New Work Routines

Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941, Brisbane residents were caught up in the exceptional demands of a war being fought on Australia’s doorstep. While a network of civil defence groups prepared Brisbane for expected attacks from land or sea, the Commonwealth Government set about mobilising every available person and reorganising the Australian economy.

The National Manpower Directorate was set up with powers to determine who would be exempt from military service, to conscript labour, to redeploy employees to industries of highest priority in the war effort, and to police anyone slacking off. Absenteeism became illegal.

Services like trains and the post had ‘reserved’ occupations where workers were kept on to the end of the war. Even the ice works in Sandgate was listed as an ‘essential service’. Men unfit for military service were conscripted into the 3 C’s (Civil Construction Corps). One of the 3 C’s main tasks was to build roads through inland Queensland, linking Brisbane to the northern battlefront.

As early as 1939 women had registered for volunteer work and had begun training in a variety of para-military organisations, however, it was not until July 1942 that the Australian Women’s Land Army was formed

Once enrolled, young women were directed to work in rural industries,
their tasks as varied as cotton picking, droving, mustering and picking bananas. Aboriginal Australians, Italian prisoners-of-war and soldiers still training for the battlefront were sent off to harvest sugar cane.

Some military units brought their own secretarial staff and typists from the southern States and a workforce of 25,000 people was raised just to staff the many military headquarters around Brisbane.

With insufficient men available for the tasks to be done, official attention turned to women. A National Women’s Employment Board was established to bring women into the workforce particularly those without family responsibilities.

The Board made decisions about their work conditions, their rates of pay and eventually the type of work they did, even forcing some to work in areas of great need such as hospitals. Just as women came to replace men in non-combatant roles in the Services, so too in civilian life: they delivered ice and mail, became conductors on the trams, worked in munitions and repaired planes.