Keeper of Industrial Memory

A Thesis Presented to NSCAD University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts

by Angie Arsenault April 2017

Thesis Committee:

Pam Ritchie, Professor, Craft Division (Program Advisor) Sandra Alfoldy, Professor, Art History & Critical Studies Division Thierry Delva, Associate Professor, Fine Art Division Chair Gary Markle, Professor, Craft Division Chair Jan Peacock, Professor, Media Arts (Director, MFA Program)

Index

I (T)Arcadia

II In the field

III Rust

IV A note on material

V Collection

VI Postcards and Souvenirs

VII Labour

VIII Coal

IX Keeper of Industrial Memory

X Conclusion

XI Storytelling

Bibliography

(T)Arcadia

“Artists can make the connections visible. They can guide us through sensuous kinesthetic responses to topography, lead us from archeology and land based social history into alternative relationships to place...As envisionaries, artists should be able to provide a way to work against the dominant cultural dimensions of culture’s rapacious view of nature, reinstate the mythical and cultural dimensions of ‘public’ experience, and at the same time become conscious of the ideological relationships and historical constructions of place.” - Lucy Lippard1

"If history were past, history wouldn't matter. History is the present... You and I are history. We carry our history. We act our history." - James Baldwin2

This is a story. This is a biography of a place. This is a historical document. This is an autobiographical account of a time and place from a particular point of view.

Cape Breton, a small island on the most eastern edge of Canada, was once a Canadian industrial hub. As a people, Cape Bretoners hauled coal from the depths of the earth and used that fuel to make steel. For those reasons, it seems fitting and familiar to me that metal is one of my mediums of choice for my art practise. Another home. It’s in my blood.

1 Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, (New York: New Press, 1997) p. 19. 2 I was introduced to this quote by James Baldwin during a presentation I attended given by Sylvia Hamilton at NSCAD University in January, 2017. It is from James Baldwin and Margaret Mead, A Rap on Race, (Philadelphia & New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1971) p.188. 2 Industry and the lack of industry has shaped my existence. I was dreaming of dwindling fish stocks, moratoriums, deficits, closed factories and industrial ruins before I was even born. The Sydney steel plant has loomed large in my life. Its shadow was cast over my childhood: The view from the second story bathroom window of my parent’s house, the house I grew up in, the house my father grew up in, is out over the three houses that stood between our house and Louisa Playground, the train yard, the tar ponds and beyond that, slag mountain and the steel plant. Industry formed the very places we played - the playground I played on as a child was built on the by-products of steel making, a stone-like substance called slag - an island of slag floating in Muggah’s Creek, the notorious Tar Ponds. (Photo of Slag Mountain by Christina Arsenault, 2007)

The train yard was also a sort of playground for us. We played on the tracks that carried coal from mines in Dominion, Glace Bay, and New Waterford. We were forbidden to enter the railyard, but it was adjacent to our playground, without even a chain link fence to keep us out. We snuck over as often as possible to leave pennies on the tracks, or to steal cherry bombs to place on the the rails, we were delighted by the explosion when the trains rolled over them.

Directly across from slag mountain was a sinking barge next to the foundation of an old military hospital. The barge was half submerged, tied to a post with thick marine rope. We’d take turns leaping from the shore onto the tarred deck of the barge to peer down the hatch into the depths of sludgy, mysterious, black water. Were we seeking monsters, pirates, adventure, treasure? Children at play.

We weren’t the first children fascinated with the carcass of dying industry. As a teenager, in the 1970s, my father and his friend, Jonathan Campbell, built a raft called Bitby from materials gleaned from scrapyards. They floated this raft in the tar ponds. Jonathan Campbell recounts the landscape where they floated Bitby in his 2009 novel, Tarcadia:

“Slag Mountain is a treeless, shrubless, grey blind that blocks the city’s view of the steel-plant. It is one hundred feet high, a mile long, and nearly shear in its angle of ascent. The train marshalling yard, including the CNR roundhouse is directly across from Slag Mountain. The roundhouse and marshalling yard are on private industrial property built on a landfill. The landfill bulges out toward the steel plant side and hides the biggest part of the north tar pond from

3 anyone looking toward it from the Ferry Street causeway. There is no commercial or residential traffic near the pond, no access road, and very little CN activity on the back lines of the yards. With Slag Mountain on one side, and the industrial buffer of the rail yards on the other, the north tar pond is very private.” 3

I have a photograph from 1975 of my father and Jonathan standing on Bitby where she is moored across from Slag Mountain. It’s in the precise location the barge I played on as a child was moored.

(My father, right, and Jonathan Campbell on their raft, Bitby, in 1975. Image courtesy of Doug Arsenault)

In 1975 when my father and Jonathan Campbell were photographed on Bitby, the steel plant would have been in operation. When the steel plant was in operation, it belched orange smoke into the sky, filling it each evening. I can recall, once, during an evening walk along George

3 Jonathan Campbell, Tarcadia: A Novel. (Kentville, N.S.: Gaspereau, 2004) p. 83. 4 Street with my sister, Christina, falling to my knees, weak with laughter as she drily noted “it’s very orange out tonight”. It was. It always was. It was the colour of relative prosperity, not to mention environmental carnage.

As a teenager, my friends and I walked the train tracks from the North End, where we lived, to our high school in Ashby every day. We walked past the Tar Ponds surrounded by chain link fence and “Human Health Hazard” signs every single day. The fence and signs were installed with our well-being in mind when I was already in my teenaged years. Sometimes we would make a remark about the sludge level, the number of shopping carts lodged in the sludge, or exchange a joke about the smell. Toxic waste was our norm, we interacted with it every day. It was not only a part of our landscape, but a part of our passing conversation and an unavoidable part of our daily life. 4

Growing up in the damaged economy of failing industry, I viewed an orange sky as a sign that there was work to be done. Employment depended upon it. Livelihood depended upon it. Orange meant sustenance. For this reason, slag, to me, represents a value laden stone remnant reflecting the unpleasant side of thriving industry, a reminder that flourishing industry, and the employment that it brings, often comes with a deep cost: coal dust sparkling like gems on the skin of children at the beach, rusted rebar and slag on the shore, industrial runoff sludging the streams. These are the grotesque souvenirs of industrial boom and bust and they are visible all over Cape Breton.

4 According to a mortality study ordered by Sydney’s Joint Action Group (JAG) in 1996 completed in 1998, the cancer rates in Sydney were 16% higher per capita than anywhere else in Canada. Tera Camus, Sydney Residents Dying Early: Doctors puzzled by problem, The Halifax Herald, Friday September 25, 1998 accessed March 4, 2017 (http://www.safecleanup.com/old_site/health925.html). 5 II

IN THE FIELD

The Abandoned Cannery

On Thanksgiving Monday I walked down to the site where the abandoned cannery used to stand. I have visited this site any number of times throughout my life - it has always held a special draw for me and I’ve found its derelict and crumbling beauty inspiring over the years. This was my first visit to the site since the structure had been taken down in 2013.

