AUSTRALIAN WOMEN'S WAR DRIVE

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 72, 21 September 1940, Page 17

AUSTRALIAN WOMEN'S WAR DRIVE

UNPRECEDENTED EFFORT ON THE HOME FRONT

Australia has embarked upon a £50,000,000 munitions programme which will make her a South Pacific arsenal, producing weapons and munitions of war not only for the use of her own armed forces, but for British and Dominion forces in outlying parts of the Empire. In this unprecedented effort on the home front women are playing their part as well as men, states the "Sydney Morning Herald."

Every hour of the day and long into the night thousands of Australian women tend whirring machines in the munitions and aircraft factories, turning out bullets and shells, aeroplanes, parachutes, and gas masks, and all the hundreds of complex things which will be needed by the men who ■stand by the guns.

You see them in the textile factories, making military clothing and uniforms. They are in the aircraft factories, sewing the. fabric that covers the wings and fuselage of Australian-made planes. They check over the gauges and armament instruments in the munitions laboratories. Thousands of them work in munitions shops, inspecting and packing the ammunition used in rifles and machineguns. GIRLS WORK AT INCREDD3LE SPEED. Many people have only the vaguest notion of the large hand taken by women workers in the mass production of munitions. Of the 5000 persons making shells and small arms ammunition in the Commonwealth Ammunition Factory in Melbourne no less than 1500 are women, whose numbers will be increased to about 2500 when the second small arms ammunition factory in Melbourne, now coming into .production, is working at full; capacity in a month or two. j

These girls, for most of them are in thqir teens, work in shifts from 6 a.m. to 1i.30 p.m., examining and packing; at what seems incredible speed, hundreds of thousands of rounds of machine-gun bullets a week. According to official figures they

handle 100,000,000 cartridges a year, an output which will be trebled, if riot quadrupled, when the new Melbourne factory and another ammunition factory now nearly completed in Adelaide are in full production.

One thing Australian soldiers and airmen are. not going to be short of is ammunition.

The girls employedi in these factories earn good wages. The rate of pay for first-year juniors is 14s a week (the hourly rate is Is higher), secondyear juniors receive 18s 9d, third-year juniors £1 9s 3d, fourth-year juniors, £1 17s, and fifth-year juniors £2 2s 3d. Thereafter, until they are 21 years of age, they earn £2 7s 3d. Adult women workers with less than 12 months' experience receive £2 10s a week, and after 12 months they receive £2 16s 9d, or £3 0s 3d if they are paid on an hourly basis. IN AN AIRCRAFT FACTORY. At the De Havilland Aircraft Company's factory in Sydney, now producing Tiger Moth training planes at the surprising rate of two a day, or about 700 planes a year, more than 25 girls are employed. Their duties include sewing, by power machines, the Irish linen fabric used in covering the fuselage, wings, and tail of the aeroplane, fashioning the material into various shapes, and hand-sewing them on to the planes. Junior girls employed on this work are paid £ 1 5s 6d a week after they have had six months' experience, £1 16s after 12 months, and £2 2s after jlB months' experience. After that the i wage is £2 9s 6d a week. I During a recent visit to munitions I ! factories in Melbourne hundreds of young -women were seen checking pre-.

cision instruments and gauges in the Munitions Supply Laboratories. About 20 women are employed in the metrology section of these laboratories. These girls are highly skilled at very exacting tasks and use machines which measure gauges accurately to a tenthousandth, <3r even a hundred-thou-sandth, of an inch. SPECIAL AIR-CONDITIONED ROOMS. Other girls in these laboratories work in special air-conditioned rooms, where range-finding instruments are checked, cleaned, and repaired. In these rooms the work, is of such a precise, .and delicate nature that the air has to be filtered .to keep out dust particles. Women have a particular aptitude for this painstaking work, and are said to excel men. Many other girls are engaged in reconditioning and reassembling binoculars, dials, and optical instruments used by the fighting forces and for measuring machine work in munitions factories. It is in the Munitions Supply Laboratories that gas masks are assembled and tested after the delivery of their component parts from scores of manufacturers all over Australia. Here, again, women are largely employed. SHORTAGE OF SKILLED FEMALE LABOUR. Not all work in the munitions factories requires a similar degree of skill. In the Small Arms Ammunition Factory in Melbourne girls attend dozens of wonderful robot machines that count, weigh, and measure cartridges, and reject the faulty ones, all in one operation. These remarkable contrivances are their own scientists and inspectors, requiring only the slightest human supervision. They do almost everything, but talk. There is a shortage of skilled female labour for munitions work in Australia, and the Government is appealing to young women to train themselves for this work in special classes which have. been arranged for the purpose. In Melbourne a series of classes is being, held in the works of Australian Paper Manufacturers, Ltd. ' Girls are there taught engineering principles and workshop practice so that, should they be required to go into the factories they will have more than a superficial knowledge of the processes allotted to them. In two months it is expected that 250 women will have passed/through these classes, enabling another 250 to begin instruction. These training facilities are a wise precaution, because thousands more women will be needed for industries directly bearing on the nation's war effort in the near future. At present about 12,000 persons are employed in Government munitions and defence establishments, but their numbers will have to be increased during the next six months to about 80,000. Six thousand persons alone will be needed to staff two new factories in Adelaide, and women munitions workers will be needed in increasingly large numbers.