Introduction
Characterizing the relationship between labor history and public history in Australia is no easy matter. Although multiple intersections between the two fields have occurred as a result of certain apparent shared interests, more often than not their paths have diverged. The aim of this paper is to provide a broad overview of the relationship between the two—conceptually and in practice. It begins with what may best be described as a genealogical approach that contextualizes the subsequent discussion of the approaches taken to public history at four industrial heritage sites whose strong labor movement connections and traditions of labor activism make them significant from a labor history perspective. All government-owned, these four sites are located in different states. The Eveleigh Railway Workshops in New South Wales (NSW), the Inveresk Railway Workshops in Tasmania, the Midland Workshops in Western Australia (WA), and the Ipswich Workshops in Queensland (QLD) have all operated as public enterprises for just under or just over a century. All four were designated as heritage places by federal and state governments and citizens after their original industrial rail operations were superseded by major redevelopments and adaptive reuse from the late 1980s. Many of their original buildings and remaining mechanical relics have been preserved, and oral history projects have been undertaken to recognize labor's contribution. However, the degree to which the history of workers and their work is presented to the public at these sites through different mediums varies. For the most part, labor's collectivist traditions receive short shrift from what Cathy Stanton refers to as “a culture-based approach” to post-industrial urban revitalization.Footnote 2
These new old worlds are, as Raphael Samuel aptly put it, “twilight zones” that encompass “a new frontier to a post-industrial future” and a shrine to the technology of the industrial past.Footnote 3 Of course, the marriage of these two apparently contradictory elements depends on many factors. Included among them are preliminary assessments of social significance and interpretation of tangible and intangible remains, both of which rely on the insights and work of labor and public historians. The latter's efforts to include workers' stories in their interpretations of material remains indicate that they, like labor historians, are interested in expanding the subject matter of history by ensuring the inclusion of working people. Yet when we look more closely at what is exhibited and celebrated and how workers' history is displayed at such industrial heritage sites, it quickly becomes apparent that the imperatives of labor history and public history are fundamentally at odds with each other.
This divergence is not simply based on a distinction between a “rational/scholarly” approach and one that responds to the “emotional/popular demands made on the past.”Footnote 4 Often referred to as a tension between history and heritage, this particular difference is something of a moot point for this discussion.Footnote 5 Most Australian labor historians who have crossed “the great divide between academic and public history” in order to recover labor heritage have recognized “the importance of the artifact as both a source of interpretation and a medium of communication with the past.”Footnote 6 Many have shown a willingness to work with “new modes of communication.”Footnote 7 Much like the retired workers, labor activists, and trade union officials with whom they have collaborated, these labor historians have been inspired by the desire to find “threads of a tradition of resistance and struggle” in order to challenge conservative representations of history and heritage and to validate current struggles against the loss of “hard-won gains.”Footnote 8 This “alternative, oppositional perspective on the past” has not only informed the scholarship of Australian labor historians but also those workers and their representatives who have engaged in recovering objects and sources that provide a record of workers' collective “struggles for a better life.”Footnote 9 It is here, in the recognition of connections between past and present, that we find a marked difference between labor heritage and industrial heritage and, relatedly, between labor history and public history in the Australian context.
This is not intended to cast aspersions on politically progressive public historians, those who acknowledge that history is incomplete and who promote a more participatory and democratic approach to the past in Australia as elsewhere. Rather, it is to emphasize that the labor historian's involvement with labor heritage projects in the public, as it were, is fundamentally different from the interpretive work undertaken by the public historian who is employed to support the rejuvenation of industrial heritage sites. The former's approach can best be described as a radical public history, one that seeks to challenge “citizens out of their complacency about the past” and to create spaces for the telling of alternative and fuller versions of forgotten stories.Footnote 10 By contrast, public historians are engaged in what Stanton refers to as “a complex mode of present-day cultural production in which local places and memories are displayed” as a means of “stimulating local pride and economic growth through tourism and other means.”Footnote 11 Such “re-imaging” of the past for public consumption,Footnote 12 particularly in the context of industrial heritage, relies on a range of artifacts and audiovisual technologies that are deployed to create an impression of what “real life” was like for individual workers. As Raphael Samuel argued, this “living history” approach shows little respect for the integrity of the historical record or for evidence.Footnote 13 More importantly it projects a “collective memory” of the industrial era that disregards the collaborative and collective nature of industrial labor and the way working people joined together to form trade unions, among other organizations, and engaged in industrial and political struggles.
