This chapter considers the educational and social significance of the practice of handmaking toolboxes, and customised tools, during an engineering patternmaking apprenticeship, in the context of twentieth-century Australian manufacturing. This practice is contextualised within the broader customary practice of making ‘foreigners’. A ‘foreigner’ is an Australian colloquial term referring to a practice whereby workers produce personal objects at work, with the tacit support of colleagues. Foreigner-making is also known as homers, government jobs and la perruque. This chapter finds that this type of ‘semi-legitimate’ production was a pedagogical strategy and held particular social significance in the moral economy of industrial workplaces. Drawing on oral histories, this chapter explores how this process has transformed, and eventually disappeared, following the recent business trend towards standardisation and factory uniformity. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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