Industrial awakening : a geography of Australian manufacturing, 1788-1890

Abstract

Industrial Awakening is a remarkable story of the way manufacturing in a new and remote country pulled itself up by the bootstraps and became enmeshed in changing world commerce and technology. During the first hundred years of European settlement in Australia, a wide range of circumstances influenced the development and location of manufacturing. Many of the issues being debated today about the role of manufacturing in the Australian economy are remarkably familiar to those who read this account of the quarrels of the past: questions of protection and tariffs, confrontations between trade unions and employers, the allocation of contracts between domestic and overseas firms, the relative quality of locally made and imported products, the plight of industry in country towns, and the competition between the colonies to attract investment. Industrial Awakening is a comprehensive account of the development and geography of manufacturing, widely and graphically illustrated and with valuable statistical tables. Much of industrial development in Australia was circumstantial: the line between success and failure was often a very fine one. Sometimes a step forward depended on the right man being available at the right moment, be this a perceptive politician, a broadminded bureaucrat or an enterprising employer. Sometimes, just when all the teething troubles associated with establishing a new kind of industrial activity had been overcome, the enterprise would be wiped out by a stroke of a ministerial pen or the strike of a militant union. The book represents the first fruits of a wider study by the author of the geography of Australian manufacturing to the present time, with information from archival and literary sources supplemented by first-hand investigation of industrial and mining processes. Show more