Making bodies, craft skills and the legacies of policy ‘blokeism’

ABSTRACT

Drawing upon over a decade of research into craft and craft skills in Australia, this article identifies the skills challenges growing within the Australian making ecosystem. Bringing together qualitative and quantitative research findings, it finds that one sector, building and construction, dominates the occupational landscape, at the expense of a richer, more diverse and future-ready skills base. The article argues that what, why and how we make, or how we support making through our consumption decisions, is one of the key ethical challenges facing us today, and one that requires major cultural shifts. Therefore, re-imagining, re-forming and revolutionizing our relationships to the cultures, and thus practices, of making is one of the core challenges facing the world today, and one, following Haraway that cultural studies needs to stay with the trouble of.

KEYWORDS:

• Making
• craft skills
• craft
• occupation
• Australia
• COVID-19
• gender
• production

This article argues for the importance of maintaining a place in a country such as Australia for ‘making’ as opposed to ‘extraction’ to make a new materialist argument around the need for cultural studies to engage with making bodies. Much of cultural studies’ pioneering work has championed the importance of a rich understanding of the demand side of engagement with material culture, especially what we broadly call its consumption, as part of the project of making sense of our collective and individual identities. In this age of climate crisis, increasing inequality and geo-political instability, accompanied by the increased visibility and precarity of supply chains and growing consumer attention being given to where and how our food and material goods are made, cultural research today needs to be concerned with the whole cycle of material production, including beyond cultural production.

This article grew out of a keynote presentation that unfolded over three years due to the conference delays necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. As we know, across that time, the wicked problems the planet is facing have only grown in both scale and number, deepening the need for critical analysis of neoliberalism and its cultural distortions. In the Australian Federal election of May 2022, voter frustration among large segments of the population over (among other things) inaction on climate change, reconciliation and the many high-profile instances of the government failing to understand the needs of women led to the end of almost a decade of conservative government at the national level in Australia. During this time, and as flagged by the reference in this article’s title to policy ‘blokeism’,¹ the political power of the male-dominated mining, construction and defence industries grew, with their growth narratives becoming further entrenched as the hegemonic economic and social common sense of the nation. As a result of the change of government, Australians are now spared the near constant high-vis² photo opportunities featuring former Prime Minister Scott Morrison, whose seeming obsession with tradie³-facing self-marketing was so omnipresent it became not only a cliché, but an electoral liability. But it will take longer to unravel the ways so many aspects of contemporary Australian culture, including its economic, education, arts and cultural policies, were distorted or negated by the political dominance of a few industrial sectors and their demographics. So, while segments of the Australian population which felt largely disregarded by the previous government are breathing a sigh of relief, the reality is that many of the key challenges facing us today are endemic to neoliberalism, regardless of the government in power (see, for example, Humpreys 2019). For this reason, following Donna Haraway, I argue we need to ‘stay with the trouble’ that is the unequal support for, and spread of, making bodies in Australia. That is, rather than withdraw as the challenges are too great or our capacities too small to make a difference, to the degree that we can do so ‘it remains important to embrace situated political projects and their people’ (Haraway 2016, 3).

I come to this research on the wider economic contribution and demographic location of craft skills, through my research into a sector of making which is highly feminized: craft and designer-makers. In 2015 I was fortunate to get funding for the ‘Promoting the Making Self in the Creative Micro-economy’ (‘Crafting Self’) project through the ARC Discovery scheme (DP150100485), the primary aim of which was to determine how online distribution and marketing was changing the environment for operating a creative micro-enterprise, and with it the larger relationship between public and private spheres, focussing on this then fast-growing sector. Despite the social and political awareness underpinning many contemporary craft cultures, and while makers of colour are highly visible in craft micro-enterprise emerging out of foreign aid, micro-credit, and other strategies of economic sustainability and cultural policy, across the Global North the picture of craft making is predominately a white one. This is true too not only of the demographics of the makers, but also the very aesthetics of the goods sold, and the ways they are marketed. This is also a largely middle-class making scene. So, for me, this meant, that much of this previous research featured makers who tended to present themselves generically like this (see Figure 1):

Figure 1. Artisanal makers, straight from central casting (or: ‘Two carpenters in a construction workshop stock photo’). Photograph by Izabela Habur, licenced for use from iStock.