In the summer of 2011, my sister, Christina, and I walked down to the former cannery building. We scaled the hill and slipped through a break in the fence, ignoring the No Trespassing sign as always. Christina had her camera. She photographed the inside of the decaying structure of the cannery extensively, including a shot of me standing in the middle of the ruin; light filtering down through a hole in the ceiling, dust on the window panes, surrounded by corroded metal and general rubble. I am so glad we took those photographs that summer. By the following summer, in 2012, the building was already being dismantled. By 2013, the building was gone.

The derelict structure of that cannery has always existed for me - throughout my entire existence it stood empty and full of the ghosts of industry. When I was a child we explored the building and the surrounding grounds extensively. I have fond childhood memories of leaping from the bank by the train tracks onto the roof of the building with a group of neighbourhood kids. We’d stare down into the ruin and decay of former industry through a hole in the roof. It was always easiest to get onto the cannery roof during the winter when the banks were high and the rusted machinery was swathed in a blanket of clean white snow. Such ghastly beauty.

6 On this particular visit to the former cannery site, in October 2015, I had arrived with a purpose, I had come to gather found objects; bits of the rubble and ruin leftover from the dismantled cannery building. I was not disappointed. I slipped through the broken bit of fence next to the No Trespassing sign and was met by a cracked concrete foundation in an overgrown field filled with the debris of a shattered industrial past. The field was strewn with broken bits of building and factory equipment, heaps of rebar, girders and rusted metal. The hulking, corroded pieces of cannery machinery stood peacefully, with grace and dignity, amidst the chaos of debris.

I eagerly combed the field and the shoreline, filling my bag with fragments of ceramic tiles clinging to hunks of cement, broken marble from bathroom fixtures, rusted nuts and bolts, nails and wires, pieces of brick and the pièce de résistance: A manageable piece of corroded marine chain.

I was practically in a swoon. I took a multitude of photographs, documenting each piece where I found it. I lost myself in the sublime I felt walking the shoreline festooned with masses of broken industrial fragments. I felt as though time had been suspended. I filled my bag, dragging my prized marine chain behind me.

My swoon ended.

I could barely lift the bag. I dragged it and heaved it up the hill, straining my back and shoulders, breaking a sweat. My arms felt like rubber. Panting and cursing and stumbling, I stubbornly heaved that bag up the hill and through the broken bit of fence, past the No Trespassing sign. I arrived back on the sleepy, holiday-Monday-morning street; dirty, dishevelled, sweaty and frantically looking around for a safe place to stash my loot. I wasn’t physically capable of dragging my treasures the two blocks home. I would have to come back with a vehicle to transport them. I felt half crazed with the idea of somebody stealing my bag of booty while I was gone, yet I was dizzy with the heady feeling of triumph. I had made the capture and fitted out my collection with exciting, new, and diverse traces of my industrial past.

Dog walkers watched me curiously.

7 Nobody stole my detritus while I was gone, and at this very moment, it graces the middle of my studio floor awaiting my further interference in its fate. Found objects, treasures, traces, artifacts, art materials, prizes - precious fragments of the past, heavy with memories and burdened by their knowledge of better days blown to bits. I have altered their destiny.

(October 26, 2015) Photographs by Christina Arsenault, 2011

September 20, 2016

Years ago, I was told that the “cannery” building was a drydock. I’ve had the photo of me standing among the ruin and debris of the abandoned building since 2011 and it is labeled “Angie in decaying drydock” on my computer. Somewhere along the line somebody I felt was more knowledgeable than me told me it was a cannery and I believed it. It’s funny how that can happen, how you can feel you know something to be true, but will admit you are wrong when presented with conflicting information by somebody you feel knows better than you. I had been looking for information on this cannery online and in the Beaton Institute archives for some time, frustratingly, without results. I started asking around this past summer and quickly found out that the abandoned cannery was never actually a cannery, it was a dry dock owned by Sydney Engineering Inc., run by a man by the last name Rosetti. The same man who had owned an enchanting home, called Northmore, on Charlotte Street. Red brick, all covered in ivy. I used to dream that I lived in that house when I was a child. That

8 house felt like it could possibly contain the Secret Garden. It felt like all your dreams could come true if you lived within its walls. To the childhood me, it looked like it contained the magic of the universe. The key to altering your existence. To this day, I have never been inside the house. But it fuelled many of my youthful fantasies. (Photo of Northmore from the Beaton Institute Archives)

The only photograph I could find of the dry dock in operation is of only the dock, which no longer exists, but which I clearly remember playing on as a child, watching it decay and eventually collapse into the sea over the years. The photograph is from 1984, and the dry dock must have closed shortly afterwards because I have no recollection of its operation during my youth. When I ask around, no one seems to remember when the dry dock closed shop. For the lack of information available about Sydney Engineering Inc., if it wasn’t for the physical evidence of its existence in that field strewn with rubble, I’d be willing to believe that it never actually existed at all. That it was always just a figment of my childhood imagination

9 III

RUST

I believe there is memory value implicit in the history carried by discarded industrial fragments: Once invaluable parts that facilitated the running of the machine of industry, when the chain of labour broke, they lay neglected and forgotten shifting only with the passing of time and weather, but still weighted by their previous sense of significance.

Reparation with difficult histories was on my mind as I collected industrial detritus to repair, reuse, repurpose, reimagine, and present in new ways. Fragments exhumed from industrial ruins built a body of new work acknowledging the weight of memory implied by the kinds of work in which they were once embedded, enhancing them with new memories and a new sense of value. I resurrected the souls of industrial artefacts while acknowledging their previous lives, my history and, through my labour, the collective history of labourers.

I intervene with objects of industrial detritus as they speak to me, repairing, rebuilding and repurposing as necessary. I see my interventions as acts of rethinking, repurposing, rebuilding and repair - an action that has a deep history in labour and industry - but also as an intervention that changes these fragments into something entirely different, adding value to a formerly valuable object that had been discarded as no longer with value. This gesture was born out of destruction and brokenness but made out of a sense of memory, reparation, preservation and industriousness. The newly built objects recall usefulness, but they are no longer of utilitarian value. They are now objects of purely cultural value. They mark a shift in time. A shift that the Island of Cape Breton has also experienced as it moved away from industrial operations and

10 toward finding its value in its own reflection, in a concept of its people and its culture, preserved in the cold Northeast Atlantic.

I have created objects that acknowledge the cracks and traces of former industry while creating new objects of beauty and preciousness. Subsequently, my labour will allow these new objects to encapsulate the scars and memories of industrial detritus while raising their status from the cast offs of collapsed industry, to memento, souvenir and, ultimately, art object

My thesis project is a project of place and time but, I believe, it has the power to speak to any place that has experienced industrial boom and bust and has had to grapple with the, often toxic, fallout that industry can leave in its wake.

I repaired a rusted and decayed marine chain. One side of each link on the heavily rusted chain was deeply corroded, thinned out by pressure, use, time, the sea. Carefully, I ground the rust from the areas I wished to repair, I then built up the links with bronze brazing rod, layer by layer. I filed the bronze flush and polished it until it was shiny, reinvigorating the chain with brassy life in a striking contrast to the minerality of rust built up over years of disuse. By building up the chain’s corroded parts with brazing rod, I created a striking contrast that beautifies and emphasizes the wounds of time.

