The Stories You Don't Expect to Find

One of the unexpected gifts of researching Shattered: Episode 1 – Origins of Control has been the stories discovered along the way.

I travelled to Lithgow to better understand the town where I was born and the industrial history that shaped generations of working families. My grandfather was killed in a quarry collapse near Lithgow in 1939, leaving behind a widow and four children. What began as a search for one story quickly became a journey through many others and a long journey through the workplaces of the nation.

Among the many stories housed within the Lithgow Small Arms Factory Museum, one display caught my attention. It was a series of paintings by artist Heliodore "Dore" Hawthorne.

During the Second World War, Hawthorne left Sydney to work at the Lithgow Small Arms Factory, helping manufacture components for Bren guns destined for Allied forces overseas. Like thousands of Australian women, she stepped into industrial work at a time when labour was urgently needed.

Between shifts, she sketched the people around her and later transformed those observations into a series of paintings known as Factory Folk, now held by the Australian War Memorial.

One painting sparked my curiousity to look further.

Titled Potential Absentee, it depicts the pressures faced by women working in wartime industry. The accompanying museum notes explain that despite their importance to the war effort, women workers were paid less than men. In 1943, the Women's Employment Board examined wages and conditions and found that absenteeism among female factory workers was more than twice that of male workers. Yet the solution was not equal pay. Women performing the same work were generally awarded only a proportion of the male wage.

The statistic itself is alarming, but the question Hawthorne appeared to be asking was even more so..

By the end of 1942, employment at the Lithgow Small Arms Factory had grown to almost 6,000 workers, with a further 6,000 employed in feeder factories supporting wartime production. Housing could not keep pace. Families shared cramped homes. Others lived in humpies at the showground or camped in nearby pine forests without water or sanitation.

The museum records that between July 1940 and June 1941 there were 786 workplace accidents at the factory, with 58 workers requiring more than a month to recover.

Women had entered industrial work in unprecedented numbers. They worked long shifts, travelled long distances, cared for families and helped sustain a nation at war.

Against this backdrop, Hawthorne painted a work titled Potential Absentee. Her response was not to paint a statistic. She painted a person.

Nearby were paintings of women returning home after night shift, sleeping on trains, or working beneath factory lights through the night. They are not portraits of military heroes. They are portraits of ordinary people carrying extraordinary burdens.

For our first Episode called Origins of Control, the paintings felt unexpectedly relevant. Long before algorithms, dashboards and performance metrics, industrial systems were already measuring labour, productivity and risk.

Hawthorne's work reminds us that there has always been a difference between what can be counted and what can be understood. More than eighty years later, the question still lingers.

When a system records an outcome, does it also understand the circumstances that produced it?