West Gate at MTC honours the families left behind

This is the version most people know. In the late morning of October 15, 1970, a section of the West Gate Bridge, then under construction, collapsed. Thirty-five men died that day; Some of them were crushed, some fell into the water from 50 meters, and some burned as a result of the explosion of diesel tanks. 18 more people were injured. The subsequent Royal Commission found critical flaws in the bridge’s design and construction methods, but no charges were laid. The bridge was finally opened to traffic in 1978.

Dennis McIntosh was an 11-year-old pupil at Newport Primary School and remembers well the day it happened. “You felt it and you heard it,” he recalls. He watched the smoke rising from the bay from the netball court. Many funerals were held at his church over the next few days.

He also remembers overhearing problems with the bridge. A similarly designed box girder bridge in Wales collapsed during construction a few months ago. Dennis’ father, DF McIntosh, had the same name as one of the engineers working on the West Gate. The letters sent to the engineer reached the family’s home. “I remember my father opening the letters and saying, ‘Mom, there’s something wrong with the bridge.'”

The 2.5 kilometer bridge connecting the city and its established eastern suburbs to the rapidly expanding western suburbs had taken many years to plan; At the time, it was an industrial and manufacturing center and home to large numbers of post-war European immigrants and blue-collar workers. “This was a great engineering achievement. 183,000 people lived in the West. [bridge] “It was a big thing.”

McIntosh lived a very diverse life, dropping out of school in the 9th grade to milk cows and haul hay; He worked as a shearer, labourer, swimming coach and language teacher in remote Australia. Not every job can be accomplished, especially when you add playwright to the list of accomplishments.

When she was 40, she enrolled in college and wrote primarily to gain the skills to write about her daughter, who had suffered a brain injury in infancy and was about to turn 21. Highway literary magazine, two books and completed his doctorate.

But somehow the story of the bridge never left him. He tried to write it as a book, “but it was always too complicated, too complicated”.

McIntosh met theater director Iain Sinclair through a mutual actor friend. Sinclair was unaware of the disaster because he was not from Melbourne. He was shocked to learn that this was the worst workplace accident in Australian history and that it had not been reported to the public “as well as it should have been”.

“And I’m fascinated by the reasons why.”

Sinclair comes from a family of coal miners in northern England. His cousins ​​and uncles worked in the mines. His father received an athletics scholarship which brought him to Australia.

What appealed to Sinclair was that the story of the bridge collapse was being told by a working-class person.

“I am acutely aware that working-class stories are often seen from the above perspective: Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck, even Orwell. Middle-class people look down on culture.

“But this play, the voice of this play, is the working class speaking on their own terms, which I think is admirable for the Melbourne Theater Company. The state company has chosen to allow this story to be told through its own value system.”

Among the shocking discoveries Sinclair made was that many engineers and managers working on the bridge later omitted this information from their CVs, despite being promoted and even won awards.

There were also implicit suggestions during the Royal Commission hearings that union workers’ militancy and labor problems were partly to blame.

The collapse of the bridge brought up a lot of “intellectual material” (engineering issues, industrial relations, unionism), but it was the story of humanity and McIntosh’s focus on workers that interested him.

“What really resonated with me was that there was a blind spot in the conversation, and the blind spot was 35 families.”

Sinclair directed MTC’s critically acclaimed 2019 production. A View from the Bridge (Age critic Cameron Woodhead gave the “astonishing production” five stars).

He worked with McIntosh from the early stages of the game. “We decided very early on that this was going to be epic and poetic at the same time. Because it’s not really a story of historical revisionism or ‘their side, our side’ kind of story. It’s not in the tradition of the old union play.”

One of Sinclair’s challenges is to stage what, in a different context, would be the explosive climax of a disaster movie.
In 2010 Sinclair made a version of this: our town For Sydney Theater Company. The prescription for Thornton Wilder’s play is that it takes place on a bare stage with no props and minimal props. “You have to create the whole world… I have been building this theatrical language since 2010.

“Arthur Miller emphasizes that the two greatest, best eras for drama and theater were the Greeks and the Renaissance. Neither of those two eras of theater had sets or costumes. And there’s something about that. We’re working in this negative space that our imagination fills, and I think there’s a tradition in epic, minimalist theater and old syndicated plays as well. And so I don’t want to give too much away, other than to say that’s the territory we’re moving in.”