It is important to recognize that given the hyper-visibility of craft and artisanal approaches to making, there is a very real danger here that the pre-dominantly white and middle class, Instagram-friendly image of craft erases the rich diversity of contemporary making in Australia. Moreover, these idealized visions of artisanal making all too often go out of their way to erase any signifier of the digital and less photogenic equipment or factory-like environment, even where they are an essential part of the making process. It is in this context that it is important to remember that making, even on a small-sale, is something undertaken across a wide range of sectors and demographics, even if not all of them are highly visible. In her 2016 book Be Creative (McRobbie 2016), McRobbie outlines what she refers to as the ‘creativity dispositif’ which:

comprises various instruments, guides, manuals, devices, toolkits, mentoring schemes, reports, TV programmes and other forms of entertainment. I see these come together as a form of governmentality, as Foucault would define it, with a wide population of young people within its embrace.

(McRobbie 2016, 10–11)

As I have argued elsewhere (Luckman and Phillipov 2020), following McRobbie’s work on the creativity dispositif (McRobbie 2016), the cultures of the the idealized worlds of localized, small-scale food and craft are united by an artisanal dispositif that festishises the ‘traditional’ in a context of intensified digitization. The ‘artisanal dispositif’ has perhaps a more middle-aged population of people within its embrace than McRobbie’s creativity dispositif mostly due to the high financial cost of entry, but nonetheless is mappable as a traceable narrative interpellating growing numbers of people with the means to realize this subject position. However, the problem remains that the particular fetishization of dreams of escape presented by the artisanal dispositif seems a highly individualized and privatized response to climate crisis, COVID-19, neoliberal workplaces, exploitative and dangerous labour practices, privatized infrastructures and geopolitical threats. ‘Getting out of dodge’ and retreating into a bucolic life of one’s own may be an attractive response for those who are in a position to do so, but does nothing to address our collective challenges and leaves those without the means to do so behind.

The reality is that most of the things in our daily lives are made by people working in not particularly Instagram-friendly workplaces. How we do this ethically and sustainably in the face of growing inequality and climate crisis is a central question we all need to variously ‘stay with the trouble’ of. Especially in this age of what Haraway refers to as ‘The Dithering’ (Haraway 2016, 102). A moment in history where the challenges seem overwhelming in both number and scale, leaving us wondering where to start to respond to the point where we are left doing nothing at all, other than acknowledging our sense of futility and loss. As she argues, what climate crisis and increasing global inequality needs is less a permanent retreat into escapist fantasy, and more highly contingent, collective, less perfect, but more engaged forms of ‘dig where you stand’ ongoing interventions. No matter where and how you live, there are larger debates and actions that especially those with the power to act should not retreat from. So, given my interest in making, for me this has meant seeking to broaden my research to explore the rich complexity and variety of making bodies. Moving beyond craftspeople as they are understood in much contemporary discourse with its emphasis on the artisanal, the reality is most people who ‘make’ everyday as a day job are more likely to look like those in Figure 2.

Figure 2. ‘Australian mixed race workers on building site taking notes stock photo’. Photograph by Julieanne Birch, licenced for use from iStock.

Or, even more probably, like the people in Figure 3.

Figure 3. ‘Manual workers working at a factory stock photo’. Photograph by andresr, licenced for use from iStock.

Ironically, a starting point for much of my current work emerged through the earlier craft project. In an interview, Tasmanian-based British shoemaker Luna Newby recounted a phone conversation she recently had with a British-based elder statesman of the trade – the man who literally ‘wrote the book’ on shoemaking, a man then of around 80–90 years of age in her estimation:

He told me … his job is to go around, he goes into major shoe factories and talks to managing directors of [she named some internationally recognized brands] and all these different shoe-making companies. You’d think, ‘Oh well, they know all about shoes’, but they know nothing about the construction of a shoe and he, he’s been in the industry all his life, and he [is flown in to] talk [to the management] about the components of the shoe, so that they are more knowledgeable about a shoe, so that they can talk to their manufacturers in China about how shoes are constructed. … It’s a bit like farm managers who know nothing about straw and hay.