In order to investigate this divergence between labor history and public history in practice at the four industrial heritage sites under consideration, the second half of the paper draws on the concepts of nostalgia and nostophobia. Taken in tandem, these two concepts provide a framework for interpreting the various approaches taken to preserve and present the memories of industry's sacrificial lambs and representations of industrialization and deindustrialization. They are, I argue, like the two faces of Janus—the Roman deity of gates and doorways, of beginnings and endings—whereby one looks forward and the other looks backwards at the same time.Footnote 14 The Janus metaphor is particularly valuable in this context because it helps to overcome the presumption that nostalgia and nostophobia are mutually exclusive opposites. As I will show, it also helps to demonstrate that what Edwards and Llurdés i Coit refer to as the “aesthetics of deindustrialization” is predicated on a conception of the past as something discrete from the present and unconnected to present labor concerns and struggles.Footnote 15
Defining Boundaries and Interstices
As Jacqui Leckie commented in a paper published over a decade ago on the state of labor history in the Pacific, labels attached to disciplines and subdisciplines need to be explained, particularly “when the word ‘labour’ is involved.”Footnote 16 Of course, her point was not without antecedents in the annals of labor history. Competing justifications for alternative definitions were a central feature of the vigorous debates over the field's focus and boundaries in the northern hemisphere during the 1970s and 1980s,Footnote 17 which reverberated in Australia. As elsewhere, in the Antipodes the study of labor became associated with approaches such as “history from below,” “people's history,” and “social history.”Footnote 18 These labels reflected struggles over relationships between disciplines and disciplinary boundaries and orientations. And while the tumult ostensibly subsided as the 1990s progressed, questions about names, boundaries, and methodology remain on the agenda as this special issue of ILWCH cogently demonstrates.Footnote 19 Naming clearly reflects and affects how labor history is pursued. As is the case in relation to the naming of communities and regions, historiographical labeling involves inclusion and exclusion. After all, the debates mentioned above were essentially about defining those subjects, entities, and people that were deemed worthy of being investigated.Footnote 20
In 1962, soon after they formed the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History (ASSLH), Australia's “Old Left” historians responded to the new vistas “of the working class ‘situation’ from below” and “social history in the fullest sense” opened up by their British comrades by questioning the institutional and political focus that had previously characterized the field.Footnote 21 These historians already had an appreciation of the value of working-class culture as a result of the close links that had developed over the preceding decades between them and those folk song collectors who shared their commitment to Marxism and radical nationalism.Footnote 22 At this stage culture was still construed fairly narrowly within the labor history canon so that it referred mainly to “those folk-songs, novels, poems and other cultural forms which were an incipient or fully-fledged expression of indigenous conditions or ideas, values and aspirations.”Footnote 23 Yet these very sources established the foundation for an expanded understanding of culture by offering “the best possible evidence … of popular attitudes, beliefs and practices in the past.” Their use effectively encouraged the growing appreciation of personal memoirs and, subsequently, the use of oral history.Footnote 24
Although the empiricist/positivist tradition prevailed throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, as did the attention to trade unions, peak councils, and political parties and their leaders,Footnote 25 labor history's subject matter gradually broadened to include Australian May Days, rank-and-file experiences, broadly constituted social and political activities, riots, and demonstrations.Footnote 26 By accentuating subjectivity and agency, the growing use of oral sources challenged the primacy given to structures and institutions. It was a change of direction that owed much to the political and social militancy that pervaded Australia during the early 1970s. The rise of the “New Left” historians at this time helped to legitimate the study of the “social history” of labor and greater attention to class formation and relations.Footnote 27 Most importantly, these sources encouraged attention to hitherto marginalized groups of workers, such as women, Indigenous Australians, migrants, as well as workers' everyday lives. Also during the 1970s, Harry Braverman's work inspired Australian labor historians to focus attention on the labor process, the organization of work, skill, management ideology and strategies, as well as their impact on workplace culture.Footnote 28 Meanwhile, the growing use of oral history within a radical populist framework led labor historians to investigate the personal and collective experiences of working men and women from a diverse range of cultural backgrounds,Footnote 29 at specific times and in specific industries and localities.Footnote 30 Such innovations also provided the impetus for locating work within a framework of a general “people's history.”Footnote 31
The election of the Whitlam Labor Government in 1972 also helped to generate a public form of labor history largely through its funding support for Australian culture. In this context grants were obtained for cultural projects undertaken by trade unions and artists, which encouraged what was described as a “celebratory approach” to labor's history and heritage. Prior to this time, trade unions had provided legitimacy and direction for labor culture most visibly through the publication of newspapers and the production of badges and banners for use during strikes and other ritual activities. Yet their cultural involvement, together with that of socialist and communist organizations, was actually more extensive in the sense that they aimed “to provide an alternative to the dominant class culture.”Footnote 32 For example, a workers' theater established in the 1930s in Sydney played an important part in the revival of Australian folk music during the 1950s. In the 1940s, the Musicians' Union and the Actors' Union encouraged interest in the arts among their members as well as among members of the Australian Labor Party (ALP). During this time too, May Day Committees organized art exhibitions in different parts of the country, and conducted poetry, short story, and novel competitions for members. By the 1950s the Waterside Workers Federation had its own film unit.Footnote 33
Australia's version of the Cold War, as reflected by the Federal Government's attempt to ban the Australian Communist Party (ACP) in 1950, and the waning of labor's industrial and electoral fortunes, gave rise to an expansion of union cultural activities. As Andrew Reeves puts it, this was a period “in which art and politics were closely inter-twined.” In 1953 members of the Waterside Workers Art Group began to paint a mural representing the history of wharf (or dock) labor in its union's offices in order to define the sense of community provided by the socialist movement. As Tom Nelson explained, “We decided to put our history on the walls because in our day to day activities, our wage cases and everything else, we always needed a record.” The mural was, he added, “a sort of dictionary … for education at job delegate meetings.” It provided not only a source of collective experience and memory, but also a channel for the extension of union involvement “beyond regulated hours of work into the realm of recreation and relaxation.”Footnote 34