Sinclair says the play’s original title was “The Fallers” and “that feeling continues.”

In the center West Gate They are Victor, an Italian welder with a young family and big goals, and his widow, Frankie. Many of the details of these characters came after McIntosh met the dead men’s children and gained their trust. They gave her insights into the characters, perspectives on what it’s like to grow up without a father, and how this tragedy changes the lives of wives and mothers.

Frankie’s real-world counterpart worked two cleaning jobs but learned to drive because he hated the bus. “Apparently he’s the worst driver in Altona,” McIntosh jokes. This is a small detail, but one that adds humor and humanity to the scenario.

For Steve Bastoni, who plays Victor, and Daniela Farinacci, who plays Frankie, the play reflects their own experiences as children of post-war Italian immigrants. (Bastoni was born in Italy, but came to Australia with his Australian mother and Italian father in 1973.)

Both actors had worked with Sinclair before. A View from the Bridge.
“I started my professional career at La Mama at Tes Lyssiotis in ’82. Journey, “Here I was playing a Greek factory worker,” says Bastoni. “So everything was wearing overalls and speaking Greek and singing Greek. So there’s a lot of similarities with that. “This actually gives me flashbacks to my first experience on stage.”

Bastoni says Victor was a typical Italian immigrant of that period. “They saw an opportunity, if not for themselves, but for their children. ‘I will do my best to send you to a good school’. This is something that does not exist in Italy. There is a caste system in Italy, you do not have the opportunity to jump into this caste system.” [different] social classes.”

Farinacci’s parents met in Melbourne in the early 60s. Her mother, the youngest of six daughters, was 18 when she emigrated. He was working as a machinist in a pajama factory.

However, things did not go well for his father. “It wasn’t a better life; she felt like she had a better life there. My mother had a really hard life in some ways, it wasn’t easy at all,” he says.

Farinacci, who has lived in the western suburbs since the ’90s, met one of the widows and her now-adult children ahead of the play (he does not name anyone to avoid misrepresentations). What he took away from this was poise, strength and pride. “She has such a chest…”

He says his character, Frankie, is grief-stricken and full of anger. “Francesca is not educated, she’s been here for 10 years. Her job is to run the house and raise a family and she’s very good at it. And then this happens.

“It would be easy to play her as a victim, and of course there’s tragedy there, but there’s more. She’s a very strong woman, and that’s how she was meant to be.”

McIntosh says the surviving workers, who received only a week’s pay after the disaster and had to find new jobs, threw their own money into the hat for the spouses of those who died. Social workers visited widows to make sure their homes were clean and another spouse had not moved in, threatening to take away their benefits.

Bastoni and Farinacci say events from more than 50 years ago contain both helpful and cautionary messages.

“This is a cautionary tale of the unchecked pursuit of power in the name of progress and technological advancement at the expense of human lives,” says Bastoni.

The play prompted Farinacci to think about why class isn’t as visible or talked about today. “Factory workers have always had a kind of invisibility. There’s still an underclass of people who don’t get paid that well or do jobs that aren’t that safe.”

McIntosh emphasizes: West Gate It’s not about how or why the bridge collapsed. “The story is: Resilience is persistence. The story is getting out of bed in the morning, doing the dishes, making the beds. You know, that’s the story. It’s the story of resilience, the story of the ability to absorb pain when there’s no way to express it, when there’s no justice, when there’s nothing. And you’re left with the pain. And one has to absorb that.”

after the fall

The partially constructed bridge collapsed at 11.50 on October 15, 1970, as a result of the 2000-ton section between the 10th and 11th legs breaking. The span, which was approximately 110 meters, decreased to 50 meters. Workers taking their lunch break under the section were crushed. Many workers were thrown to the ground or burned to death when tanks containing diesel fuel exploded.

According to the subsequent Royal Commission report: “The disaster that occurred… and the tragedy of the deaths of 35 people was completely unnecessary. It was inexcusable that it was allowed to happen.”

The Milford Haven Bridge in Wales, which has many design similarities with the West Gate Bridge, collapsed during construction two months ago, killing four workers and injuring five. British company Freeman Fox and Partners served as consulting engineer on both projects.

Some of the workers who were laid off four days after the disaster returned to work on the bridge when construction resumed six months later.

West Gate At the Southbank Theater from 10 March.