Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This silent black-and-white clip shows a factory that manufactured farming implements in the 1920s. A series of images shows men at workbenches, a mechanised forge for shaping metal, a man lowering a wheel into a paint bath and women making binder canvases for harvesting machines. A panning shot across the roofs of the factory reveals the factory’s size, and the final shot shows rows of new harvesting machines. One of the intertitles reads: ‘Some Implements ready to assist in harvesting Australia’s annual crop of 160 million bushels of wheat and oats’.

Educational value points

• This clip shows the H V McKay Pty Ltd works in Sunshine in Melbourne – the largest factory in Australia in the 1920s and reputedly the largest manufacturer of agricultural machinery in the southern hemisphere. The works had been acquired by H V McKay (1865–1926) in 1904 to manufacture the Sunshine stripper harvester and other farm implements, and had grown to cover some 30.7 ha. In the mid-1920s the factory employed about 3,000 workers.

• The huge factory seen here owed much of its expansion in the early 20th century to high tariffs that protected its products from overseas competition. From 1904 to 1906 McKay had waged a publicity campaign to alert Australians to the dangers posed by what he called the 'American octopus trust’ – the International Harvester Company of Chicago. The Australian government of the time passed higher tariff legislation to protect McKay’s harvesters.

• McKay built his reputation on harvesting machines and by the 1920s the widespread use of harvesters that stripped (cut), threshed and bagged grain in one single operation made harvesting more efficient and allowed farmers to crop large areas. Prior to mechanisation, wheat and other grains were harvested manually. The harvesters seen in the clip awaiting delivery may be examples of a horsedrawn model with a wide front produced in 1926.

• As the clip reveals, in the 1920s women were employed in factories, which provided an alternative, albeit poorly paid, to domestic labour. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the expansion of industry saw women increasingly employed in factories – for example, by the 1920s about two-thirds of factory workers in Victoria were female. Most were employed in the clothing and textile industries or in the manufacture of food and drinks.

• Many of the factory workers would have lived locally at the model community McKay created at Sunshine as part of his efforts to break militant trade unionism among his workforce. The company provided amenities such as libraries and stores, and senior company executives also lived in the community. According to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, McKay’s critics saw the Sunshine community not as philanthropy, but as a form of social and industrial control.