Griffiths compared the Australian market unfavourably with Saskatchewan,
where the Co-Op Elevator Company was handling 30 million bushels a year:
Bulk-handling will release an army of men to engage in work of a productive
nature. Would it not be far better if those men were engaged in growing wheat,
rather than carrying it? Let mechanical and electrical appliance and gravitation
move your wheat about andfind these men something easier. (Griffiths 1920, p. 3)The impetus for the introduction of bulk handling in NSW, thefirst Australian
state to adopt the process, was the deterioration of supplies of wheat during
the First World War. Huge reserves of bagged wheat had been stacked in the
open at railheads and sidings, only to be destroyed by mice and weevils
because of a shortage of shipping and labour. During the great rodent plague
of 1916, 33,000 mice were said to have been poisoned in one night at Port Pirie
in South Australia (Anderson 1958, p. 2). The losses prompted the Common-
wealth to establish the Wheat Storage Commission in 1917 and pass the
Wheat Storage Act, making almost £3 million available to the states tofinance
the installation of bulk handling.
In the aftermath of the war, NSW adopted a £2 million plan to build seventy
grain silos across the state, with a large facility at White Bay on Glebe Island
which had a projected capacity of 5.6 million bushels. By the time commercial
ships began loading at White Bay in 1921, the cost had increased to £2.6
million, part of a wider scandal that contributed to the ousting of Premier
W. A. Holman from office.
In Victoria, John Monash, later General Sir John Monash, had been a pre-
war advocate of concrete grain silos. Monash’s Reinforced Concrete & Monier
Pipe Construction Company built thefirst concrete silo at Rupanyup, Vic-
toria, in 1907 forflour miller George Frayne, based on Monash’s innovative
1904 design for concrete tanks for Carlton Brewery. Yet it was not until 1934
that the Victorian parliament passed the Grain Elevators Act, introducing bulk
handling.
In Western Australia, the Westralian Farmers’Co-Operative Ltd reached an
agreement with the Commonwealth in 1921 to install bulk handling, but in
West Australia a mixed system of bags and bulk continued into the 1950s.
South Australia was the last state to change to bulk handling in the mid-
1950s, a full ninety years after the system had begun to develop in North
America. The chaotic nature of South Australian wheat handling was exposed
by a Royal Commission in 1908. Rail carried bagged wheat to the four main
ports, but at others, like Port Wakefield and Port Victoria, wheat was hauled
down to the ports and loaded, sack by sack, onto lighters. Much of it was taken
to Port Adelaide where it was shipped over the side to ocean ships. If arrange-
ments failed, and the trans-shipment could not be carried out directly, the
sacks would be loaded on to the wharves to wait until a ship became available.
Nick Cater