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Men at Work

The following men or members of their family were interviewed in relation to road-making within the Highways Department or, as in one case, as a private contractor. Four men have retired, one still works in the Department and one died some time ago. They all enjoyed their work and being part of a big organisation or work group with the same goals. Their stories relate to road-making, but also make links with South Australia's wider history of migration and resettlement.

Craig Simcock

When Craig started line-marking (pavement-marking) the Department used Bedford trucks. In later years Isuzu trucks were introduced and the men thought they had limousines. Most of the equipment used dated back to the 1960s and 1970s and was overhauled to continue use on the new trucks. 

Craig recalled staying in a Highway Department camp at Bon Bon during construction on the Stuart Highway during the early 1980s. ‘These were pretty good. They had the old ATCO huts with a couple of beds …. you had your meals in the main building’.

It was Joe Rich, Craig’s Supervisor in the early 1980s who suggested that Craig restore one of the disused pedestrian pavement markers (see Heritage Objects). They had hoped to restore one of the three-wheel ride-on markers that had been imported from America, but there was a good market for them and they were sold off instead.

Joe Rich added to Craig’s comments by saying the Line-Marking Group was formed in the 1960s and was initially auxiliary to the Traffic Engineering Group until 1972. By this time they had 35 men in the group and 30 pieces of plant.

Line-marking can be a dangerous operation according to Craig who has had, ‘Plenty of close misses with traffic. Plenty of them.’

In 1994 the Department commenced out-sourcing all line-marking and Craig is now one of two Contract Supervisors or Surveillance Officers auditing the contractors performing the line-marking operations.

Ted Newman

‘I worked under Mr John Yeates who was the Supervising Engineer at the time. He took me ‘under his wing’’. He gave Ted the job to design and start construction of the Northfield Asphalt Plant and the Central Workshops and Stores. Ted remembered the first trucks that delivered the hotmix from the asphalt plant – they had to be covered with a specially insulated tarpaulin to keep the mix hot. There was a thirty-two km limitation on how far the mix could be carried. The two plants at Northfield and later at Marino provided asphaltic concrete for road-making north and south of Adelaide. The outer country areas had their own small portable units (Barber-Greene), or used bitumen kettles. These smaller units were used solely for bitumen that had to be covered with aggregate and rolled, unlike the asphaltic concrete of hotmix. Ted explained that bitumen was the lowest product in the production of petrol. It was delivered to the Northfield plant where it was kept hot in tanks, heated by oil-filled coils. Aggregate and sand was heated in a Dryer Drum before being mixed with the bitumen to form asphaltic concrete. Kerosene was sprayed into the tip trucks to stop the hotmix sticking to the truck. He thought the mix was heated to 148C. The Department laboratories determined the composition of the mix according to the type of road or bridge to be ‘laid’.

On completion of this contract Ted went to Nauru Island, Malaysia and back to England. When John Yeates attended a conference in London Ted contacted him regarding work back in Australia and he was told to, ‘Get on the first ship, or the first plane’. Ted and his wife returned in 1967 and he worked as Engineer in the Department’s Mechanical Section. Ted was involved in Operation and Maintenance of the Birkenhead Bridge at Port Adelaide. The bascule design of the Bridge was the only one of its type in South Australia. Ted observed, ‘The reason was to have a road bridge and also provide access to the upper Port River’. The Civil Engineers in the Department were having difficulties with the decking, and the bitumen coated tiles on the Bridge that were not able to withstand the heavy traffic. This proved to be an alignment problem that Ted and the Mechanical Section solved by aligning the bearings and re-tiling the Bridge.

David Roberts

Initially David travelled fortnightly from Adelaide to consult with the Council Overseers and Highway gang at Lipson. He stayed in hotels at Cowell or Tumby Bay. Later he married a Port Lincoln lady and lived locally.

District Councils on the Peninsula would contract local farmers to bring gravel from the ‘pits’ for use on the roads, using horse and dray and later trucks. In return the Councils would grade their property tracks. David remembered an earth-moving contractor named McDonald from Port Lincoln who ‘re-located’ a section of the Lincoln Highway for the Franklin Harbour Council. The road was mostly sandhills through natural scrub and it was another 15 years before it was bitumised. Some private operators had their own graders and the Councils had tractors and loaders so they would hire the contractors for more extensive work. The Councils mostly did patch-up work themselves using local men. ‘ It was very dusty work on the country roads,’ said David, ‘the (road) levels were often set from up on the nearby railway line’.

