-Second World War period.

In his study of Elizabeth, a planned industrial town that was built and regulatedby the South Australian Housing Trust, Mark Peel has shown how a progressiveurban development scheme faltered following the contraction of affiliated second-ary industries that had nourished its expansion.2 While Peel convincingly dem-onstrated the limitations of contemporary comprehensive planning approaches, itis important to remember that Elizabeth and other model towns were far fromtypical. A near complete absence of planning marred the lives of the far greaternumber of Australians living in post-war industrial suburbs similar to Sunshineand its surrounds, many of which lacked basic urban services well into the 1970s.These areas, heavily populated by do-it-yourself builders and tenants of hastilyerected public housing estates, ballooned across the edges of Australian citiesduring the post-war ‘long boom’.

The failure of organic suburbs to adapt to social developments arising from therapid growth of manufacturing industries during this period is particularly high-lighted by the trajectory of Sunshine because of its distinctive origins. A pre-SecondWorld War ‘company town’ initially, overseen by the manufacturer Hugh V.McKay and his firm Sunshine Harvester, its history provides a revealing counter-point to the later phase of laissez-faire suburban sprawl. To comprehend thecontinuities and breaks with the past involved in this transition, it is crucial to firstexplore how Sunshine’s locally distinctive origins precipitated its emergence as anindustrial-suburban harbinger in the post-war era. While the town’s relativelyorderly development prior to 1945 contrasted with its later freewheeling expansion,this article asserts that Sunshine was never a socially progressive model settlementof the variety established by nineteenth century Atlantic industrialists. Instead, itsprogress was characterised from the outset by a mixture of inconsistent environ-mental regulation and opportunistic, laissez-faire growth.3

SUNSHINE HARVESTER AND THE ROAD TO BRAYBROOK

The paradox of Sunshine’s development was embodied in the career of McKay.He was born at Raywood, Victoria, in 1864 to an Irish immigrant family thatmoved in his teenage years to a rural property near Drummartin, north ofBendigo.4 In 1885, he and his brother John assembled a prototype for a harvesterthat integrated the stripping, threshing, and winnowing of wheat. Although a

2 Peel, Good Times, Hard Times, pp. 100–87.3 On nineteenth century industrial paternalism, see Cherry, Bourneville; Tarn, Five Percent Philan-

thropy, pp. 156–8; Meacham, Regaining Paradise, p. 11.4 McNeil, The McKay’s, p. 7.

Industry and environmental transformation 149

© 2012 The AuthorAustralian Economic History Review © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty Ltd and the Economic HistorySociety of Australia and New Zealand

hagiography stemming from the later pronouncements of his company sought tocast McKay as the inventor of the device, another man had patented a combinemechanism the previous year and pipped him in an 1885 government trial.5

However, the shrewd and entrepreneurial McKay was the first person to bring theinvention and refinements he registered to the commercial marketplace. Bendigoand Melbourne contractors produced McKay’s design before he established afactory at Ballarat with partners in 1888.6 Recession forced the business intoliquidation in 1893, but McKay soon settled its debts and became the sole ownerof the firm. He named it ‘Sunshine Harvester’ after having attended a lecturetitled ‘Sunshine’ by a visiting American evangelist at the suburb of Brooklyn inWestern Melbourne.7

During the drought of 1902, a stock surplus impelled McKay to send hisyounger brother Sam to Argentina, where he opened an export market. Theincreasing importance of overseas and interstate trade thereafter sent McKay insearch of a base with fast rail links to the port. As one of Australia’s first largemanufacturing operations producing high-value finished products for domesticsale and export, easy access to shipping routes was essential to the future viabil-ity of Sunshine Harvester.8 A solution surfaced in 1903 when McKay learnedthat the liquidated Braybrook Agricultural Implement Works was invitingtenders for the business and 35 acres nearby.9 Braybrook Junction, at the inter-section of the Bendigo and Ballarat railway lines, provided desirable transportconnections to both the port and the firm’s inland delivery network. The smallsettlement had been established by a land sale on 21 June 1886 and grownunder the auspices of the implement works and a nearby rolling stock work-shop, which together employed 400 men in 1891. However, depression anddrought soon forced abandonment of the stock works, and C. G. Carlton,founder of Sunshine’s first newspaper the Advocate in 1924, remembered Bray-brook Junction near the turn of the century as a thinly populated windsweptplain.10 The 90 square mile (Shire of Braybrook) Shire encompassing the junc-tion contained 1556 persons in 1891.11

After submitting the successful tender of £3,651 in April 1904, McKay begantransferring manufacturing operations from Ballarat in 1905.12 Between 1906 and1910, he relocated or opened the coach building, tool making, tillage machinery,and harvester assembling components of his business at Braybrook Junction.13

The village then lay outside the jurisdiction of the metropolitan wage board and

5 Lack, McKay, H. V., p. 291; Lack, Legend of McKay, pp. 124–7.6 Herald, Life of Great Australian, p. 27.7 Austin, Antipodean Bourneville, p. 16.8 Fahey and Lack, Kind of Elysium, p. 103; Freestone, Australian Garden City, p. 256.9 Austin, Antipodean Bourneville, p. 16.10 Veltri, Evolution of an Outer, 34; Carlton, Sunshine Cavalcade, n.p.11 Popp, Glimpses of Early Sunshine, p. 25.12 Ford, Harvester Town, p. 94.13 Freestone, Model Communities, p. 143.

Dan Morrow150

© 2012 The AuthorAustralian Economic History Review © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty Ltd and the Economic History


there is strong evidence that this motivated McKay’s move there.14 In 1908, thecitizenry of Braybrook Junction sealed a transformation of the township into theepicentre of McKay’s burgeoning empire by voting to change its name to Sun-shine. Australian employers had hitherto been reticent to assume responsibility forhousing their workforces, save for remote extractive operations such as BrokenHill Proprietary, which provided limited accommodation at Whyalla in SouthAustralia for employees involved in transporting iron ore from the MiddlebackRanges to Port Pirie during the early twentieth century.15 However, the decisionto transfer production to a sparsely developed area made accessibility for keyemployees a logistical concern for McKay, and he was inspired by overseasexperiments with company housing.16

In 1906, following a trip to Europe, during which he is believed to havevisited two of the most famous English model industrial villages – Port Sunlight,founded by the soap manufacturer William Lever, and Bournville, run by thechocolate-making Quaker Cadbury Brothers – McKay purchased three sitestotalling 330 acres near the junction.17 His exact ambitions for the settlementremain unclear, although a newspaper in nearby Footscray speculated followingthe visit that McKay planned to replicate aspects of the English villages ‘on amore modest scale’ in Australia.18 He began his settlement by marking out ninelots of 120 by 330 feet next to the works, whereupon he built cottages for leaseto workers. One year later, he established a subdivision between the Bendigoand Ballarat railway lines and began inducing his workforce, mainly foremenwho were veterans of the Ballarat operation, to relocate there. By 1926, hewould open eight subdivisions comprising 700 allotments occupied by a widerrange of plant employees and non-affiliated persons.19 Incentives workers wereoffered for living on site included favourably termed external loans arranged byMcKay and occasional gifts of allotments.20 Such apparent altruism obscuredspeculative motives, as reflected in McKay’s boast to his brothers of being ableto sell ‘land by the foot instead of acre’.21 However, the industrialist seemed, inaddition to the aim of commercial profit, equally committed to improving thepoor aesthetics of the village.

