Factory 19

By Dennis Glover

We’re told that the future will be brighter. But what if human happiness really lies in the past?

Hobart, 2022: a city with a declining population, in the grip of a dark recession. A rusty ship sails into the harbour and begins to unload its cargo on the site of the once famous but now abandoned Gallery of Future Art, known to the world as GoFA.

One day the city’s residents are awoken by a high-pitched sound no one has heard for two generations: a factory whistle. GoFA’s owner, world-famous billionaire Dundas Faussett, is creating his most ambitious installation yet. He’s going to defeat technology’s dominance over our lives by establishing a new Year Zero: 1948. Those whose jobs have been destroyed by Amazon and Uber and Airbnb are invited to fight back in the only way that can possibly succeed: by living as if the internet had never been invented.

The hold of Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg and their ilk starts to loosen as the revolutionary example of Factory 19 spreads. Can nostalgia really defeat the future? Can the little people win back the world? We are about to find out.

‘Like Orwell, of whom he has written so brilliantly, Dennis Glover’s work is charged with courage, intelligence and purpose. He is the complete writer, and one made for our times.’ —Don Watson

‘Savagely hilarious and unlike anything else you’ll read this year. It boils with the anger of the present moment.’ —Rohan Wilson

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Inc. Books
• Release date: Nov 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781743821428

Dennis Glover

Dennis Glover grew up in Doveton, Australia, before studying at Monash University and King’s College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a PhD in history. He has worked for two decades as an academic, newspaper columnist, political adviser and speechwriter. The Last Man in Europe is his first novel.

Book preview

‘how’.

PREFACE

It all started when Dundas Faussett got bored with making money, which is obviously how a lot of billionaires’ problems begin. Fate has chosen me to tell his story, which is ironic given I was one of the last people on Earth to have heard of him. But like everyone else, I came to regard D.F., which is what we all called him, as the most extraordinary man who ever lived. I’ll never forget what he said the first time I saw him. It was his famous slogan, which you’ve no doubt heard. The one that gave new hope to those under thirty-five who had never known what real work meant or what a fully lived life could be:

I have seen the past, and it works!

To the hundreds of millions of economically disrupted across the world, it was the opening sentence of a new gospel of freedom.

What sort of person talks about the past like that? And what did this view of the past make him – a conservative? A radical? A revolutionary? I still can’t decide, even though I was closer to him than anyone else, with the exception of his equally famous wife. To find the answer, you first have to force your mind back and try to remember just how much his astonishing enterprise changed the way we interpreted the world. Do you recall it now, how categories like ‘left’ and ‘right’, ‘rich’ and ‘poor’, suddenly ceased to matter? How the only thing that really counted was whether you were for the future or the past, for bondage or freedom, with Dundas Faussett or against him? Maybe that is his true legacy: helping us understand freedom in a wholly new way.

How did D.F. first get bored? The answer is through too much success. Making money was something he was good at, and I mean very good. Had he continued with it, I’ve no doubt he would have become the richest person on Earth. He was one of those who figured out very early on how to generate revenue from the internet – others, you might recall, generated only clicks and eyeballs and were swept away in early dot-com crashes. His means was gambling. I won’t go into the details because, having failed high-school mathematics, I couldn’t explain them, but the syndicate he founded made millions every week from betting on horses, which was a tax-free occupation back then in Australia, where all this action took place. It made him in quick time the wealthiest man on the island state of Tasmania (admittedly, before D.F. came along that wasn’t saying much), where he had grown up the brilliant but lonely son of factory workers in a pleasant housing-commission suburb – what the Americans might call ‘a project’ and the English ‘an estate’. He soon had sufficient wealth to do as he wished, which was pretty much the same as every other rich man wished: buy a jet and collect mistresses and Egyptian antiquities.

What transformed his fortune from millions to billions was devising the algorithm that broke the world’s sovereign lotteries. Thanks to D.F. those lotteries no longer exist, but back then they paid out sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars from a single draw. His syndicate once won them all in a week, and then again the week after, and again the week after that, quickly making him one of the half-dozen wealthiest people on the planet. The Russian lotteries predictably refused to pay up, but even without their cash he was up there with Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin and all the others. And just like those men when they became multi-billionaires, he then did what he really wanted to do.

