Wednesday, December 2, 2020

Australian housing industry

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Taken from our Hub Pages article Australian building industry



This type of house were built id the sixties. Today they are being renewed.  

Dear readers, we have said that we are going to write about DIY brickwork and other building things, which we believe can help people that are willing to try DIY small building or repairs, but first let me explain how I acquired that knowledge myself.

When I came to Australia in the sixties I ended up working in the building industry, we were working mainly on fixing old houses, or building new house from scratch, units and warehouses, so, I ended up learning how lots of building things were done, in the end I became a bricklayer, and have worked most of my life as a bricklayer.

Anyhow, in this article we are going to write about; the Australian housing industry in the sixties; Working in the Australian housing and building industry; Earning and saving money if you can; and Working with this Italian builder.

We believe that the Australian housing and building industry, is one of the major employment industries in Australia, you can say that this is so in other countries. But I believe that in other countries building new houses is not as important as it is in Australia. One of the reasons for this is that Australia is a new country, it needs and takes in many emigrants. In the sixties Australia was taking emigrants in a regulated way, now because the population grows steadily also accommodation need to grow steadily, therefore, new houses need to be built to keep a steady balance. This building of new houses gives opportunities for the newcomers to be employed, since there is manual work involved, therefore, a healthy cycle is created; but even with these opportunities the building industry has its ups and down, as we know. So, let us talk about it and try to make sense, if we can.  

You know, the housing building industry and real estate work together to complete the cycle of supplying to the public what is needed, so, both have their ups and downs and it cannot be avoided. It could have been helpful if one could foretell what is going to happen next year, on the housing market, but it is not possible to guess what is going to happen in the future. If people can know this, then they could make money, since they could invest their money at the right time.

Now, for those buying a house and saving to buy a house. We are going to write another article about buying houses, because now I want to tell my story about working in the building industry, building houses.

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Working in the building industry

As I have said, when I came to Australia from Italy, I ended up working in the building industry. Now let me explain this working position, working on building in Australia is a temporary job, because even the employer is subject to the same opportunities of work and he cannot help it, therefore, one is never sure what is going to happen next, when the job you are working on is finished, therefore, there were concerns about our employment status, so, we kept asking ourselves, whether our employer would get another job to do, before we finished the one we were doing, but even though we were thinking that, we still worked hard to finish the job on hand, as soon as possible, because to find work you had to be competitive.

Well I should say that although this small Italian builder did lots of small jobs, it did work out all right most times, so, we were able to move from one job to another all-around Brisbane and to other close by town/s. Of course, this would cause worries if you had no transport of your own and you had to rely on some friends or the employer to take you on the work site, where the building was going to be built, but we managed somehow.

I remember that there were times, when I had to get up early and catch the first tram to the city, and then I had to catch the second tram to another suburb, where the builder would pick me up and drive me to the onsite job, in the evening after eight hours or more of hard work, I had to go back home, which took again a long time, but anyhow we managed all right, after all we were here in Australia to earn money, so, as long as we had a job to go to and earn money, we were happy to do that. You see, on building sites workers can earn above other people wages, but there was this uncertainty because there was no guaranty that the work would last, and it also was hard work all day long.

Anyhow, it was a good job with good opportunities to learn and improve your knowledge of building something yourself. You see, in those times we could improve our working and earning position more easily than today; it was possible then because a lot of things were simple, and therefore, they could be done just by using your common sense. Of course, there were always inspections from local authorities to follow, but once you knew what it was required they were easy to follow, if you used your brains diligently, therefore, we should say that we had more opportunities then compared to today opportunities. I believe that it was so, because the building we were building were small houses, so, if you were a tradesman, you most likely could be the builder as well.

Having said that, now let us see, how this type of work affected us newcomers money-wise. However, this post is already long enough, so, see you in our next post, where we talk about money and working for this Italian builder.     

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