A personal incident that sticks in David’s mind was an occasion when he had a gang working on the Port Neill road. One of the workers, ‘an uneducated volunteer’ according to David, was having difficulty understanding how to operate the bitumen kettle. They were stoking the boiling tar and David was showing him how to empty a new drum into the stoking kettle. At that moment Assistant Commissioner John Yeates and District Engineer Jack Holton drove up. It was not the sort of work an Engineer was expected to do; yet David knew the roadwork was expected to be finished in a set time. Mr Yeates said the gang should have been closed down if no operator was available.

David returned to Adelaide in 1957 to supervise the widening of the Adelaide to Murray Bridge Road between the Onkaparinga River and Kanmantoo. Between 1960 and 1964 he was liaison officer for John Yeates in the construction of the south wing of the Walkerville Highway Department Building.

Jack Holton

Jack served overseas with the AIF during the war. On his return to the Department he resumed work on Design, in the Roads and Bridges Department. In 1953 he was appointed District Engineer for the Western District and commenced travelling from Adelaide on a regular basis to inspect and supervise road-making in the area. Engineers gave advice on design and planning to the Councils for the roads they maintained. This involved picking the gradings, the curves and generally planning the roadworks. He recalled a problem that occurred at one time with the road alongside the airport at Whyalla. He had been up to see if it was completed ready for sealing and had given it the OK. The trouble was that unbeknown to him the road gang were unable to seal it for four weeks and in that time the gravel road developed corrugations. The corrugations were sealed in forever.

Jack had a travel routine of short trips to Port Lincoln and Tumby Bay, and each month a longer trip of a fortnight or more, to the 12 District councils in the area. He would drive over in his Ford Fairlane V8, complete his circuit, and often travelled back to Adelaide on the gulf vessels Morialta or Moonta. While on circuit he would stay in hotels at Murat Bay, Ceduna, Streaky Bay or Elliston. He enjoyed the hospitality of the people on the Peninsula and the company of the travelling salesmen and other business people who stayed in the hotels. The local areas were always grateful for any help they could get. Sometimes there would be 30 people staying in a town and that would mean a lot of business for the locals too.

Re-construction was underway on the Lincoln Highway in the time Jack was there – Forbes Cockburn, his predecessor, had gone as far as Tumby Bay and Jack took it over from there going north. The gang was working on construction and sealing. The Flinders Highway was also started and there were a couple of Bridges underway as well, with their own Bridge Gangs.

There were about 30 men in the Lincoln Highway gang living in tents. They were self-reliant and sometimes the wife of the foreman would be the cook. Jack said the Maintenance people under Bitumen Engineer, Jack Baird, had things a lot tougher. He was a tough man who did not believe in the men getting any ‘benefits’. Getting men to work in the gangs must have been interesting. Jack called the Eyre Peninsula the channel between South Australia and Western Australia. ‘You got all sorts of people wandering through looking for jobs. They were often pretty suspect people the police are looking for ….. we had to rely on the foreman to pick and choose the people. Believe me they had some beauts.’

Jack was instrumental in having a house built for the District Engineer in Port Lincoln, however, before he was able to use it he was brought back to the Central District where he spent another three years.

Jack eventually became Assistant Chief Engineer (Design) and was responsible for the planning and design of the South Eastern Freeway. He left the Highways Department in 1966 after being offered a position with the Commonwealth Bureau of Roads where he stayed for 11 years.

Carlo Ferraro

Carlo’s first job was picking grapes at McLaren Vale. When the vintage ended he was again out of work. He had determined he did not want to spend much time in the city and was recruited for work on Kangaroo Island cutting Yucca plants and living off the land. After nine months his employer disappeared leaving the workers with no money and no way back to Adelaide. Eventually he got twenty-five pound from his employer’s brother and worked for a short time as a builder’s labourer.