To grasp why he did what he did rather than, say, try to send a manned mission to Mars or eradicate malaria, you have to remember that he was seriously interested in art. That’s unusual for someone so good at maths, but D.F. was nothing if not unusual. So he purchased abandoned factory land on a sprawling Hobart harbourside promontory and dug an intricate series of underground tunnels and bunkers, accessible only via a manhole situated in a car park, to house the most controversial art gallery the world has ever known. He called it the Gallery of Future Art, but to the world it was simply GoFA.

GoFA’s theme was the inadequacy of the present. Anything that smacked of the future or thumbed its snotty nose at contemporary morality found a place of honour in its subterranean galleries. The more rudely any work of art violated existing conventions of aesthetics and taste, the better it was. Each new installation outdid the last in its outrageousness and reckless pursuit of controversy. Who could forget ‘One of Our Aircraft Is Missing’? A pilotless A380 superjumbo was filled with hundreds of water-buoyant crash-test dummies and flown until it ran out of fuel, the crash filmed by D.F. himself in a chase plane flown by his personal pilot (who will come into our story later). Members of the public were offered $10,000 for returning to GoFA any dummy that drifted onto dry land, and a further $10 million was proffered to anyone who could determine the crash site to within a square kilometre. The world’s media were transfixed for months, and to this day, as readers will know, the $10 million still awaits a claimant. D.F. was adamant it was a genuine work of art; others, especially the relatives of plane crash victims, weren’t so convinced.

Everyone was wondering what outrageous stunt Dundas would pull next. One day they awoke to read that GoFA was exhibiting ‘Big Fella’ – an uncannily realistic six-foot-high penis, said to be made of human cartilage and skin, which became erect and ejaculated visitor-donated semen on the hour, every hour. (Men received a discount on their entrance charge for every donation.) Catholic bishops of course protested vigorously, which was exactly the response D.F. wanted.

For a while after that, the gossip pages were filled with lurid accounts of another installation called ‘A-list’ – a spectacular party for those Hobart vagrants who found a golden ticket under their soup dishes at D.F.’s sponsored homeless refuge. Reports of the party, which featured tables laden with free cocaine and naked go-go dancers suspended in cages from the ceiling, increased calls from local morals campaigners for GoFA’s closure, naturally boosting GoFA’s worldwide appeal even more.

Unsurprisingly, GoFA soon became a must-visit for the global 0.1 per cent. D.F. built an eight-star hotel to house the top names of Hollywood, Bollywood and the Gulf kingdoms. (George Clooney was rumoured to have made multiple donations to ‘Big Fella’ during his well-publicised stay, or so the tabloids said.) Tasmania’s economy, which had missed out on the generations of growth experienced by Australia’s mainland states, boomed and its population swelled as the world’s youth arrived, driving real estate prices through the roof. Chinese Communist Party officials quickly snapped up the best waterfront properties. The Prada store and Lamborghini outlet duly opened. Tasmania, everyone said, had finally ‘arrived’ after two centuries of comparative poverty and backwardness.

There were plenty of doubters. Many warned about the fragility of the state’s contemporary art–led boom, but they were ignored.

During this time, D.F. maintained his carefully cultivated mystique. He seldom left his underground Xanadu. All the world saw of him was the coming and going of his jet, adorned in brightly coloured dots by his friend Damien Hirst. The occasional report seeped out, like that famous dinner party he threw for Claire Foy, Emma Stone, Martin Sheen, Madonna and the new liberal-minded Pope. By such means he rapidly attained the status almost of a god. The last rumour to circulate from that time was that he had fallen in love with someone whose eccentricity matched his own, although the lover’s identity was never publicly disclosed.

It seemed the psychedelic artistic binge would go on forever. He probably had enough money to make it last until infinity. And then, early one morning, patrons queueing to beat the crowds found the manhole entrance to GoFA padlocked and a typewritten note pasted over it:

THANK YOU FOR ENJOYING MY ART

NOW PISS OFF!

Everyone initially thought this D.F.’s greatest artistic gambit. A closed gallery was, naturally, the ultimate artwork and the coolest statement you could make about the contemporary art scene. The world kept coming, standing around looking at a typed sheet of foolscap paper glued to a manhole, expecting it to turn into something magical. I’m sure the queuing patrons thought they were the gallery’s latest exhibit, and indeed photographs of the crowds appeared in all the expensive art magazines. (Let’s face it, you can’t go wrong appealing to an art lover’s desire to be considered in the know.) But as the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, it dawned on everyone that GoFA had indeed closed for good.