(Luna Newby, shoemaker, February 2017)

We still largely take for granted the ongoing presence of many of the mainly invisible industrial craft skills that contemporary production relies on. But in this age of decades-long offshoring and automation, in countries such as Australia, these knowledges and skills are in fact highly vulnerable. Many of the skilled craftspeople current Australian manufacturing, including innovation, relies on are ageing and retiring. This loss of practical making skills and knowledge of materials and their capacities is further compounded by the closure of many key TAFE courses, and the winding back of expensive studio training by schools and universities.

To this end, where craft skills are located across the Australian making ecosystem is thus the focus of one of my current projects: ‘The Importance of Craft Skills to the Future of Making in Australia’ (DP190100349). Employing both qualitative and quantitative research approaches, this research critically explores the cultural and economic significance of craft skills to making in Australia, especially their loss, as our economy narrowly focusses on extraction rather than the development of more sustainable engagement with the material world. Its starting point has been a statistical mapping to identify craft skills in the Australian economy, above and beyond the obvious sites of activity (again, see Figure 1). The second part of the project focuses upon qualitative semi-structured interviews to flesh out the quantitative findings. The focus here has been upon both skills that were attained formally, as well as those more ‘tacit’ skills that accumulate through previous employment, self-education, family and/or hobbyist activity (that is, through immersion in a making habitus).

A few other Australian scholars also explore the contemporary relationship between craft and manufacturing. Design historian Jesse Stein’s research employs oral histories to capture the rich stories of industrial craftspeople in Australia. Her most recent book, Industrial Craft in Australia (Stein 2021), focusses on engineering patternmakers and industrial model makers who are, as she says, the hidden skilled workers located between the designer who comes up with the idea, and the manufacturer. Such people are essential to the making process now, even as prototyping and manufacturing is increasingly digitized, precisely because they are the people who turn an idea into a physically replicable object. Notably too, cultural geographers and urban planning scholars Chantel Carr, Chris Gibson, Carl Grodach and Andrew Warren through their examinations of making in place (Gibson and Warren 2018, 2021; Grodach and Gibson 2019; Warren and Gibson 2014; Warren 2014, 2016) situate the potentialities of contemporary digital tools in niche manufacturing within much larger craft histories of making, with all the economic ups and downs these have entailed. Gibson and Warren’s research into surfing culture and surfboard production, as well as guitar making, richly explores the intersections of making with culture and place (Gibson and Warren 2018, 2021; Warren and Gibson 2014; Warren 2014, 2016). Carr and Gibson’s work similarly examines craft skills and making in place at the level of the home, and in particular the potentialities for those of us in the Global North to consider what we really need to make and the conditions under which things are made (Carr 2017; Carr and Gibson 2016; Gibson and Chantel 2018). It is against this backdrop of nuanced and situated research that the Craft Skills study seeks to locate craft skills across the whole Australian making ecology.

To locate craft skills within the broader Australian economy, I sought to apply a similar approach to that undertaken in a previous study into the British craft economy by the UK Crafts Council: ‘Defining and Measuring Craft: A Review for the Crafts Council’. The release of the findings of this UK work spanned a series of three reports: Report One: Definitions 1998–2012 (Dodd and Morgan 2013a), Report Two: Proposals for a Way Forward (Dodd and Morgan 2013b), and Report Three: Measuring the Craft Economy (Bennett, License, and Tuck 2014). This Australian mapping draws heavily upon the data-gathering and definitional approaches mapped out across these three documents and received invaluable input from those involved in the UK study. But while this laid down vital methodological groundwork and research principles, the significant differences in the way occupational data are classified and collected between Australia and the UK meant that there was no easy direct application of the British approach. Instead, the process of identifying which employment categories included at least some aspect of craft skills had to be undertaken from scratch using the very different Australian and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations (ANZSCO) and to do so it was necessary, as the earlier study had, to clearly define what we mean by ‘craft skills’ in the Australian context.

