The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (2 page)

1
ONE DAY IN A PENAL COLONY

LOWER DEPTHS It was the same every morning. At ten to six reveille sounded. Mostly a broom handle was applied to the green dented side of a locker, one of sixty to hold the clothes of the men of the four shifts. This time someone with a sense of humour had taken a length of two-inch plastic hose and used three or four lockers as a gong, producing a deafening, heart-stopping crash. This was a bad thing to do; it split the hose used to get hot water from the taps over the handbasin into the mop bucket. Finances didn't run to another tap or to the employment of cleaners. The echoes died quickly into the concrete.

‘Spread out!' roared the Glass Canoe. His voice was throaty and rich and greedy as if his words were cream. He'd taken his wake-up pill. ‘Stand aside or lose a limb!' He was always nasty when it wasn't his turn to go down on night shift. His face smiled when he bashed the lockers with the hose, but that smile was for the Glass Canoe, not the other prisoners. He advanced into the narrow floor space between the rows of lockers with mop and bucket of hot water. Red-eyed, faces puffed and pouchy, hampered and confused by early morning horns, the sleepers were up, desperately scrambling to get hundreds of pieces of scrap rag—their beds—up off the concrete and back into the rag carton before the Glass Canoe could spill hot water on them with the legitimate excuse that the cleaning roster had to start on time. He was a large and formidable man with a history of mental illness; his head full of ambitions, his pocket full of pills, his mouth full of other men's words. He had no trouble getting past Doctor Death when he came up for his medical. Doctor Death, who would pronounce a prisoner fit for work if he could stand unaided, breathe and had a detectable pulse, was a paid company man in the best understood sense of the word: he knew what his modest two hundred dollars a month was worth and gave service to that amount, making three short visits a week. Six hours. Put out your tongue. Drop your tweeds. Cough. He wasn't paid to look for nervous disabilities, just cripples and dead men.

This was shift 2 at the cracking plant. Friday morning, the last of seven consecutive horror shift mornings. Pay day. The normal visible life at the Administration end of the refinery would proceed for the rest of the day and close down at four. Three other shifts would keep the revenue-producing end going—the refinery itself, whose columns rose spirelike into the distance—and shift 2 would come back at seven Monday morning for another seven days. In this place no day started. Nothing ended or began, things just went anonymously on. Morning was a start for some, an end for others.

They were more than half asleep still; only the fear whipped up by the Glass Canoe's savage voice got them moving quickly. And the heart-thumping shock of his way of waking them. They were demoralized, cold and cramped and stupid and something less than men. This was due to night shift work; no reflection is intended on the economic circumstances they had been allowed by the wise and benevolent workings of an almost planned economy to attain. Strong young men who'd never been tired in their lives were stopped cold by night work.

Night shift was sleeplessness, it was an upside down stomach, bowel movements back to front. It was waking up in sunlight at home after two hours sleep to the sound of motor mowers, children, pneumatic drills, door to door salesmen. It was trying to sleep through summer days drenched in sweat, eyeballs grating in sandy sockets, and waking not knowing what day it was. Or where you were, or who you were. And it stretched before them for the rest of their working lives.

Dust and silverfish dropped from overalls and hair and boots back into the rags from which they came. Look back at the title of this chapter, it has saved me an explanation.

Most stooped unthinkingly to scratch the inch-wide residual scar of chains passed down from father to son, from ankle to ankle for half a dozen generations, their legacy from the bloody and accursed empire which, to the amusement of its old enemies and its powerful pretended friends, had since died a painful, lingering death. Though you would not know this if you examined the laws of the colony: all were promulgated in the name of the sovereign of another country.

Somewhere beyond the refinery's dome of dust and gas the sun shone splendidly golden.

 

GENERAL COMPULSION Dutch Treat eyed the glare of day with annoyance and prepared to put his earphones away and pack up his crystal set. Daylight was no time to be contacting God. Night, when stars shone and the impediment of light was removed, was the right time. God dwelt in impenetrable darkness and could only be contacted by radio.

Blue Hills, who usually had a better hideaway up on the structures, pulled the beanie from his head, the woollen cap decorated with concentric circles of red and white. His only contact with the society about him was that he was a one-time verbal supporter of a metropolitan football side and grew orchids in his spare time. A shiftworker now, there was a time when he wasn't; he could still remember going to see the football every week; the yell of the crowd, beer-flushed faces, men selling doubles, ferocious women barrackers, the sly pee into empty cans. It was a long time ago. He had been in for eleven years.

He had fifteen years to go to retire at sixty. It was a long time. A lot of orchids opening and falling and one year less of life for each few years on shift.

The country towns had nothing to offer, no new cities were being developed or dams built in the country's dead centre; prisoners were allowed to drift jobless to the few large coastal cities from all over Australia as soon as they left school, to choose their place of detention. Since wherever they looked the land was owned by someone else, the only place they were not trespassers was on the roads and there were laws about loitering and vagrancy. You had to keep moving and you had to have money or else. There was an alternative. Without alternatives there can be no democracy. There was an infinite freedom of choice: they could starve sitting, standing, asleep or awake; they could starve on a meat or vegetarian diet. Any way they liked as long as they didn't bother anyone. Unemployment payments weren't meant to be lived on. They weren't compelled by others to apply to any one place of labour, but they understood that once accepted for detention their boss or commandant had power over them just as great and far more immediate than the government of the country. To all intents their employer was more powerful, for he was the main point of contact between government and prisoner: he deducted the government's tax. Apart from this he prescribed how and when men should come and go, how they dressed, when they ate, the movements of their arms and legs, the words they spoke. There were accepted facial expressions, compulsory signs of loyalty, accepted opinions, desirable morals, compulsory attendance on pain of loss of food money, and the rule, made by employers, that the prisoners must not refuse to work no matter how unfairly they considered they were treated. This had once been relaxed and the right to strike obtained, but this right was being eroded away and soon would be no right at all. Employers simply applied to a Court and a strike ban was written in to prisoners' Awards: no one consulted the prisoners. The days of five hundred lashes were gone but in their place were strike penalties of five hundred dollars a day. The word Democracy had been heard for centuries on political platforms but was nowhere to be seen in the daily earning lives of citizens. They knuckled under or they got out. As for having a say in the running of the enterprise that repaid their support by rigidly controlling them…