The state-wide recession happened overnight.

1

Dundas Faussett’s life to this point would have made an amazing story – it’s what happened afterwards that made it so gobsmackingly unbelievable. How I of all people became part of it and now find myself its storyteller involves the making of medical history.

I had a nervous breakdown. An unusual and rather spectacular breakdown, it must be admitted.

Those who followed party politics back then will have some inkling of its cause when I mention my boss: Prime Minister X, the one whose office set world records for staff turnover.¹ After his fourth speechwriter in less than a year collapsed from overwork, I found myself in the job.

I’m getting a little ahead of myself, so maybe it’s best if I go five years further back, to when it all really began: the morning of my first day working in Parliament House.

I was a typical PhD graduate back then, by which of course I mean I was starved into taking a job I didn’t want. That meant signing on as assistant to one of those ambitious members of parliament destined for either: (1) the outer cabinet, (2) a career in talkback radio, (3) leadership of a new fringe party, or (4) jail; you probably know the type. I suppose it could have been worse: I didn’t end up on an insurance company help desk or selling smartphone plans on commission, like many of my academic contemporaries.

On that first morning, I’d been in the job for barely fifteen minutes, trying to remember my new boss’s name, when the office telephone rang. It was a female security guard at one of Parliament House’s many entrances. Apparently there was someone for me to collect. ‘Claims to have an appointment.’

‘Who is it?’

There was a clunk as the guard put down the handset and, in an annoyed tone, shouted some incoherent question. I remembered her tone because it’s famously difficult to rile those security guards. There was a muffled reply, and she returned to the phone. ‘Bobbie Bellchamber.’

‘Alright, I’ll come and get him.’

I wrote the name, which back then meant nothing to me, on a sticky note and showed it to my boss. The moment he saw it he headed for the door, much as if I’d just shown him the words ‘bubonic plague’. ‘You’ll have to deal with it,’ he said.

Halting at the doorjamb, one foot already in the corridor, he threw a small box at me. ‘Oh, here’s your phone. It was your predecessor’s, so it’s already set up. Stick to it like glue. I’ll be in touch when I need you.’

As our exchanges went, that would prove typical. The man of the people had important powerbrokers to meet.

Downstairs, I handed the sticky note to the security guard. She pointed to the waiting area and wished me luck – a kindly sentiment I definitely wasn’t expecting. It turned out it was a public hearing day, which meant the building was quickly being invaded by an assortment of obsessives needing to be kept out of trouble until it was their turn to testify to long-suffering House and Senate committees. Fearing that I was now a cross between a tour guide and a psychiatric nurse, I looked around for Bobbie Bellchamber.

All I could see at first from behind a concrete pillar was a set of well-polished flat-soled, blue-leather plimsolls – the sort of shoes you associate with ten-pin bowling. They were worn over a pair of bobby socks that obviously belonged to a woman, clearly not Robert Bellchamber. Rounding the pillar, I followed her costume upwards. She was wearing bibbed denim overalls, a floral shirt and a purple synthetic zipper jacket with ‘Milwaukee’ on the left breast. Her red hair was just visible beneath a silvery-blonde bobbed wig, and she sported glossy orange lipstick and glittery makeup on her cheeks. By her side was a small case that carried a line drawing of a pair of rollerskates, beneath which were the gold-embossed initials B.B. I took another look at her.

‘You’re . . . Bobbie Bellchamber?’

She raised her gaze and took a wad of chewing gum from her mouth to stick it behind her ear. ‘My stupid parents wanted a boy. Now, where can a girl get a Coke and fries around here?’

She was American. Not what I had expected, and I was thrown. ‘Ahh, actually, I don’t even know where the staff canteen is. I only started in this job twenty minutes ago, and the building’s sort of confusing.’

She groaned.

We asked around and found the canteen, then queued for food and selected a table at the edge of the eating area. Watching her chug down Coke and shovel in fries, I noticed her security lanyard. Beneath her name, next to ‘Organisation or company’, it said ‘CHUMI’.

‘Does that mean you’re friendly?’

‘It means I represent the Committee on Human Microwave Interaction.’

‘They interact?’

