Controversy over redeveloping Canberra Brickworks may have cooled, but a former employee has recounted the fierce heat and frantic activity that once came from Yarralumla's landmark.
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An estimated 600 million bricks were manufactured in the Commonwealth brickworks. A forklift driver there for 14 years, Vern McMullen's most vivid memory is of the columns of clinker bricks that never made it out of the yard.
As he stands near old timber waiting to be recycled, his pale blue eyes look about for clinkers. Once discarded in their thousands, these hard burnt old bricks are more valuable in Mr McMullen's view than both the timber and even the Canberra red bricks that recyclers seek out these days.
When he first arrived in 1962, production was flat out and new kilns were being built to keep pace with a fast-growing city. Bricks misshapen and stuck fast to other bricks while baking were discarded as 'clinkers.'
A long-time builder in Canberra David Howarth remembers as a youth watching Canberra red bricks arriving at building sites on a flat bed truck. The driver would unload them by hand. "Everything was done by hand," he said.
"Bowral Bricks brought out a clinker brick in the 1970s and they became all the rage," Mr Howarth said.
"Clinkers had rough bits hanging off them. The Canberra reds came from government brickworks, and they probably had a policy to produce only clear-faced bricks."
Mr McMullen said his work mates had warned him about working in the kilns.
"They said 'You'll get burnt to death in there, Scrubby.' I was from the bush, from Tumut, so they called me Scrubby," he said. "They were from the city, they were all scared: I was from the bush, I would have a go."
He had learned how to handle heavy machinery as a young man growing up in the timber industry near Batlow, where he helped with 'sniggin' or pulling out felled logs from the bush.
At age 19 he was driving 'dozers on the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectricity Scheme and later drove locomotives into the tunnels to shine lights on rock faces while gelignite was placed inside bore holes.
Later, he drove a D9 dozer in Canberra helping to build Lake Burley Griffin, before landing a job at the brickworks, where his forklift ticket made him the envy of long-term workers who up until that time stacked bricks in the kilns by hand.
"The old blokes screamed seniority. They never had a forklift ticket. A mate ,Len Colless, invited me down to this yard in Fyshwick, [to qualify for a forklift driving licence]. It was like winning the lottery, getting my ticket," Mr McMullen said.
He loaded coal hoppers, loaded bricks into the kilns for baking and afterwards would break a mud seal around the firebrick door and wicket opening of the kiln.
His son Malcolm remembers as a 10-year-old on school holidays going to the brickworks and sitting on his father's lap on the forklift and at other times standing well back while he pulled open the firebrick doors.
"You'd feel the heat come out of the kiln, like water coming over the top of you. He would tow in a big fan with the forklift and circulate the air inside the kilns."
Mr McMullen is unsure whether it was the coal dust, asbestos lining on the doors, or cigarettes which caused his emphysema. These days he is on oxygen 16 hours a day. On the rare occasion he goes out he keeps a sharp eye for Canberra red bricks and rare clinkers.
