Pedal to metal for old car plant’s tech phoenixes

It began life as a forlorn reminder of what South Australia had lost – a sparsely tenanted technology park on the ruins of what had once been the bustling home of Australian car manufacturing.

Micro X engineering manager Anthony Skeats, left, and production manager Chris Aistrope with their team at Adelaide’s Tonsley Innovation District. Picture: Roy Van Der Vegt

It began life as a forlorn reminder of what South Australia had lost – a sparsely tenanted technology park created with public money on the ruins of what had once been the bustling home of Australian car manufacturing.

Critics regarded it as a triumph of hope over reality when the old Chrysler/Mitsubishi factory finally shut forever in 2008 – and the dusty, abandoned site was transformed into the Tonsley Innovation District four years later.

Ten years on, the district is ­becoming a private sector-driven success story, where state and ­federal assistance is rapidly being dwarfed by investment from major and emerging firms in tech, defence, health and manufacturing that are flocking to the old car plant to set up shop.

And for a state that was belted by the collapse of traditional jobs in auto, whitegoods and textiles, the good news is that these new enterprises are scooping up former car workers and finding them new roles as Tonsley establishes itself as the hub of high-value manufacturing in SA.

They include hi-tech businesses such as Micro X, an award-winning manufacturer of medical and security X-ray products which makes everything from ultra-lightweight X-ray units to be used in the field by the military, to anti-terrorist airport scanners.

Engineering manager Anthony Skeats credits the success of Micro X to its workforce, many of whom transferred across from Holden when the car giant closed.

Mr Skeats says the closure of Holden in Adelaide’s northern suburbs in 2017 gave Micro X a chance to collaborate with the car giant in finding new workers with transferable, job-ready skills.

“We knew that we needed people with specific skills if we were going to move quickly to develop our own manufacturing capacity, and Holden was hugely important in that,” Mr Skeats says. “Holden saw that pretty much all of their staff could be transferred and the process began from there.”

Chris Aistrope is a 36-year-old former Holden worker who is one of 17 Micro X workers who shifted across from the car industry. He spent much of his early career working on the VZ and VE Commodore but has now been at Micro X for the past five years as production supervisor, using the same logistical skills he developed on the engine and chassis line at the Holden plant.

“We knew the writing was on the wall, so when the opportunity came up I said that I was keen on coming down here,” he says.

“The principles are the same but this is obviously a lot more specialised. At one stage we were doing 330 cars a day, here it’s a lot more sophisticated. I love working here. It feels like we are part of the future.”

One of the reasons for Tonsley’s success is that it is led in large part by its major tenant Flinders University and is also home to a TAFE, allowing business tenants to craft courses that suit their own needs.

BAE Systems is one of the site’s major tenants and it occupies what’s known as Line Zero, the “Factory of the Future” housed within the cavernous shell of the production line where the Chrysler Valiant was created in the 1960s and the final Mitsubishi model, the 380 sedan, was produced in the 2000s.

Many of the BAE Systems workers at Line Zero are ex-auto and are now involved in all sorts of radical new work, including the use of holograms to create virtual training modules for the design of ship parts.

BAE Systems strategy director Sharon Wilson said the defence giant was attracted to the Tonsley site because it allowed for the creation of bespoke education programs such as the TAFE diploma in digital technologies to retrain workers for new hi-tech roles.

“We had people whose skills were needed, so rather than pay them off and make them redundant it was about training them up with new skills,” Ms Wilson says.

“We had people who had never touched a computer before who passed with flying colours and are now doing a great job. The numbers are growing, too. We had 51 people who did the course in the first year and this year we have got 116 students.”

Flinders University professor John Spoehr worked formerly for government on the transition of the car industry and is now Pro Vice Chancellor: Research Impact based at Tonsley.

“We are looking at a manufacturing renaissance in Australia,” he says. “Manufacturing had plateaued but it is now starting to increase, and that is very exciting from where we were.

“I think that when Tonsley started there was a degree of scepticism and people thought it was some attempt to use public money to create an illusion that things were happening here, but you can see the evidence now that there is a whole raft of private sector activity here, working in concert with the university sector and ­vocational training to deliver real results. What we are talking about here now is collaboration on ­steroids.”

The Tonsley concept is based in part on the successful “Catapult Centres” in Britain, which have been set up in cities such as Sheffield and Glasgow hit by the collapse of the steel industry and the decline in heavy manufacturing.

The vibe of the place is at times reminiscent of Q’s laboratory in the James Bond films, with tenant SA Power Networks pioneering the use of a robotic dog called Fearless made by Boston Dynamics to fix dangerous power lines.

Tonsley is also playing a lead role in beautifying what has long been a less than picturesque part of Adelaide, with 11ha of the 61ha site set aside for 900 architect-­designed medium-density homes.

Philipp Dautel moved from Germany to head up Tonsley as Precinct Director and says great care has been taken to maximise collaboration between its business and university tenants.

“It even comes down to little things like making sure there are no private staff lunch rooms for individual tenants so that all the eating is in shared areas where people bump into each other and get to know each other,” he says.