During the 1970s, Labor government support for cultural activities associated with workers and the labor movement enabled visual artists, musicians, playwrights, and theater companies to work on trade union cultural projects.Footnote 35 For example, the Amalgamated Metal Workers Union organized a regular series of performances in factories by community theater groups. Other unions began to hire arts officers. In 1977 the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) voted unanimously to support greater access to the arts for union members and in 1979 it formally established a national arts subcommittee. By 1980 it was reported that over 50,000 workers were being reached through trade union arts projects, which were “taking the arts into the workplace.”Footnote 36 Finally, a major watershed occurred in 1982 when the federal government's new arts funding and advisory body, the Australia Council, launched the Art and Working Life Program in order to
encourage art practice and policy informed by the issues and concerns of workers' own lives; to acknowledge working class tradition … to encourage the development of opportunities for workers and their families to gain access to the arts, and to enjoy opportunities for creative self-expression and participation, to promote communication within the trade union movement … on cultural policy and practice and working life, and to encourage documentation of this.Footnote 37
Two years later, a review of the Australia Council's policy of support for cultural pluralism recommended that the union movement “should be the focus for the Art and Working Life Program” on the grounds that it was “an organisational product of working life” and the “only large-scale, ongoing organisation which” could “express and service the cultural needs and interests of workers.”Footnote 38 Through the collaboration between arts and other professionals, union officials, and members, this program helped to both “recover” and revitalize labor's culture. Old trade union banners were restored and new ones were made. Historic photographs and documents were unearthed and presented in exhibitions. Oral history projects were launched and new life was given to traditional labor rituals such as May Day and Labor Day.Footnote 39 During the second national Art and Working Life Conference held in 1990, numerous speakers commented that such activities had strengthened links between the trade union movement and the broader community.Footnote 40 Not only did they encourage union members to celebrate working-class traditions and participate in their culture but they also played an essential role in “building the effectiveness of the union movement.”Footnote 41 Labor historians associated with the universities and the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History were prominently involved in such activities.Footnote 42
These efforts to revitalize workplace culture helped to promote connections between labor heritage and labor history, particularly in the railways. One theatrical project, initiated by a union shop steward at the Chullora Railway Workshops in Sydney, in order to express the concerns of workers about their industry, brought together workers, unions, and representatives from the Sidetrack Theatre Company and the Art and Working Life Program. Within a short time, this was followed by an oral history project that collected songs and recollections for an audiotape and that drew on research by university students and academics for the history-focused “Railway Unions Cultural Exhibition.”Footnote 43 The exhibition itself included panels on major industrial upheavals such as the NSW General Strike of 1917, as well as on industrial accidents and union efforts to improve working conditions, safety, and pay for all rail employees, including women, migrants, and Indigenous Australians. Unionists interviewed on their attitudes to such projects in 1983 placed great emphasis “on the need to use arts activity to strengthen and promote existing union culture” and to overcome the amnesia that surrounded its historical traditions in Australia.Footnote 44
The NSW Branch of the Australian Railways Union took the opportunity to address this issue a few years later as part of its centenary celebrations. With funds obtained from the joint Federal-State Government Community Employment Program for an oral history project, the union produced an audiotape in 1987 called “Railway Voices” and published a book written by a labor historian in 1990. Both conveyed “messages of endurance, discontent, pride and resistance” drawn from over one hundred interviews with railway workers and their memories of toil and struggle to improve conditions.Footnote 45
Although the Art and Working Life program was relatively short-lived, subject, as so much else, to the vagaries of electoral politics, labor historians around the country, as in New Zealand, continued to collaborate with unions and retired workers to protect and promote labor's cultural heritage. In the late 1990s, members of the ASSLH played a pivotal role in the struggle to save the Noel Butlin Archives of Business and Labour.Footnote 46 Others have participated in community-based mobilizations to protect industrial heritage from demolition. Such efforts reflect a growing awareness on the part of labor historians that industry's physical remains and its intangible cultural heritage are immensely important for labor heritage and working-class history.Footnote 47 In this regard, Australian labor historians continue to play an important political and social role that extends beyond the words they commit to paper. In this country, labor history has always been more than just a body of knowledge or a “set of intellectual debates.” In Terry Irving's view, labor history “is best defined by its sense of political purpose” and its relationship with the public sphere.Footnote 48 As Lenore Layman put it in 1991, the “vitality” of Australian labor history lies in its “presentist frame” and its links with the organized labor and “progressive” social and political movements.Footnote 49 A critical element of this frame is the continuity between past and present.
The year 1991 was a particularly significant one for public history in Australia. In that year leading academic historians who were engaging in what locals then referred to as “professional history” began to reflect on the historical work being pursued outside of the academy.Footnote 50 In the first major book on the subject, Graeme Davison provided an outline of the paradigms of public history in which he acknowledged the field's origins in the United States, where it was informed by both a populist orientation and “a notion of history as a form of professional public service.” As Davison saw it, Australian historians adopted the term unreflectively; those who were employed as oral historians, museum curators, and heritage consultants happily used it to “present themselves as the professional mid-wives who helped ‘ordinary people’ to re-discover and re-interpret their own past.” In practice, however, their pursuit of a populist agenda was not without difficulties. The public sphere they entered was, and continues to be, dominated by bureaucrats and politicians who construe “the professional's role in terms of a scientistic paradigm of objectivity, impartiality and authority” and the historian's role “as a dispenser of expert opinions rather than an advocate or an interpreter.”Footnote 51 This context tends to constrain the approach taken by “progressive” public historians (including those who identify as labor historians).
