A work in progress on Work in Progress

Geoffrey Blainey in crumpled suit and Gideon Haigh in torn jeans, 59 books between them—

On the elevators and steel skeleton constructions
coinciding with the growth of a city.
White collars.

Fogged windows and chocolate biscuits: a comfortable routine.

Both Chicago and Melbourne had height limits, for a time, on office buildings. ‘Some of the earlier skyscrapers [in Chicago] sat like a petrified forest’, said Haigh, until the ’20s and ’30s when more skyscrapers were built.

In Melbourne, the six story limit related to the length of fire ladders. ‘People wouldn’t go into the lifts’, said Blainey. They were afraid.

The Manchester Unity building on Swanston Street is the ‘little brother’ (as Haigh put it) of the Chicago Tribune building, which was built from Raymond Hood’s competition-winning design for the most beautiful office building in the world. (Aside: glorious art deco.)

You used to be able to tell, said Blainey, what line of work people were in, by the way they dressed. Office workers were clean. Positions in some professions were determined by uniform, now we have titles. And many titles don’t tell us anything.

How do we judge the output of office workers?

‘We come up with means to judge an office worker’s productivity.
9-5 or 8-6
there’s an expectation of
minimal diligence by presence,’
said Haigh.
It’s hard to judge productivity, in an office, any other way.

In the early mixed-gender office men were worried they’d be distracted by ‘female frivolity’, or perhaps the women would become coarse. They were still segregated: telephone operators, secretaries; in the basement. Typing was ‘feminine’ but relied upon. Lorena Weeks fought for the shiftman’s job and, eventually, she won.

Blainey remembered a boy writing his school essays on a typewriter. At the time, they didn’t know what to think of him.

Haigh was ahead of the technology in the early ’90s, taking a giant computer home from the office each night to do his writing.
Now we can easily work from our homes/on the move. ‘Perpetual contactibility,’ Haigh called it.
The office is inescapable (she types, working from home).

At least as long as the physical office exists, we can leave it behind—Haigh (paraphrased).

One can be seduced by corporate culture. One can belong.

Or there are those subtle acts of subversion: stealing stationery, satirical emails.

But, as an audience member pointed out, we’re not so assured of ‘careers’ now. Contract work, downsizing, takeovers, discrepancies between the salaries at the lowest and highest levels. Decisions are made a long way from where they’re implemented (but maybe, the panel says, that’s not new).

But work itself. Blainey and Haigh embody it, because they enjoy what they do:
‘It gives me enormous pleasure,’ said Blainey, who remembers the joy of working with the fruiterer as a boy.
For Haigh there is the satisfaction of self-sufficiency, there’s a desire to improve and to be productive. Blainey is an inspiration to him.

Gideon Haigh’s latest book is The Office: A Hardworking History and Geoffrey Blainey’s latest book is A Short History of Christianity.

‘Thwarted by the general drift of society’: celebrating George Orwell

Yesterday afternoon, Gideon Haigh and Alan Attwood got together with Overland editor Jeff Sparrow to discuss the life and work of George Orwell, 60 years after his passing. Nineteen Eighty-Four is one of my favourite novels, but I am not so familiar with Orwell’s nonfiction – but I tell you what, Haigh and Attwood’s discussion, and the segments they read, made me want to get to know Orwell intimately. They mentioned such things as the simple and almost timeless language; Attwood mentioned Orwell’s ‘extraordinary grasp of detail’ but also his ‘powerful sense of humanity’; and Haigh noted Orwell’s sincerity and intellectual honesty – as opposed to a lot of today’s ‘phoniness’ and opinion for the sake of having an opinion. Orwell, even in his personal nonfiction, remains disembodied and humble. His consistent enemy was ‘orthodoxy’ and he was aware of contradictions, as in the class systems, but as a writer, ‘Orwell never shouts’, the speakers agreed.

I’ll share with you this section that Haigh read from an essay called ‘The Prevention of Literature’ (and I highly encourage you to read it in full) which demonstates the enduring relevance of Orwell’s prose and themes:

‘In our age, the idea of intellectual liberty is under attack from two directions. On the one side are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate, practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy. Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution. The sort of things that are working against him are the concentration of the press in the hands of a few rich men, the grip of monopoly on radio and the films, the unwillingness of the public to spend money on books, making it necessary for nearly every writer to earn part of his living by hackwork, the encroachment of official bodies like the M.O.I. [Ministry of Information] and the British Council, which help the writer to keep alive but also waste his time and dictate his opinions, and the continuous war atmosphere of the past ten years, whose distorting effects no one has been able to escape. Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer, and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed down from above and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth. But in struggling against this fate he gets no help from his own side; that is, there is no large body of opinion which will assure him that he’s in the right. In the past, at any rate throughout the Protestant centuries, the idea of rebellion and the idea of intellectual integrity were mixed up. A heretic–political, moral, religious, or aesthetic–was one who refused to outrage his own conscience.’

Attwood mentioned that today, Orwell might in fact be a blogger. What do you think?

You can find more of Orwell’s works collected online, here.