Hello to all...I'm new here...

I was born in 1958 in Warragul in Victoria. As a little tacker I fondly recall our Astor lowboy 21" TV and our Astor radiogram. Both were beautiful pieces of woodcraft and electronics. Whenever the TV serviceman visited (usually to fix a dud valve) I used to marvel at the "glowing city" of valves in the TV set. I remember, well, the two huge "Rola" speakers below the chassis and the proud Astor branding on the masonite TV back. "It's an Astor- that's the difference!" and Electronic Industries Australia.

Rola speakers were made, I believe, at the Plessy factory in Dandenong North right next door to the Gillette factory. My dad drove us past the place very often on our trips to the Dandenong market. We lived in Springvale and I had a cousin who worked on the transistor radio assembly line at Astor's factory in Huntingdale. One Christmas when I was about 11, as I recall, I was allowed to go to the factory at Christmas time and I got a glimpse of the place. It was HUGE! You could have parked three jumbo jets in the place! They made everything there from whitegoods to TVs to radios and some military communication equipment, if memory serves me right.

I remember when Gough Whitlam dropped the tariff on electrical goods in '71 or '72. The effect was almost instant. It started with radios. Suddenly the market was flooded with cheap radios out of Hong Kong. The Japanese branded radios still had higher prices but not as high as the Astor, HMV, AWA Radiola and Ferris sets. Within a couple of years radio production was almost dead in the water. Astor (by then owned by Phillips) kept making Diamond Dot radios for Holden and Chrysler and some mantle radios (one of which I have...stereo-style twin speakers in lovely teak wood...solid teak wood, mind!). I do know that Astor had been gearing up to make colour TVs and had a chassis ready to go as far back as '72 but then Phillips dictated that its chassis would be used in Phillips-branded sets and Kriesler sets. The Astor TV brand was, by that time, virtually dead in the water. The colour TV craze kept the local industry going for quite a while but then the Japanese just flooded the market. To be fair they also made sets here but the tariffs kept dropping and the writing was on the wall...that was it for EIL and most other Australian makers. AWA transitioned into a defence business and now its a computer servicing business, I believe. The rest are now just brand names slapped on stuff made overseas but proud Astor is gone and it really hurts my heart.

I suppose the point of my first post here is this...Its my melancholia about what has happened to all of our industry. As a kid nearly everything we owned, bought and used was made in Australia and was of excellent quality. The shoes on your feet (I always wore "Corvin" brand shoes to school), the socks on your feet (Red Robin, thanks very much), your clothing (Hickock and FJ) the cars you had in the driveway...all Australian made. Then someone decided that to make things cheaper for the workers that tariffs would be dropped on industries that were assumed to be inefficient. Yep prices dropped...but jobs went south as well. It wasn't long before that huge Huntingdale EIL factory was empty. Now it is a housing estate!

This year, watching the last Australian-made Fords and Holdens come off the production line I am full of sadness and anger at what our politicians have done to this country. Where once all political parties wanted to build our industries up so that we were self-sufficient, they now want us to go back to simply digging things up out of the ground to sell. They groused about the subsidies given to the car industry but, really, these were much much less than those enjoyed by makers in Europe and the US and many times smaller than the obscene diesel subsidy paid to the huge mining companies in this country.

Yes I know that the Chinese can do things cheaper but the quality is just crap in many cases and even Japanese quality is not what it used to be (Takata anyone?). An economist friend of mine has told me that this is all symptomatic of globalisation. He used to believe fervently in the concept until he realised that it was all a farce perpetrated by the multinational corporations to obtain goods cheaply in Asia and still sell them at close to the prices they used to charge for locally made goods. Yes things are much cheaper now relative to wages BUT unemployment is terrible and much worse than what official figures show. There has been a growth in short term contract work and casual work but the old "jobs for life" are now few and far between...no more gold watch. Some would say this promotes "efficiency"/ I say that all it promotes is disloyalty and workers who work hard but don't care about what they make.

Back in the 50s and 60s things were more expensive. It took longer to buy a TV set or a car BUT the upside of that was that we all had work, there were far fewer social problems like drug taking and juvenile delinquency primarily because people had hope for a brighter future and they knew that there would always be a job for them somewhere, even if they didn't finish high school. Tariffs or not, we still traded our goods around the world and we still imported stuff...just not as much. Globaiisation has not created a level playing field or increased wages for all. All it's done is to decimate industries and jobs in the west and send them to China. We've been had and we've been sold out by our own politicians of all persuasions. It makes me sick to my stomach. Where once you never saw homeless people and beggars on the streets of Melbourne now they are everywhere. Drugs are rife and kids do not have the kind of optimism we had as kids. Where did it all go? Why did we let this happen?

Hi Stroppy,

I share your anger on how a small band of politicians allowed this to happen. Being a hard-bitten one sided voter of a party who used to keep things together so well when I was a kid, I have now dumped them and joined a brand new mob who reckon they can bring back the Menzies Era.

Whether they can or not is another matter---a huge task in todays free trade greed and bullshit----but I am prepared to give the AC's the benefit of the doubt and watch all the traitors squirm as the new mob gather disenchanted voters like myself.

