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Before every Australian construction site was smothered in high-vis vests, orange traffic cones, and crawling speed limits, most workers could have been mistaken for anyone else.
Striking photos from the 1970s and 80s show construction crews wearing whatever clothes they brought from home - often going shirtless under the hot sun - and scarcely any safety gear.
Far from today s uniformed gangs visible from space in bright yellow vests and hard hats with young female backpackers directing traffic, occupational health and safety appeared to barely followed.
Shots from the building of the Western Distributor in Sydney in the early 1970s showed a worker pouring concrete by gripping a tube while wearing just a pair of gumboots.
News by Leisa Scott
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Subscriber only Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to believe that tucked away in the perfectly ordinary Brisbane suburb of The Gap, lived a family of spies. Mum, Dad and the three kids. They went on holidays to the Gold Coast with Soviet defectors, the Petrovs. Dad did the books for Abe Saffron, one of Australia s most notorious underworld figures. They d pop into the city looking like an everyday family posing for happy snaps but that was a ruse; they were busy collecting intelligence on could-be Communists. If it s a mission too outlandish, too impossible for you, that s understandable. Even the woman who lived this story finds big chunks of her childhood hard to believe.