One of the key problems with oral history is that we don’t often have the time to actually sit down and listen to a whole interview. This is especially the case for long-form oral history, where the interviews can be upwards of 3 hours…
I can’t completely do justice to the life stories of these engineering patternmakers here, but I wanted to provide a quick glimpse into these stories, to show their diversity, the sheer bloody challenge of working in Australian manufacturing today, and the passion these people maintain for the trade, and for quality work in general. In short, I hope what the reader might get from this is the understanding of these skilled tradespeople as complex, whole human beings, not interchangable parts on a production line, nor mere examples of a ‘lost trade’.
Reshaping Australian Manufacturing 