Carlo made his way to the Eyre Peninsula where he worked as a farm labourer and it was here the locals, who appreciated a hard-working man, knew him as Charlie Ferraro. The work was sporadic and he earned only three pound a week plus keep. This was enough to send back to Italy the money he had borrowed and to pay the fares to bring his brothers Peter and Tony to Australia. They all worked for keep at first and lived a simple life. In the late 1920s he secured a Council road-making contract. Contracts were based on price per mile (km). Carlo borrowed money from the bank for a truck even though he did not have a driver’s licence and he and his brothers started work. They had to first clear the ground, locate suitable stones, break them up with ‘knapping’ and ‘spalling’ hammers to the two sizes required by the Council Inspectors, add top soil and compact the road to a reasonable surface. Nerio and Lino Ferraro (sons of Carlo) spoke about the stories they had heard, mostly from their Uncle Peter, about how their father would drive around the tracks looking for stones, saying, ‘That’s a nice farm, got a lot of stones there’, and they would go and ask if they could clear the paddocks. Several of the current landowners in the area have shown Nerio Ferraro where Carlo had taken stone from their properties. The Inspector’s carried two different size metal rings that the stones were to fit through and these were selected as random samples along the roads built by the Ferraros. Lino explained, ‘ The way I envisage it – the way he [Carlo] described it was just like a gaoler with a set of keys’.

Carlo and his brother Peter unloading stones from Carlo’s Fargo truck c1930. Photographs courtesy Migration Museum.		The Yeelana road stretches into the distance as Carlo and Peter Ferraro break rocks by hand ready for the Inspector’s ring check.

The brothers lived in a tent and apart from a bank address were of ‘no fixed abode’. Residents of Cummins have told Carlo’s sons of how the Italian men made balls from mallee stumps and played ‘bocce’ in the street. After dinner on Saturday night they were invited to the Parker farm and played table tennis on the kitchen table.

In 1930 the Government passed legislation preventing anyone other than an Australian citizen from obtaining day-work or contracts. Carlo enlisted the help of one of his farmer friends who tendered on his behalf and sub-contracted to Carlo. The work was dirty and back-breaking and the Ferraros worked harder and cheaper than anyone else, but when public works were cut back other work was needed to survive. In 1933 Carlo was asked to tender for work on the newly acquired golf course ‘giving a day’s trial work at the rate of one pound per day and free bread donated by Mr F.W. Rowe’. Carlo also established a regular fruit and vegetable business around the Yorke Peninsula and to the West Coast returning to Adelaide with a backload of rabbit skins. In the late 1930s Carlo brought his other two brothers, Louis and Vic to Australia. They worked together with other Italian men that Carlo began to employ. Lino said that the contract Carlo had with these men included a bottle of wine each day; Carlo made this wine himself.

In 1930 Carlo was living in Cummins and he became a 'British subject', something his sons find rather ironic. During World War II Carlo was contracted to build a runway at Alice Springs Airport by the Highways Department, while other members of his family were interned.

Carlo’s work was finished at Cummins about 1934 and he moved back to Adelaide and got married, taking his new wife to Meningie while he worked on the Tailem Bend to Meningie road. The Ferraros moved to Port Pirie and Warnertown where Nerio and Lino remembered living on the Young’s family property. There was no electricity and their Mum did all the washing, ironing and cooking. There were yabbies in the dam and on Sunday morning when there was a day off they would fish for them. Carlo had a stone-crushing plant at Solomontown and they used the stone for the railway station goods yard. In about 1943 they moved to Freeling where they lived in tents and a tin shed until 1947 when Carlo Ferraro bought White Rock quarries at Magill and a family home at Newton.

Warren Duncan

He was a Plant Inspector for the Northern Regions during the early 1960s, in later years becoming the Chairman of the Advisory Committee for Load Rating at the same time serving 14 years as a Technical Services Officer (TSO). 

Warren replacing an engine at Snowtown in 1954 using a ‘sheerleg’.

It was during his time as motor mechanic that Warren first saw and slept in the caravan described in the Heritage Objects section of this website. He was sent there to work on a truck and shared the four-bunk van with Foreman Danny Thomas, his off-sider Toby Glazebrook, and another worker who all came from Minlaton.

During the 1960s Warren worked as a Plant Inspector and continued to travel the State. In 1975 the position of TSO was created to provide the Highways Commissioner with technical support in vehicle related matters. Warren gained his commercial pilot’s licence and flew the Highways Commissioner Michael Knight, the Minister for Transport and departmental officials to distant country and interstate locations for inspection visits to roadworks.

Dusty work near a loader at Gladstone in 1960.		Warren in white hat talking to foreman Danny Thomas at Marion Bay.

Warren became pilot for the Department during work on the Stuart Highway. Between 1985 and 1987 he regularly flew this ten passenger, Highways Department owned ‘Piper Cheiftan’ aircraft to outback regions. All photographs courtesy Warren Duncan. ^ Back to top