Almost everybody in Melbourne who was older than 10 years (or thereabouts) will remember where they were on October 15, 1970. It was on this day at 11.50 am that the West Gate Bridge, then under construction, collapsed and 35 men lost their lives, 18 men were injured, and the whole workforce was traumatised. A 2000-tonne concrete and steel span, 112 metres high, plunged into the Yarra River. Many of the killed were having lunch in huts underneath the span, and some who survived actually rode the span down the 112 metres into the river. It was the worst workplace disaster, both before or after, in Australia, and it changed industrial health and safety laws forever. But subsequently, a strange silence seemed to descend on Melbourne. While there is a memorial garden under the bridge on the western side where every year on the anniversary of the collapse, the survivors and their families meet, most people in this city of 5 million people do not think about the tragedy that happened there in October 1970. I suspect that many do not even know it ever happened.
The Royal Commission that inquired into the disaster found that a combination of design flaws and problems with construction methods caused the collapse. A bridge with a similar design being built by the same company in Wales had collapsed and killed four workers a few weeks prior, but the workers had only heard about this through union connections, and when they called a meeting to discuss the issues, they were assured of the safety of the bridge design and construction and voted to continue work. There had been whispers of problems on the West Gate site on both sides of the river, but these were dismissed by management in the construction and engineering companies. The West Gate could be considered the first private/public partnership undertaken by the Victorian government. Other bridges had been designed and built by government agencies like the Board of Works, but the scale of the project was thought to be too large for the Board, and it was given over to an entity called the Lower Yarra River Crossing Authority. It was decided that tolls would repay the private investment needed over many years.
Very little was written about the collapse, either in the academic or popular literature (with the exception of the Royal Commission report, arcane engineering theses and a book by journalist Bill Hitchings in 1979). On the screen, there was a short report on the ABC on the 40th anniversary of the collapse and a documentary made by the Jackobsen brothers for one of the commercial stations the same year. This comparative silence seemed so complete that when a radio programme on Melbourne ABC interviewed Dennis McIntosh about his play, ‘West Gate’, having a season at the MTC, the cheery hosts happily took calls from people about their most enjoyable experiences of the bridge, riding from one side of Melbourne to the other. While some people rang to tell of their memories of that day and the great sadness it caused, many others talked of birthdays, holidays and beautiful views. Luckily, McIntosh was a great interviewee, able to negotiate this attempt (however unintentional) to undermine the very seriousness of his subject. How do you talk about such a disaster during a radio programme dedicated to light entertainment? How do you write a play after such a silence of almost 60 years?
McIntosh comes from a long line of working-class writers that stretches back to the early 20th century, but who have not been particularly prominent in the 21st. George Johnson, Ruth Park and Frank Hardy come to mind, but the new generations have not had quite the same impact. McIntosh is not a writer of fiction, as the others were—his two published books have been memoirs of his personal experiences as a shearer and a labourer on a tunnel project in Melbourne. But his descriptions of manual and physical labour on the cusp of major industrial and economic changes in Australia paint pictures of a world that has almost completely disappeared. Not that the poor and working class have gone: they have been silenced along with the unions who represented and fought for them. Arts and culture, along with much of the political Left, have moved on, wary of the racist and misogynist aspects of masculine labour. The language of class conflict is too reminiscent of a particular type of masculinity that makes many on the Left uncomfortable. Best to stop mentioning them altogether.
West Gate has been a surprise hit for the very bourgeois Melbourne Theatre Company, which is not really known for presenting working-class voices in its repertoire. Melbourne has a long history of small theatre groups presenting the work of playwrights like Daniel Keene, Patricia Cornelius and others, whose plays open up the world of the poor, dispossessed and marginalised, but almost never is this work seen outside of the tiny theatres and spaces that are disappearing from our cultural life. So many of the spaces that used to give voice to the powerless are losing state funding, and very few can resist this trend. To call West Gate an anomaly is to minimise this cultural moment. Australia is being denuded of the theatre and arts that represent the working class and other powerless groups. So much emphasis has been laid upon sexual minorities and their part in our cultural world, we can almost pretend that there is no such thing as the working class-men and women who scrabble to secure their own and their families’ lives and wellbeing.
