‘Are you happy now?’: women gauge readers and postwar Victoria

Victoria's State Rivers and Water Supply Commission employed more than 150 gauge readers in the postwar period. Theirs was a unique labour: not quite a volunteer role, not quite a career. Gauge readers were often the wives and daughters of farming men, and their remuneration was meagre. This article explores the informal remarks left by the gauge readers on the forms they supplied to the Commission and finds intersections that further add to the dynamic labour histories of postwar Victoria. This article argues that the gauge readers utilised the forms effectively to bargain for improved labour conditions, despite their geographical and hierarchical distance from the Commission's central office in Melbourne.