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VCH International Symposium 2009, 6- 8th July 2009

Professor Erik Eklund, Monash University, Australia. [email protected]

‘Localities, local history and knowledge production - Accessing vernacular history in Australia beyond the capital cities’

In 1995, local historian Colin Stanton published a history of the south Australian industrial town of Whyalla, entitled Hummock Hill to Whyalla: our hidden past, 1900 to 1970. The book is everything that academic historians criticize. It was a series of short entries on the first shop, the first post office, the first water supply and so on. It did not have an overarching narrative or argument. It was a pastiche of local development, sport and culture. Yet we dismiss the book and those like it at our peril. Looked at another way, it was an expression of a local historical sensibility. The reference to ‘our’ history in the subtitle refers to a sense of ownership and commitment to the local past. The word ‘hidden’ is equally suggestive, indicating a history that has hitherto been buried or unacknowledged. Stanton’s father worked at the BHP steel works in Whyalla, and Stanton followed him in 1967. His book is self-published, the layout and design done by the author. In the preface he wrote:

Whyalla does not have a long or colourful history, but what we have is ours. This history is important to those of us who have been born and raised in Whyalla and to those who have come here to make this a home for themselves and their children.1

This kind of localist sentiment in industrial and mining towns is central to my current research. Why was Stanton so tentative in setting up his history of Whyalla? In a deliberately provocative formulation, I would suggest that Stanton was tentative because academic and -2- popular history encourages people who live beyond the city limits and not even in the revered bush, to believe that their own history, and that of their communities, is entirely irrelevant.

This paper is concerned with the political economy of academic knowledge production. Based on my own research on the history of industrial and mining towns in Australia, I argue that this political economy has made it difficult to study the diverse local histories of such localities. For the most part the focus here is on how this political economy operates to exclude industrial and mining towns. I briefly suggest throughout and elaborate at the end of the paper that oral history interviews with local residents are one way to side-step this political economy. That topic, a substantial one in itself, is clearly something for another paper and another forum. However, one of the most effective ways to connect with local history is through interviewing local people. In six towns across Australia, I interviewed approximately ten people from various social backgrounds and experiences. I had no trouble recruiting willing participants. There was an interest in telling their stories, not only their own family story but the story of their town. They felt somewhat aggrieved by a national history that excluded them. In that context speaking to an historian was akin to striking a blow of their town and setting the record straight. This method reveals dissonant voices from the edges of Australian culture and geography, who speak with powerful authenticity about their place and their place in history. Memories from respondents across Australia act as a kind of counter history, revealing a vernacular take on the Australian experience. As Louisa Passerini argued the task of the historian ‘is to participate in different memories, to share their differences not in any way in an attempt to demonstrate their universality but rather to insist on the diversity and plurality of memory.’2 This plurality of memory, experience and local history sits uneasily with the dominant paradigms of Australian history.