Another paradigm that influenced the boundaries of public history in Australia, according to Davison, was the “People's History movement,” which originated in England where it “sought to create links between the trade union movement and the universities and to foster the study of working-class history.” As noted earlier, this movement had a profound influence on Australian labor history during the 1960s and 1970s and arguably also on the field of labor heritage. In Davison's view, this paradigm had little real impact on the practice of public history. While he acknowledged that “people's historians asked some important questions that the public historians were inclined to side-step or ignore, especially about the political purposes of historical study,” he stressed that the two differed epistemologically and ideologically. For Davison, “people's history” had little following among the consultants and commissioned historians who lived “on the crumbs that” fell “from the corporate table.”Footnote 52
Clearly, this point of intersection between labor history and public history provided a fork for two different pathways, even though books and articles on public history included populist accounts of efforts and projects that aimed to rescue the tangible and intangible heritage associated with “ordinary” working people. It was in this context that one leading public historian considered the relationship between public history and industrial heritage, some fifteen years after the term was coined by Georges-Henri Rivière at the Le Creusot symposium in France. Yet in 1991, at a time when Australian public and labor historians were beginning to obtain jobs as oral historians to document the lives and work of those who had occupied sites that were facing demolition or redevelopment, Peter Spearritt commented that appreciation of industrial heritage by professionals and the public was “a relatively recent notion” in Australia. In his view it was “a residual category” that owed more to the work of geographers and archaeologists than to historians.Footnote 53
While the redevelopment of redundant industrial sites required the commissioning of heritage conservation consultancy reports in order to comply with heritage laws, assessments produced by architects and industrial archaeologists from the late 1970s focused mainly on the need to preserve built fabric and machinery. The involvement of public historians and labor historians in such projects was (and continues to be) limited to undertaking oral histories and to producing “thematic histories” that are tacked on to the end of inventories of heritage items.Footnote 54 In turn, the domination of what Iain Stuart refers to as the “object fetishism” traditionally associated with industrial archaeology has not only subordinated history generally and labor history specifically at sites of industrial heritage but has also obscured the “human dimension” of technological heritage.Footnote 55 This “unfortunate dichotomy between technological and humanistic culture” is particularly evident at railway heritage sites where, according to Terry Wallace, a “celebratory interpretative style” trades on nostalgia by idolizing the steam locomotive and idealizing, romanticizing, and sanitizing the steam era. The impression of a “mythical transport heaven” where workers were “always happy” reflects an institutionalized amnesia that renders “crucial aspects of our industrial past” invisible and helps to distance us “from those processes which have impacted upon our lives.”Footnote 56 This outcome obscures connections between industrialization and deindustrialization because it conceals industry's conflict-ridden history and, in the words of Michael Frisch, “how the past becomes part of the present.” As Summerby-Murray points out, through the use of memory and nostalgic images and myths in such renderings of the industrial past, “industrial heritage landscapes become important devices in creating and reshaping collective memory.”Footnote 57
Nostalgia and Nostophobia
For most people nostalgia is an extremely familiar term that is usually taken to mean a “veneration of the past.”Footnote 58 As David Lowenthal pointed out, this “universal catchword for looking back” was captured by the popular press and the advertising industry during the “Heritage Craze” of the 1980s.Footnote 59 In his view, this transformation of the past into “a crucial haven” during the late twentieth century reflected a “growing rebellion against the present” and “mistrust of the future.”Footnote 60 Such “nostalgic evocations” were not, however, new. Lowenthal found their antecedents in late eighteenth-century English history, when “the great changes of the times … made nostalgia pervasive” in the works of the great poets and writers.Footnote 61 Is it any surprise to find that this was precisely when the spread of manufacturing and the gradual increase in waged labor and occupational specialization began to alter landscapes and lives?Footnote 62 Is it any surprise to find that nostalgia gained virtual cult status against the backdrop of profound changes we usually associate with the information revolution, globalization, deindustrialization, and the recolonization and transformation of abandoned industrial sites into convention centers, hotels and retail outlets, massive residential villages, new “industrial parks” dominated by information technologies and call-centers, and, in relatively few cases, museums devoted to industrial heritage tourism?Footnote 63
How have the subjects of labor history, the retired or displaced workers, reacted to such developments? Some have certainly tried to “cling to the remaining familiar vestiges” of the past by mobilizing to save industrial heritage from demolition.Footnote 64 Others, according to Mike Wallace, have responded to “capitalism's ruthless destruction of the old” by trying to establish personal links to the past through volunteer programs that support the consumption of “embalmed remnants” contained in museums.Footnote 65 And it is precisely at this point that we find another important point of intersection between labor history and public history.
