It is a great find with both content and style reflecting the immense, ‘modern’ engineering effort that the DAP represented. Much DAP material is now contained at ANAM Moorabbin Archives and the patient process of opening boxes and cataloguing continues. Always welcome, my friend, to open some boxes and discover treasures, catalogue a few bits and pieces along the way.
The DAP and the Beaufort design, which really brought the DAP into existence and introduced distributed production as intrinsic to the manufacturing idea could really be described as the cradle of modern Australian manufacturing. Another key influence was the BHP, and systems it invented, such as the shadow board, that pushed the young engineers of the DAP to a well sharpened point. Certainly a piece of paper, so dense in administrative and engineering data, would be thrusting farriers and locomotive boilermakers into a new era. I love the red overprint, which I have seen on other DAP documents, utterly ‘space age’ for the 30’s.