The origins of the marginalisation of non-metropolitan local histories are twofold. Firstly, it relates to the nature of mainstream Australian history. Secondly, it is linked to broader cultural forces at work in Australian society in the post-second-world-war period. In terms of the professional practice of Australian history, the relatively recent growth of the history profession in Australian Universities located in capital cities has tended to focus historical attention on the six capitals. What lies beyond those capitals was typically portrayed as simply ‘the Bush’. Despite the preponderance of city-based professional historians, not all have accepted the notion that national history equals capital city history. From the 1960s, historians focusing on regional topics developed a dissenting view of national history. As they trawled the major works of ‘national history’ they struggled to find information on their chosen localities, and struggled to reconcile -3- the relationship between their regional histories, and the national story.3 This was partly the result of the growth of non-metropolitan universities and colleges of advanced education. In these institutions, often located some distance from capital city libraries and archives, the availability of local sources made local history a viable proposition.4 For example, critiquing the city and the bush dichotomy in Australian history, Nancy Cushing argued that her chosen subject, the industrial and port city of Newcastle in NSW, has been overlooked. ‘In the dominant metaphor’ she wrote, ‘the spaces between the City and the Bush have been left uninhabited and unacknowledged.’5 Similarly in my research on the NSW industrial town of Port Kembla I argued that the ‘history of Port Kembla is important in light of powerful and homogenising national discourses that equate Australian history with capital-city history.’6 It is significant that places like Newcastle and Port Kembla were central to this critique of the bush/city dichotomy. These towns have always been characterised by a degree of liminality.7 Rural areas were better served by historians, and the pioneering works in this field included some high-profile researchers including Margaret Kiddle, Keith Hancock, Duncan Waterson and Alan Atkinson.8 These predominantly pastoral regions were a neat and to some extent accidental fit with a mainstream disciplinary focus on land and land legislation, though in the process many historians found distinctive societies in their regions.9 The political economy of academic history in Australia militates against research that reveals life beyond the capital cities. The largest, richest Universities in Australia with the most number of postgraduate students are the Group of Eight, the sandstone Universities all based, without exception, in the capital cities. The largest Group of Eight Universities have as many as one hundred history postgraduate students at any one time, and collectively they exert a powerful influence on the direction of research. On graduation, this talented cohort with access to fine scholars and excellent resources percolates through the history profession in new appointments and new research projects. Overall, they are very good at creating histories that reveal something of themselves. In the backstreets of Carlton, Glebe or Nedlands, in the heady mix of an urban intelligentsia, they have a ‘feel’ for topics that speak to their own lives in the city. Trawling through new electronic resources such as the Australasian Digital Thesis Data Base gives a sense of the focus of recent postgraduate historical research. Across all disciplines, not just in history, these towns figure in very particular ways. The mining towns naturally appear in works on geology, metallurgical studies and process engineering. Such interests are joined by epidemiological research on blood lead levels, an issue which has plagued many mining towns in Australia. The research on Port Pirie is almost exclusively epidemiological studies of lead in the blood. Broken Hill, another mining town with a complex structural geology also appears in many -4- geology theses as well as work on metallurgical processes, geochemistry, industrial relations and labour history.10 There are notable exceptions but for the most part this work emphasises geology, productivity and production, and sometimes labour relations, whilst paying little attention to local history and local experience. This is no conspiracy but a structured favouring of capital city and cosmopolitan research topics. The research student in Melbourne, or indeed staff member for that matter, will favour a topic where resources are close at hand, where supervisors are imbued with the urbane certainty of that cultured city. There are spaces within this web of capital city and cosmopolitan networks for the outsider. The humanities project is more reflective and diverse than this brief sketch allows for. Yet the vernacular knowledge at the heart of these towns, usually many miles from major Universities, is not easily accessible to humanities scholars nor is it always seen to be of great import. A project on ‘Images of Urban Melbourne’ or ‘Colonial Cities Across the Empire’, acknowledging the growth of transnational histories, would have been a more career-valuable, if somewhat more cynically-conceived, project. These kinds of projects would bring an army of not necessarily like-minded scholars, but certainly a group familiar with the patterns in the evidence and historiography. This would be a ready-made professional community. In this context, a project on the history of Melbourne makes sense (both intellectually and in terms of available resources) in a way that a project on the history of the distant mining town of Mount Isa would not. Given the overwhelmingly absence of University researchers – as argued above – the main forms of historical knowledge production about these places were in the hands of very specific groups or organisations, mainly companies and governments and, to a lesser extent, trade unions. Graeme Griffin makes this point with regard to Mount Morgan when he notes that ‘the bulk of the empirical evidence – the documents, the minutes, reports, early eye-witness accounts, and the photographs – has emanated from the company itself and other sources of institutional power such as newspapers and banks.’11 The work of Geoffrey Blainey, which includes books on Australian mining towns and others of general relevance, is another example where company resources and influence have shaped the focus of the available historical literature. Blainey was commissioned to write histories of companies not towns, and he has shown a continued interest in the discovery and establishment of the mining fields, as well as the board room and engineering challenges with a preference for management-inspired views of labour relations.12 His work has shaped an overall sense that company history can function as a replacement for town history in these places. On the issue of commissioned history more