This Is Why Australia Stopped Training Fitters and Turners

In 1965, almost every workshop in Australia had one. The fitter and turner, the man who could take a lump of steel and make or mend almost anything. Today he sits on the national skills shortage list, and the country cannot find enough of them. This is the story of how that happened, and who made the decisions that caused it. The fitter and turner never stopped being needed. He disappeared because Australia stopped making him. The great public workshops that trained generation after generation of tradesmen, Eveleigh in Sydney, Newport in Melbourne, Islington in Adelaide, and the State Electricity Commission of Victoria, were corporatised, broken up and sold through the 1980s and 1990s. The apprenticeships went with them. At the same time, the technical colleges were folded into universities, and a whole generation of young men was told that real success wears a suit. The result is a country that now scours the world for a tradesman it once trained five thousand at a time on a single site. CHAPTERS 0:00 The man at the lathe 1:30 Where these men came from 3:15 What they actually built 5:30 The human cost on the workshop floor 7:00 The chain that made every tradesman 8:30 The sell off begins 10:00 The message to a generation 11:15 The shortage today 12:30 What was really lost THE FACTS BEHIND THE STORY Eveleigh Railway Workshops employed more than five thousand men at their peak and built the first steam locomotives made in Australia. It closed in 1988. Newport Workshops built the Spirit of Progress in 1937, Australia's first fully air conditioned all steel passenger train. It closed after one hundred and six years in 1992. The State Electricity Commission of Victoria, founded in 1918, was split in 1994 and sold off between 1995 and 1999 for around twenty three and a half billion dollars. Around seven thousand jobs were cut in the lead up to the sale of the Yallourn power station alone. The fitter and turner sits on Australia's national skills shortage list today, and four in ten apprentices never finish. If you served your time at a railway workshop, the SEC, a dockyard or a factory floor, this one is for you. Tell us in the comments where you did your apprenticeship and what the trade gave you. Subscribe and stay with the channel for more stories of the Australia that was built by hand, and the men who built it. #AustralianHistory #Tradesmen #FitterAndTurner #Apprenticeship #MadeInAustralia