'A Job for Life' by Grant Hobson
Current Billboard
Grant Hobson's 'A Job for Life' is a collage of photographs taken in late 1993 at Fitzroy's Anderson and Ritchie foundry, shortly before its closure after nearly one hundred years in business. The foundry later reopened as a modern automated plant in an industrial suburb in outer Melbourne.
'A Job for Life' is a social comment on the nature of work, and a counterpoint to the mobile web-oriented workforce typified by the Creative Industries Precinct. It directly contrasts with the previous billboard in potraying the nature and stability of work in a time of global uncertainty.
Inspired by the otherworldly nature of the foundry, Hobson photographed a mixture of craft and ancient trade over a period of two days. Heavy set men moving in choreographed unison balancing dangerous loads on muscle and bone, the methods employed principally unchanged for generations. The blast furnace in the billboard image was a crude derivation of an invention dating back to the China in the 5th century. The factory used a mould and sand casting technique centuries old.
The
rich billboard composition features foundry worker Cyril McCann, who worked at Anderson and Ritchie for 30 years. Cyril died late last year, but was lifted in his final illness by learning of this project and seeing the final image proposed for the billboard. Cyril's family writes:
It was a good life, but not an easy life or a conventional one. Cyril’s mother was a textile worker who came to Australia from England in 1917 to take a place in a wool processing plant in the textile heartland of Abbottsford. She married a salesman and had two children, Cyril and James. When the marriage didn’t work out and Cyril’s father left, times became tough and the boys aged 14 and 15 went to work. It was when their mother found a new partner that the boys came to live on the street, and out of necessity, off their wits. They did whatever they could to survive.
Eventually Cyril started taking shelter in a foundry. It was on one of these occasions that he was discovered by the owner of the foundry. The family took him in and he started work. He worked at the same foundry for 30 years. The work itself was hard, dirty and hot. As one of the few factories where wrought iron was produced, black sand was used in the process. The job required the lifting of huge weights of molten metal using massive ladles. Nothing was mechanised and today’s safety measures unknown or ignored. Cyril later moved to a second foundry where he worked in the same role for another 23 years. During this time he married and had three children. Cyril believed that you just got on with the job, that you work with the hand that life has dealt you and make the best of it.
The Artist
Grant Hobson has exhibited as a professional artist for the last 18 years. His photographic work has explored notions of Australian identity using landscape and societal contexts including work and sport. His photography at the Anderson and Ritchie foundry in 1993 that comprises the billboard image began a lifelong interest in documenting people in work contexts. The range of people and workplaces has included manufacturing and construction industries, ports and transport, unions, office and scientific environments, heavy industrial and pastoral locations, community and government services. He is also deeply engaged with environmental protection and his landscape photographic work over time has contributed to raising awareness of significant areas on the Eyre Peninsula.
Grant has held solo exhibitions at the Centre for Contemporary Photography Melbourne, Monash Art Gallery, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, and the Yarra Valley Regional Gallery as well as a number of joint shows. He is a grant recipient from the Australia Council, Melbourne City, and Arts Western Australia. His works are represented in the collections of a number of Universities, the State Library of Victoria, the National Library of Australia, the Museum of Victoria, and the Bibliotheque Nationale De Paris.