Brazing speaks directly to mediation. It joins the precious to the non-precious creating something new. Brazing permits steel encrusted with layers of rust to be joined with more precious materials such as brass, creating an entirely new object, a thing that contains multiple histories and tells multiple stories.

I found a large, rusted bolt on the train tracks, where the coal trains used to run, near the intersection of Dodd and Prince Street, in Sydney. From this bolt, I have forged two hammer heads. The process of making these hammers was incredibly labour intensive. I spent hours hammering the hot steel from the bolt into shape. Hours filing the hammer heads while the steel was hot from the forge. I brazed onto the hammer heads, filling out the places where the metal became thin from repeated heating. For me, this was a miraculous transformation. From a rusted, corroding bolt to an object that resembles a tool found in every person’s home. A multilingual tool; we all intuitively know what to do with a hammer.

The handles of these hammers have been repurposed from portions of a wooden fishing trap I found washed up on the shore in Westmount, Cape Breton, directly across from the drydock site. The wood is greying and brittle with rusted nails imbedded and bits of twine tied about them. The handles are long and oblong, weak, not ergonomic, they wouldn’t feel comfortable in the hand. These hammers will not be used, they were not made to be used.

Hammers, to me, are a universal symbol of labour. My hammers are symbols. They are a product of intensive labour, but they have never seen even a moment of labour in their new lives. They resemble a ball-peen (machinists) hammer and a claw hammer that have been laid to rest, or hung up, signaling the end of labour, but neither one of these so-called hammers have ever struck a blow. They have labour embedded in them, but they do not know labour.

The nails that accompany the hammers have been created from the ends of the brazing rods I used to repair the chain. It is important to me that I save and reuse the industrial waste that I produce while transforming found objects into art objects. I gathered my industrial waste as I

12 worked and I collected it in bottles, embedded it in concrete, embalming my waste like the tar ponds sludge is embalmed under Open Hearth Park. A reminder of what lies beneath the beautified facade of the former site of the Tar Ponds, in Sydney: literal tonnes of industrial waste.

In a similar gesture, I have rebuilt a lobster trap out of various trap pieces salvaged from several beaches on Cape Breton, incorporating brass rods and brazing where needed to create a new trap. A trap that contains fragments of memory, shadows of usefulness and utility, but an entirely new object that would never be tossed into the sea to gather food, to facilitate consumption.

13 IV

A note on material

Using plaster in my work was not an obvious choice for me. I didn’t consider plaster as a medium I would be drawn to. I didn’t actually consider it at all until I began to work as a teaching assistant, to Thierry Delva, in Introductory Sculpture. Plaster is one of the first media that Intro Sculpture students work with, and it wasn’t long before I saw its appeal. The tactility of mixing the plaster with your hands through different stages intrigued me. Its casting possibilities delighted me; it picked up minute details and varied textures sensitively. By the time Intro Sculpture visited the plastics lab for a demonstration on vacuum forming, I knew I would introduce plaster into my practise.

14 It was around this time that I read an essay about Rachel Whiteread’s House by Richard Shone which opens with: A cast of an object traps it in time, eventually displaying two histories - its own past and the past of the object it replicates.5

I was stopped in my tracks by how much I related this passage to the work that I was undertaking. It was brilliant. It was then that I began to think about casting some of the objects that I have collected from sites of former industry around Cape Breton.

I carried a piece of dry dock, a slab of cement with white octagonal tiles clinging to it, down to the plastics lab. It weighs about 20lbs and measures about 19 inches at its widest point. Donnie, the plastics lab technician, helped me vacuum form my tiled slab in polystyrene. I took my slab, newly encased in plastic, back to my studio and cut some slits from the edge of the slab to the edge of the plastic, to enable me to ease out an object so full of large undercuts. I patched the cuts with duct tape, smoothed oily clay into the cracks to seal them and carried my new mould downstairs to the sculpture studio to fill it with plaster.

A few hours later I carried my mould, now filled with set plaster, back upstairs to my studio and carefully removed the plaster copy from the mould. I was breathless. It was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. It made my heart swell. I was so proud of this first cast and I eagerly welcomed it into my collection. It occurred to me then what my plaster casts represented. They were ghosts of the detritus I had collected. If I brought them back to the sites where their originals came from they became of the space, but not of the space. Other-wordly objects falling somewhere between imposter and original. The fact that plaster is white made the concept more ghostly and appealing to me.

It was a little while later when I realized that plaster actually made sense for me and my work. I believe it was while flipping through photographs taken by my sister-in-law this past summer when she, her parents, and my brother visited Cape Breton from San Francisco. We had all rented cabins in Cheticamp for the weekend, and on our last day, we hiked up to an old gypsum quarry to take a dip in the very deep, very cold water that now filled it.

5 Richard Shone, Rachel Whiteread: House. Edited by Ian Lingwood, (Phaidon London, 1995) p. 52. 15 I remember looking at the photograph and thinking wow. I don’t think I realized just how beautiful that space was while I was actually in it. The water was so green and the cliffs were so white. The realization flooded over me: Of course they were white they were made of gypsum, and gypsum makes plaster. (Photo by Anna Arsenault)

Collection

I laid my collection of refuse out on my studio floor so I could live with it: Nuts and bolts, railway spikes, broken fishing traps, slag, slag glass, coal, nylon ropes, tiles clinging to bits of broken cement, rusted wires, broken glass, a hefty industrial chain - so much rust, so much decay, so much brokenness, so much potential.

It was while reading Jennifer A. Gonzalez’s essay, Autotopographies, that I realized what I was doing with my collecting. While wandering the train tracks and coastlines of Cape Breton Island seeking out material links to a collective industrial past, I was actually searching for fragments of my own identity and creating “a spatial representation of identity”6 from the detritus of industry.

6 Jennifer Gonzalez, Autotopographies, Prosthetic Territories: Politics and Hypertechnologies, Gabriel Brahm Jr. and Mark Driscoll (ed.), (Westview Press, Oxford, 1995) p.133. 16 The items of detritus that I collect have become props in my own personal narratives and enablers of my myths. These objects are speaking to me about who I am and where I come from. As a displaced Cape Bretoner who has lived “on the mainland” for more than a decade, they root me in my homeland, and they serve as landmarks in my personal journey into the past. They have become souvenirs.

These souvenirs now function as the premise of any further storytelling - be it about the industry that once defined them, or about the manner in which the souvenir came to be in the storyteller’s hands. Gonzalez speaks to this when she discusses souvenirs in Autotopographies:

“These autobiographical material artifacts that assert a presence of the past also locate individuals in that past - individuals who turn to these objects for the reassurance, indeed material proof, of having been a particular person in a particular time, place, and community.”7

It’s as if she is speaking directly to me and my thesis work in this statement. I am most certainly seeking out reassurance in my collecting, I am also seeking out the relevance of having been in relation to my particular community. The souvenirs I collect and the memories I attach to them begin to function as proof of my own existence.

