INTRODUCTION
The establishment in 1913 of the New South Wales State Government Dockyard and Engineering Works at Walsh Island, Newcastle, represented the practical political expression of a number of complimentary socialistic labourist ideals and preferences. In considering the rationale behind the establishment of the Dockyard it is clear that its function was not only to serve the government in terms of enhancing its capacity and efficiency in industrial procurement. Rather, the Dockyard as a state enterprise had specific social and political functions related to the labour movement's selective socialist objectives. The Dockyard's industrial role was prefaced by an ideological assumption that state enterprise, along with state sponsored industrial and infrastructure development, should be directed towards the material and social advancement of organised labour. This statist model of politically directed developmentalism reflected organised labour's desire to capture and use state power to extend the economic and industrial functions of government in order to temper the worst excesses of unrestrained capitalism. This model of labourist industrial developmentalism had a distinct socialist agenda, as its central assumption was to extend the ownership of key industrial sectors to the people of New South Wales through state ownership.
In the years immediately prior to the First World War, state intervention on behalf of labour was considered a socialist strategy by organised labour. State enterprises, such as Walsh Island, were intended to compete against monopoly capital and to provide an enterprise base with which the state could direct economic and social development. The establishment of Walsh Island represented one of the first physical attempts by a Labor Government at underpinning this embryonic ideal with an industrial enterprise. Labor's state enterprises were established to undertake industrial production where private enterprise would not engage in the economy, to provide the productive capacity for Labor's massive public works infrastructure development programme, and set standards for wages and conditions. All of these aims were part of Labor's broader ideal to industrialise New South Wales in order to promote the dynamic industrial economy necessary to underwrite the social progress and greater standard of living desired by organised labour. In short, this strategy was levelled primarily on an assumption of male wage-based social security, through state promotion of employment growth and stability and high male wages, to underpin a reasonable standard of living for organised labour.
This thesis owes its inspiration to a comment made by historian James Docherty, who wrote that the existence of the Walsh Island Dockyard had been largely forgotten.1 Indeed, secondary sources on the Dockyard's history are as scarce as they are incomplete. The immense volume of documentation that was generated by the Dockyard has largely disappeared and very little has found its way into the State and Local Archives. My investigations though the Parliamentary Library, State Library, New South Wales Archive Authority, Public Works Department, Maritime Services Board, Newcastle Regional Library Local History Unit, and local historians, have found that the bulk of the Dockyard's administrative documentation was dumped or destroyed after the Dockyard closed in the late 1930's. Indeed, local sources have confirmed that most of the records were taken away during the Dockyard's demolition and unceremoniously deposited at a local rubbish tip, and other records destroyed at the Dyke End State Dockyard after the Second World War.2 However, the archival material available, parliamentary and government documents, union records, and newspaper reports do form the necessary primary source basis required for this account and analysis of the Dockyard's establishment and early activities.
The first chapter outlines the physical establishment and early operations of the Dockyard between 1912 and 1918, and analyses the political process that directed its development. The second chapter looks more closely at the political ideology and practice associated with the development of state enterprises between 1910 and 1914; specifically investigating the political and economic considerations that informed the Dockyard's role as the Labor Government's largest state enterprise. The third chapter assesses the Dockyard's performance as an enterprise in terms of its labour relations between the years 1913 and 1918. This chapter focuses on workplace relations experienced between labour and management, inter-labour relations, and the state as employer. The interplay between the effects of the First World War, the introduction of new technology, and work and management practices on the character of labour relations are also analysed.
The last chapter encapsulates the establishment of Walsh Island as a product of a strong socialist labourist tradition that sought to use the state to intervene socially, economically, and politically, in support of the social and material progress of labour. State enterprises, such as Walsh Island, were part of a wide ranging institutionalisation of class politics (which included arbitration, industrial awards and social welfare measures) that prioritised the centrality of the male 'family' wage as the preferred means of social security and progress. In essence, the Walsh Island Dockyard, as a locus for industrial expansion and employment, was one early practical manifestation of socialist inspired labourism. This labourist strategy came to dominate the political economy in Australia in the years after the Second World War in the form of the male wage-earners' welfare state.
ENDNOTES
1. J.C. Docherty, Newcastle: The Making of an Industrial City, Sydney, Hale & Iremonger, 1983, p. 34.
2. Ewan Melliville, a district officer with the Maritime Services Board in Newcastle, and Ken Bayliss, Site Manager for the MSB at the Dyke End dockyard site, both confirm that most of the Walsh Island records were lost or destroyed during and after relocation from Walsh Island to the Dyke End in 1940-41. Mr Melliville and Mr Bayliss were both responsible for saving what was left of the Walsh Island records stored at the Dyke End site, and having them deposited with the State and Local Archives. A local historian, Ron Cummings, also confirmed, from accounts made to him by some of the workers involved, that records were dumped and destroyed during the demolition of the dockyard in the late 1930's.
© 1997 david.cameron@mailbox.uq.edu.au
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