The rise of labor heritage in Australia and New Zealand, as outlined earlier, reflected a revival of interest in the labor movement's cultural traditions and artifacts. Here, the focus centered on ritual activities, labor iconography, trade union banners and badges, photographs, movies, plays, songs, the collection of oral histories, and exhibitions in and also independent of established museums. The conference on “Culture and the Labour Movement” that formed part of a weeklong “Workers History” festival organized by the New Zealand Trade Union History Project, held in October 1990, provided a testimony to this interest and orientation. It was here that Lenore Layman pointed out that “efforts to draw on history and heritage to both illuminate labour's past” and respond to the industrial problems of the 1980s were occurring against the backdrop of an increasingly “pervasive climate of nostalgia.” For Layman, this spread of “nostalgic constructions of the past” created “a quarantined, safe, distant, antiseptic past unconnected to the present” that could “be visited to view the quaint and archaic … the ugly and the horrifying without any uncomfortable questions about the present concerns of society being raised.” Labor historians should certainly “acknowledge the place of romantic and sentimental” representations, argued Layman. However, she also warned them to “beware of nostalgic reconstructions” that divorced past from present. Not only did they distort understandings of the present, but they also made it less likely that present injustices could be “even partly rectified.”Footnote 66 Her position on nostalgia was subsequently echoed in the pages of the relatively new Australian journal, Public History Review, where Katheryn Evans stressed that although nostalgia was “easy to use,” it was “not reflective” and certainly not “safely apolitical or unconscious.” On the contrary, she stressed that it “is not passive, but active styling of the past.”Footnote 67
All these perspectives on nostalgia suggest that it performs a compensatory function for members of fast moving and atomistic societies suffering from “future shock” and social dislocation.Footnote 68 According to Fred Davis and Yiannis Gabriel, although it may draw on the past, it is a product of present conditions. For Tim Strangleman, it demonstrates how “contemporary concerns… lead to a particular annexation of the past.” As Gabriel puts it, “the nostalgic past is highly selective, generally idealized and infused with symbolism and meaning.” It resists historical elucidation and “creates a retrospective mythology, something which is at once part of us but not part of the present world.” When employed in organizational settings, he adds, “the past is frequently separated from the present through a radical discontinuity, a symbolic watershed, which cannot be undone.”Footnote 69
This notion of discontinuity between the past and the present not only informs nostalgia but also nostophobia. For those sociologists interested in the study of emotion in the workplace, particularly in the context of the massive corporate restructurings of the 1990s, nostophobia was an apt term to describe the efforts that were being made to distance organizations and their employees from their longstanding traditions.Footnote 70 In this context, managers who construed an organization's past as something “to be escaped from”Footnote 71 and who promoted the view that the future belonged to those who could “adapt to the new emphasis on the market and its demands” were depicted as nostophobics.Footnote 72
On the face of it, nostalgia and nostophobia are opposites—the former referring to grief suffered by those who have moved away from their native land, the latter referring to a fear of returning home. Yet if we look at how both are harnessed it becomes evident that this dichotomous appearance conceals a more complex interrelationship. As Strangleman points out, the dichotomy fails to take into account the way that nostalgia is used to promote change. Indeed, he argues that we need to recognize that “management and politicians actively” employ both nostalgia and nostophobia “to win consent for change, or at least to marginalise criticism” against change and to isolate “resistance based on attachment to the remembered past.”Footnote 73
How is this relevant to the relationship between labor history/heritage and public history? I would argue that this connectedness between nostalgia and nostophobia is manifested in the approach taken to public history at redeveloped industrial heritage sites by the active distancing of the past from the present, the concealment of multiple (and often conflicting) stories, and the use of the past predominantly for present and future commercial benefit. In short, the commodification of selected memories of and images from the industrial past at such sites serves to obscure the traditionally collectivist and political concerns of labor history by eradicating all vestiges of pollution, inequality, oppression, and conflict. It is here in the sanitized representations of industrial processes and life whose focus is on attaining economic advantage, that nostalgia and nostophobia are joined at the neck, like the two faces of Janus.Footnote 74
Finding Janus
The closure and/or downgrading of all of Australia's largest railway workshops from the late 1980s, undertaken in the name of rationalization and efficiency, left respective state governments with responsibility for managing immensely large, derelict, and vacant sites with huge potential for redevelopment and adaptive reuse and the need to decide on future uses. As we will see, all the governments in question financed conservation of built fabric and tangible material culture at these sites, while supporting redevelopments ranging from public and commercial facilities to cultural tourism operations. In this context, the degree of funding for public history in the form of heritage interpretation has been fundamentally shaped by the type of use selected, and this, in turn, reflects the degree to which governments have valued commercial outcomes over community heritage values and their responsiveness to lobbying from various community stakeholders.
This state of affairs raises an important question. Does it matter whether adaptive reuse involves heritage tourism or other cultural and economic pursuits? For those who have personal attachments to heritage sites the answer must be yes if for no other reason than heritage tourism invariably results in more funding for public history interpretation of past operations. However, from my perspective the answer is less clear-cut. Despite variation in the type of new uses selected and the degree of interpretative public history undertaken at the four heritage sites to be examined, the creation of a whole new cycle of postindustrial development has consistently been legitimated by an aestheticization of the industrial era and a celebration of steam power. At all four workshops nostalgia has been harnessed for nostophobic ends, an outcome that has a direct bearing on the stories that are told and interpreted.
The Eveleigh Railway Workshops in Sydney, NSW
The NSW government built the Eveleigh workshops in the 1880s on a forty-hectare site, four kilometers south of Sydney's Central Business District where they operated continuously until the main railway functions were terminated in the late 1980s as part of far-reaching changes to government public transport policy.Footnote 75 Eveleigh has been listed on federal and state government heritage registers.Footnote 76 It has been the subject of nine heritage assessment reports and conservation management plans produced by or for the NSW government. Mostly these have emphasized Eveleigh's architectural and technological significance.Footnote 77 All have helped to protect Eveleigh's more substantial buildings and its remaining machinery collection.