Indeed, one of McKay’s first actions upon relocating to Sunshine was convinc-ing the Shire council in 1906 to replace dead trees lining the streets with sugargums. For this project he gave the paid labour of his employees and tree-guardsbuilt at the factory. In 1909, McKay opened the appealing three-acre SunshineGardens on Anderson Road, which the firm took care to keep in good condition

14 Lack, H.V. McKay; Freestone, Model Communities, p. 143.15 Freestone, Model Communities, p. 143; Kreiger, Working for the Company, pp. 2–3.16 Freestone, Model Communities, p. 143.17 Austin, Antipodean Bourneville, p. 16; Freestone, Model Communities, p. 143; Australian Garden

City, p. 257.18 Cited, in Freestone, Australian Garden City, p. 257.19 Cited, in Freestone, Australian Garden City, pp. 257–8.20 Austin, Antipodean Bourneville, pp. 16–20.21 Lack, ‘McKay, H.V.’, p. 293.



until 1953. George McKay, H. V.’s younger brother and superintendent of theSunshine factory, was elected to the Braybrook Council in 1906 where he was atrenchant advocate for regulating housing developments in the area and a foe ofnoxious industrial development until his death in 1928. In 1917, George wasresponsible in large measure for pushing through a by-law specially crafted toprevent residential overcrowding. The rule required every home to have 2,000square feet of yard space and stand 15 feet from the front line and four feet fromeach sideline. Building blocks had to be no less than 5,000 square feet.22

ARBITRATION AND LABOUR UNREST

McKay was willing to commit resources to enhance the local environment buttook a more conventional entrepreneurial stance to running his business. InOctober 1907, the firm’s priority of wage economy clashed with a key provisionof the progressive legislative framework for the newly federated nation.23 TheCustoms Excise Tariff Act 1904 placed a duty on locally produced goods,although employers able to convince the recently established CommonwealthCourt of Arbitration and Conciliation that they paid ‘fair and reasonable’ wagesqualified for exemption. McKay applied for an excise waiver in 1907, but theAgricultural Implement Makers’ Union (whose attempt to install a wage board hehad thwarted the previous year) opposed his application.24 This conflict prompteda hearing before the Court, headed by former Victorian politician Henry BournesHiggins.25

A series of judgments subsequently made by Higgins would render the court ahigh-profile instrument of social improvement. However, Sunshine Harvester wasa challenging introduction for Higgins to the world of wage determination.26 Afterexamining the operations of McKay’s factory and hearing the evidence of workersand their wives on the cost of living, Higgins, in what became known as the‘Harvester Judgment’, denied him exemption and determined a ‘basic’ daily wageof seven shillings for unskilled male employees. The rate met the needs of theworker ‘as a human being in a civilized community’.27 McKay was ordered to pay£20,000 in excise. While his successful appeal saw the statutory link between tariffprotection and a minimum wage broken, the judgment’s coupling of remunera-tion with some estimation of the cost of living informed a wages policy thatbecame central to the Australian political economy.28

22 Veltri, Evolution of an Outer Suburb, p. 109.23 Kelly, End of Certainty, pp. 1–7.24 Fahey and Lack, Kind of Elysium, p. 105.25 Rickard, H.B. Higgins, pp. 170–1.26 Fitzpatrick, Australian Commonwealth, p. 79; Castles, Working Class and Welfare, p. 13.27 Commonwealth Arbitration Committee Reports Vo1. 2, p. 5.28 Macintyre, Winners and Losers, pp. 53–5; Castles, Working Class and Welfare, p. 13; Markey, The

ALP and Social Policy, pp. 103–38.

Dan Morrow152



Although McKay harboured a vigorous enmity for arbitration, the HarvesterJudgment did little to slow his business. In 1911, the firm exported 3,528 har-vesters to Commonwealth markets and employed 2,000 men. While McKaystrengthened his grip on the industry, so did the Agricultural Implement MakersUnion, whose enlarged membership emboldened them to impose a closedshop at Sunshine.29 On January 22, 1911, the Union’s leader, E. F. Russell,announced a strike unless all employees joined by 16 February.30 When 2,100men abandoned work on the following day, McKay shut the factory and refusedto negotiate.31 In a speech years later at Ballarat, McKay maintained that hemerely stood up to union bullies.32 However, the industrialist’s threat on 17February to import cheap labour from England betrayed his primary concernwith controlling wage rates.33

THE MAKING OF A MODEL TOWN?

Although he eventually prevailed against the Agricultural Implement MakersUnion, bad publicity surrounding the strike brought the strategic potential ofSunshine to McKay’s attention. His first forays into town building had establishedthe rudiments of life for his small resident workforce and made limited cosmeticimprovements. After the strike, McKay redoubled his efforts to sell property,improve the local environment, and establish amenities. This time progress wasfar more rapid than his previous cautious forays into urban development. By theend of 1911, 76 four-bedroom brick and concrete villas filled the streets of the firstsubdivision. Another 80 homes had been erected by 1918.34 In mid-1911, he paid£1,000 for a bowling green, put aside a section of land for a reserve, and set upprizes for the best kept garden in an attempt to stimulate competitive pride in theattractiveness of dwellings.35 That June, McKay made the gesture of giving theEducation Department four acres and £2,000 to found a technical college atSunshine, although he undoubtedly recognised that such development wouldincrease the value of the surrounding land.