Before actually setting to paper the narrative I related in The Abandoned Cannery, I related it verbally to some friends and family members. By now this story has become so much a part of the detritus that I gathered at that particular location in the North End of Sydney that the two things can barely function apart for me. They support and reiterate one another’s importance and existence, as well as my own existence. Gonzalez says “the autobiographical nature of the souvenir is not often to be found in the object alone. It emanates equally from an accompanying narrative, an individual storyline that is usually the result of a changing pattern of memories and identifications”8

I have immortalized the dry dock ruins in my memory, in my story, as well as in the significance that I have placed on the fragments that now make up its tangible existence in the present. For me, they have become postcards from the dry dock site confirming “I was here” and they have,

7 Gonzalez, Autotopographies, p.141 8 ibid 17 similarly, become postcards from me asserting that “I was here” also. I have embedded myself in these souvenirs and once I build them into something new, they take on new meanings and acquire new narratives. In the future, they will become souvenirs of myself in this time and this place.

Postcards and Souvenirs

(Commercial postcard of Albert Bridge, Cape Breton.)

“Is it not also materials, souvenirs - along with and apart from thoughts which perform the past by virtue of their enduring existence in the present”

18 - Godfrey Baldacchino, The Lure of the island: A spatial analysis of power relations, Journal of Marine and Island Cultures9

Shedden Studio, opened by Leslie Shedden in 1916 provided photographic services for the people of Glace Bay and New Waterford until 1977. The Sheddens, originally from Boston, served as official photographers for BESCO (British Empire Steel Corporation) in Cape Breton. They also produced and sold hand tinted landscapes of the, now famous, scenery that were a hot commodity for locals and tourists alike.

Cape Breton Island was already a popular tourist destination in the early part of the 20th Century, and the Shedden family were but one of the number of local photographers who cashed in on the early tourist trade:

At the same time, these colour landscapes celebrated the local beauty of the region to which hordes of tourists flocked in order to “consume” its natural picturesque areas. That consumption was both visual and actual, as any indigenous, historical and manufactured artifacts became fair game to weekend visitors. Lumps of coal, lighthouses made from seashells, carvings, pottery, lobster traps, hand tinted photographs, and even picture books served and serve today for these curio hunters as symbolic reminders of the place, the authentification of their past presence there, and in a sense their conquest of Cape Breton. (XVIII, Leslie Shedden)

In Esther Leslie’s essay about Walter Benjamin, Souvenirs and Forgetting: Walter Benjamin’s Memory Work, she discusses Benjamin’s journeys and the ways in which they influenced his thinking about memories and souvenirs. According to Leslie, Benjamin “concludes that the native and the tourist experience environs differently. The tourist seeks out the superficial, exotic picturesque. But the native traveling into the past, not into the distance, finds in corner and nooks, dusty and forgotten moments of childhood, encrusted in the paving stones, like mislaid gems”.10

9 Godfrey Baldacchino, "The Lure of the Island: A Spatial Analysis of Power Relations." Journal of Marine and Island Cultures 1.2 (2012): 55-62 accessed October, 28 2016. (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.imic.2012.11.007). 10 Esther Leslie, “Souvenirs and Forgetting: Walter Benjamin’s Memory-Work” in Marius Kwint, Christopher Breward, Jeremy Aynsley (ed.), Material Memories: Design and Evocation (Materializing Culture), (Berg Press, Oxford, 1999) pp 107-122. 19

These are the kind of souvenirs I have been collecting, “souvenirs of individual experience” (p.138)11 as Susan Stewart would call them. Different and, yet, the same as the souvenirs gathered by the hordes of tourists who pass through Cape Breton Island seeking pleasure and views each May through October.

Each time I travelled to Cape Breton with the intention of collecting industrial refuse, I journeyed not only to the Island, but into the past, into my childhood, into my life history and I pulled out gems that were prompted by my interaction with that particular space and the souvenirs available in that space. Solely from undertaking the journey, a narrative begins to arise, and it is furthered as present experiences and memories from past interactions with the space begin to stack up. I believe that the memory narratives I brought back from these sojourns also become souvenirs and they become embedded in the particular object that prompted their telling.

The random bits and bobs of an industrial nature that I have collected and compiled are my individual souvenirs from a collective past signifying where we have been as an Island of people who once collectively laboured within industrial environs that no longer exist. The items of detritus I have collected have also become personal souvenirs carrying the weight of a personal narrative about a specific time, place, feeling and association. I have collected personal souvenirs to reinforce and remind me of the particular set of mythologies I believe about myself and my heritage as the descendant from a legacy of labourers. These souvenirs function as a tangible extension of the ideas that I have about myself as a product of my past and my present.

11 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, ( Duke University Press,Durham and London, 1993) p.138.

20 VII

COAL

(Sydney, 1923, “B” Squadron of the Royal Canadian Dragoons, part of the Federal military contingent brought to suppress labour activities during the 1923 strikes against BESCO, Buchloh and Wilkie, p. XI)

Over the next nine years BESCO (British Empire Steel Corporation) was to wage some of the most brutal anti-labour campaigns in Canada’s history against the local workers and their families. On three occasions the military were called upon by the civil powers to aid BESCO in solving industrial disputes. The industrial area of Cape Breton was literally occupied by an army paid for in part by the people it was there to suppress. - Robert Wilkie12

The history of coal mining and its sister industry, steel making, in Nova Scotia remained tumultuous right to the very end. No doubt, the stories of repression and indentured servitude

12 Benjamin HD Buchloh,and Robert Wilkie. Mining Photographs and Other Pictures 1948 - 1968: A selection from the Negatives Archives of Shedden Studio Glace Bay, Cape Breton. (NSCAD Press and UCCB Press: Sydney and Halifax, NS, 1983) p. IX. 21 are similar in nearly every mining town across the province, the country and, very possibly, even the world.

June 11, 1925, William Davis was shot and killed on the streets of New Waterford, Cape Breton, by a hired BESCO “Company” thug who was probably only paid marginally more than Davis, a coal miner. Shot dead by another man who eked out an existence from the Company and its coal.

It was on that June day in 1925 that an angry crowd of miners marched on the Waterford Lake Power Plant resolute that they weren’t going to take any more guff from “the Company”, the British Empire Steel Corporation (BESCO). They were going to return the power and water supply to the town of New Waterford, which the Company had turned off in an attempt to put pressure on the town of impoverished and striking coal miners.13

The military was present, the police were present, company thugs were present. Labouring men pitted against labouring men. It is estimated that 300 rounds were fired into the crowd by the company’s guard. It’s a wonder that more lives weren’t lost that day. After Davis was shot, the army of miners surged forward, pulling thugs and military men, alike, from their rides and trampling them in the street until they had recovered the town’s water and power. For days afterward, the tired, exploited miners looted and burned nearly every company store in Industrial Cape Breton. 14

The Company Store, or “Pluck Me” as it was locally called, represented the physical manifestation of the Company’s greed and the corporate “red right hand”15 that effectively held the miners down and out in a state of indentured servitude. After the burning of the company stores during the “coal wars” of 1925, the concept of the company store effectively died, taking with it the years of hard labour and debt ravelled up in the overpriced goods it had carried.