By 1990, the reality of owning valuable real estate close to the city center imposed immense pressure on the government to promote economic revitalization to which it responded by announcing a plan to help three of Sydney's universities establish an advanced technology park in Eveleigh's two locomotive workshop buildings and works manager's office.Footnote 78 The Australian Technology Park, Sydney Ltd. (ATP) was formed in 1991 as a registered company with a board including both university and industry representatives. Its goal was to nurture technological innovation at the site, but because Eveleigh had formally been designated as being of heritage value, the ATP was also given some responsibility for the conservation of its buildings and the remaining moveable heritage artifacts contained in them. Most of the industrial machinery was shifted into a couple of bays in the main Loco building. By the mid-1990s, remediation, conservation, and adaptive reuse had begun. Only Bays One and Two were excluded from redevelopment by a Heritage Council of NSW Order in July 1996. Subsequently, immense community concern about the fate of the remaining industrial artifacts led to government funding for the conservation of Eveleigh's machinery collection. The refurbishment of the three buildings cost well over $AUS40 million and the ATP raised an additional $AUS25 million for adaptive reuse. It also matched a grant of $AUS300,000 from the state government for the conservation of Eveleigh's remaining machinery collection.Footnote 79
By contrast, meager funds were provided for interpretation, which was limited to design proposals and signage on heritage machinery.Footnote 80 Although oral history formed part of the Conservation Management Plan for Eveleigh's Moveable Items and Social History, commissioned by the NSW government in 1995, priority was given to the production of an inventory and it was expected that workers' stories would focus on the machines that they operated. No attempt was subsequently made by the site's managers to use the social history, oral history recordings and transcripts, or the historical photographs collected as part of the research for public history purposes.Footnote 81 Up to the present, the remaining machinery and tool collection continues to gather dust in Bays One and Two. Guido Gouverneur, the blacksmith whose Wrought Ironworks operation has occupied part of this space since the early 1990s, has only recently averted eviction.Footnote 82
Public history has been reduced to a few photographic and text panels, signs, and some explanatory plaques on various machines in the locomotive workshop buildings. Most retired Eveleigh workers who visit the site are disoriented and disheartened by what the ATP website describes as a “unique confluence of heritage, research, business and education in Sydney—Australia's main economic centre for information and communications technology,” and an “energetic business environment with an unparalleled mix of established and emerging Australian technology companies.”Footnote 83 Neither the deluxe office spaces nor the large machines that stand like gravestones in and around them provide the sense of a familiar landscape. The collective identities of those who worked in the locomotive shops have been lost as conclusively as those who worked on the site's northern side in the carriage shops, which were recently transformed into a performing arts center with the aid of $AUS45 million from the NSW government.Footnote 84
Nowhere do we find mention of the massive contribution made by Eveleigh employees to Australia's industrial and political culture—the struggle for and attainment of the eight-hour day, the formation of the Australian Labor Party, the support for Aboriginal rights and citizenship, to mention a few of their activities. These are significant omissions that conceal the site's working-class history and its important links to the Australian Labour Party and Labour governments. A few old basins have been left in situ in one of the smaller Locomotive workshop buildings to reflect the workers' struggle to improve their sanitary conditions. A solitary sign adorns the exterior wall of the main Locomotive workshop building's Bay Eight, a place known to the workers as “Red Square,” where unions and shop committees held their meetings on the site's southern side. No reference is made to the twenty-five Labour politicians who began their working lives in this place and who served in both state and federal parliaments, including three premiers of NSW and one governor-general.Footnote 85
The absence of any public history interpretation here, coupled with the government's creation of a new government authority for the South Sydney region with powers to override the state's heritage laws, has further severed the site from its past. From the Redfern Waterloo Authority's perspective, “adaptive reuse will generate significant new community and cultural activity on a currently dilapidated industrial site” and provide “a major impetus for renewal of the remaining areas of North Eveleigh.”Footnote 86 This patently nostophobic view was also evident in the government's refusal to renew the lease over Eveleigh's Large Erecting Shop, which had been held by the volunteer railway heritage conservation operator 3801 Ltd. for the past decade, allegedly on the grounds of cost and safety concerns. Certainly, an immensely successful public struggle by the steam buffs and retired workers associated with 3801 Ltd. helped to overturn this decision in early December 2008. Yet even this outcome reflects a merging of nostophobic and nostalgic imperatives. As Railcorp's Chief Executive Officer explained, the decision to “endorse a plan to retain the building for rail heritage related uses” was part of the organization's effort to implement the NSW government's Sustainable Rail Heritage Asset Management Strategy.Footnote 87
Janus, however, not only peers through the doors of the Large Erecting Shop but also the new Carriageworks Performing Arts Centre, which was opened in January 2007. Touted as “an exciting addition” to Sydney's cultural life, this development is depicted as a place where “the physical beauty and scope of the” center's “cathedral-scale foyer” and the “distinctive nineteenth century industrial atmosphere of the former railway carriage and blacksmith workshops” will provide “an environment which pulses with a unique spirit of creativity and innovation.”Footnote 88 Such overarching concern for the conservation of Eveleigh's “tangible” industrial remains has been at the expense of their “intangible” social and cultural associations with labor and working-class history. No funds have been allocated for interpretation at this part of the site. Eveleigh might well be construed as a theater of memory, but it has become little more than a stage full of props, devoid of historic drama and actors. The site's labor heritage appears only in the pages of books and journals devoted to labor history.