Despite the mixed motives guiding McKay’s town building efforts, they soonwon praise. In 1912, a correspondent for Footscray newspaper the Independentdescribed how the silent, uninviting paddocks of Braybrook Junction had givenway to the sound of ‘whistles calling the hour of work, the incessant clang clangingof the hammer and anvil, the throbbing of machinery’, and ‘hundreds of modern

29 Fahey and Lack, Kind of Elysium, pp. 107–10.30 Argus, Harvester Strike, p. 8.31 Argus, 2,100 Men Out, p. 19.32 H.V. McKay, Speech at Ballarat, 1915, H. V. McKay Archives (University of Melbourne).33 Argus, Harvester Strike: Construction in Britain, p. 8.34 Austin, Antipodean Bourneville, pp. 16–20.35 Ford, Harvester Town, p. 158.



villas, all occupied and enclosed in spacious and pleasant surroundings’.36 Profil-ing Sunshine in December 1917, Land and Transport magazine noted that the sugargums McKay had planted 10 years earlier lined its avenues. In contrast to thetightly packed housing of Melbourne’s inner-west, Sunshine’s 2,000 residents,almost of all of whom worked at the plant, dwelt in spacious detached bungalows.In coming years, other publications would laud Sunshine as an ‘Industrial GardenCity’.37

On 21 May 1926, McKay died at the age of 66, one week after laying thefoundation stone of Sunshine’s first Presbyterian Church.38 His estate was valuedat £1,448,146 and included a codicil that channelled a significant portion of thiswealth into a charitable trust to encourage further development of the area.39

Over two decades, the industrialist had subdivided lots and financed sales to hisemployees, supplied the burgeoning settlement with electricity, and eventuallydonated a technical school, a park, community gardens, a bowling green, and alibrary. Despite the accolades bestowed on him for encouraging his employees tobecome homeowners and providing basic amenities, the town McKay leftresembled neither Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City prototypes Welwyn andLetchworth, nor socially ambitious earlier English industrial model villages.40

Neither did Sunshine feature anywhere near the ‘unity of design’ that the StateElectricity Commission of Victoria’s architect A. R. La Gerche, influenced byRaymond Unwin and Barry Parker’s Letchworth plan, would envision for themodel settlement of Yallourn, built for workers in Gippsland southeast of Mel-bourne from the 1920s.41 Sunshine – though generally less fractious – ratherrecalled the archetypal American ‘company town’ of Pullman, Illinois: the site ofintense industrial acrimony in 1894, whose pleasant facade belied drab housing,intermittent paternalism, and punishing factory conditions.42 Like GeorgePullman, McKay viewed his role as a businessman combining personal profit withmodest improvements of his workers’ lives. His first forays into town building hadestablished rudimentary comforts for a small resident workforce and made somecosmetic improvements. However, this limited largesse tellingly began in earnestonly following industrial action at the plant in 1911. Combating labour unrestwith modest material incentives rather than any heightened social consciousnessor repressive impulses appears to have been McKay’s chief objective, frustratingany temptation to cast him as either a social visionary or dark satanic millmaster.43

36 ‘Echoes from Sunshine’, Independent (Footscray) 5 October 1912, p. 2.37 Australian Home Builder Magazine, Sunshine: Industrial Garden City, p. 41.38 Argus, Death of H.V. McKay, p. 36.39 Lack, Mckay, H. V.40 Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow, pp. 3–20.41 Fletcher, Digging Up for Coal, pp. 10, 46.42 Lindsay, Pullman Strike, pp. 61–106.43 Fahey and Lack, Kind of Elysium, p. 174.

Dan Morrow154



INDUSTRIAL EXPANSION

As foreign investment flowed into Australia in the 1920s, Sunshine became amagnet for other manufacturing operations. Attracted by the area’s proximity totransport nodes, three large foreign companies, Nettlefolds, Guest, and Keen,(woodscrew makers based in Birmingham, England) Wunderlich (Sydney produc-ers of cement sheets), and Spaldings (an American sporting goods manufacturer),opened production facilities at Sunshine in 1925.44 In 1926, Nettlefolds purchased60 acres, upon which it promised to erect a model village for employees. Althoughthis plan never eventuated, the population of the Shire rose with the new employ-ment from 2,373 in 1911 to 4,000 in 1921; 9,426 in 1933, and 11,800 in 1942.45

While life in Sunshine was undeniably hardscrabble during the 1930s, by the endof the decade, poverty had given way to austere industry. The harvester works,trading as McKay–Massey–Harris following several mergers, changed to warproduction and reached its largest ever payroll of 3,400 in 1944.46 Althoughhousing construction ceased elsewhere in Melbourne during the war, the town’ssuitability as a dormitory for war workers stimulated government spending onnew accommodation and the number of new buildings climbed from 100 in 1938to 399 in 1941.47

Robust wartime growth however, paled in comparison with the pace of localexpansion in the next two decades, propelled by a domestic manufacturing boom.From the mid-1950s, Commonwealth government incentives and the stabilisationof world markets following the Bretton Woods Agreement spurred a steady flowof British and American capital investment. Foreign funds drove growth in allsectors of the economy, most vitally for working-class areas like Melbourne’s westin manufacturing industries.48 Jobs in manufacturing climbed from around 25 percent of the paid national workforce in June 1947 to just over 27 per cent in 1966.49

Three-quarters of jobs created by expanding secondary industries during thisperiod were in the burgeoning state capitals. International firms, compelled bysteadily increasing tariffs to establish local operations, took advantage of readyaccess to markets, cheap land, and labour provided by recent Europeans arrivalsunder the Commonwealth government’s expanding migration scheme to openhuge plants on the fringes of large urban areas.50 By 1954, 40 per cent ofMelbourne, Sydney, and Adelaide residents worked in manufacturing.51

As an outlying industrial suburb, Sunshine seemed perfectly positioned toabsorb this industrial growth. Forging Ahead, a booklet published by the Shire ofBraybrook with the neighbouring City of Footscray in 1947, conveyed an image

44 Ford, Harvester Town, p. 120; McGoldrick, When the Whistle Blew, p. 74.45 Ford and Lack, Melbourne’s Western Region, pp. 7, 86.46 Ford and Lack, Melbourne’s Western Region, pp. 7, 86.47 Advocate, War Worker’s Homes, p. 1.48 Bolton, Middle Way, p. 97; Crowley, Tough Times, p. 9; Lees and Senyard, The 1950s, pp. 48–50.49 Anderson, Tariffs and Manufacturing, p. 169.50 Dingle, ‘Gloria Soame’ p. 191; Freestone, Urban Nation, p. 24.51 Frost and O’Hanlon, Urban History, p. 10.