Laid out on my studio floor is a collection that spans my Island’s manufacturing history and

13 Don MacGillivray, William Davis, Dictionary of Canadian Biography (online), Volume XV, 1921 - 1930 accessed March 8, 2017 (http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio.php?id_nbr=7807). 14 Unions, History of Mining, Miners Museum website accessed March 8, 2017 (http://www.minersmuseum.com/history-of-mining/?section=2). 15 Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Red Right Hand, from the 1994 album Let Love In which references John Milton’s, Paradise Lost

22 future spelled out in industrial debris. Formerly attached to the machine of industry, the debris on my studio floor has the history of coal in every particle of dust and rust fragment. Cape Breton coal lives in my artworks, just as it lived deep underground for millennia.

I was born on an island of coal. Coal and I have been intimately acquainted. Not only have I had it clinging, shimmering, on my skin while swimming in the ocean at Dominion, or Inverness Beach, but I’ve picked it up and taken it home. It lies in a collection on the floor of my studio as I write. We are invested in one another, we are embedded deep into each other’s histories and futures. My art hinges on coal. In many ways my life hinges on coal.

My great grandfather, Leo Doucette was a veteran of WWI - a war partially built of Cape Breton steel and fuelled by Cape Breton coal. Following the end of WWI, Leo returned to New Waterford, Cape Breton, and the collieries with Lucy Doucette née Devinish, his new British wife.

Leo also fought in the Coal War of 1925. Family legend has told me that Leo was marching in the crowd of angry mine workers demanding better conditions for themselves and their families that fated June 11. Leo was directly involved with the conflict that day. Family lore tells me that he pulled a military man or police officer off of his horse and beat him in the street of New Waterford. Leo arrived home to Lucy, after the battle, on June 11, 1925 with a badge he had taken off of a man while fighting. Lucy feared the repercussions that might arise if her husband were to be caught with such a trophy, and she threw it down the well. Lucy, returned the steel back into the depths of the earth from where it had originally emerged in the form of coal.

23 Deep at the bottom of Lucy’s well, the process of reclamation has been underway for almost a century. The steel of the discarded badge began to rust and corrode ages ago and is probably corroding while I type, until finally, some day, it will break down so much that it will be reabsorbed by the earth from which it came. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. My objects have been spared this eventual demise. I have the power to halt their decay and alter their existence.

(Photo of Leo and Lucy Doucette on the occasion of their wedding courtesy of Mary Doyle)

24 VIII

Labour

(Albert Doyle, my maternal grandfather, a descendant from a long line of fishermen, spent his life fishing in Ingonish, Cape Breton Highlands. Photograph by Doug Arsenault)

It took me a long time to get here. Longer than most, it seems. When I left my Island home and moved to “the mainland” to pursue my studies in art, I was already out of my depth. I had led a sheltered existence and I had just a taste of what it meant to be an outsider. When I began my undergraduate studies, I was thoroughly in over my head and I truly felt like an outsider. I also found that I was embarrassed by my unworldly, labouring past. I began to distance myself from it. I began to pursue art making practises that would never require me to get my hands dirty: Photography, sound art, film. These mediums felt clean and clinical to me. They made it easy for me to pretend that I was not a labourer at heart, that I didn’t come from a legacy of labourers. This line of study felt unnatural and forced to me in some ways, but I was hell bent on

25 leaving my unrefined past behind me. I have no doubt that this internal struggle showed in my work. I don’t regret this time of forced flux in my life, it has left me with a love for film and lent me a taste of the creative writing (in the form of screenwriting) that I would come to love and use as a means of self expression. I’m not afraid anymore. I don’t need to struggle with my identity any more. I like to build, carve, form, model, get dirty, use my body actively in my art practice. Labour has become important to me as my means of self expression has evolved. In many ways I feel that I carry the history of labour and industry within me. All of the turmoil and struggle. All of the violence, beauty, ugliness, toxicity and decay.

Industry requires labour and labour requires labourers. Labour, particularly manual labour, is closely tied to the human body. My family legacy has a deep history of people who physically toiled to produce the very sustenance they fuelled their bodies with, the fuel they heated their bodies with, and the structure they sheltered their bodies with. My own body is only marginally tied to these acts of labour - but the memory of it is there and the memory of it has manifested itself in the physical undertaking of collecting souvenirs connected to that remembered toil and using my body to build them into something new. Alongside the physical act of constructing, I have been cataloguing, categorizing and archiving my acts of labour to create a collection documenting the original act of collection and its subsequent research.

Acknowledging and embracing the legacy of labourers that I have descended from adds to my own narrative and the way in which I place myself in the world. I am blue collar, I am a worker, just like all of the people who came before me. This is part of the reason I am drawn to the work of Richard Serra.16 Like me, Richard Serra came from a port city and a blue collar family. He worked as a labourer early in his life, and he worked with steel when he was performing his blue collar duties. As an artist he also works with steel, but the meaning of the metal has changed from utilitarian, practical, necessary to Art, with a capital A. The shift is irreversible and Richard Serra’s steel can never be blue collar steel, no matter how much he associates his material of choice with his labouring past. It can come from the same steel plant, but its use value has shifted, its place in the world has shifted once it is ordered up by one of the most famous living sculptors in the world.

16 All of the information about Richard Serra was gleaned from two interviews with him: "OUR MOST NOTORIOUS SCULPTOR." The New York Times. The New York Times, 07 Oct. 1989 and "Man of Steel - The New Yorker." The New Yorker. n.p., 5 Aug. 2002 26

Richard Serra moves through the world still associating himself with steel, with blue collar labour. I relate to this, my identity is very much wrapped up in my blue collar legacy. Serra also has a deep relationship with steel. I carry it around with me in my bloodstream. The way in which we change the nature of the steel we choose also relates me to Richard Serra. I may be scavenging steel from sites of former industry in Cape Breton Island, but the intentions I have projected onto these articles have changed their place in the world. They have become art objects. They have become elevated in a way that only art can elevate an object or material with reverence and an almost esoteric fervour.

Richard Serra makes his home on Cape Breton Island. He has invested himself in that iron rich soil. I wonder if the production of steel on the island influenced his choice of locations to settle. I find myself wondering if Richard Serra thinks about the loss of industry on Cape Breton Island? I wonder if the steel brought him there.

KEEPER OF INDUSTRIAL MEMORY

Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to the store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of poetry that was lost. -Gaston Bachelard17

Walid Ra’ad’s work is an attempt to write this obscure history in images and text. But these images and texts are themselves made opaque in the process, for as much as his project is a kind of historical documentation, it’s also an attempt to investigate how history gets imaged and written, thereby questioning the very idea of a definitive history. -Alan Gilbert18

On what ‘table’, according to what grid of identities, similitudes, analogies, have we become accustomed to sort out so many different and similar things? What is this coherence - which, as is immediately apparent, is neither determined by an a priori and necessary concatenation, nor im-posed on us by immediately perceptible contents? For is it not a question of linking consequences, but of grouping and isolating, of analysing, of matching and pigeon-holing concrete contents; there is nothing more tentative, nothing more empirical (superficially, at least) than the process of establishing an order among things; nothing that demands a sharper eye or a surer, better-articulated language; nothing that more instantly requires that one allow oneself to be carried along by the proliferation of qualities and forms. And yet an eye not consciously prepared might well group together certain similar figures and distinguish between others on the basis of such and such a difference: in fact there is no similitude and no difference, even for the wholly untrained perception that is not the result of a precise operation and the application of a preliminary criterion. -Michel Foucault19

I’ve never really considered myself to be a collector. I suppose that I have dabbled in collecting over the years, a brief stint with sock hangers as a child,20 but nothing too serious. It was summer 2015, just before beginning NSCAD, that I began to collect. I felt that the shards of industry that had been left to perish in fields and sand were important somehow and I began to gather them together. It quickly became an obsession whenever I visited Cape Breton.