The Inveresk Railway Workshops in Launceston, Tasmania
Redevelopment and adaptive reuse proceeded far more smoothly in Tasmania. From a public history perspective the outcome is far more positive than at Eveleigh, although the Inveresk railway workshops provide another example of how the union of nostalgia and nostophobia serve to conceal labor's collectivist traditions and connections between past and present.
Built in 1870 on a fourteen-hectare site in Launceston, the Inveresk workshops operated until 1993 and in 1995 they were transferred to the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery (QVMAG). Subsequently, the latter's Conservation Department was moved to the 1947 Boiler Test House, and the largely intact Blacksmith Shop and the still workable machinery in the Smithy's three buildings were all conserved, and an interpretation strategy was adopted for the historic workshops. As occurred at Eveleigh, the federal government contributed funds for site development and structural works and an oral history project with retired workers was undertaken.Footnote 89 Also like Eveleigh, the site is now linked to tertiary education, providing an outpost for the University of Tasmania. Unlike Eveleigh, however, a museum at the site was funded by the Launceston City Council and the Tasmanian State Government. The site is now owned and operated by the former with continuing financial support from the latter. According to the museum's marketing and the state's tourism promotion information,
This extraordinary industrial heritage site … has been transformed into a new cultural precinct for Launceston. The Museum has established a magnificent new Art Gallery to showcase its renowned … collections … and the history of the state's railways. The former life of this unique workplace is also revealed. Star attraction is the Blacksmith Shop, an intact relic of the state's industrial past.Footnote 90
As was noted at the Seventh Biennial Conference of the Australia and New Zealand Shakespeare Association held at the university's School of Visual and Performing Arts facilities at this location, one of “the best features of the vast industrial buildings, in various stages of picturesque dereliction … is a superb industrial museum,” where “a variety of means” are used to evoke “the noise, heat, and hard labor of this working environment.” Here, at Launceston's “tourist attraction of distinction,” the working lives of its people are allegedly given proper recognition.Footnote 91
As the Museum's website notes,
amidst the array of forges, hammers, furnaces and the earthen floor, it becomes possible to comprehend the raw energy and forces of the Industrial Revolution. A walkway guides you through this unique experience with the voices of workers and sounds of machinery … where you'll see a blacksmith at work with furnace fired and machinery powering.Footnote 92
This adaptive reuse and heritage interpretation allegedly presents visitors with a “realistic” work setting. Yet the limited and selective use of oral histories with retired workers results in a romanticized, sanitized, and aestheticized representation of industrial processes. The memory of workers' experiences of industrial life and their struggles has effectively been decollectivized, and the recolonization of this site as part of the story of industrialization and deindustrialization is left unaddressed. In effect, the past is cordoned off from the present.Footnote 93 It is an outcome that is also evident in Western Australia (WA).
The Midland Westrail Workshops, Midland, WA
The Midland Railway Workshops operated on a sixty-eight hectare site, sixteen kilometers outside of Perth, from 1901 until 1994 after which they remained vacant for five years.Footnote 94 Only after the WA government began to set up the administrative structure to enable the site's redevelopment in 1999 was the community spurred into action. In this context, the Perth Branch of the ASSLH launched the Westrail Midland Workshop Labour History Project and organized a Visitors' Day on March 21 to promote the collection of memories and memorabilia. The event attracted well over two thousand people and led to a successful application for funding to the Australian Research Council.Footnote 95 The oral history project was extended and other Open Days followed. A political campaign by a range of stakeholders was also launched to influence the Midland Redevelopment Authority (MRA), which was established on January 1, 2000.Footnote 96 Initially the latter's focus was on commercially viable development. In 2001, a call center was established at the site, and work commenced on stage one of the WA Police Service Operations Support Facility project, the CADCOM (Computer-aided Dispatch and Communication) building.Footnote 97 In the meantime, together with the City of Swan, the MRA began to respond to heritage concerns by actively supporting the oral and social history project, and, together with the newly elected WA Labour government's minister for planning, it agreed to support a heritage interpretation center, local arts activities, and even a workers' wall.Footnote 98
The Midland Railway Workshops Interpretive Centre was established with government funding in 2004 under the auspices of a partnership between the MRA and Rail Heritage WA. Located in the restored and refurbished former Time Keeper's office at the entrance to the site, it contains audiovisual oral history materials and other archival sources and artifacts, which offer visitors insight into the workshops' labor and social history.Footnote 99 At the same time redevelopment and adaptive reuse continue. According to Ric McCracken, stalwart of the Art and Working Life Movement, member of the ASSLH and the first Interpretive Centre Coordinator, the site's eastern half is earmarked for a four-hundred-bed hospital. Already “there are about twenty bulky retail outlets built and operating” there and new Police Central Investigation Bureau offices are planned in the former flanging shop. While the exterior of this building has been retained, three stories are to be added inside. Meanwhile “about forty housing lots are being built around the Coal Dam” on the site's western side. The pattern shop has been preserved intact and is used as a fine wood workshop for trainee pattern makers enrolled in Technical and Further Education (TAFE) courses. The adjoining foundry has been reduced to its original pre-Second World War size for occupation by a creative industries center. An interpretive node is planned around the electric furnaces, while the historic administration building is being used by TAFE and Curtin University. Unlike Eveleigh and Inveresk, efforts have been made to acknowledge the material culture associated with the workers' industrial and political activism. The flagpole and also the area in the machine shop known as “Red Square,” where workers held their stop work meetings, have been preserved.Footnote 100 Yet, like the other cases already examined, Janus lives on at Midland. Adaptive reuse centers on site development that physically segregates the past and past operations from new (arguably profitable) commercial activities. The former is secluded in the Interpretative Centre and in those parts of the site devoted to the preservation of railway hardware associated with the steam era where volunteers have, according to one of them, “a chance to become ‘a part of living history.’ ”Footnote 101
Ipswich Railway Workshops, Ipswich, Queensland (Qld.)