of orderly expansion with its colour plates depicting identical bungalows frontedby wide immaculate footpaths, lush public gardens, a bustling shopping centre inHampshire Road, and the inviting frontage of a local factory.52 A raft of new firmsestablished plants in the city throughout the 1950s. Chemicals giant Monsanto setup in Somerville Road in 1950, providing employment for over 500 workers.Invicta Carpets moved to Braybrook in 1952, and three years later, Taubmannserected the largest paint factory in the southern hemisphere, which sprawled over14 acres on Macintyre Road.53 ETA Foods established a large plant at Braybrookin 1960.54

Parochial pride swelled with each year of growing investment. On the after-noon of 5 January 1951, 3,000 white pigeons were released into the skies aboveHampstead Road.55 The gesture was to mark the replacement of the Shire ofBraybrook with a new municipality, the City of Sunshine. Officiated by VictorianGovernor Sir Dallas Brookes, the ceremony surrounding the occasion bespoke anindustrial nationalism increasingly pervading post-war Australia. During this era,manufacturing growth ‘became a central objective of government policies’, a newnational ‘frontier’, and in many cases, an ‘obsession’.56 Municipal leaders inSunshine were clear about the role their city had to play in this process. ‘A betterstandard of living for Australians can only be brought about by a greater supplyof consumer goods’, announced Mayor Geoffrey Dobson, ‘in the factories of thecity of Sunshine there is a large and comprehensive supply of articles produced forconsumption in Australia and throughout the world’.57 The local media pro-claimed that the town was on the cusp of becoming a major centre of Australianmanufacturing.

MIGRATION, THE HOUSING COMMISSION,AND SUBURBAN GROWTH

Sunshine’s residential base swelled following the arrival of large-scale heavyindustry. From 20,000 in 1947, its population leapt to 56,000 in 1959 and to76,000 in 1971. The demographics also changed. A desire to increase populationfor regional security and labour needs convinced the Commonwealth governmentto offer assisted passages to British migrants and European refugees in 1947.58

Interest in Britain was insufficient to satisfy a planned national population growthof two per cent per annum, so Australia signed agreements with European nations

52 City of Footscray and Shire of Braybrook, Forging Ahead, n.p.53 Advocate, Taubmanns, p. 2.54 Ford and Lack, Melbourne’s Western Region, p. 110; Carlton, Sunshine Cavalcade, p. 60.55 Carlton, Sunshine Cavalcade, p. 52.56 Van Der Wee, Prosperity and Upheaval, p. 35.57 Carlton, Sunshine Cavalcade, p. 52.58 See Jupp, White Australia to Woomera, p. 13; Lack and Templeton, Bold Experiment, p. 76; Collins,

Migrant Hands, pp. 20–47.

Dan Morrow156



to welcome ‘economic’ migrants.59 Sunshine, a centre of the low-skilled industrialwork, needed migrants and became increasingly ethnically diverse during thepost-war period. By 1971, 40 per cent of its residents were born overseas, and 25per cent was of school age.60

This expansion of industry and migration coincided with and exacerbatednational and local shortages of accommodation. Although Australia had escapedthe mass destruction of housing stock visited upon European cities during the war,a post-war accommodation ‘crisis’ caused considerable public disillusion. Theshortage of housing – estimated towards the end of the war at 450,000 dwellings– dated from the halt of new building during the depression and worsenedfollowing the government’s imposition of wartime rent controls.61 With marriagesand births rising after the war, thousands of young couples smarted at an inabilityto find suitable accommodation that frustrated long-deferred dreams of domesticcomfort and stability.62 In 1947, the first post-war census showed more than 10per cent of Australian households were sharing accommodation, while 80,000‘camped out’ in temporary structures on the properties of relatives.63 Alreadyovercrowded conditions in Melbourne deteriorated in the late 1940s. John Lack,historian of Footscray in the city’s inner west, has described the area as BungalowCity in the early post-war period, packed with thousands of married couples livingin makeshift accommodation in the backyards of parents.64

The scarcity of housing in established city areas led many Australians to obtaininexpensive land on urban fringes and undertake incremental do-it-yourself con-struction of suburban houses for their families. Homes erected partly by theowners rose from 20 per cent to 45 percent of all domiciles built in Australiabetween 1945 and 1953.65 The popularity of owner-building helped propel a risein home ownership: the proportion of private residences owned outright or in theprocess of purchase by their occupants rose from 58 per cent in 1947 to slightlyover 70 per cent in 1961. By then, 82 per cent of Melbournians owned theirhome.66 Cultural and economic historians have widely credited the proliferationof suburban homeownership with underpinning an era of unprecedented massconsumption, premised on the constant accumulation and upgrade of homes,automobiles, and household durables. As Richard White has observed, ‘suburbanliving with its focus on home and garden, and on a catalogue of family possessionssuch as refrigerators, washing machines, radiograms, and television sets and, ofcourse, the family car, was the basis of the post-war affluence which manufactur-ers and governments encouraged’.67 Australian popular culture rapidly adopted

59 Collins, Migrant Hands, pp. 22–3.60 Sunshine City Council, Your Share in Sunshine, N.P.61 Frost and O’Hanlon, Urban History, p. 9.62 Davison, Car Wars, p. 1.63 Greig, Stuff Dreams are Made, p. 36.64 Lack, History of Footscray, pp. 338-9.65 Dingle, Necessity Mother of Invention, p. 67.66 Murphy, Social Policy and the Family, pp. 228–39.67 White, Inventing Australia, p. 164.



the home-owning consumer as a normative image. A Liberal-Country Partycoalition conservative government led for 16 years by Robert Menzies wouldremain in power for 23 consecutive years from 1949, largely because its rhetoricshrewdly constructed and appealed to an emotional mass middle class composedof domestic consumers.68

It is unlikely that the European migrants who spearheaded owner building inthe outer areas of Australian cities like Melbourne’s outer west had the sameemotional investment in suburban lifestyles as Australians did. They probablyperceived do-it-yourself building as a simple response to intense competition forhousing, rather than a gritty realisation of thwarted dreams. Unlike a majority ofindependent homebuilders elsewhere, a lack of capital, credit opportunities, andlocal knowledge forced many newcomers to buy land and erect their houses inareas that were unlikely – due in part to metropolitan planning policies examinedshortly – to receive urban services in the immediate future.69 Western reaches ofSunshine like Ardeer, a micro-suburb settled heavily since 1950 by Ukrainianimmigrants, lacked piped sewerage and paved streets until the mid-1970s. Itsresidents trudged through muddy, unlit streets to work. As late as 1974, when itrained, parents ferried their children to the local primary school on a makeshiftbridge across rivers forming on the side of unsealed road, then waded throughwater to access the building.70