Craft is a description of a process of production, rather than just the nature of the end product. The mode of interaction with materials is crucial to identifying craft activity. For millennia, craft skills have been central to the process of materials and practices innovation. As leading craft historian and curator Glen Adamson has written:

In comparison to a pharmaceutical researcher in a well-financed laboratory, an architectural engineer armed with the latest digital tools, or a military supplier capable of turning out fearsome laser-guided weapons of mass destruction, the capabilities of one individual, no matter how skilled, might seem very limited. But as Gell reminds us, craft is the origin and ultimate signifier of material potency. The pharmaceutical lab, the engineer’s office, the weapons factory—all would grind to a halt without the skills of experimental technicians, model makers and prototypers. We need to insist on the fact that these workers are artisans. Craft exists within even the most high-tech situations. … Craft infuses the material world with enchantment not by revealing knowledge, nor by concealing it, but rather by rendering knowledge into material form, thus producing a moment of wonder.

(Adamson 2013, 104)

The focus here is therefore not just on hands-on, practice-based labour skills; craft also demands the ability to think creatively, as well as a capacity to think across existing disciplinary and practice boundaries, to ‘craft’ or be ‘crafty’ in working ideas up into prototypes and then, potentially, commercially viable products, or in mending or building something that is unique. Sorting workers based on their qualification level was considered as an option. However, while you might have completed a two-year trade qualification, you may still be working in a large firm doing only one thing repeatedly, on a blank slate, with new materials, and hence largely identically. This may be skilled work, but it is not the more active and vital exercise of craft skills as defined above. Therefore, we decided that qualification levels were not a sufficient reflection of the likelihood of a worker performing craft activity, and so we did not apply this method to the data analysis. Rather, the approach we adopted was to understand the context of all interactions with materials and craft-relevant roles. As such, the project required a method to understand the work style intent of the maker and the environment in which they are working.

Consequently, of the 1,353 occupations listed in the ANZSCO occupation list, we ultimately identified 114 as containing at least some potential engagement with craft skill. These were dealt with statistically in three ways:

1. For 56 of the 114 occupations, all workers in an occupation are craft workers. We have defined some occupations, often those which are directly related to working with a particular material, as being fully related to craft work, for example, sculptors, blacksmiths.

2. For 46 of the 114 all workers in an occupation who are ‘sole traders’ were included in the study. We have assumed that workers who are the sole worker in their own business are performing craft activity on the basis that someone working as a sole worker is most likely to be doing a combination of work and less likely to be on a production line or undertaking highly repetitive work, and is therefore more likely to be applying a high degree of control over the production process.

3. For 12 of 114 we intersected the craft occupational data against the ABS dataset on the ‘Industry of employment’ for occupations where the industrial context of an activity is likely to make the difference between craft and non-craft activity, and identified those industries where a worker would be most likely to be carrying out craft work to include in our scope. For example, we included locksmiths in the ‘Fabricated Metal Product Manufacturing’ industry, but not in ‘Basic Material Wholesaling’.

What this meant was that, for the 56 occupations identified under the first category, 100% of those identifying in the census data as employed in that occupation were counted in our calculations. For the second and third categories, while figures differed across category and occupation, approaching defining craft skills in this way tended to lead to much smaller cohorts (ranging between a low of 1% for locksmiths and high of 49% for floor finishers). For key building and construction occupations with large overall employment numbers, the final percentage of workers counted as being engaged in skilled craft work was bricklayer 6%, cabinetmaker 16%, carpenter 29%, carpenter and joiner 22%, fibrous plasterer 8%, glazier 15%, and joiner 19%. Yet, as can be seen in Figure 4, even when these percentages are applied to the occupational data, overall employment in the building and construction sector is so large in comparison to all other craft skills – related sectors that it dominates craft employment, with textiles and metal coming in well behind as the production sectors with the most craft skills employment.

Figure 4. Craft employment in Australia by sector as measured in the 2021 and 2016 censuses. Based on Australian Bureau of Statistics data.

Overall, employing this methodology, we found that in 2016 Australia’s craft economy employed 119,843 people (1.1% of the total labour force as recorded in the census) and generated $17.2 billion gross value added (GVA) (1.0% of the total) as measured by worker income. To contextualize this relationally, Australia’s craft economy is similar in size and impact to the sports economy, which in 2016–17 supported 128,000 jobs and contributed $14.5 billion to gross domestic product (KPMG 2020). In 2021, despite all the governmental and media discourse about sovereign manufacturing and needing to ‘make things ourselves again’, the total craft employment figure had dropped marginally to 116,579, albeit with a slight growth in worker ‘productivity’ in terms of GVA contribution ($19.2 billion). GVA per job for craft occupations increased by 16.9% from 2006–2021 (in real terms denoted in 2016 dollars), diverging from the national picture where GVA per job declined by 5.3% from 2006 to 2021 in real terms denoted in 2016 dollars. In part, the increase in GVA per job for the craft sector is a result of how employment has declined over time, by 26% from 2006 to 2021. As employment has declined while output has increased in nominal terms, output per job has increased. So, while the workforce has shrunk, it has also become much more productive, and, due to increasing scarcity, the skills held by workers who have remained in the sector have become more valued.