That's all I can do about it.

Hope to see some pictures posted sometime of some of your Astors.

Cheers.

The Red Robin (I think) sock factory was still running in Brookvale until a few years ago. Harbord Rd.

I just checked. It's now "Northern Beaches Harley Davidson". Sigh....

There are quite a few contract electronic assembly plants around Sydney, using robotics to assemble PCBs. Our company uses one of them. It can still work out cheaper to make stuff here than in China, depends on the product, because you have more control over the quality.

Does anyone have any information on the proposed Astor colour television, or its chassis?'

Wayne.

Bring Back the Valve"...Many on the left decry Menzies but he was the one who drove industrial development and released land so that housing could (and did) become more affordable. Chifley's Labor party were, similarly, driven to promote local production. The politicians following Menzies and Harold Holt I wouldn't give you a cracker for and today's Liberal and Labor parties to me, seem to be in the pockets of big multinational business without giving one hoot about the average Australian. They seem only to think in the short term...the next election cycle...rather than having the vision for a great nation that Chifley and Menzies did. It's a crying shame. I feel nothing but loathing for Tony Abbot and Joe Hockey for the number they did on Holden and Ford and Malcolm Turnbull's aboutface with the NBN rankles me greatly. Shorten's Labor party, with the likes od Dastyari is similarly on the nose.

Without vision...without the drive to develop new industries we will flounder and die as a nation. We should have our own space port and space program. Australia is in an excellent launch window, geographically and yet Woomera sits gathering dust when it should be refurbished and then contracted out to new companies. We should be putting more money into sponsoring biotech...something we are really good at and we should set up an "exit tax" for any company wanting to slink off-shore.

"Labrat". This clip was taken from test footage shot at the Royal Melbourne show circa 1972. As far as I know much of the equipment used was either PYE and other stuff adapted by EIL-Astor. My cousin who worked at the factory saw a few colour test monitors in the experimental area around 1972/3 but more than that I don't know. Perhaps if there is a member enthusiast who worked there at the time...they could tell us more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjiAprY1JuU

Wayne, a guy who was also called Wayne was an apprentice where I worked in the 60s - 70s.
He had an Astor prototype monitor - no tuner - and was in the process of adapting some Philips B&W tuner and IF modules to add to it. He lived at Forestville at the time.

That was the last I heard of it. I do know it was delta gun 90 degree and all solid state.

QUOTE: Does anyone have any information on the proposed Astor colour television, or its chassis?

It's sad for those of us who are good at making things because we'll never get the chance to make a living from it. Cheap clothes and televisions aren't much of a compensation, despite what economists may think.

Speaking of cheap clothes - I remember a time when the famous Dunlop KT26 joggers lasted longer than six months! They still look the same but aren't anywhere near the quality they once were.

That also applies to tyres: Have some on my Ag bike as I haven't been able to find an alternative: Don't know what tubes they have in them, but they are porous: Previous lot were the same. Neighbour had Dunlop on an Audi A4: They were bad news: Now has Pirelli.

I actually stopped using Michelin as I had two "chunk out" , never seen that before, on a car only very old tyres on tractors. Like the ones on mine are 50.

Marc

My Dunlop Volleys only lasted a year of occasional wear before I had to get the glue out to fix the perished rubber. Not cheap and not good value either. I guess they're what the Russians call "two-week shoes". I've had trouble with Michelin tyres losing lumps of rubber as well, I avoid them now. And they were supposed to be the best.

I have an Astor Devon Fringe television from 1965. I noticed that the picture tube as well as other components such as capacitors and diodes were made by Astor under the Anodeon brand.

NewVista said the following

QUOTE: "It used thyristor for H output."

Good Lord that would have been the last nail in Astor's coffin had they went into production with a Thyristor based line o/p stage colour TV chassis as I know all too well what happened to EMI with the 211, 212 chassis and how they resorted to importing sets from the UK (Decca 30 Bradford based chassis) and Japanese (General sets which were very reliable compared to the 211,212 chassis) and who can remember the Sharp 18 inch horrors that were also using Thyristor based line o/p stages.

National also had a Thyristor based line o/p chassis in 1976 and how a d/j in the yoke path would cause the CRT to be holed in the neck because the EHT would shoot up very much like what happened with Philips K9 and K11's when the tuning cap across the line o/p transistor went o/c.

Losing chunks of tyre rubber is chunking out, & usually happens as the rubber hardens & becomes brittle. Best run so far were actually Goodyear on a car doing 600Km a week, they must have cottoned on & stopped making them.

Some colour TV's were just horror stories. However, we had two Thorn branded ones with pretty much the same (I think Mitsubishi) chasses. around 1972 when colour first came in. One did an EHT transformer around 2000 & the other was still running in 2012 when it was passed to a collector.

Those AWA and Thorn tellies were very good, reliability-wise. The last of these models were made in the mid 1980s and you cannot go wrong when everything is on one single motherboard and kept as simple as possible. I had one for years, members of my family had the AWA model and neighbours also had a couple - all the 63cm version. The hospital I did my apprenticeship at had the 53cm version of the Thorn on each ward. They were all still working when I finished up there.