Regardless that McIntosh’s play is an anomaly, it is still a really good play. And considering that much of the material is arcane and difficult to represent successfully in live theatre, it hits its mark more often than not. There is no way to present the bridge collapse without at least trying to explain the poor design, inattention to the workers’ complaints and demands from management to keep going regardless; there is no way this could not be spoken about. The box girder bridge was a lousy design, and the British company, which claimed to be the best bridge builder in the world, seemed to treat the bridge being constructed on the other side of the world as a colonial enterprise. They did not even bother to send the required detailed drawings that their own head engineer had requested. An aside worth including comes from the radio program mentioned earlier. In the midst of the memories of summer holidays on the west coast and the beautiful view from the apex of the bridge, came a call from Karl Kruszelnicki, the science nerd beloved by ABC viewers. He recounted that in his first job working at the steel works producing the steel for the bridge, he was quietly told by his bosses to fudge the figures just a little so that there would be no time lost by having to produce more of it. He said that he could not do that, so as a 20-year-old, he had to step away from the job altogether. It was a stunning moment on live radio, but I fear that not too many people realised the importance of it. One of the hosts admitted that she had not seen the play, so how would she have known that one of the characters in the play complained about the poor quality of the steel?
There were many hundreds of workers on both sides of the river, and their stories are too numerous to present individually, so the actors must each represent many people. The workers are represented by only four actors, so it is not surprising that their dialogue sometimes sounds like speechifying. Thankfully, this does not happen too often. Each character is given a life, from the union delegate to the Italian welder and his young offsider. The dialogue must have been somewhat confronting for some of the audience with its casual sexism and racism, but authentic it certainly is. The management and engineers are not so fortunate. They are given little dialogue that suggests a rounded life and character. But that is ok. This is a play about the workers and the wives (only one really) left to pick up the pieces. This is unashamedly a play about the working class.
The collapse of the bridge itself is a masterclass in live theatre technology. A huge, rectangular, grey stage prop falls towards the audience, preceded by ominous scratching noises and then a deep bass shuddering goes through the whole theatre. This produces a silence in the audience that I have rarely experienced. Instead of an intermission, the second act begins in a kitchen, and here the only woman in the cast emerges. She is the widow of the Italian welder who died in the arms of the young, brash apprentice. She is played by Daniela Farinacci, who exudes an anger that just radiates out into the audience. She has been left alone and bereft with young children and a babe in arms. She is here to represent those women left behind. The class aspects are also on display here. The widows were forced into the arms of the welfare, and little time was left for grieving. If they wanted any funds from the large contributions that were made by the public, they had to prove that they were ‘good’ mothers. They were shamed and intimidated into proving their worth.
The remaining workforce was sacked with a week’s pay and platitudes. No workers’ compensation, and a management that was determined not to take any responsibility. At one point, one of the bosses in the play starts blaming the militant unions and mentions Henry Bolte, the premier at the time. You could hear the audience take in a collective breath and breathe out an anger that was visceral. Those of us who remember him still detest him. The play ends with a roll call of the 35 dead, which echoes one of the first minutes of the play, which was a roll call of members in a union meeting to discuss the workers’ complaints and questions about the bridge that fell in Wales.
When building resumed, the unions took a stand and refused to return to finish the bridge until health and safety measures were introduced, including the now dreaded union health and safety officers. Bigger and higher bridges have been built in Melbourne since, and workers have not died in the effort. It does not take much to draw a direct line from the dangers inherent in the building industry and the militancy of the building unions. The dangers and violence in the building industry for the workers produced Norm Gallagher of the BLF and John Setka of the CFMEU. Younger readers might need to be reminded that the reason union leaders like Gallagher and Setka stayed in their positions for as long as they did was that they won gains for their members that otherwise would never have existed. That they eventually may have corrupted that trust should not necessarily diminish their gains. West Gate, the play, reminds everyone of how we got here and the sacrifices that were made for us.
Comments
I was a junior doctor at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, doing a shift in Casualty (now the Emergency Department) on the day of the disaster. I remember how unprepared we were for such an event. I was told that the ambulance service had phoned and that the West Gate Bridge had collapsed with multiple casualties. These were expected to arrive in the next half hour. We were told to discharge as many of the patients in the Emergency Department as we could to leave room for the expected influx. In those days we did not have training in the area of multiple trauma, and it was in the time before CT scans and MRI. We did the best we could. I also understand that the other city hospitals were involved as well.