In addition to the efforts of individual homebuilders, state government housingauthorities contributed to the expansion of post-war housing stock, particularly inperipheral industrial suburbs. When overcrowded conditions in Melbourne wors-ened following demobilisation of service personnel, political pressure compelledthe Victorian Housing Commission (VHC) to sideline its initial mission of innerslum clearance and begin erecting housing for rental to returning soldiers andlater the general public. In response to concerted pressure from local politicians,in 1946, the VHC began building an estate of bungalow homes at Braybrook-Maidstone in the Sunshine area. The VHC harnessed federal funding and a rangeof its own industrial construction innovations to erect more than 2,200 houses onthe estate by the end of 1956. The vast majority of these dwellings were three- orfour-bedroom concrete villas assembled at its factory in the southern suburb ofHolmesglen.71 In April 1956, Sunshine’s Advocate marvelled at the ‘near completetransformation’ of the area into one of the many modern housing estates that nowprovide attractive accommodation for thousands of Australians’.72

Tenants of VHC homes at Braybrook-Maidstone and small pockets ofstate housing in other parts of Sunshine enjoyed amenities – like gas laundries –alien to the suburbs migrants were establishing nearby. Yet in contrast to theprogressive plans of the South Australian Housing Trust at Elizabeth, the VHC’s

68 Brett, Menzies Forgotten People, p. 50; Murphy; Imagining the Fifties, pp. 136–49.69 Advocate, Land Miles from Water, p. 1; Advocate, Big Problems, p. 1.70 Advocate, A way to go, p. 1.71 Housing Commission, Victoria, Annual Report 1957, p. 32.72 ‘Windswept Plain to Modern Suburb,’ Advocate, 6 April 1956, p. 8.

Dan Morrow158



objective during this era was simply to build as many dwellings as possible tostanch a demand for accommodation overwhelming the commercial buildingindustry.73 Quickly erected with minimal planning, estates like Braybrook-Maidstone were drab, sprawling, and lacking in social amenities. Many of theprefabricated concrete houses were poorly designed for the local climate, and amajority of estates would not receive much needed recreational facilities, such asswimming pools, until at least the late 1950s.

THE PATTERNING OF SPATIAL INEQUITY

This paucity of basic services and communal amenities reflected the priorities oflocal planning bodies, which mirrored and exacerbated long-term spatial inequityin Melbourne. True to its mission to provide amenities to the largest number ofcitizens, the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works (MMBW) aimed toimprove sewerage and street lighting in the far more populous southeast ahead ofthe west. The dynamic was most pronounced in a disparity between the develop-ment and access to services of the west and southeast sectors of the city. While thepopulation of the western suburbs had increased by 112 per cent between 1947 and1971, the southern sector of the metropolis also nearly doubled in the same periodbut from a much larger 425,500 to 830,000. Meanwhile, the fastest growing easternsection expanded by 160 per cent.74 In 1947, about two-thirds of Melbourne’swhite-collar workforce resided in the city’s southern and eastern sectors, while eightof every 10 jobs created in professional, administrative, clerical, and sales sectorsbetween 1933 and 1967 were within the same belt of middle suburbs. This stretchedfrom Doncaster in the city’s northeast to Beaumaris in the south.75 In its 1954 TownPlanning Scheme report the MMBW attributed the disproportion to an organicallure the rich-soiled southeast held for the middle class:

The reasons for these differences are highly discernable. The proximity of the bay-sidebeaches, the lighter soil and gentle slopes all have contributed to the greater popularityof the southern district. In the east, the higher, more undulating terrain, while addingsomewhat to the building costs, has resulted in many delightful residential areas, which,added to the proximity of pleasant hill country and further out, have had an increasingattraction for home seekers. In the west, on the other hand, the country is flat, wind-swept and barren, the soil heavy and tenacious, the rainfall low. Generally the area ismore suited for industrial than residential use. The north, while attractive, has not theappeal of the east and south. It is not surprising, therefore that over a period of fiftyyears, two thirds of the population has settled in the southern and eastern districts. Thistrend expresses a strong desire that cannot be ignored.76

73 Peel, Good Times, Hard Times, pp. 1–32.74 Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works (MMBW), Planning Policies Report 1971, p. 24.75 MMBW, Planning Scheme 1954 (Vol. 2), pp. 40–1; Future Growth of Melbourne, p. 5.76 MMBW, Planning Scheme 1954 (Vol 2), p. 49.



Despite this attempt to describe the lopsided development of the city as natural,the MMBW and the Town and Country Planning Board, as revealed by theabove aside about suitability of land uses, were key drivers of the imbalance. Theysupplied the urban services necessary to attract corporate investment in the southand east, while ignoring closer areas of the northwest.77

While enough to overwhelm poor local infrastructure, the growth of Sunshinewas modest compared with middle-class suburbs on Melbourne’s more aestheti-cally pleasing southeast. The Shire of Mulgrave on the edge of the southeastsuburbs, which became the City of Waverley in 1955, typified this post-warsprawl. Like Sunshine, Waverley morphed from a semi-rural shire at the closeof the Second World War into a bustling and youthful suburban city by theearly 1960s. Waverley’s population reached 177,000 in 1976, double that ofSunshine’s, having started from a smaller base of 4,770 in 1947. Sunshine satseven kilometres from the General Post Office and almost exclusively housedmanufacturing and basic service employees; Waverley was 20 kilometres outsidethe central city and contained a mix of blue and white-collar workers. In con-trast to Sunshine’s dominance of the suburban west, Waverley was one of adozen nearby municipalities whose identical expansions reflected the long-termdesire of Melbournians to live southeast of the Yarra rather than the undevel-oped west. A public preference thus justified and was itself exacerbated by con-tinuing official neglect.78

Sunshine’s population and amenities compared poorly even with its New SouthWales sister city, Bankstown in southwest Sydney. The two cities shared outlyinglocations, industrial bases, inexpensive housing, and robust post-war growth. Yetaccounting even for the size differential Bankstown – more than twice as large asSunshine with 200,000 residents in 1971 – enjoyed superior urban services andrecreation facilities. The city had received an Olympic-sized swimming pool in1933, a large public library in 1954, a new hospital in 1957, and a shoppingcomplex in 1960. Unlike the rugged conditions then prevailing at Sunshine, thosewho grew up in Bankstown during 1950s and 1960s – according to historianGeoffrey Bolton – ‘lived in a highly contemporary environment with very little todistinguish it from similar new suburbs in all Australia’s and North America’scities’.79

THE BEGINNING OF A BACKLASH

As the industrial economy that had nourished Sunshine’s frenetic expansionbegan to ebb in the early 1970s, so did local morale. Unemployment in the area

77 MMBW, Planning Scheme 1954 (Vol 2), p. 86.78 Dingle, People and Places, p. 36.79 Bolton, Two Pauline Versions, pp. 228–39.