17 Gaston Bachelard. The Poetics of Space, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994) p. 6. 18 Alan Gilbert, Artists in conversation: Walid Ra’ad by Alan Gilbert, Bomb Magazine 81 Fall 2002 accessed March 8, 2017 (http://bombmagazine.org/article/2504/walid-ra-ad). 19 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, (London: Routledge, 2001)p. XVIII. 20 I have no doubt that my sister Christina would love to tell you all about this. In my defense I will say that it felt practical at the time. 28 Especially at the site of the abandoned dry dock. It seemed that every time I entered that particular site I went into some kind of collector’s trance and obsessively gathered far more than I could possible carry and irrationally persisted in carrying it all somehow anyway.

It was while reading a book called Collections of Nothing, that it occurred to me that I am probably not a serious, compulsive, long term collector. I don’t think I have the collector’s compulsion outside of this project. Or perhaps I am just telling myself this. William Davies King, author of Collections of Nothing, chronicles his own humorous journey of collection over the span of about 30 years. He too collects detritus, primarily metal objects in the beginning, but his collecting habits are far more broad than my own and encompasses not only bits of metal but round rocks, thousands of fish can labels, cheez-its boxes and other bits of trash he irreverently refers to as “diddlysquats”. Reading beyond this irreverent attitude toward his collecting, King reflects that “collecting, like art, is a way of coming to terms with the strangeness of the world.”21 The world I grew up in, was very strange indeed, and I am still struggling to come to terms with much of it. Perhaps my own collecting, repairing and categorizing has been a way to try and control something that I can’t actually alter, and grapple with my personal history ravelled up with the tumultuous history of the place where I was raised.

In the shaggy fields of Open Hearth Park, didactic panels tell a bureaucratized version of steelmaking. Didactic panels are visible all over Cape Breton, imparting choice bits of history, promoting a sanitized version of our collective past. In contrast, by collecting history’s garbage and reconceptualizing it, my project promotes a more complicated engagement with key stories in both tangible physical spaces and recorded materials. It brings to light a story with a heartbeat from the vantage point of somebody who was there, growing up beneath the orange smog of a faltering steel plant and sifting through sites of industrial ruin.

In my thesis work I am exploring the ways in which our sense of place in the world shapes us as individuals. Along with embedded histories implied by land, our accumulated experiences form memories and narratives that build in us a sense of identity: I come from a storytelling culture and I am a natural storyteller. My life is recollected through narratives. Some are my own, some are peripheral, some I’ve inherited and some are drawn from myth or urban legend. I view memory as another system of recycling in which we call upon something old and give it new life.

21 William Davies King, Collections of Nothing, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) p. 76. 29 Remembering can also be an act of reclamation. If harnessed with intention, remembering can be powerfully transformative.

I call on memory narratives embedded in a decaying industrial landscape and anchor them to objects of industrial detritus that I have exhumed from the graves of industry around Cape Breton Island. I travel to sites of industrial ruin to gather objects that speak to me. At the same time, I travel back into my memory space and I draw out narratives that have clung to the surface, often because of their sensory nature. I catalogue, house and interpret the objects in a collection of industrial memory.

I have created an archive of industrial debris as well as an archive of memory data. Alongside my neural and physical plumbing of memory spaces, I have gathered a bank of research data: photographs, maps, documents and other support materials to bolster and prop up my memory archive.

I have also been manually mapping my memory spaces alongside the spaces where much of the detritus used in this project was collected to create a topography where my collected fragments, tangible and intangible, fit together. Some of these places once existed but do not exist anymore, some of these spaces exist but not in the form that they are remembered and some of these spaces may have never actually existed at all; emerging as tricks of memory and figments of my imagination honed from urban legends, cultural myths and family stories.The maps reference real historical maps and draw from memories and narratives built by a youth spent in the shadow of industrial decay.

By exploring the landscapes of forgottenness and decay left behind by fallen industry, I intervene in the existence of the industrial detritus left behind. I carry away hand selected fragments of the ruin, leaving traces of myself behind me. As a result of disturbing the graves of industry, ghosts arise. Ghosts that can take the shape of memories and narratives as well as ghosts that I have constructed and returned to haunt the place of their origin, existing in a purgatory of belonging yet not belonging: Casts from originals.

The industrial objects that I have collected and interfered with have begun to become less of their spaces, and more of the memory realm. They are shadows of themselves, stand ins for time and place that may or may not exist. Memory markers, forms invented to represent my accumulated memory and narrative data. Simultaneously of the place and imposters. Having been removed from their place of origin, never to return, they have entered into diaspora.

Memory narratives tell truths and imply lies in their very springing out of memory space. I’m filtering and framing narratives, memories and objects to create new histories. By telling stories in multi-media, I am seeking the space where they come together to create an immersive sensory experience. Storytelling and art making are both natural practises for me, I follow my instincts to the place where they come together in a way that can relay my message while

31 allowing space for the viewer to fill in any gaps and relate to my work through their own experiences.

I excavate “historical constructions of place”22 pertaining to Cape Breton’s industrial past, and explore the ways in which our sense of place shapes us as individuals. In an act of artistic and academic memory keeping, emphasis in my work has shifted from the physical act of repair to return to the act of gathering. I display industrial detritus alongside legends of place to be valued in a new way, exploring the holes and broken spaces of Cape Breton’s industrial history, filling those cracks with memories. I challenge history when I pick up industrial detritus and garbage and place them in my archive of industrial memory. Among other things, such acts enter them into narratives with a culture that once thrived from their existence. Moreover, I believe there is poetry in coal and slag. I imbue them with new value, releasing their poetry. As Bachelard puts it “We are never real historians, but near poets…”23

Like Walid Ra’ad I use fragments and reclaim space as a way to engage with history. Like Walter Benjamin, I travel back into memory space drawing out narratives, memory-keeping and storytelling in three dimensional forms or ghosts that arise from the graves of industry.

I am casting pieces of broken floor in plaster, placing them on the floor of Gallery III at the Anna Leonowens gallery and inviting viewers to walk on them, to make them crack, break into pieces and possibly turn to dust. This idea wasn’t intentionally a riff off of Carl Andre’s 1960s floor tiles that encouraged the public to tread across his minimal installations, but unconsciously, it’s there. This piece, also was not an intentional rumination on the massive crack Colombian artist, Doris Salcedo, created in the floor of the Tate Modern’s Propellor Hall in 200724, but the parallels are most definitely there. Salcedo’s Shibboleth is a raw, emotional act that physically illustrates the cracks in the structure of Western society. Salcedo manifests societal cracks for all to see on the floor of an internationally renowned cultural institution. With this gesture, Salcedo calls upon the ones who have fallen through the cracks. The ones who are downtrodden and as a result lost, forgotten, and left behind. She dredged up the history of those who have no voice and she used the power of the voiceless to fracture and open up the floor of

22 Lippard, The Lure of the Local, p.19 23 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, P.6 24 Salcedo Causes Rift at Tate Modern, The Guardian, October 9, 2007 accessed March 8, 2017 (https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2007/oct/08/art3). 32 a major Western institution. I believe that I make a similar gesture with my floor and my entire installation. I am also attempting to create a voice, a place, for the ones who were left behind, impoverished and lost to drugs, alcoholism and despair when industry departed.

