The clever tea lady

A chat with Ruth Ludwig, the department's longest serving female employee, reveals a very different workplace for females in the 1960s. When women married in those days they were forced to resign. Ruth is now a business analyst for Information Management.

I can still remember the first day I arrived at the Commission. I was one of two young girls sent from the Public Service Office. We were given the choice of two jobs – one in the typing pool and the other in the ledgers area to be trained in accounting machine work. Never one for sitting in front of a manual typewriter for long, I chose the second area.

In those days the department was situated in the Anzac Square building. To get to the area I was going, you entered via French doors into a dingy waiting room area with dark lino on the floor and then down an equally dark corridor in the interior offices. After being spoken to by the secretary, I was taken into the ledgers area by the accountant and given another firm talking to about more rules and regulations. There were lots of them. I needed to dress a certain way, starting and finishing times were very precise and I wasn't supposed to talk to the other staff during the day. As a shy young girl just out of school the office rules left a lasting impression.

The room had an overall impression of being dark and dirty. It was filled with old antique wooden desks and some of these had turned legs. Each desk was piled high with paper files. There were about 30 large tables lined up like schoolroom desks one row down each side of the large room and three more rows in the middle. The accountants would often stand gazing out over the staff, intimidating them into working harder.

At the back of the room was a line of accounting machines, six in all. It was at those machines that sat the only females in the room. The machines made a lot of noise as the girls worked at their oversized keyboards and the carriage moved about a meter across the top. I was to later see many a male hit in the groin by one of those because they forgot to look at which way it was moving. Behind the girls were open windows. The noise and smell of the traffic floated up the four floors to the office and as the office was not air-conditioned the windows had to be open. Paperweights were on all the loose paper in the office. There was paper and files everywhere.

There was a small dingy tea making area with a single sink and I was told it was one of my roles to make morning and afternoon tea for everyone in the office. As the junior female member of staff, I fulfilled this duty for the next two years. The majority of the people were mainly young men under 25, but they did not make the tea.

Times have certainly changed in that respect. We all make our own tea and women are obviously now respected in the department.