Dan Morrow160



soared by 150 per cent between 30 November and 30 December 1972.80 This wasan anticipated jump following the school year. However, in contrast to thesituation that had prevailed a decade, or even 5 years earlier, school leavers of1972 could no longer expect instant employment in local manufacturing opera-tions increasingly embattled by global economic slow down and the prospect oftariff cuts that would expose their business to competition from developing Asianeconomies.81 Massey Fergusson Australia PTY, who had always retrenchedlabour during cyclical downturns, began permanently downsizing at the verypoint steady employment was most needed in Sunshine.82 In 1971, it cut 900workers and announced shortly after that it would be selling part of its Harvesterworks to commercial developers.83 Many Sunshine youths leaving high schoolhoped, understandably given the local prominence of factory work during the pastdecades, to find unskilled employment in the heavily tariff-protected manufactur-ing sector. That most of them lacked the training to compete in an economyincreasingly geared towards the manipulation of data, and the provision of ser-vices is probably why Sunshine led the state in youth unemployment by 1981.Approximately a quarter of its young people out of work came from non-Englishspeaking backgrounds.84

Uncertainty surrounding the closing off of industrial employment opportunitiescontributed to public unrest over inequitable urban development. Local angerover a long-term lack of adequate service provision erupted in February 1972.The MMBW had recently released a report of planning policies, which noted thatfunds for providing sewers to Sunshine would be unavailable until the completionof infrastructure projects in the south and east.85 By early 1972, a new movementfor equality of urban services was emerging, steeped in the rhetoric of relativedeprivation. In March 1972, the Advocate attempted to parlay acrimony overinequality in service provision into a unified identity and political purpose when itbegan organising a seminar titled ‘the Deprived West’ for that May. The purposeof the meeting was to bring wider attention to the sufferings of the region’sresidents and plot strategies for reform.86

The marked swing in the tone of the local newspaper Advocate from its uncriticallauding of progress during the 1950s amplified the emerging culture of grievance.In contrast to the self-satisfied announcements of industrial progress and tableauof gleaming new homes recently adorning its cover, the typical front page in 1972depicted sour scenes such as the polluted Stony Creek in West Sunshine, while itscolumns seethed at the greater western’s region lack of basic amenities such as

80 Advocate, Unemployment Same, p. 2.81 See Jones, Sleepers Wake, pp. 30–44.82 Fahey and Lack; Kind of Elysium, p. 108; Working at Sunshine, pp. 100–1.83 Age, History Could, p. 24. See also Dale-Hallett, Fahey, and Lack, Resurrecting Sunshine

Harvester, pp. 9–28.84 Australian Institute of Multi-Cultural Affairs, Atlas of Youth Unemployment 1981, p. 17.85 MMBW, Planning Policies Report, p. 24.86 Advocate, 72 Seminar, p. 1.



sewerage.87 The local anger embodied broader disquiet surfacing by the 1970sabout the lack of urban planning in the post-war period. Labor Party leaderGough Whitlam swept to federal office in December 1972 on a platform partlydevoted to improving conditions on the peripheries of big cities. ‘I am the firstLabor leader who has ever represented the urban sprawl’, he told a FederalLabour Women’s Conference in Sydney in 1968, ‘I have lived in these areas fortwenty-one years. I raised four children there. We have never been connected tothe sewer’.88

Almost immediately, Whitlam created the Department of Urban and RegionalDevelopment (DURD) to help local authorities develop and coordinate plans foreach city and region and administer grants for urban development. Anotherpolicy initiative, the Australian Assistance Plan (AAP) funded regional SocialDevelopment Councils to represent areas of 250–500,000 persons, which exhib-ited ‘regional and social unity’.89 Melbourne’s western suburbs was declared thefirst such region in 1973 and received $700,000 that it used for citizen informationservices, grants to ethnic clubs, emergency support, and a range of other com-munity development projects over 2 years.90 In its April 1974 budget, the Whitlamgovernment directly allocated funds to local organisations to spend on civicservices. The Western Region Commission, which succeeded the initial SocialDevelopment Council, received a $3 million start-up grant.91 When Whitlam wasousted from office because of a constitutional crisis in November 1975, MalcolmFraser’s incoming Liberal-Country Party coalition government disestablishedDURD, starving the newly created development infrastructure of funding anddashing hopes of federally funded uplift in the west.92

Following a decade of industrial stagnation, the total number of jobs in Sun-shine fell by 14 per cent between 1981 and 1986, while work in manufacturingdropped by nearly 30 per cent.93 A wages-price explosion in 1983 and series ofmicroeconomic reforms implemented during the decade of the Hawke-KeatingLabor government, in particular the accelerating removal of tariff protection,decimated the once heavily protected employment base of the city and the greaterwestern region. In 1988, a report by its town planner gloomily observed of therapidly deindustrialising area:

The City of Sunshine experiences most of the urban problems usually associated with itsposition as a western suburb. In fact, it could easily be regarded as the western suburb interms of its urban problems. The proximity of industry to residential areas; large housingcommission estates, relatively drab urban environment, lack of developed open space,

87 Advocate, 72 Seminar, p. 3; The Deprived West 2, p. 3; Seminar 72 on Sunday, p. 1.88 Whitlam, Whitlam Government, p. 372.89 Social Welfare Commission, Australian Assistance Plan, p. 10.90 Advocate, Region to Get, p. 191 Advocate, Leaders Talk of Future, p. 2.92 Ferber, Diary of Legislative Changes, pp. 312–3.93 Sunshine Council, Planning Twenty-First, p. 125.

Dan Morrow162



neglected rivers and creeks, high unemployment, large migrant population, familybreakdown, lack of education and support systems.94

Massey Ferguson continued to retrench labour throughout the 1980s. By themid-1980s, it had sold its Hampstead Road premises to the state government andbecome an import and distribution operation.95 Sunshine council soon afterarranged with the Herschfield Corporation for development of a $200 millionshopping plaza and cultural centre, where the main plant had formerly stood.96 Byearly 1995, shortly after Sunshine amalgamated with several of its northernneighbours to become part of the sprawling new city of Brimbank, the official rateof youth unemployment in the area had reached 56 per cent.97

CONCLUSION

This article has traced Sunshine’s evolution from a company town in the firstquarter of the twentieth century, to a sprawling and spatially disadvantagedmultiethnic agglomeration of suburbs following the Second World War and arepository of urban ‘problems’ by the 1990s. It argues that this single area’strajectory illuminates important social and spatial outcomes of mid-twentiethAustralian urban industrial growth, some of which run contrary to popularwisdom about the period. It contends that not only was the era of ‘full-employment’ a short-lived phenomenon in Australia but also that many of thematerial advantages long assumed to accompany the contemporary expansion ofdetached suburban housing and industrial employment were in fact lost on thoseAustralians – a high proportion of them recent migrants – who dwelt in peripheralworking-class suburbs of large cities, where growth outpaced the provision ofservices.

