On Webster’s ground the scotch thistle and long grass will succumb to the bulldozer. The row of pines that runs alongside the railway lines, which had a reason for being there once, possibly before the lines were laid, a logic that has long since deserted them and left them vulnerable, will tumble. The shrubs and bushes will be swept away. All will bend to the will of Webster.
Flat ground will follow. The bumps will be smoothed, the hollows that in winter and spring fill with muddy water and which are home to tadpoles and frogs will be levelled. A factory, Webster’s Engineering, will sit upon the flattened ground as soon as the obstacles of nature and the remnants of somebody or other’s farm have been removed.
It is mid-morning and Webster is standing on his ground, legs wide apart, with the architect’s plans under his arm. The plans have been finished for some time and he waits, ready to supervise the imposition of his will. A bulldozer will soon arrive and Webster is here to greet it.
Work would have begun earlier. The war has only just finished, however, and bulldozers are hard to find. But Webster has contacts — his other factory in a nearby suburb having been converted to wartime production and Webster having made a tidy sum from manufacturing the bullets for the Owen machine gun, which stopped the Imperial Japanese Army in its tracks in the jungles of New Guinea, dead on the ground, riddled with Webster’s bullets. The Imperial Japanese Army was marching directly towards them all and seemed, in the most uncertain of the sad and violent years, to be unstoppable. But Webster’s bullets, manufactured in the West Essendon plant in the summer of 1942, had other ideas. And Webster is quite proud of that. And frequently reminds his contacts in government and army administration of his contribution and of their debt. And so a bulldozer, at a time when bulldozers are hard to come by, is on the way to where Webster stands, architect’s plans rolled up under his arm, in readiness to meet it.
He sees the ground as it is and as it will be. Here — and he knows the plans by heart, his photographic memory for such things having snapped the plans in all their detail — will be the factory floor, where the giant crushing machines will sit in rows, where workers will pull on giant levers (between eight-thirty in the morning and four-thirty in the afternoon, with forty minutes for lunch and ten-minute morning and afternoon smokos) so that the crushing can begin and the noise of production be brought to the suburb that is about to be born. And here, where the pines that have lost their logic and which will soon tumble, will be the offices where the accountants will sit and calculate the worth of the noise. And above it all will rest the mezzanine office where Webster himself will sit overlooking the whole complex, noisy process. Where each day he will thrill to the noise of production until one distant day, inexplicably, the thrill will be gone and Webster will be conscious only of a deep hollowness, a vacancy where the thrill once was.
But that day, in November 1959, is a long way ahead of him. This morning he is young and his faith in the laws of production, distribution and exchange is strong, and it is still thrilling to watch all of the moving parts come together, and not just the machines on the factory floor but the whole process. A whole world operating by the invisible laws of supply and demand that govern it. As basic as the laws of gravity that hold the planets and stars in their places up there in the sky. For it is this, the production process, that makes a society a society. It is this that puts you on the straight line of History, this that converts scrub into frontier suburbs where lawns and gardens spring up while you watch, this that causes houses to pop up overnight like cardboard cut-outs until it’s not a frontier suburb any more, and the frontier, like lengthening summer-afternoon shadows, moves further inland and new frontiers burst into being. It is production that does this. All the rest — song, books, dance and sponge cakes — simply follows. And this is why the ground upon which Webster stands must, this mid-winter morning, bend to his will.
It is at this moment that the groan of a giant lorry, bearing the promised bulldozer, straining up the very incline that the Spirit of Progress, later that evening with Paddy Ryan in the cabin, will take in one extended, smooth progression, catches Webster’s attention, and he turns from his land to the road. Then it appears, the nose of the lorry and its load, the yellow bulldozer, with, Webster knows, the curious name of Caterpillar stamped on its side. Slowly, the lorry crests the incline, turns off the road at Webster’s corner and comes to a stop, the machine ready to burst free of its restraining chains and eagerly commence its work.
A team of five workers materialises and Webster walks towards them, his plans rolled up under his arm. Now, he thinks, a dream, years in the planning, a dream that not only includes Webster’s factory site but the land and the mansion of an old farm nearby that will soon become Webster’s estate and from which he will travel every working day through the suburb in his chauffeur-driven Bentley to and from the factory, now this dream that envisions a whole world unto itself can begin.