McLean Bros & Rigg Ltd, General hardware electrical and machinery merchants, Catalogue No. 3 1950.
ISBN 978-1-875778-36-2, (1950, R 2024) A4, 340 pages, French flaps, highly illustrated, 980 grams, $80.00*
This magnificent catalogue with thousands of illustrations of items will become as essential reference for collectors of a wide range of Australiana items, dealers, ebayers, and those involved in all manner of heritage studies.
A lucky find in the crowded shelves of a junk shop. The only known copy now reproduced for the benefit of all.
My father worked for McLeans as a shipping clerk before the war and was helpfully advised by the Customs officer son of Pilmer of Northern Patrol in customs clearances. Nearby was his father’s business, Bridge Built Tinware & Sheetmetal Work based in Wellington Street, Perth, and started in his Carlisle backyard during the Great Depression. Wartime work was on the submarine fleet at Fremantle. Later it became Bridge and Wilson, which again later became Jason Industries at Welshpool. The plant in the old Government Munitions Factory grew into the large factories in Pilbara Street. This unfortunately was stripped of people, land and assets by the banksters and a flourishing business employing hundreds of West Australians was thrown to the wolves, if not of Wall Street, their close relatives, and just as savage.
The pages of this wonderful catalogue display the Model Maid and Cinderella kitchen products as well as the Fasta bath heater, all produced by Jason Industries. My youthful visits to the anodising and plating operations and forced work on the metal spinning lathes (to keep an eye on me after a thwarted adventure) are still fresh in my mind. I admired the work of the toolmakers, the 100 ton press and the hard working machine operators.
The destruction of so much of Australian industry by the Whitlam and following Labor and other governments, with the Lima Agreement, globalism and free trade have been a disaster for the nation. Some of the blood sucking scum of the underworld became billionaires and with others cannibalised the assets of a once highly productive and creative nation. We all know who they are but their faecal families may object to being named.
This process, ongoing in the Western world, has delivered us into the hands of the crass commercialism of China and elsewhere. Our once almost self-sufficient nation has been ‘consumerised’. There is currently no way out of this mess. It is going to get bad, very, very bad.
The once most advanced political economy in the world has been reduced to beggar status and we are now just a colony of international capital. Our so-called allies (All Lies) are merely those closer to our dinner plate, with us as the dinner. The swamps of the ruling political parties must be drained and the poison of those beholden to alien interests defanged.
While few understand the processes of destruction that have gone on we all have some nostalgia for the past and this is expressed in the growing interest in the relics of our past. Collector’s, historical societies, and vintage shops flourish, albeit as adjuncts to pawn shops, a sign of our sad times.
The republication of this magnificent catalogue will enable collectors and dealers to identify and place the significance of items. It will bring to light many lost memories. Perhaps it will also act as a reviver for those whose autarkic ideas may regenerate industry and a natural nationalism.
McLean Brothers and Rigg’s Perth operations were serially cannibalised and eventually closed sometime in the early 2000s.