Australia entered the COVID-19 pandemic a country identified by some of its own economics writers as a dumb economy ‘getting dumber’ despite its wealth (Patrick 2019, 7). Drawing upon data drawn from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Centre for International Development Atlas of Economic Complexity, Patrick (2019, 7) notes that the country remains overwhelmingly dependent (70%) upon the export of minerals and energy, primarily iron ore, coal, oil and gas, as the basis of its exports. The bulk of the remaining 30% (29%) consists of ‘food, alcohol, wool, tourism and metal products’ (Patrick 2019, 7). Just as COVID-19 laid bare the supply chain vulnerabilities of globalized trade, there is also increasing recognition that in a climate crisis future Australia’s current reliance on minerals and energy is completely unsustainable. The final loss of car manufacturing in Australia – the last locally made car rolled off the production line at General Motors-Holden’s Adelaide facility in October 2017—was reported as the ultimate sign that the nation had indeed become economically dependent on ‘mines and mortgages’ (Kurmelovs 2020). Yet against this larger backdrop of decline, governmental rhetoric from both major parties continues to celebrate our desire, and ability, to be a country that makes. But as this research indicates, people in employment with the skills to do so in any kind of creative, problem-solving, innovative or original way are in steady decline (see Figure 5). The national making ecology is also disproportionately skewed towards building and construction, at the expense of a richer, more diverse craft skills base. There are many reasons why this should matter to those of us in cultural studies. While Australia’s moment of ‘peak blokeism’ may have passed with the defeat of the Morrison government, some making bodies continue to be able to flex more political muscle than others. The strength of building unions and the centrality of home ownership, together with the persistent desirability of low-density living in the Australian national imaginary, will persist even with a Labor government. So, while this particular moment of ‘high-vis’ festishism may have passed into history, public discourse (including media visuals) still tends to foreground some making bodies over others, reinforcing a limited gendered, raced and classed picture of who makes and what they make in Australia. Unsurprisingly then, government policy frameworks have tended to privilege highly visible and numerically significant industrial sectors, at the expense of small to medium enterprises, as well as sole traders, who make up the majority of skilled craft workers. Further attention needs to continue to be paid to overlooked parts of our making ecologies. This includes giving thought to what are we not currently making or doing that we really need to be for ethical and/or sustainability reasons, not just economic ones.

Figure 5. Total craft employment in Australia by as measured in the 2006, 2011, 2016 and 2021 censuses. Based on Australian Bureau of Statistics data.

The language of material self-sufficiency is a culturally powerful one individually and collectively. As is the case in similar economies in North America and Western Europe, much of the popular political pressure for policy action to redress the loss of making jobs to overseas (especially China) is driven by the social and cultural, not just economic, impact this has had upon especially men without university education. The subsequent rise of right-wing populist governments, Brexit and the so-called ‘culture wars’ which have ensued, and which in no small part are driven by this demographic, points to one of the key ways making bodies, or their absence, have profound cultural impacts. An examination of governmental policy funding released to support the cultural and creative sector in the wake of the profound impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic revealed that not only did the majority of COVID-19 recovery funding prioritize the male-dominated economy of mining and building, drilling into the detail of the (smaller amounts) of largely state funding made available to the arts and culture sector again reveals this funding to be largely targeted at building and construction, not arts and cultural workers or their employers directly (Pacella, Luckman, and O’Connor 2021a, 46; see also Figure 6).

Figure 6. This graph aggregates the publicly announced COVID-19 response funding for the arts, cultural and creative sector made by all state governments in the period January to December 2020 and breaks this down according to whether it was support for creative workers directly, for the administration and management of arts, cultural and creative organizations and/or events, or an infrastructure announcement. As is clearly evident, approximately 85% of even this funding was in an immediate sense further support for the building and construction industry. Source: Pacella, Luckman and O’Connor (2021b, 12).

