The Unknown Industrial Prisoner by David Ireland - ISBN: 9781922147066
Paperback
Oil refinery, dehumanizing labor: Trapped on shores of Botany Bay.

The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

$13.45

  • Paperback

    452 pages

  • Release Date

    26 June 2013

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Summary

What was Puroil? At Clearwater it was a sprawling refinery, an army of white shirts, a fleet of wagons, a number of apparently separate companies, dozens of monolithic departments protected from each other by an armour of functional difference and jealousy. On the refinery site it was two hundred and fifty shabby prisoners, a heavy overload of foremen, supervisors, plant controllers, shift controllers, up to the giddy height of section heads (popularly miscalled Suction Heads, a metaphor …

Book Details

ISBN-13:9781922147066
ISBN-10:1922147060
Author:David Ireland
Publisher:Text Publishing
Imprint:The Text Publishing Company
Format:Paperback
Number of Pages:452
Release Date:26 June 2013
Weight:324g
Dimensions:36mm x 198mm x 130mm
Series:Text Classics
What They're Saying

Critics Review

‘When I think of my favourite Australian novels, two 1970s works by David Ireland are near the top of the list: The Unknown Industrial Prisoner and The Glass Canoe .’

‘David Ireland offers a fiercely brilliant comic portrait of Australia in the grip of a dehumanising labour system.This almost prophetic book has been written to recognise these unknown industrial prisoners.’ * M/C Reviews *
‘When I think of my favourite Australian novels, two 1970s works by David Ireland are near the top of the list: The Unknown Industrial Prisoner and The Glass Canoe.’ * Stephen Romei *
‘There had been nothing like it in Australian literature before, and the only thing like it since was Ireland’s second great proletarian fiction, The Glass Canoe (1976).’ * Peter Pierce *

About The Author

David Ireland

David Ireland was born in 1927 on a kitchen table in Lakemba in south-western Sydney. He lived in many places and worked at many jobs, including greenskeeper, factory hand, and for an extended period in an oil refinery, before he became a full-time writer.

Ireland started out writing poetry and drama but then turned to fiction. His first novel, The Chantic Bird, was published in 1968. In the next decade he published five further novels, three of which won the Miles Franklin Award: The Unknown Industrial Prisoner, The Glass Canoe and A Woman of the Future.

David Ireland was made a member of the Order of Australia in 1981. In 1985 he received the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal for his novel Archimedes and the Seagull.

David Ireland lives in New South Wales.

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