I have been a bricklayer most of my life, so, I have been working and building these type of houses in the seventies. Houses building in Australia, seems to evolve more rapidly than in the old countries of Europe, perhaps because it is a new country. Anyhow you will understend this change when you read our blogs,
Welcome to our article, Australian building industry.
Building houses in the sixties.
Dear readers, the following blogs that I am writing here, will be about my life story and what I did to earn a living when I camo to Australia. Anyhow, these articles will be written is such a way that can help people to DIY brickwork and other building things, which we believe can help people that are willing to try DIY small building or repairs, but first let me explain how I acquired that knowledge myself.
When I came to
Australia in the sixties, I ended up working in the building industry, we were working
mainly on fixing old houses, or building new house from scratch, units and
warehouses, so, I ended up learning how lots of building things were done, in
the end I became a bricklayer, and have worked most of my life as a bricklayer.
Anyhow, in this
article we are going to write about; the Australian housing industry in the
sixties; Working in the Australian housing and building industry; Earning and
saving money if you can; and Working with this Italian builder.
We believe that the
Australian housing and building industry, is one of the major employment
industries in Australia, you can say that this is so in other countries. But I
believe that in other countries building new houses is not as important as it
is in Australia. One of the reasons for this is that Australia is a new
country, it needs and takes in many emigrants. In the sixties Australia was
taking emigrants in a regulated way, now because the population grows steadily
also accommodation need to grow steadily, therefore, new houses need to be
built to keep a steady balance. This building of new houses gives opportunities
for the newcomers to be employed, since there is manual work involved,
therefore, a healthy cycle is created; but even with these opportunities the
building industry has its ups and down, as we know. So, let us talk about it
and try to make sense, if we can.
You know, the housing building industry and real estate work together to complete the cycle of supplying to the public what is needed, so, both have their ups and downs, and it cannot be avoided. It could have been helpful if one could foretell what is going to happen next year, on the housing market, but it is not possible to guess what is going to happen in the future. If people can know this, then they could make money, since they could invest their money at the right time.
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Working in the building industry.
As I have said, when I came to Australia from Italy, I ended up working in the
building industry. Now let me explain this working position, working on
building in Australia is a temporary job, because even the employer is subject
to the same opportunities of work and he cannot help it, therefore, one is
never sure what is going to happen next, when the job you are working on is
finished, therefore, there were concerns about our employment status, so, we kept
asking ourselves, whether our employer would get another job to do, before we
finished the one we were doing, but even though we were thinking that, we still
worked hard to finish the job on hand, as soon as possible, because to find
work you had to be competitive.
Well, I should say that although this small
Italian builder did lots of small jobs, it did work out all right most times,
so, we were able to move from one job to another all-around Brisbane and to
other close by town/s. Of course, this would cause worries if you had no
transport of your own and you had to rely on some friends or the employer to
take you on the work site, where the building was going to be built, but we
managed somehow.
I remember that there were times, when I had to
get up early and catch the first tram to the city, and then I had to catch the
second tram to another suburb, where the builder would pick me up and drive me
to the onsite job, in the evening after eight hours or more of hard work, I had
to go back home, which took again a long time, but anyhow we managed all right,
after all we were here in Australia to earn money, so, as long as we had a job
to go to and earn money, we were happy to do that. You see, on building sites
workers can earn above other people wages, but there was this uncertainty
because there was no guaranty that the work would last, and it also was hard
work all day long.
Anyhow, it was a good job with good
opportunities to learn and improve your knowledge of building something
yourself. You see, in those times we could improve our working and earning
position more easily than today; it was possible then because a lot of things
were simple, and therefore, they could be done just by using your common sense.
Of course, there were always inspections from local authorities to follow, but
once you knew what it was required, they were easy to follow, if you used your
brains diligently, therefore, we should say that we had more opportunities then
compared to today opportunities. I believe that it was so, because the building
we were building were small houses, so, if you were a tradesman, you most
likely could be the builder as well.
Having said that, now let us see, how this
type of work affected us newcomers moneywise.
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Learning how to earn and save money.