generally, we can also see the structured patterning of historical -5- knowledge coming through the more well-resourced localities. Commissioned local histories in Australia are more likely to come from the large local government authorities such as the Sydney and Brisbane Councils. These municipalities employ historians and archivists, and commission specific public history projects. By contrast, the regional and isolated councils often share a heritage officer or have no access to such expertise at all. The professional, well-resourced exhibitions and institutions of the cities are a dramatic contrast to the facilities in the regions, which are often is a state of disrepair, run by well-meaning but under-resourced volunteers. Urban history, perhaps more so that any other field of historical enquiry, revealed the complexities of everyday life in particular environments, sharpening history’s sense of place with detailed evocations of the urban experience. The rise of urban history did encourage a number of scholars to consider the non-metropolitan urban experience.13 Nonetheless, it was defined by the great names in the field as extensive study of ‘the city’ as though the urban experience itself was defined by city life alone.14 Australian studies followed this lead, again with high profile researchers focusing on the history of their own city environments.15 While the growth of urban history was a positive feature of a more nuanced social history, the widely-acknowledged demographic domination of the capital cities in the Australian urban hierarchy has at times overwhelmed regional and local history. The dominance of capital cities was established, with some colonial variation, usually from the foundation of the colonies. By 1901, 1.4 million Australians (or 36%) out of a total population of 3.8 million lived in the six state capitals. By 1947, 3.9 million lived in the eight capital cities (now including Canberra and Darwin) or 51% of the total population of 7.6 million. By 1982 out of a total population of 15.4 million, 9.8 million or 64% lived in the eight capitals.16 Relative to their state environments and their regional contexts, population figures beyond the capitals should not be dismissed to readily. Take, for example, the date 1911. Many of Australia’s most important metal mining towns were founded in the previous three decades. The colossus of Broken Hill, established in 1883, reached a population of 30,972 by 1911. It was the third largest town in NSW behind Sydney and Newcastle. Mount Morgan had a population of 9,772 in 1911 and it too was the third largest town in Queensland; Brisbane and Rockhampton being the two larger towns in this most decentralised of all Australian states. The issue of population size can be taken further. The static population figures captured at census time, and charted from one census period to the next, can obscure the characteristic boom- bust cycle of growth and decline which all of these towns experienced to varying degrees. Mount Morgan was widely regarded to have around 12,500 inhabitants at its peak in 1909, though the 1911 Census only records just under 10,000 as production and employment levels declined with -6- falling copper prices. By 1921, further decline in commodity prices and a post-war recession had reduced the numbers to 7,500. History tracks the fate of the winners so tables covering historical population figures only include towns that survived and prospered rather than those that declined or disappeared.17 By only considering the absolute numbers in capital cities at only one given time, we treat populations as immobile and immune to the influence and experiences of other places. Just as mining towns had a flow of migrants moving through them, they also directed people to the expanding capitals. Australian cities were, to some extent, shaped to the urban and rural experiences of its migrant populations, both overseas and locally born. There was a net movement of people from rural areas to larger towns and capital cities over the twentieth century. Yet this does not mean we should ignore non-metropolitan areas. In fact, we need to account for the backgrounds and cultural baggage of these migrants to understand better the nature of the expanding metropolis. That baggage was partly acquired in the kinds of places that are the focus of this study, emphasising that the ‘city’ is not a separate, isolated unit of analysis, but exists in relationship to those places around it. Australian history conceptualised as a patchwork of interconnected regions was explored by J.W. McCarty in 1978 but never fully developed, refined, or critiqued by other scholars. The regions themselves are variously organised around a number of key industries and principal towns. These hubs connect to their surrounding regions, to their state capitals and beyond. Other connections, financial, cultural, political and familial radiate out across and beyond the continent forming a region that has both national and transnational connections.18 As persuasive as the population figures for capital city dominance, as an argument for the centrality of the city it fails to account for this connectedness that McCarty articulated. Can a city be studied in isolation from all of the regional and international connections that shape its character? Canberra is what Mount Isa isn’t. Sydney is what Broken Hill isn’t. Metropolitan cosmopolitanism is arraigned against the apparent cultural uniformity of the regional towns. This relational sense of place was clearly articulated by French historian Ferdinand Braudel: ‘a town never exists unaccompanied by other towns: some dominant, others subordinate or even enslaved, all are tied to each other forming a hierarchy, in Europe, in China, and anywhere else…’19 Human geographers have developed this relational understanding of place. John Allen, Dorreen Massey and Allan Cochrane, for example, write that ‘regions draw their meaning in any one point in time through their differences from other regions.’20 This moves the study of these towns into the very heart of urban studies of capital cities. These towns are the shadows that shape our assumptions and beliefs about the city and city life. All of these places from the capital cities to the towns mentioned in this paper -7- embody a coded hierarchy, of diverse economic, political and cultural origin, but ultimately a social and ideological organising of value. Geographer Rob Shields writes of an ‘emotive ordering or coded geography’ while Antoinette Eklund and I termed this a ‘geography of desirability’.21 This relative construction of images and assumptions of cities and regions worked to erase complexity to our understanding of both sites. Just as towns were not as culturally uniform or as dependent on external forces, nor were cities as internally undifferentiated or overdetermining of their own fate. Historians were not immune to these attributions of a place’s cultural value – encouraging research on some places while discouraging it for others – as always taking their cues