Importantly for the future viability of Sunshine, when the Australian economyexpanded and diversified after the war, no controlling industrial figure equivalentto McKay, or an elected regulatory body, emerged to provide the public resourcesand sense of directed the settlement sorely needed. This was a role that local orstate authorities could and should have taken. However, they were neglectful ofSunshine, and as we have seen, not even-handed in their deployment of amenitiesand planning expertise. By the time the world economy entered recession in theearly 1970s, a history of unsatisfactory urban planning in many of these spatiallydeprived areas had engendered rancour and disaffection over the new outwardpatterning of suburban inequity. The alienation of Australians living on thesuburban fringe increased following disruptions caused by economic liberalisation

94 Sunshine City Council, p. 23.95 Dale-Hallett, Fahey, and Lack, ‘Resurrecting Sunshine’, pp. 9–28.96 Catherine Menagh, ‘History Could Shadow Sunshine Development’, Age, 21 January 1987,

p. 24.97 Martin Flanagan, ‘Over the Bridge: Hard Times in the West’, Age, 20 May 1995, E1.



policies of the 1980s. Once symbols of optimism and upward mobility, by themid-1980s, Sunshine and similar regions in other Australian cities provided bleakevidence of the repercussions of unregulated urban growth in their high rates ofyouth unemployment, poor social services, and wasteful suburban sprawl.

REFERENCES

Advocate (1942) War workers homes. 20 February, 1.Advocate (1950) Big problems caused by shanty towns. 6 October, 1.Advocate (1951) Land miles from water being sold to migrants. 5 October, 1.Advocate (1955) Taubmanns build largest paint manufactory. 7 April, 2.Advocate (1956), Windswept plain to modern suburb, 6 April, 8.Advocate (1972) The deprived west 2-sewerage. 23 February, 1.Advocate (1972) Unemployment same as ever. 2 February, 2.Advocate (1972) Deprived west 2: sewerage. 23 February, 3.Advocate (1972) Seminar. 9 March, 3.Advocate (1972) Seminar 72 on Sunday. 3 May, 1.Advocate (1973) A way to go to school. 17 February, 1.Advocate (1973) Leaders talk of future. 20 August, 2.Advocate (1974) Region to get money. 31 January, 1.Age (1987) History could shadow sunshine development. 21 January, 24.Age (1995) Over the bridge: Hard times in the west. 20 May, E1.Argus (1911) Harvester strike: construction in Britain. 20 February, 8.Argus (1911) Harvester strike. 20 February, 8.Argus (1911) Harvester strike: 2,100 men out, conference refused. 18 February, 19.Argus (1926) Death of H.V. McKay: useful life ends for inventor of the harvester. 22 May, 36.Anderson, K. (1987) Tariffs and the manufacturing sector in R. Maddock and I.W. McLean, eds., The

Australian Economy in the Long Run (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 165– 95.Austin, G. B. ( 1981) Sunshine-An Antipodean Bourneville? Thesis (undergraduate), Faculty of Architecture,

Building and Planning, University of Melbourne.Australian Home Builder Magazine (1925) Sunshine: an industrial garden city. 15 April, 41.Australian Institute of Multi-Cultural Affairs (1981) Atlas of Youth Unemployment, 1981: Geographic

Distribution of Youth Unemployment in Australian Cities from the 1981 Census (Canberra: GovernmentPrinter).

Bolton, G. (1995) Two pauline versions. In: S. Prasser, J. R. Nethercote, and J. Warhurst, eds. TheMenzies Era: An Appraisal of Government, Politics, and Policy (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger), 33–55.

Bolton, G. (1996) Oxford History of Australia Volume 5: The Middle Way (Melbourne: Oxford UniversityPress).

Brett, J. (2002) Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People (Carlton: Melbourne University Press).Brown, N. (1995) Governing Prosperity: Social Change and Social Analysis in Australia in the 1950s (New York:

Cambridge University Press).Cannon, M. (1981) That Damned Democrat: John Norton, An Australian Populist 1958–1916 (Carlton:

Melbourne University Press).Carlton, C. G. (1951) Sunshine Cavalcade (Sunshine, Vic: C.G. Carlton).Castles, F. G. (1985) Working Class and Welfare: Reflections on the Political Development of the Welfare States in

Australia and New Zealand (Wellington: Allen and Unwin/Port Nicholson Press).Cherry, G. (1996) Bourneville, 1895–1995. Journal of Urban History, 22, 493–508.City of Footscray and Shire of Braybrook (1947) Forging Ahead (Footscray: City of Footscray/Shire of

Braybrook).Collins, J. (1991) Migrant Hands in A Distant Land: Australia’s Post-War Migration (Leichhardt, NSW: Pluto

Press).Commonwealth Arbitration Committee Reports Vo1. 2. (1907) (Melbourne: Government Printer).Crowley, F. (1986) Tough Times: Australia in the Seventies (Richmond, Vic: Heinemann Australia).

Dan Morrow164



Dale-Hallett, L., Fahey, C., and Lack, J. (2003) Resurrecting the Sunshine Harvester Works: repre-senting and reinterpreting the experience of industrial work in twentieth century Australia.Labour History, 85, 9–28.

Davison, G. (2004) Car Wars: How the Car Won Our Heart and Conquered Our Cities (Sydney: Allen andUnwin).

Dingle, T. (1995) People and places in post-war Melbourne. In: G. Davison, T. Dingle, andS. O’Hanlon, eds. The Cream Brick Frontier: Histories of Australian Suburbs (Clayton: Monash Aca-demic Books). 27–40.

Dingle, T. (1999) “Gloria Soame”, The Spread of Suburbia in Post War Australia’, in R. Harrisand P. Larkham, eds., Changing Suburbs: Foundation, Form and Function ( London: E. & F.N.Spon).

Dingle, T. (2000) Necessity the mother of invention, or do-it-yourself. In: P. Troy, ed. A History ofEuropean Housing in Australia (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press). 57–77.

Fahey, C., and Lack, J. (2001) A kind of elysium where nobody has anything difficult to do:H.B. Higgins, H.V. McKay and the Agricultural Implement Makers 1901–26. Labour History, 80,99–119.

