Stories
If You Haven’t Got Water, You Haven’t Got Anything
The corrugated iron rainwater tank is an Australian icon, one of those self-consciously nationalistic symbols celebrated along with the windmill or the Hills hoist. With its squat profile and its rippled sides and curious little pointed top the corrugated iron water tank is so much of a visual cliché that we can almost forget that it is a manufactured object like any other: it is still a surprisingly handmade object, using processes that are known to many craftspeople such as jewellers, albeit writ very large.
Prosaic and of comfortable proportions, the rainwater tank once squatted in most Australian backyards as a mute reminder of the uncertainties of climate. Its cold water, sometimes with its faint whiff of kerosene to keep the mozzies down, would overflow by the end of winter and with luck and frugality, it would last the whole summer.
In the 1970s and 80s, the old-fashioned rainwater tank became regarded as an eyesore, with some local councils passing by-laws to actually ban them under the pretext that such tanks were unsanitary.
Now with climate change, drought, rising water prices and a nagging worry that the social infrastructure may not necessarily supply us with all the essentials for living, the rainwater tank is returning with a vengeance.
The irony of this situation is not lost on Graham Woolford, who, with his wife Aileen, has owned N. J. Denyer Pty Ltd since 1952.
“I can’t quite believe it,” he says. “The corrugated iron rainwater tank has become fashionable, a status symbol.”
Now located in Hindmarsh, Denyer Tanks is the oldest tankmaker operating in SA and amongst the oldest in Australia. The company, started in 1918 by Norman John Denyer when he was a very young man, became one of a number that manufactured tanks and agricultural containers. Nearly all those companies have vanished.
Graham, who married Norman’s daughter Aileen, went to trade school at night and got his trade certificate in sheetmetal work whilst running the company, occasionally doing specialized jobs such as lobster-back pipe bends, canopies etc.
Working in sheetmetal, especially if starting from scratch, requires a certain ability to understand how shapes transform from two dimensions to three dimensions. How does an oval cone intersect a round shape at an angle? What does it all look like laid out flat? Hanging on the wall at Denyer Tanks are dozens of flat master patterns and shapes ready to be marked out for all manner of tanks, silos and feed containers.
A 500 gallon tank starts by curving the corrugated iron through rollers which, with the correct pressure, can form the iron into the required tank walls. The overlapping iron is then riveted together using traditional solid rivets – a top tankmaker, working with a good assistant, can do sixteen rivets in two and a half minutes. Solid rivets add a certain sturdy quality to the work and require a particular skill to execute efficiently.
A bottom is then marked out and cut out of flat galvanized iron and soldered onto the tank. A galvanized pipe fitting or bush for the tap is added to the base and a threaded pipe for the tap. Then a flattened cone is marked out, cut out and joined to the top of the tank. An access manhole is fitted on top. Occasionally a finial is added to the top of the tank. Once a finial was added to cover the hole left at the pointed top of the tank but now it is only done for those happy to pay for a traditional-looking tank.
The seams are then sealed with lead/tin solder, using a gas-fired copper soldering iron.
Each tankmaker generally makes his own tank from start to finish, taking around four and a half hours for a 500 gallon tank. The work takes place in a moderate sized factory, with occasional outbreaks of hammering and intervening periods of silence. On one bench is a range of jennies, swaging machines and other devices operating in much the same fashion as giant can openers. These ancient but very useful devices can turn over edges, put reinforcing beads into the metal, join and crimp edges. Nearby an intriguing assortment of small anvils such as funnel stakes are used to persuade metal into useful shapes.
A great deal of sheetmetal work is done these days with electric shears but according to Graham, the tankmaker’s tools are still fairly straightforward: a pair of 14 inch straight hand snips and 10 inch curved snips for cutting out sheet metal, a 24 ounce ballpein hammer, a prick punch for making rivet holes, a rivet set and a couple of steel dollies (a backing tool for ‘dressing up jobs’ giving them a neat, clean finish).
It is not easy to find people willing to do the work. It can be noisy and, according to Graham, there is the stigma of ‘working with the hands’. Like many others experienced in the forming of shapes for a job, Graham emphasises that it is the people who use both head and hands ie give the job some thought, who do best at this type of work. He also acknowledges that it can be very repetitive, which is hardly surprising as the basic form of the corrugated iron water tank has not changed for at least one hundred years.
Others things do change. Plastic has now replaced the assorted domestic containers that were once sheetmetal. Not too many years ago, buckets, rubbish bins, washing basins, even bathtubs were all the products of the sheetmetal worker. But growing concern about water shortage has swung the spotlight back onto a trade with a curious history. With only a few tools needed, many sheetmetal workers were once wandering tradesmen – “journeymen” in the original sense of the word. Gypsies, too had a rich history of being sheetmetal and wire workers: they are still known and valued as such in parts of Eastern Europe.
But for now Graham’s problem is one of demand: there is a five month wait for one of his traditional rainwater tanks and he doesn’t see the work drying up. After all, there’s something fairly fundamental and, in a sense, honourable about making rainwater tanks for a living. As he says: “If you haven’t got water, you haven’t got anything.”
This article by Mark Thomson has been supported by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.