The funny thing was that with all this power, employers were not the State, they were free men. They could come and go out of one industry into another, they could employ or dismiss, make new rules and change old ones. No responsibility beyond the elementary one of providing themselves with a workforce able to work. If they didn't want to pay an extra cent in wages, they appealed to the prisoners' patriotism—think of the economy's good. The economy's good consisted of each employer maximizing sales or profit or both: there was a maximum wage but no maximum profit.

However, these considerations didn't bother prisoners. Fifteen-odd years to go. All Blue Hills had now were the orchids and his beanie—it kept his head warm at night—and the extra money from the shift penalty rates prescribed under the provisions of the Industrial Service (General Compulsion) Bill.

Penalties? Who was penalized? At the best of times any of them could have made only a confused answer to this question, but now all were numb, too numb for thinking, including those who had stayed up almost reading, almost sleeping, almost listening for the phone, almost alert for the steps of inexperienced foremen who did not know the ropes and might come stumbling in on those who had gone down. A Commissioner of Conciliation ruled once that a man was less than fit on night shift, showing a greater understanding of refinery working conditions than any other person who sat in judgment on prisoners' grievances. He was preparing to reduce their shift loading percentage and in fact did, but the fact didn't register, they thought of him as their champion. But no amount of money makes up for lost sleep.

What was Puroil? In Australia it was a few gardens in which distant proprietors planted money and after a while tangled masses of plants grew, though with no fairy princess inside waiting to be wakened with a kiss. Their financial budgets were larger than the States in which they operated. What was Puroil? At Clearwater it was a sprawling refinery, an army of white shirts, a fleet of wagons, a number of apparently separate companies, dozens of monolithic departments protected from each other by an armour of functional difference and jealousy. On the refinery site it was two hundred and fifty shabby prisoners, a heavy overload of foremen, supervisors, plant controllers, shift controllers, up to the giddy height of section-heads (popularly miscalled Suction Heads, a metaphor deriving from pumps) who were clerks for the technologists; project and process engineers and superintendents who were whipping-boys for the—whisper it!—the Old Man himself, the Manager, who was actually only a Branch Manager and a sort of bum-boy for Head Office in Victoria which was a backward colonial outpost in the eyes of the London office, which was a junior partner in British-European Puroil its mighty self, which was the property of anonymous shareholders.

Did these people know their humblest prisoners were asleep on the job? Could they have ridden easily on their magic carpet of dividend cheques if they had known the foundation of their empire was missing? Would they have suffered attacks of vertigo, thinking the whole edifice was tottering? Not at all. For not only was their investment spread over dozens of countries so that whatever tariff barriers were erected Puroil could get underneath them and whatever upheavals occurred Puroil would survive and only people would suffer, but with real ingenuity the humble prisoner was being replaced as the foundation on which the structure was built; machines were to be the foundation. Machines that ran day and night; machines that ran for years. Why imprison these men? Why not free them?

This was a transition stage. The refinery processes were more automatic and needed far fewer men than a manned assembly line, but were far short of automation.

On the job, it was not necessary to do anything about it unless a transition man was caught sleeping. If no one actually tripped over a body there was no need to find one, for owing to the many sudden, strange shifts of Puroil industrial policy, it was not always clear which body was going to be in the soup: sleeper's or finder's. If there was some industrial advantage to be won by turning a blind eye perhaps on the eve of a wage agreement, an eager foreman might easily find himself caned severely and with a bad staff report. It was demonstrably bad to be one of the lowest bodies, a part of Labour, but being on the Staff wasn't all beer and kisses either. It was a one-way ladder suspended over the cruel sea of separation.

 

BOOKS VERBOTEN ‘What's this!' the Glass Canoe exulted. ‘Books! Papers!' He had spied the poor, torn Westerns, science fiction novels and
Reader's Digests
left lying about, and the sheets of newspaper that Bubbles had used to insulate his sleeping rags from the cold concrete.

Books were forbidden to prisoners. Even when the plants ran well for twelve months and there were hours between alarm buzzers on dreary night shifts or between routine checks and instrument readings, the men were expected to sit and stare at the concrete floor; and, to give them their due, most did. Puroil preferred zombies. Standing instructions expressly forbade reading during working hours, or the bringing into the refinery of books or newspapers.

Yet there they were. The company guards in their smart field-grey uniforms and peaked caps—if you took the stiffening wire out of the crown you could have a real Rommel cap, and they did—the guards realized that operator bods could cause them a lot more work if they chose, so they went easy on them. When the men's bags were opened under their noses on the way out each shift, they were blind to little things like paperbacks. They looked mainly for 44-gallon drums. In return, the men obligingly failed to report them when they neglected to open the boots of certain outgoing cars.