What was Puroil? At Clearwater it was a sprawling refinery, an army of white shirts, a fleet ofwagons, a number of apparently separate companies, dozens of monolithic departmentsprotected from each other by an armour of functional difference and jealousy. On the refinerysite it was two hundred and fifty shabby prisoners, a heavy overload of foremen, supervisors,plant controllers, shift controllers, up to the giddy height of section heads (popularly miscalledSuction Heads, a metaphor deriving from pumps) who were clerks for the technologists; projectand process engineers and superintendents who were whipping-boys for the-whisper it!-theOld Man himself, the Manager, who was actually only a Branch Manager and a sort of bum-boyfor Head Office in Victoria, which was a backward colonial outpost in the eyes of the Londonoffice, which was a junior partner in British-European Puroil its mighty self, which was theproperty of anonymous shareholders.
On the shores of Botany Bay lies an oil refinery where workers are free to come and go-butthey are also part of an unrelenting, alienating economy from which there is no escape. In thefirst of his three Miles Franklin Award-winning novels, originally published in 1971, David Irelandoffers a fiercely brilliant comic portrait of Australia in the grip of a dehumanising labour system.
'It has been my aim to take apart, then build up piece by piece, this mosaic of one kind of humanlife...to remind my present age of its industrial adolescence.' David Ireland
This edition of The Unknown Industrial Prisoner comes with an introduction by Peter Pierce.