‘We’re against the cell phone.’ She stuffed in another fry. ‘Mobile phone, smartphone, whatever. That’s what your boss’s committee hearing is all about: cell phone safety. Didn’t he tell you? I’m appearing as an expert witness.’

In all the strangeness, I hadn’t thought to ask why she was there.

‘What have microwaves got to do with . . .’

She gave me another withering look. ‘See this French fry.’ She held one up, watching disgustedly as it drooped, and dangled limply in her fingers. ‘As you can see, it’s been microwaved, not fried.’

I suddenly understood why my new boss had run away.

‘Sorry?’

‘Do you know how a microwave oven works?’

‘You close the door and push a button.’

‘It shoots pulses of high-frequency energy through food at the speed of light. It’s what your cell phone does to your brain whenever you hold it close to your ear. It’s a mini transmitter of electromagnetic radiation. Less powerful than a microwave oven, maybe, but the same essential principle.’

I wondered what was coming next. Maybe she had invented a perpetual motion machine.

‘Why do you think your ear gets so warm during a long call? Why do you think you get headaches when talking dirty with your girlfriend?’ She paused. ‘Sorry, with your mom.’ She swallowed the limp fry she had been holding up. ‘A cell phone is basically the same as the machines they use to blast tumours. This device,’ she said, picking up the box containing my phone, ‘is cooking your head.’

‘You mean you don’t have a smartphone?’

‘Do I look nuts?’

I said nothing.

She slurped some Coke and then looked theatrically around the packed canteen. Everyone was wearing earbuds and staring into their palms, which nestled screens. ‘Doesn’t this all look strange to you?’

I looked around. It appeared normal.

‘Look at them. No conversation. None. Listen’ – she dropped her voice to a whisper, inclining her head towards the crowd – ‘silence. It’s meant to be a goddamn canteen, where people talk to each other, bitch about the boss, conduct affairs, be human.’ She sat back in her chair and shouted at the top of her lungs: ‘Hello! I’m taking my clothes off for my lover over here.’ There was no response. ‘I’m bending down now.’

A few bothered to look up curiously, but most acted as if they hadn’t even heard. A security guard came closer and mumbled something into the radio transmitter fixed to her lapel. Another guard appeared from around a corner and watched us.

‘What did I tell you?’

It was a scene I’d witnessed thousands of times – groups of people physically together but their minds each somewhere else. For the very first time, it seemed, well, mildly strange.

‘Everywhere at once,’ she said, as if reading my thoughts.

‘And nowhere at any one time,’ I replied, unconsciously continuing the slogan made popular by one of the Big Tech companies. I feigned a lack of interest. ‘They’re just using their phones. They could as easily be reading a book.’

‘They’re not, strictly speaking, human anymore,’ she said. ‘The computer world has already rewired their brains. It’s doing their thinking for them.’

‘Like zombies?’ I said, sarcastically.

‘Zombies. That’s good. You’re getting the picture. They don’t think, at least not in the sense that our parents used to. They just sift and exchange data instead, giving themselves brain cancer.’ She gave them another vile look. ‘The stupid jerks. Do you know how many people get run over every year crossing the road while sending text messages?’

‘Brain cancer? Really?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘We’d know,’ I said, glancing down at the box on the table. ‘Something like that couldn’t be kept quiet.’

‘How did Teddy Kennedy die?’

‘No idea.’

‘Glioma. It’s brain cancer. The guy spent twenty-five years with a cell phone gaffer-taped to his temple. Sometimes two, like that woman over there.’

I turned and saw a woman who looked to be conducting two simultaneous conversations, a smartphone to each ear. ‘That’s one example, and I’ll bet the jury’s out on what caused it.’

‘John McCain, then.’

‘Okay, two. So what?’

‘Both ran for president. Coincidence?’

‘Not really. Teddy didn’t even win the nomination.’

‘Read the small print on that phone you’ve got. Give it to me.’

She snatched the box, fumbled it open, tipped the handset onto the table like it was vermin and pulled out the small glossy handbook. ‘Here it is,’ she said, flicking through the pages. "‘Do not hold closer than four centimetres from your ear." Do you think they might know something we don’t?’

‘Standard disclaimer.’

She laughed dismissively. ‘Just being in this building, we’re in a sea of electromagnetic radiation our bodies weren’t designed for. I can’t wait to get out of here, to somewhere without wi-fi. It should be banned.’

