Skilled with 110-word Pitman’s shorthand, touch typing, invoicing and payroll skills, Barbara Todkill enjoyed a fabulous career in Goulburn from the 1940s to 1990s. Photo: Todkill family collection.
In the early decades after World War II Goulburn teemed with jobs and Barbara Todkill could not get enough of them.
“I just loved work. I loved the jobs, the people I worked with in teams,” the retired and much sought-after secretary said.
American manufacturers opened clothing and bedding factories and imported their frenetic work culture into Goulburn. And United States and Australian miners teamed up to open a lead, copper and zinc resource Woodlawn Mine near Tarago. All of them eagerly sought the skills and versatility Barbara offered.
Living with her husband Frazer in stone stables converted into a large flat behind Lansdowne homestead on the edge of Goulburn, she became indispensable in the office.
In the early 1950s and fighting morning sickness, Barbara set off on her pushbike and rode through Eastgrove, around the back of the golf course to North Goulburn and the vast Pacific Chenille-Craft factory for work.
Hundreds of cutters, overlayers, machinists and examiners who checked stitching filed through a turnstile gate and punched their daily Bundy cards to begin work making bedspreads.
“They had an asphalt tennis court; we used to race down there at lunch time for tennis and eat lunch on the lawn,” she said.
Each factory worker was paid as a piece worker. “They all had these little books recording what they had done each hour,” Barbara said. “To go to the toilet in the main part of the building, you walked up these stairs to this old lady sitting at a little desk. She put down your clock card number and the time you went in and the time you came out and that (time) came off your pay.” The aim was to flush out secret smokers.
Frazer had first met Barbara in Belmore Park while they listened to the city band and began sharing their mutual interest in hockey at which they both excelled. He was on big money at the Chief Clothing Factory. But it wasn’t to last.
“We go on our honeymoon, get to Katoomba, read the paper and learn the clothing factory is closing down,” Barbara said. “It frightened the life out of us.”
Barbara Todkill climbs up one of Woodlawn Mine’s first Caterpillar D-9 dozers. Women were employed to drive the monster vehicles, an innovation of mine principal, Mike Blackwell, a South African ahead of his time. Photo: Todkill family collection.
Luckily her father Ted Gray, who worked at the Perway Railway workshop, helped his son-in-law get a cleaner’s job. Frazer later became a head storeman for the railway.
Barbara left work to have their first baby, a daughter Kerry, and later bumped into her former boyfriend Ken Brown’s sister Shirley, who said Heat’s Motor Sales in Auburn Street needed someone with her skills.
“I was there when Harold Heat got the first Toyota LandCruiser from Japan. Oh, did we cop hell,” she said, reflecting on the simmering bitterness after the Second World War against the allies’ former foe Japan.
She again left the workforce to have a son, Philip, and while walking down the street once more after his arrival scored her next job when Moira Debenham (later Murphy) enlisted her for the Goulburn Workers Club.
Years later the formidable Presbyterian Ladies College principal Jeanette Buckham offered Barbara a secretary’s position and annual leave coinciding with school holidays which the working mum couldn’t resist.
In the late 1970s she ventured out to the ambitious new Woodland Mine still under construction.
“Best move I ever made; Woodlawn was fantastic,” she said, clasping her hands together gleefully. “It was hard work, oh my God it was hard, but it was so exciting. When I was doing the purchase orders I had never seen so many zeros on numbers when you had to pay for tyres and things for the trucks.”
Her boss Mike Laverty, a workaholic, dictated letters to her and, ahead of a huge explosion the chief explosives officer tested her sense of humour on a fresh blasting site.
“OK Toddy, when I tell you get out and run, you do it,” he said, alight with anticipation.
“Of course I did, didn’t I,” she said. “And I turned around and he was laughing his head off.” The explosion had not yet gone off. But when it eventually did a huge face of the mine collapsed into a thunderous dust storm.
Working for Presbyterian Ladies College, Barbara Todkill would type out exam papers for every subject and every class in primary and secondary school, taking the work home to complete. Photo: John Thistleton.
As more secretaries came on board Barbara rose through the ranks until the mine succumbed to financial strain and started to wind down.
Later she joined another American multinational, Gillette’s subsidiary, Oral B at Bradfordville, temporarily at first, but then settling in to a long stint under manager Peter Vandeleur and later Ron Gray who came to depend on this dynamic and enduring office professional.