Fahey, C., and Lack, J. (2006) Working at Sunshine: a case study of the recruitment, retention, andmanagement of labour in a Melbourne manufacturing enterprise, 1946–63. Labour History, 90,95–117.

Ferber, H. (1980) Diary of legislative and administrative changes, 1975 to 1978. In: R. B. Scotton, andH. Ferber, eds. Public Expenditures and Social Policy in Australia Vo1. 2: The First Fraser Years(Melbourne: Longman-Cheshire). 504–52.

Fitzpatrick, B. (1956) The Australian Commonwealth: A Picture of Community 1901–1955 (Melbourne:F.W. Cheshire).

Fletcher, M. (2002) Digging up for Coal: A History of Yallourn (Carlton: Melbourne University Press).Ford, O. (2001) Harvester Town: The Making of Sunshine 1890–1925 ( Sunshine, Vic: Sunshine and District

Historical Society).Ford, O., and Lack, J. (1986) Melbourne’s Western Region: An Introductory History (Melbourne: Melbourne’s

Living Museum of the West).Freestone, R. (1985) The Australian Garden City: A Planning History (PhD thesis: Centre for Environmental

and Urban Studies, Macquarie University).Freestone, R. (1989) Model Communities: The Garden City Movement in Australia (Melbourne: Thomas

Nelson).Frost, L., and O’Hanlon, S. (2009) Urban history and the future of Australian cities. Australian Economic

History Review, 49, 1–18.Greig, A. (1995) Stuff Dreams Are Made of: Housing Provision in Post-War Australia (Carlton: Melbourne

University Press).Herald (Melbourne 1922) Life of a Great Australian, (Melbourne), 3 June, p. 27.Housing Commission, Victoria (1957) Annual Report: 1st July, 1956–30 June 1957, p. 32.Hudson, W. J. (1974) 1951–72. In: F. Crowley, ed. A New History of Australia (Melbourne: William

Heinemann), 504–52.Independent (Footscray 1912), Echoes from Sunshine. 5 October, p. 2.Jones, B. (1983) Sleepers Wake: Technology and the Future of Work (Melbourne: Oxford University Press).Jupp, J. (2002) From White Australia to Woomera: The Story of Australian Immigration (Melbourne: Cambridge

University Press).Kelly, P. (1994) The End of Certainty: Power, Politics, and Business in Australia (St Leonards, NSW: Allen and

Unwin).Kendal, F. J. (1972) H.V. McKay: a pioneer industrialist. Victorian Historical Magazine, 43, 885–

95.Kreiger, R. J. (1980) Working for the Company: Work and Control in the Whyalla Shipyards (Melbourne:

Oxford University Press).Lack, John, ‘McKay, Hugh Victor (1865–1926)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National

Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/mckay-hugh-victor-699/text12823, accessed 6 July 2012

Lack, J. (1990) The legend of H.V. McKay. Victorian Historical Journal, 2 and 3, 124–57.Lack, J. (1991) A History of Footscray (North Melbourne: Hargreen).Lack, J., and Templeton, J. (1995) Bold Experiment: A Documentary History of Australian Immigration After

1945 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press).



Lees, S., and Senyard, J. (1987) The 1950s: How Australia Became a Modern Society and Everyone Got a Houseand a Car (Melbourne: Hyland House).

Lindsay, A. (1967) The Pullman Strike: The Story of a Unique Experiment and of a Great Labour Upheaval(Chicago and London: Phoenix Books/University of Chicago Press).

Macintyre, S. (1985) Winners and Losers: The Pursuit of Social Justice in Australian History (Sydney: Allen andUnwin).

Markey, R. (1982) The ALP and the emergence of a national social policy. In: R. Kennedy, ed.Australian Welfare History: Critical Essays (South Melbourne: Macmillan). 103–38.

McGoldrick, P. (1989) When the Whistle Blew: A Social History of the Town of Sunshine 1920–1950 (Morwell,Vic: Gippsland Printers).

McNeil, D. (1984) The McKay’s of Drummartin and Sunshine: Their Personal Story (Sunshine, Vic: privatelypublished).

Meacham, S. (1999) Regaining Paradise: Englishness and the Early Garden City Movement (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press).

Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works (1954) Metropolitan Planning Scheme 1954, Vol 2: Survey andAnalysis Report Submitted to the Town Planning Committee by E.F. Borrie (Melbourne: the Board).

Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works (1967) The Future Growth of Melbourne: A Report to theMinister for Local Government on Melbourne’s Future Growth and Its Planning (Melbourne: the Board).

Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works (1971) Planning Policies for the Melbourne Metropolitan Region(Melbourne: the Board).

Murphy, J. (1995) Social policy and the family. In: J. R. Nethercote, S. Prasser, and J. Warhurst, eds.The Menzies Years: A Reappraisal of Government, Politics, and Policy (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger).

Murphy, J. (2000) Imagining the Fifties: Private Sentiment and Political Culture in Menzies’ Australia (Sydney:Pluto Press).

Peel, M. (1995) Good Times, Hard Times: The Past and the Future in Elizabeth (Carlton: MelbourneUniversity Press).

Popp, E. (1979) Glimpses of Early Sunshine: Dawn of a District from Aboriginal Times to 1901 (Sunshine:Sunshine and District Historical Society).

Rickard, J. (1974) H.B. Higgins: The Rebel As Judge (Sydney: Allen and Unwin).Social Welfare Commission (1974) The Australian Assistance Plan (Canberra: Australian Government

Publishing Service).Sunshine City Council (1971) Your Share in Sunshine: A Progressive Municipality (Sunshine, Vic: the

Council).Sunshine Council City Planning Department (1988) Sunshine: Planning for the 21st Century (Sunshine:

Sunshine Council).Tarn, J. N. (1973) Five Percent Philanthropy: An Account of Housing in Urban Areas Between 1840 and 1914

(London: Cambridge University Press).Van Der Wee, H. (1987) Prosperity and Upheaval: The World Economy, 1945–1980 (Berkeley: University of

California Press).Veltri, D. (2002) The Evolution of an Outer Suburb: A Study of the Shire of Braybrook 1888–1951 (M.A. Thesis:

School of Historical Studies, University of Melbourne).White, R. (1981) Inventing Australia 1688–1980 (Sydney: George Allen and Unwin).Whitlam, G. (1985) The Whitlam Government 1972–1975 (Ringwood: Viking).

Dan Morrow166



Documents

‘FORGING, AHEAD’: INDUSTRY AND ENVIRONMENTAL TRANSFORMATION IN A MELBOURNE SUBURB 1906–85