‘And you want to ban wi-fi?’

I suddenly understood her costume. She was one of those committed nostalgics. You saw them on television occasionally, explaining how they only bought clothes, cars and furniture from a particular era. Like the Amish, but without the religion. They just couldn’t see their confident sense of style for what it was: the sign of some undiagnosed mental problem. ‘My God! You really are living in the 1950s, aren’t you?’

She put out her arm for me to touch her jacket. ‘Feel it. Go on! It’s real 1950s acrylic bonded to nylon. You don’t see that around much anymore.’

‘And you’re going to say all this, about microwaves and wi-fi and Teddy Kennedy and John McCain, to the committee hearing?’

‘Especially the bit about Kennedy and McCain. Dead legislators! Always appeal to self-interest.’

‘Getting people to give up their smartphones? It’s not going to happen. Believe me.’

‘Getting rid of cell phones is actually quite easy, once you know how.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Watch.’ She picked up my phone with two fingers, as if handling a radioactive pellet, and dropped it, with a splash, into her half-full pitcher of Coke. ‘No more phone.’

‘I only got that today!’

Just then, the phone began to ring. The pitcher vibrated and the black liquid within foamed, frothing onto the table. I pulled out the sticky object and, self-consciously holding it four centimetres from my ear, answered the call. It was the boss. It was time for Bobbie to testify.

I delivered her to the attendants and stayed to watch the show.

* * *

Twenty minutes later, Bobbie Bellchamber was being dragged from the hearing room by parliamentary security, streaming obscenities at the watching MPs, senators and lobbyists. It’s difficult to recall exactly how I felt about it at the time. I doubt I saw her as any sort of idealist, just an anti-technology zealot. But the fact that the lobbyists laughed at her nervously made me think she might have had a point. After all, everyone knows lobbyists are paid to cover up the truth.

The footage of her ejection made the evening news, and I dined out on my encounter with her for a couple of days, but it soon blurred into the craziness of life on the hill and I forgot about it. She disappeared completely from the public spotlight after that, although I was sure I saw her on a music video program late one night, way in the background, as the drummer in an all-girl 1950s retro-rock band. Apart from this, I didn’t give her another thought – until five years later, which just happened to be my last-ever twenty-four hours in Parliament House. It’s funny, isn’t it, how your fate can be linked to someone you hardly know.

I had arrived at my apartment block at around 10.30 pm, which was considered early when you worked for Prime Minister X. The trouble began when I tried to stick my key in the lock. To my frustration, it refused to go in. The passageway was dim, so I used the torch on my phone to get a better look. Someone, it seemed, had jammed the lock with superglue. Bastard.

I tried the owner, who let the place through Airbnb, but got her voicemail. I left a message, put it down to a teenage prank and sighed, resigning myself to another night on the roll-up mattress on the floor of my office. I say ‘another’ because sleeping in the office was a regular expectation of those who worked for Prime Minister X, thanks to his late-night habit of asking for new speeches or briefing notes to be on his desk by 6.00 am. I had been looking forward to the luxury of a night in my own bed, and to celebrate had planned a glass of Verdelho and an episode of The Crown (it was the one where Prince Charles gets coronavirus). I suddenly realised, angrily, that I was being denied the only moment of relaxation I was likely to have for the next fortnight. I jabbed at my phone to order an Uber to return me to the office.

As I stared at the app, I felt a small twinge in the left side of my face. This wasn’t unusual; the twinges typically arrived in moments of high stress, usually once or twice a week. I registered it only because it was my second or third for the day – which had been a rather tough one. I had worked for fourteen and a half hours straight on a speech Prime Minister X was planning to give the following day. It was about a coalmine closure, which naturally we were welcoming as way to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The fate of the miners, we treated as barely an afterthought. I emailed the draft, which had been going back and forth all day, to him just before 10.00 pm and, after twenty-five minutes didn’t bring a reply, and hearing from the chief that the PM had left for the evening, I took my chance to escape the office. Maybe he’d read it and was happy, I thought, with the sort of reckless optimism brought on by fatigue.

Halfway back to Parliament House in the Uber, we stopped at what I assumed was a set of traffic lights. I wasn’t watching, distracted by responding to the half-dozen emails that had come in since I’d left the office. Then I heard a crash – it sounded like wood on metal. I looked up: a gang of balaclava-wearing women were thumping the Uber with cricket bats. I heard the smashing of glass as they knocked out the headlights.