Thinking more broadly about what, why and how we make, or how we support making through our consumption decisions, is one of the key ethical challenges facing us today, and one that requires major cultural shifts. Clearly there are important labour issues here, but small-scale making alone cannot be the answer to this. Nor is it going to enable the kind of larger scale transitions we need now to address climate crisis. Craft and design have been with us for millennia and will continue to be so into the future. Making things is central to human survival and pleasure, to cultural practice for all peoples. Craft is therefore far more than unnecessary tat or pleasurable adornment; it is not having to drink water out of your cupped hands. It is also a key way we express who we are and what we value. Craft practice has long had as a central tenet a profound respect for materials, a valuing of them including in re-use, and this sensibility continues to inform much craft practice today. So too do ideas of quality and building to last which also have rich and long traditions in craft practice and which are all the more salient in the age of ‘fast fashion’ and accelerating climate decline. Foregrounding the deep and rich materials and skills knowledges underpinning craft practice allows us to move below the surface of products and into the deeper questions of how things are made. Leading British architect, industrial designer and craftsman David Pye wrote his iconic 1968 book on craft and making The Nature and Art of Workmanship on the cusp of the second Western craft revival, informed as it was by a ‘back to basics’ sensibility and emerging environmental awareness. Evoking one of the leading thinkers of the (first) Arts and Crafts Movement that was influential across much of the Global North not coincidentally in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, Pye wrote:

Ruskin said ‘If we build, let us think that we build forever’. Shall we say ‘If we build, let us remember to build for the scrapheap’? Shall we make everything so that it goes wrong or breaks pretty quickly? I think not. [People] do not live by economics alone. There is a question of morale involved. A world in which everything was ephemeral would not be worth working for. There are overwhelming social and aesthetic arguments for durability in certain things even if, as we are told, there are no economic ones.

(Pye 1995, 83)

Humanity’s materials use is at the heart of the challenges that face us in the Anthropocene. Re-imagining, re-forming and revolutionizing our relationships to the cultures, and thus practices, of making is thus one of the core challenges facing the world today, and one, I argue, cultural studies thus needs to stay with the trouble of.

Acknowledgments

This paper is based on a keynote presentation given at the (much delayed) 2020 Cultural Studies Association of Australasia (CSAA) Conference hosted by Edith Cowan University and eventually held in July 2022 in Perth, Western Australia, the traditional lands of the Whadjak people of the Nyoongar Nation. Huge thanks to Professor Panizza Allmark for the initial invitation, and to her and the rest of the organizing team for persevering with organizing a conference during a global pandemic. Who knew when you went with the conference theme ‘Bodies in Flux’ exactly how true that would come to be!

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council under Grant DP190100349. The views expressed herein are those of the author and are not necessarily those of the Australian Government or Australian Research Council. The craft skills occupational data presented here is based on census data collected by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and the author is grateful for the skilled and timely support offered by ABS staff in the delivery of the customized data request. The data analysis was undertaken by the author in collaboration with Fiona Tuck and Nathan Wallwork who advised the UK Crafts Council on their initial project and, again, I am extremely grateful for their personable guidance and precision.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Australian Research Council [DP190100349, DP150100485]

Notes

1. In keeping with my arguments regarding the socio-economic significance in Australia of building and construction, there is a rich everyday vocabulary associated with workers in this arguably still culturally working class, even if no longer economically disadvantaged, sector. Because they carry greater cultural meaning beyond a simple translation, some colloquial everyday Australian terminology has been retained here, despite the journal’s international audience. The reference to ‘blokeism’ and ‘blokes’ in the article’s title and elsewhere denotes, as it does in a number of English-language contexts, ‘man’ or ‘guy’, but in Australia also connects with highly masculinized, white, colonial national identity myths around laconic anti-authoritarianism, ‘common sense’, perceived authenticity and ‘a fair go’.

2. ‘High-vis’ means high visibility (usually bright orange or fluorescent yellow) safety workwear, the ubiquitous uniform of trades workers, miners and politicians seeking to connect with the ‘everyday worker’.

3. ‘Tradie’ is short for tradesperson.