I am filtering and framing narratives, memories and objects to create new histories. I create new didactic panels and tell other stories in multimedia, seeking spaces where methodology, materials and narratives come together. My goal is to take my research and practice beyond the gallery and library, and into the slag heap and community in an act of healing and environmental reconciliation. This is a project rooted in place, but also a project about entering and overcoming traumas, hardships, adversity that defies place and enters the realm of universal human experience, grappling with complex relations of industrialization, waste, artefacts and environmental legacy that are a crucial global concern.

CONCLUSION

The coal and steel industries died on Cape Breton Island, discarding in their wake, dinosaurs of industry that slowly fell and eventually rotted back into the earth, leaving us their legacy of runoff, toxic waste, pollution, disease. Also left behind was a workforce of lost labourers: What do coal and a call centre have in common? A make work plan for unemployed coal miners in New Waterford. From hauling flammable stone from the bowels of the earth to sitting in a cubicle at a phone, plaguing strangers around the world with cold calls.

What do coal and throngs of drug addicted adults and hopeless youth have in common? Oxycontin, a heavy duty pain narcotic used to treat the bodily residue of a life down a coal shaft. Hillbilly heroin, easily accessed in Glace Bay and New Waterford, Cape Breton.25 A town full of

25 Ashley MacKenzie wrote and directed a film titled “Werewolf” (2016) that deals with methadone addiction in New Waterford, Cape Breton. According to the Cape Breton Post, the film “..., inspired partly 33 former coal miners and dreams lost down the pit. What is left for these men and women? The hope of a brighter future “Out West” in the Tar Sands: Oil, petroleum. Fossil fuel is in their blood, after all.

Outmigration and lost youth, the inheritance of a century smelting steel, and more than a century hollowing out the earth deep under the ocean for coal. A shattered steel town and crumbling colliery towns, one industry towns without any industry, an economy in shambles. Perhaps more. We have also used this coal to burn a hole into our ozone, pollute our water supplies, recklessly damage our environment and the earth that sustains us so severely that we have created an anthropocene. Coal is being rethought, though, by the world. An article released recently in The Hill, announced that the US Environmental Protection Agency has vowed to dramatically reduce their coal use over the next number of years. China has vowed to do the same and a number of other countries are following suit.26 The Liberal government of Canada has vowed to phase out coal powered energy by 2030, however, Nova Scotia is one of the provinces of Canada that still relies heavily on coal for much of its energy production.27 Perhaps coal has seen its day.28 29

I have been collecting the debris industry has left behind it. The tangible evidence that it was there and the physical evidence of the repercussions of its death. I could very well be collecting by real people and events, shines a light on the difficult realities — drug addiction, poverty and hopelessness — faced by many people, and families, in Cape Breton.” in it’s September 6, 2016 edition (http://www.capebretonpost.com/living/2016/9/7/world-premiere-for-cape-breton-film-this-4634972.html). 26 Devin Henry, “EPA Chief: Coal no longer marketable”, The Hill, December 10, 2015 accessed March 8, 2017 (http://origin-nyi.thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/262776-epa-chief-coal-not-in-uss-future). 27 Kathleen Harris, “Liberals present plan to phase out coal-powered electricity by 2030”, CBC, November 1, 2016 accessed March 8, 2017 (http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-coal-electricity-phase-out-1.3860131). 28 During the months spent writing this paper, American politics shifted dramatically and saw power change hands from the Democratic Party, under Barack Obama to the Republican party, absurdly led by real estate magnate, Donald Trump. Under the Trump Administration, fossil fuels are being promoted and coal mining is once again being revived in America. Jim Krane, Trump’s Sisyphean Coal Revival Require a Battle with the Free Market, Forbes, March 7, 2017 accessed March 8, 2017 (https://www.forbes.com/sites/thebakersinstitute/2017/03/07/trumps-sisyphean-coal-revival-requires-a-bat tle-with-the-free-market/#60e908977a84). 29Cape Breton is also grappling with the last gasp of coal mining with the reopening of the Donkin Coal Mines. Jennifer Ludlow, Donkin mine begins producing coal in Cape Breton, CBC News, March 1, 2017 accessed March 8, 2017 (http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/donkin-coal-mine-cape-breton-1.4003452).

34 used needles and discarded phone cords, because they are also the remains of lost industry. I have literally picked up the coal and the steel where they were left to die and I have been using them to fuel and build the fruits of my own labour. A body of work from bodies of industry built by bodies of labourers who often left their bodies deep in the dark of the underground. Maybe their bodies will become coal one day. Hopefully, next time, we’ll leave it where it lies.

STORYTELLING

Ghosts in the house

The road was crumbling at the end of DesBarres Street, just before the guardrail in front of Louisa Playground, and it made a kind of gravelly spot. That’s where I went over the handlebars of a bike for the first time. I wasn’t riding my own bike, my bike had brakes on the pedals. I had traded with a friend and her bike had handle brakes. DesBarres is the second steepest street in the North End, after Louisa Street. I went careening down DesBarres on the bike and just before I hit the cumbly part I squeezed on the brakes. I guess that only the front brake worked because I flew over the handlebars and skidded along the gravel on my face.

Or so I’m told. I blacked out when I made contact with the street. No helmet. It was the eighties.

I vaguely remember stirring for a few moments in Laurie Ann’s Grandmother, Eunice’s house (she was missing a pinky finger!!!). I remember stirring again in the emergency room and I have a small memory of being in our red Volvo with all of the body filler on it (loved the smell of that stuff). I can recall my mother’s sense of panic as a feeling.

My face was a wreck, and it was right before school started up again. I lost two teeth. I went down to that part of DesBarres, right in front of Laurie Ann’s house, frequently after the accident, looking for my teeth. I felt cheated - I could have really used the cash from the tooth fairy.

I still get nervous going down hills on my bike, and it’s been almost thirty years. I have scars on my face and all over the inside of my mouth from that accident. I still love the feeling of the wind on my face, but I’m too scared to let myself go. On a really hot day, catching that extra bit of breeze flying down a hill can feel like a gift, but I ride the brakes.

Gems like death

My grandparents always took us to Dominion Beach. I’m not sure if it was because they were fond of it or if it was because it was near the city, but of all the beautiful beaches on The Island, Dominion was their beach of choice. We’d pack a lunch (my grandmother favoured salami on rye with mustard, all ingredients from Ike’s Delicatessen on Charlotte Street, next to the Y), and we’d drive out in their white Pontiac with the bench seats to spend a few hours on sunny, warm days in summer. My brother, sister and I would play in the waves, and they would sit on the sand in low folding chairs and observe, or read thick, paperback romance novels, allowing the sun to warm their skin, wearing hats and sunglasses.

