...into the categories "Skilled" and "Unskilled" were now subsumed in the single category, "Industrial workers". (1) Looking inside that category as it was used in the 1891 New South Wales census we can see that it included both "skilled" and "unskilled" occupations. Whilst "labourers" were a majority in the category there were also an array of other occupations which could claim a degree of skill--"engineers, engine-drivers and stokers", "machinists and machine-hands", "factory workers", and "mechanics". (2)

This new way of grouping together occupations that had hitherto been classified separately according to skill, describes the "deskilling" effected in the 1891 censuses. It was a sudden departure, not only from preceding classificatory practice, but also from a trajectory which in some respects appeared to make the categories of skill better attuned to a modernising society. In the preceding two New South Wales censuses the range of the category "skilled" had been gradually widened. The exclusively masculine application of the category was abandoned in the 1871 and 1881 censuses when for the first time female occupations (in the needle-trades) were described and classified as "skilled". (3)

Although this disjunction in occupational classification has not previously been the subject of historical investigation, two possible explanations for it are latent within the existing historiography. The first is that the eradication of categories of skill--at precisely the point where their use was becoming applied to female labour--was part of the mechanism by which a rising middle class--of which the New South Wales statistician, T.A. Coghlan was a prominent member reshaped the classification of work in the 1890s to reinforce the gendered character of the social division of labour. A principal mechanism was to de-emphasise the value and significance of women's paid non-domestic labour in sites such as censuses, and in so doing emphasise that the realm of domesticity and dependence on the male wage was appropriately women's. (4) The effect of this explanation is to characterise figures such as Coghlan as antediluvian and retrogessive--almost as existing against the flow of progressive historical change. The second form of explanation lying latent within the literature is that the deskilling of the 1891 censuses in New South Wales and Tasmania simply reflected the deskilled nature of work in those colonies. (5)

There are problems with both these forms of explanation. While it may be possible to see some work in late-nineteenth-century New South Wales as deskilled and industrial labour, it is hard indeed to characterise work in Tasmania in the 1880s and 1890s in the same way. (6) Thus, the changes to occupational classification effected in the 1891 censuses cannot be explained adequately as a direct response to changes in the character of work. Indeed, as much contemporary analysis has shown, a gap between work and how it is portrayed and described--its representations--always exists, often performing important legitimating functions for a particular mode of organising work and society. (7) The presence of such a gap between work and its representations demands that attention be given to the conceptual resources from which particular representations of work are constructed.

Recent approaches to statistical works such as censuses have argued that they should be considered as sites in which representations of work and workers are unfolded and disseminated. (8) As such, occupational classifications are places where ideologies are displayed, and particular gender, racial and class dimensions of social orders constructed and reinforced. (9) Drawing on these perspectives, in this paper the conceptual resources used to devise the occupational scheme in the 1891 censuses are closely examined. This examination provides an explanation that contradicts the emphasis within the literature on the masculinist character and effect of the occupational classification in the 1891 census. While the views on gender held by Coghlan and his Tasmanian colleague, R.M. Johnston, were historically conservative, their views on labour were not. Rather, their contribution in 1891 was to have set in place an historically progressive schema of occupational classification. Both statisticians championed what was then a newly emerging view that skill was not distributed among the human population according to biology. This was the underlying conceptual basis of their 1891 occupational classification--precisely that which would be drawn on in the 1970s and 1980s in Australia to push forward the movement for male and female equal pay. While they were not the only advocates of this view in the 1890s--feminists also pushed its use into the public arena (10)--Coghlan and Johnston were important disseminants and agents of legitimation of the modern view of skill. However, as we shall see, that view of skill also conflicted with another innovatory feature of the census--the rigorous application of scientific method. The argument presented in this paper is that the eradication of the categories of skill from the 1891 census was a product of this intersection of two histories--the history of the concept of skill and the history of scientific method in Australia.

II

Since at least the early eighteenth century in England two quite distinct understandings of skill existed side-by-side. The first of these can be called the artisanal concept of skill, an understanding which explained the different distribution of abilities across the human race by reference to divine or--increasingly in the nineteenth century--biological factors. In this view, to be "skilled" referred as much to socio-biological identity--north-western European, a member of the labouring orders, male, adult--as to a set of objectively described work abilities. This understanding tended to explain work abilities of the skilled through such categories as "instinct", "feeling" and "intuition". On the basis of this understanding of human ability, the skilled worker was positioned at the centre of production, not as the bearer of highly developed "labour power", but as a representative of the social and biological type his skill denoted him to be. Ultimately, in this understanding, skill was rooted firmly within the interior of the skilled worker, and it followed from this that skill did not have an existence outside the skilled worker from whom it was indissociable. It was thus not possible from this conceptual base to separate out something that was skill from the person of the skilled worker.

Although precision is difficult concerning questions of ideology and dominance, it is fair to say that the artisanal view of skill was dominant in England in the eighteenth century and for much of the nineteenth century in Australia. However, alongside it there existed an alternative view of human ability, which rejected mystical and biological explanations and concentrated on the importance of learning and acculturation. The focus of this view was not on the "skilled worker", but on "skill" itself--seen as an object which existed outside the bodies and identity of particular people who had it. In this view--which may be called the industrial concept of skill--the categories "skilled" and "unskilled" were indices of abilities which had been learnt, and simply reflected differential access to training.

Although the industrial concept of skill remained marginal...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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