Curious to see the industrial debacle going on at North Geelong’s GrainCorp in recent times.
Always a tough ask reconciling EBAs. Pay, rosters, safety and the likes can be very moot, and emotional, issues. Lots invested.
And historically, the grain game’s been, and will probably continue to be, as much a part of industry evolution, challenge and change as anyone else.
Go back a century and Australia’s grain game was in about as deliberately-unproductive state as it could be. Farmers, authorities, governments, defence forces that won World War One under Monash, had all learned – the hard way, mind you – that the traditional manual labour-driven grain handling and transport game was basically hopeless.
Massive amounts of wheat awaiting shipment to the Allies led to heavy losses, thanks to mice, weevils and weather on unsheltered stacks. Shipping shortage and slow handling exacerbated urgent supply needs. Can’t expect to win a war like that. Armies march on their stomachs, of course.
Throw in the menace of epidemics from fouled grain and public pressure prompted plans for a grain elevators system in Victoria. But just as tenders were about to be called, the war stopped and the whole idea fell away.
It was inevitably resurrected 20 years later, with various elevator boards built around the country. Geelong’s Grain Elevator Board was built in 1938. Pretty hopeless, really, considering the grain elevator was invented by Dart and Dunbar, in the US, back in 1842.
Only 100 years behind. But hey, the Archimedes screw, the brilliantly simple augur on which the elevators operated, dated back to 234 BC or thereabouts.
Talk about slow out of the stalls but what’s a couple of millennia between friends? Besides, Geelong’s a designated UNESCO Creative City these days.
Funny thing, for me anyways, is the fact grain silos were a near-fatal lure as a kid. Grew up on an Agriculture Department research station at Werribee where silos and haystacks were the iPads and social media of the day.
Big thing was to crawl across the wooden planks above the inside of two very dark, very spooky red-brick silos. If you fell in, you were cactus. Or so we certainly believed.
But a greater fear, and excitement, was the possibility a local killer on the run hid there from time to time.
A more sensible fear might have concerned our practice of burrowing deep down into the haystack that was smack up against the silos, excavating dusty, scratchy tunnels that might have collapsed on us at any moment.
Smoking cigarettes down there was even dumber but somehow we survived without become literal strawman boys.
A great collection of Geelong’s Grain Elevator and its construction can be found at the Public Records Office of Victoria. A fair collection of additional grain-handling enterprises, too.
One fascinating aside you’ll find in there is the extraordinary 560-strong Murtoa Stick Shed grain store up near Horsham.
As Geelong’s clever polymath Gideon Haigh says: “ Australia’s largest corrugated iron building is so incongruous that Erich Von Daniken would probably have chalked it up to aliens.”
You can find more about that at his cricketetal.com website. Interstellar visitors or not, check it out, it’s something else altogether.
Meantime, you might want to feel for GrainCorp staff. Who knows what they’re going to face with the coming of AI.
If not mice and weevils, I suspect they like many others might face a few rats and weasels as the new industrial revolution exacts its human toll. But, hey, I’m from the last millennia, what would I know?
This article appeared in the Geelong Advertiser 3 November 2025.