The driver fumbled under his seat, pulling out a tyre lever, which I figured he kept handy for personal protection. He unlocked the door, pushed it open and jumped out, brandishing the lever. The attackers scattered into the darkness, some fleeing into the nearby bushes. He ran after them, and I got out of the car to inspect the damage. I found a card under a buckled wiper. Printed on it, in characters that looked like they had come from an old-fashioned typewriter, were two words: The Disrupted.

After waiting a few minutes for the Uber driver, who must have continued chasing the attackers, I gave up on him and hailed a passing cab. On telling the driver what had happened, she smiled. ‘Is that so, sir?’ is all she said.

Back at the office, I found a group of colleagues sitting on a couch in dimmed light, watching television. A collage of images filled the large flatscreen, showing incidents that were happening simultaneously across the world. CCTV cameras had captured thousands of incidents of people in balaclavas – just like those I had seen – squeezing glue into the locks of short-stay apartments and bashing in the panels of rideshare vehicles. In one clip, a set of delivery vans had parked in a driverless truck, which moved backward and forward, like a lion locked in a cage that prevented it from turning around. Long queues of people stood outside train and tube stations, unable to use Oyster or credit cards because the swiping panels had been painted over. So had the self-checkout machines at hundreds of supermarkets.

The screen flashed back to the newsreader, who announced that, in a remarkable development, a VHS cassette claiming to be from the organisers of the worldwide protests had just minutes earlier been delivered to the studio wrapped in brown paper, and they would broadcast it for the audience.

Filmed in a basement somewhere, the footage showed a woman standing in front of a sign identical to the card I had found on the windscreen. She too was wearing a balaclava. She held up a clenched fist in an old-fashioned left-wing salute and said, in an American accent: ‘Workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your smartphones.’

Those few words were enough for me to recognise the voice as Bobbie Bellchamber’s.

The next thing I remembered was waking up on the office floor as my phone attacked me. I must have gotten to bed shortly after midnight and had briefly entered the darkest realms of sleep when my phone, which I had been ordered to keep switched on at all times, vibrated its way off my desk and landed with a painful smack on my face. I had been dreaming that I was on holiday, snoozing in a beach shack, a pile of books beside me, listening to the waves. The phone had to ring a dozen times before I fully awoke, located it in the darkness and swiped to answer.

‘Wakey-wakey, princess.’ It was the chief of staff, who had already been fielding calls from the PM for at least half an hour. ‘Change of plan. He wants to scrap the coalmine speech and talk instead about this Disrupted group. He wants to say they’re a threat to our way of life. The frame is contemporary terrorists. Let’s see . . .’ – I could hear him counting to himself – ‘just twenty-seven main points and fifteen subpoints. I’ll forward it to you. He wants a draft on his desk by six.’ He hung up. I heard my email ping.

I could feel my daily fatigue headache beginning. I ran my hands through greasy hair, dressed in the crumpled clothes I’d folded over a chair and went to the kitchenette. In the dark reflection of the window, I saw the left side of my face give another involuntary twitch. It was the first time I had actually seen this happen to me – it reminded me of old documentaries

Reviews for Factory 19

[sarahebear · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

When political speechwriter Dr Paul Richey suffers a very public nervous breakdown and develops an "allergy" to the modern world he thinks his life is over. He moves to Hobart, which since the closure of the only economically viable business, the "Gallery of the Future/GOFA" has become a technological dead zone. But then out of the blue, eccentric billionaire and former GOFA owner Dundas Faussett returns to town to set up a new project. Welcome Factory 19, where every day is 1948. Dundas establishes an old-fashioned post-war factory, replete with typing pools, tea ladies, mechanical workshops, and traditional shipping. There's a job for everybody and a purpose-built 1948 style town. Dundas creates what he considers to be the ideal society, with 1940s everything, but with some elements of modern thinking (gender equality for example). What could go wrong?Readers familiar with recent Australian politics and social history will recognise some of the characters in this very entertaining and highly amusing satire. The story is set in the near future and is narrated by Paul, who describes the development of Factory 19, and the lives of all within.  The book is easy to read, entertaining, and often funny. There are many moments where you almost wish that you were living with them back in 1948...but then again...