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Recruitment of Single Men to Remote Enterprises

Some Implications for Policy Formulation

Faculty of Business Administration, University of Manchester

J.B.W. Thomson

Business Management from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology

In view of the importance of the recent development of mining projects in the Australian tropics, in 1971 the CSIRO Division of Building Research set up an inter-disciplinary task force to demonstrate how conditions could be created in the associated remote communities such that:

(a) people will be attracted to these towns; and

(b) residents will enjoy a quality of life as good as or better than that which they would expect to lead in developed centres anywhere in Australia.

In the course of a number of surveys in the early phase of this work, it became apparent that the existence of single men in these mining enterprises was often seen by managers to present a particular set of problems. In a number of cases they tended to be regarded as a necessary evil, and were stigmatized as unruly. For planners they represented a homogeneous group, who must be buffered from contract with the rest of the population. This often results in their being isolated from the community proper by being banished to barracks in remote corners of the settlement.

Accordingly in 1975 a sub-sample of single men was interviewed in Nhulunbuy concerning their attitudes and feel ings about the community. This paper explores one facet that emerged in the course of the interviews — the need to differentiate single men according to their subjective orientation rather than treat them as a homogeneous group.

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