This is a very interesting workplace novel, which has been reissued a few times since it originally came out in 1961. The characters are office staff, managers and shop-floor workers in a textile dyeing plant on the suburban fringes of Sydney, and the book digs, sensitively and a little bit obliquely, into some of the everyday, but still brutal, cruelties and arbitrary injustices that go with any kind of paid employment. A skilled worker with long years of experience is pushed out by someone less competent but with better paper qualifications; a manager gets away with sexually harassing women workers; faceless accountants looking for abuses pick on a man who has had to take time off to give his pregnant wife urgent care; workers are exposed to all kinds of dangerous chemicals, whilst the company denies all responsibility for injuries and disease; shop-floor workers are too lazy to get around to organising a proper union committee to protect themselves; and the only really competent workers left in the place are eventually rationalised away by head office in an efficiency drive.

There's nothing very unexpected in any of this, but Calthorpe manages to present it all in a very human, engaging way, with plenty of humour and detailed observation of the way people behave in work situations and at home. And there's a certain amount of sixties New South Wales local colour and some interesting textile industry jargon to enjoy.

A chance find, and a rewarding one! ( )

Mena Calthorpe’s debut novel The Dyehouse (1961) has a special place in Australian publishing history: it’s the 100th reissued title in the Text Classics collection, which is in itself a remarkable success story. It seems like only yesterday that I was reading Geordie Williamson’s The Burning Library – a plea for the rescue of Australia’s forgotten literary achievement, a book which I feared would have very little impact despite his eloquence. I am delighted to have been wrong about this: the Text Classics series has done more than reissue some long-forgotten titles, it has introduced new generations to some of Australia’s finest authors, and even resurrected the long dormant writing career of Elizabeth Harrower.

IMO The Dyehouse is the perfect novel for the Text Classics centenary. It’s a shining example of a book ‘we’ve never heard of’ that is very good reading indeed.

(I can assert that it’s a book we’ve never heard of with some authority: it’s not listed in The Burning Library, nor is it in Jane Gleeson-White’s Australian Classics. It doesn’t get a mention in Jay Vernay’s A Brief Take on the Australian Novel or his The Great Australian Novel, a Panorama. Michael Orthorfer doesn’t include it in The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction, (though to be fair, Australia only gets 10 pages in that, and we have to share them with New Zealand and the Pacific). And although The Dyehouse was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, you won’t find it listed on Wikipedia because the records aren’t comprehensive for that era and so the shortlists are only included after 1980. I think there’s probably a very interesting story in how this particular book was (a) rediscovered and (b) chosen for the honour of being the 100th title…)

According to the Text Classics website: Mena Calthorpe (1905–1996)

was born in Goulburn, New South Wales, in 1905, and grew up there. After marrying, Calthorpe moved to Sydney and lived for most of her life in the Sutherland Shire. Working in office jobs and writing in her spare time, she was active in literary groups and in the Labor Party—for some years she was a member of the Communist Party, and she opposed B. A. Santamaria’s attempts to stop communism in trade unions.

The Dyehouse (1961) was followed by The Defectors (1969), which dramatised unions’ internal power struggles. Mena Calthorpe’s third and final novel was The Plain of Ala, an Irish migrant story, which was published in 1989.

The Dyehouse is a vivid picture of postwar Australia. ( )