Living history also forms a prominent feature of heritage interpretation at the Ipswich Railway Workshops, which were built on a twenty-two hectare site in 1885 and which were designated for closure in the early 1990s. In 1999, however, the Qld. Labor government responded to growing interest in industrial railway heritage by including the site on the Qld. Heritage Register and by providing $AUS20 million to establish a branch of the Qld. Museum at the site. The opening of the Workshops Railway Museum on September 1, 2001, in the original Boiler Shop provides an exceptional case of redevelopment and adaptive reuse for the simple reason that it is adjacent to and integrally linked with the operational workshop in which the continued maintenance and conservation of Qld. Rail's heritage rolling stock can be viewed during “behind the scenes” tours.Footnote 102 In other words, unlike all the other cases examined, parts of the site are still being used for traditional rail purposes.
The site's entire devotion to railway heritage and the proximity of the museum to the original workshop, coupled with the use of “state-of-the-art” interpretative exhibitions to chronicle “the history and future of rail,” ensures a greater intimacy between the past and the present than at the other sites examined.Footnote 103 Films and tours of the conservation workshops celebrate the “romance of steam locomotives,” and the museum engages “colourful characters, many of who” once worked at the site, to “share their love of the railways with the public” by acting as guides and telling their stories. Unlike the other sites, a hands-on exhibit of a diesel locomotive acknowledges the importance of this technological transformation for workshop operations from the 1950s.Footnote 104 As well, a simulated drive on a tilt train provides a “virtual experience” of the latest in high-speed train technology.Footnote 105 Despite the implicitly linear conception of progress underpinning these exhibits, they do chart changes over time and in doing so avoid giving the impression of a sharp rupture between past and present.
Yet even here we find a nostophobic imperative driving the museum's goal of reviving and developing “the birthplace of Queensland's railways into a ‘living history experience.’ ”Footnote 106 The aim of developing a “world class tourist attraction” that will provide “a major boost to … Queensland's oldest provincial city,”Footnote 107 underpins the use of “‘big machinery,’ colourful multimedia experiences” and train rides that provide “reflections of the past” and “glimpses into the future.”Footnote 108 So while the interpretation of the railway's industrial heritage at this site is much more sophisticated than at the other three cases examined, and the distance between the past and present is not as great, I would argue that the focus of its public history retains the same “aesthetics of de-industrialization” as at the other sites examined. None of the displays incorporate the collective industrial struggles undertaken by Qld. rail workers against poor conditions at Ipswich or recognition of their hard-won gains.Footnote 109 Nor is any effort made to contextualize the new post-industrial cultural production that is being carried out in and around the built fabric and the tangible material culture of the industrial era at this site. By idolizing the steam locomotive, the interpretative style adopted here trades on nostalgia and, as at the other workshops, Janus helps to institutionalize amnesia of the collective and conflictual aspects of the industrial past.Footnote 110
Conclusion
The transformation of the Eveleigh, Inveresk, Midland, and Ipswich workshops into marketable cultural assets is based on the fabrication of entirely new environments in which workers and citizens become volunteers, consumers,Footnote 111 and co-conspirators in representations of “various pasts” as “dead events … segregated from the present.”Footnote 112 Of course, this view of the past as “a foreign country” informs efforts to preserve, display, and celebrate the material and social remains of a bygone industrial era.Footnote 113 Maintaining it through a failure to address “how the past becomes part of the present”Footnote 114 suits the economic and political imperatives of industrial heritage tourism, among other economic and cultural pursuits. To the extent that public history supports the goals of profit maximization through representations that sustain nostalgia for the steam era, it helps to promote an ahistorical perspective of industrialization and deindustrialization. Not only does this conceal the relationship between economic changes and social experiences but also “the tension between continuity and discontinuity.”Footnote 115 By discarding stories of struggles to improve working conditions, and to preserve the places in which those struggles occurred, individual workers, their trade unions, and their families are excluded from public memorializing. As a corollary, the social inequalities, conflict, oppression, danger, and industrial pollution that were, and continue to be, part and parcel of industrial life are exorcized from the collective memory.Footnote 116
Despite apparent intersections between labor history and public history, these four case studies demonstrate that in Australia, the two fields diverge in practice. Labor historians have maintained a strong track record of working with labor organizations and community groups to preserve and promote labor heritage. Their collaboration with retired workers and labor movement organizations, as much as their research, forms an important part of current struggles to preserve working people's rights and the places that reflect their past struggles to protect such rights. No doubt nostalgia plays a part in such activities. Yet this radical public history, which brings knowledge of labor history to the public, is driven by a strong urge to retain connections between past and present. By contrast, public history, at least in the context of redeveloped industrial heritage, reflects an urge to create a collective memory that mythologizes the past and construes it as a foreign country in which workers' collective struggles are concealed beneath the large machines that once enslaved them.
