Douglas Darian Smith - Women at Work WW2.

Douglas Darian Smith, born in North Adelaide on 4 May 1900 and died on 14 August 1984, was an Australian commercial, industrial and aerial photographer whose career produced an extensive record of South Australian working life. After military service during the First World War he studied photography at Regent Street Polytechnic in London and experimented with aerial photography before returning to Adelaide in 1919. He established his own photographic business in 1926 and subsequently worked for industrial and commercial clients including General Motors Holden. During the Second World War his professional access to South Australian factories, engineering works and agricultural operations placed him in a position to photograph the rapid expansion of women's employment as labour requirements changed and industry was reorganised for wartime production. His photographs of women workers therefore belong to the wider commercial and industrial archive he created rather than to a separate independent documentary project.

The Women at Work photographs record women performing specific industrial processes that had become essential to wartime manufacturing. Smith photographed women operating presses, winding armatures, welding, inspecting components and working directly with munitions. Individual photographs show the manufacture and inspection of bomb bodies, ammunition boxes and components for anti aircraft shells, while another substantial group records work connected with Australian production of the Bristol Beaufort aircraft. Women are shown riveting aircraft ribs, drilling components, assembling oil tanks and undertaking technical drawing alongside other forms of precision engineering. Smith frequently photographed the worker together with the machinery, tools and component being produced, making it possible to identify particular stages of manufacture rather than simply presenting general factory scenes. The photographs consequently record the technical nature of women's wartime employment and their presence within engineering and manufacturing occupations that had previously employed predominantly male workforces.

The series also extends beyond factories to women's contribution to South Australian agriculture. Smith photographed women picking grapes and almonds, pruning and cultivating vines, working with draught horses, operating agricultural machinery and hand milking. These photographs place agricultural labour alongside aircraft production, munitions manufacture and engineering as interconnected parts of the wartime economy. Australian women entered an expanded range of occupations during the war as large numbers of men entered military service and demands on manufacturing and food production increased. Smith's photographs document this change at workplace level, recording clothing, machinery, factory interiors, production methods and agricultural practices as well as the workers themselves. Preserved by the State Library of South Australia, the images now provide a detailed photographic record of how women's labour formed part of South Australia's industrial and agricultural mobilisation during the Second World War.

Douglas Darian Smith
Australian Dictionary of Biography
South Australia State Library

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Photographs by Douglas Darian Smith.
Collection: State Library of South Australia.
Source: State Library of South Australia on Flickr Commons.
Rights: No known copyright restrictions.

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