The beach is rather unremarkable: eroding cliffs, a sandy shore, a sunbleached boardwalk, but one feature of this particular beach stands out clearly in my mind as extraordinary: Coal dust. It shone on the shore in sparkling lines of black, mapping the rise and fall of the tide. It glinted in the surf and shimmered like jewels clinging to our skin when we would emerge from the waves. As children we found it enchanting, magical, otherworldly.

I don’t know what my grandparents thought about the coal dust. I guess they just thought it was normal.

Smoke in the air

It had been raining the last time I saw Robbie. In my mind it was August, maybe because of the lush humidity left by the afternoon rainfall, and the sun that followed and made the streets shine. The air was heavy and the entire neighbourhood smelled like smoke. Something was burning.

I was sitting on the veranda when I saw Robbie go by. There was nothing unusual about seeing him walk by, he only lived down the street a few blocks and around the corner on Pleasant Street, but for some reason I remember what he was wearing. He had on rawhide moccasins, cut off jean shorts, his hair was dark brown, short on top, long and curling in the back, he had a mustache and he was smoking a cigarette. I don’t think he was wearing a shirt.

He walked by the house, just like any day. Fire trucks whizzed by shortly afterward with their sirens wailing. It wouldn’t be until later that day when the news would travel around the neighbourhood - Robbie stabbed his girlfriend to death up in Ashby, then he went back to his house, set it on fire and lay down on the attic floor, waiting to die. When it took too long to die, Robbie left. He walked away, just like any day, his house burning behind him.

Ice at night

The fire department came every year around the end of November to flood the tennis court. The neighbourhood kids loved to watch the firefighters, all done up in their gear, let the water rush out of their hoses, filling up the entire tennis court. There were never any nets there anyway, and we all loved to skate. All winter long we had our very own outdoor ice rink and we skated every day.

Mr. McQuarrie, our next door neighbour, also flooded his backyard every winter to make a rink for his grandsons. When they weren’t around we were allowed to skate there and we did so often, especially when the tennis court rink was being used for hockey. It was after dark one cold, still night while Laurie Ann and I were skating on Mr. McQuarrie’s rink that we saw the strangest thing. There was a man jogging (nobody jogged in our neighbourhood) up Des Barres Street, in what appeared to be peach coloured tights. As he got closer to us, by the light of the street lamp, we realized that there were no peach coloured tights. He wasn’t wearing any pants at all! We ducked down behind the hedges and rolled on the ice with laughter. Imagine jogging around at night, in winter, without any pants. Oh man, that was too much. He did another lap, and that was when Laurie Ann got scared. She figured he must be crazy. We snuck quietly through the backyards to Laurie Ann’s house where we told her dad, Laurie, what we had seen.

Laurie had been sitting around with a few buddies, having a few beers (he favoured Keith’s) when we burst into the house with our news. He was absolutely outraged by what we told him. I didn’t really understand why he was so mad, I still thought it was funny. Laurie and his buddies rounded up baseball bats, hockey sticks, chains, tire irons, etc. and raged off into the night. I can still recall watching them storm up Des Barres Street like a posse of vigilantes.

It was better off for everyone that they never found him. He did come back, though.

On the downswing

It seemed like the jungle gym in our playground was always getting burned down. It was made of wood, basically telephone poles, and was meant to look like a ship. There was a captain’s wheel and everything. I actually don’t know who was setting it on fire all the time, although if I had put some thought into it at the time, I’m sure I could have figured it out. I don’t recall ever really caring, it happened so frequently that it seemed like a normal part of everyday life. We all just assumed it was some of the big kids who were doing it for whatever reason, or for no reason at all. It was all the same to us.

Every summer, the city sent counsellors to the playground every day. To make sure that we weren’t getting into too much trouble, I guess. I always got the feeling that Louisa Playground in the North End was the least desirable assignment to these counsellors, although they did sometimes give us Kool-Aid. It wasn’t until after the counsellors left, after 5pm, that we could really ever do anything fun.

After 5pm, some of the big kids, Glen MacDonald (everyone knew he was the toughest guy in Sydney!) and his friends, would come to the playground and they would lift the picnic table up onto the giant steel swingset. They’d loop a swing around diagonally opposite sides of the bench seats to get the thing balanced, and it became one gigantic swing. It was utterly ingenious. All of the kids would pile on the table top and the benches and the big kids would push it to get some momentum going until we were flying. That thing was so heavy that it could really pick up speed. Luckily the swing set was cemented into the ground.

After the big kids set up the swing and got us going, they’d leave and go to the Foundation (drinking). To keep the swing moving we had to take turns jumping off, giving it a few good pushes and then letting it scoop you back up on the downswing. It had to be carefully choreographed. One time, I hopped off to take my turn pushing and I got hit in the face by the swing. I ended up with a big shiner, but the worst part was that Laurie Ann told me she didn’t feel bad for me. She said it was my own fault and I shouldn’t have been pushing the swing.

I was so mad at her for that because I was just taking my turn.

Scavengers

Louisa playground, our playground, was built on top of the tar ponds. Part of the big pond was filled in (with slag, I heard) to make room for the train yard and the north end’s recreational areas: Playground, tennis court, and ball field. When we’d build sand castles at the playground, digging the moat was always the best part, we didn’t even have to go to the swamp for a bucket of water to fill it in. Water would just rise up and fill the moat in all by itself. It was sort of magical.

The big kids told us that there was an octopus in the swamp that would grab kids when they were crossing the railway tie bridge, but that wasn’t true. One time, one of the Boyce boys (it was Robert) waded into the black water of the swamp and cut his foot pretty badly. We were afraid that he was going to get sick because the water was so dirty, but he didn’t. Around that time, I learned in school that lobsters are scavengers and people used to fish for them in the harbour but had to stop because of the tar ponds flowing into the harbour water. I think it was just glass that got Robert’s foot, though.

Sudden death

My second big bicycle accident happened after a heavy rainfall and with a different bike. It must have been early on in hurricane season because there were branches strewn all over the street. I was riding my Princess bike: pink and white with a banana seat, sissy bars, purple streamers, one purple handle brake and a bell I won in a colouring contest. I believe that bell was the first thing I ever won, the second thing was a two dollar bill for guessing the correct number of jellybeans in a jar at school. Anyway, I was riding down the hill (York Street) by the Convent and I made a hard right onto George Street, saw a downed branch, hit the brake, skidded, collided with the branch and went flying. Once again no helmet. It was still the eighties after all.

I blacked out, as you tend to do when you hit your head hard. The next thing I remember I was being carried, bleeding in the arms of Glen MacDonald. He carried me directly home and delivered me to my parents, I don’t remember much else about it. I do remember, though, that in a rough neighbourhood in a tough town, I looked up to Glen as a protector and he came through for me. The North End kids tended to stick together, the big ones looking out for the littler ones.

Glen kept order in the neighbourhood. He was the undisputed top dog. He took care of his parents (drinkers) and his brothers and sister. Glen sold drugs, and not just hash like my friend’s parents, but real drugs.

After I left home for university, my friend Becky told me that Glen had had an accident. He was playing chicken with a friend down at the train yard when he went through the windshield of his Mustang and was decapitated. He died instantly.

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