Whatever you do in
life, the most important thing is; Earning and saving money. In my case,
because there was uncertainty of not having a permanent job in the building
industry, we soon learned that whatever money we earned from our job, we had to
save some, otherwise we could have problems soon or later; so, this
disadvantage that we had in this job pushed most of us building workers to
become good at saving money, because we wanted to feel safe and independent.
So, let me talk
about money. In Australia because the economy is based on capitalism the more
money you can earn and save the better off you are; of course, this is also
true to most other part of the world, but in Australia seems to be more so,
because it is a new country, and people rely more on what they can earn than
anywhere else in the world. This is because there are not existing reach
families that live on the earnings of the properties that have been passed down
from generation to generations. Therefore, in Australia is mostly up to
yourself, if you want to get richer, you should try harder to earn and save
money. You see, most of the people here, have earned their own money.
Therefore, we must
understand that in Australia, not only you have to try to earn money, but it is
important that you should save it too, and at the same time you have to try to
improve your working position, so, you can be more independent and not rely on
others. This attitude can help if it happens that you lose your temporary job,
and also by saving money you can start one day buying your own house, which is
the most important thing that people must do, if they want to live an
independent decent life. I know now that most of you are saying that this
buying a house is a hard thing to do, but you see, this can be done because I
have done it myself.
Anyhow, I believe
that I have said enough about this money business; so, let me go back to tell
you, my progress in the building industry and what I did to become a tradesman.
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Working and learning with this Italian
builder.
Dear readers, in these articles, while I am
telling you the story about myself working in the Australian building industry,
I am going to try to give you details of how things were done in those days;
therefore, if you are one of those people that want to do your own building
renovations one day, on those building that we built then, you can somehow
guess what you can find, because you already know how we built them.
Now let me go back to when I started work
with this Italian builder, who was a bricklayer and concreter, we were working
on houses and because there was not enough bricklaying work on these houses, as
they were mostly built with timber, we were building only the foundations, the
concrete stumps and some brickwork as the base of the house. Of course, we did
also some jobs under the existing houses, and this has given me an opportunity
to learn many things about those old houses in Brisbane.
Just for comparison’s sake, to see the
difference between those times and today, let me describe to you what we did to
prepare a new base for a new timber house, which would be setting on concrete
stumps and some brick walls.
First of all, we went to set up the site, if
it was not set up from the builder or carpenter that was building the timber
house. This setting up required that we should fix some timber frame to the
ground with pegs and per the measurement in the plan. These timber frames are
called profiles, and they are marked accurately to the measurement on the plan,
so that we had the right measurement to go by, to start digging the foundations
for the stumps and brick walls.
Then we had to dig the foundations, and this
was mostly my job as I was the labour and I was pretty good at digging, this
may seem hard to believe but even digging one has to be an expert to do a good
job, as the shape and depth of the foundations is important to do a good job.
Just to show you what I mean to dig a hole for a new concrete stump, 20x20
centimetres as most stumps were supposed to be; the hole for this stump should be
in exactly the right place, it should be at least sixty centimetres deep in
natural ground and at the bottom should have a circumference of at least 40
centimetres or more. These were the average specifications then, unless it was
stated otherwise. I know this because I have dug several hundreds of them if
not thousands.
All the tools that I needed to do this
digging job were a pick a post hole shovel and a crowbar, it usually would take
me a couple of days to dig the entire house holes, which could usually be
between twenty and thirty holes. You see I was able to dig a hole in less than
half an hour, but it was hard work. Sometimes when there was some brickwork to
do, we had also to dig these foundations by hand; the foundations were usually
dug according to specification, which usually would be 60 centimetre deep in
the natural ground, this means that if the grounds had been filled up that
filling should not be counted as depth.
Anyhow, before I finish writing this article,
I want to say that those houses that we were building in the sixties, with this
builder contractor that I was working for, they were average affordable house
that the average family could afford to buy, and therefore, they were sold
easily.
Now, I believe that I have said enough in
this article and although there is a lot more that can be said, we are going to
tell you in our next article, which is going to be about how we made those
concrete stumps on site, while we were working on these,
To see more click on this link, Australian building industry.
See you soon.
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