from the broader cultural and social milieu beyond the historical profession. It is to that broader milieu that we now turn; the second of the two factors that obscure the historical and cultural acknowledgement of industrial and mining town history. At a cultural and social level, places of industrial and mining production maintain a fraught position in the Western imagination since the industrial revolution. By the late nineteenth century, positive images of industry and mining while never overwhelmingly dominant were common. This more positive take on industrialisation reached its zenith in the 1950s and 1960s, when the furnaces of Port Kembla, Mount Isa, Newcastle and Port Pirie were seen as sites central to the post-war development of Australian industry and the Australian ‘way of life’. Steel and other products, such as copper from Queenstown and Mount Isa, were the new metals of modernity. Modernity celebrated economic growth and prosperity and many of these towns found a place in this discourse. However, the focus of cultural life and assertions of an Australian way of life were changing. During the 1950s and 1960s, there was a cultural shift, a deep but uneven changing of the tide which turned attention towards coastal cities and culture, as opposed to inland Australia. Put simply, the beach replaced the outback. Russel Ward’s personification of the Australian legend in 1958, a practical rural outback type with rough manners, was roundly criticised by the 1980s.22 A more worldly cosmopolitanism of city culture replaced a defensive assertion of rural Australian distinctiveness. This broad movement occurred across the continent, implicating all kinds of places in a new geography of desirability. Bryon Bay replaced the back of Bourke. Bondi replaced the endless paddocks of a once revered pastoralism. Despite these changes, the towns that are the focus of this study remained at a distance from this Manichean split. By the 1980s, the networks of cultural power and influence were firmly focused on the cities and the coast. In this formulation there was even less space for industrial and mining towns that once shared some geographical and cultural proximity to the bush ethos. In the ‘post industrial’ world, sites of industrial and mining production that developed in an earlier wave of capitalist investment maintain an uneasy place. No longer seen as sites of -8- cutting edge modernity and economic development, the towns covered in my research, accumulated a series of far more negative images from the 1970s. Recession and unemployment hit these areas hard in the mid-1970s and again in the early 1980s focusing national media and political attention on their economic well-being and apparent decline. This focus on disadvantage and dysfunction was not confined to media presentations. In the steel town of Whyalla in South Australia most of the available refereed literature on the town covers, family dislocation, youth suicide, depression and regional disadvantage. For Port Pirie, as we have seen, the research is focused on lead pollution.23 Mount Morgan is best known as one of the poorest local government areas in Australia.24 Queenstown has a strong presence in a series of deeply critical scientific reports on the environmental rehabilitation of the mine site.25 The experience of disadvantage is a vital part of the history of these towns, but combined with negative national perceptions, such work tends to emphasise the perceived victim status of local residents. By interviewing locals and tapping into their histories and lived experiences through oral and written sources, we can move past these powerful national myths. Such an analysis reveals vigorous civil societies and lives played out with all of the joys, hardships, and satisfactions that city dwellers experience. If we were to create a picture of regional town life based on the refereed literature it would indeed be a grim and unpleasant picture. All of these factors enumerated above generated cultural oversights, or anxieties, which made a sober assessment of the history and culture of these towns problematic. If this was not enough, another crucial factor needs to be emphasised. During the post-war boom, visible signs of production, including belching chimneys and smoking stacks, were symbols of progress. As one respondent from Port Kembla expressed it: ‘When there was smoke coming out of that stack there was money going into people’s pockets’.26 As environmental consciousness grew from the 1960s and 1970s, industrial and mining production was less likely to receive the kind of broad support that it did during the post 1945 boom. By the 1980s these sites were fraught with too many anxieties and too many negatives to be celebrated without reservation. In the brief time left available, I want to give you a flavour of the oral history interviews, which, I suggest, are an ideal method to circumvent the kind of assumptions and prejudices outlined above. Interviews with local residents operate as a counter or vernacular history disrupting national assumptions about place. The mining town of Queenstown, near the west coast of Tasmania, where gold and copper has been mined from the 1880s, has a national reputation as a site of environmental destruction. The spectacular bare hills that surround the town were understood to be the principal marker of that destruction. For non-locals the image of these hills, denuded by pollution, bushfires and poor soils, was one of the defining images of the late -9- twentieth century backlash against unfettered industrial progress. Coupled with this outside perception was an identification of locals as simple and inward looking, almost complicit with the polluting industry. ‘Locals’ apparently lacked the sophistication and awareness that seemed to come with city-based social movements and green politics. Queenstown residents are fully aware of such outside perceptions. Paul is a single man who worked in the mines, and devoted much of his life to union, labor party and more recently Council politics. He noted that, ‘Tasmanians have got these preconceived ideas about the West Coast.’ When asked to elaborate he said ‘Well we’ve got two heads around here. We’re stupid. We’re rednecks.’27 Another respondent, Janice, made a very clear connection between the outside perception and local perspective: I know people think we’re you know, hillbillies, but like I say to them well, do you love the town you live in? Cause I do … I try and tell them, don’t come here and condemn it…. But I don’t think it’s right, once they’ve got to come here and they’ve got to learn about it. And find out why the hills are bare.28 In this case, the respondent links the outsiders’ view with a call to visitors and new residents alike to understand more about the nature of those well-known hills, in order to transcend the dominant narrative on Queenstown with a local, vernacular understanding.

It remains to bring all of these threads together. Across a number of domains forces worked to obscure the local histories of industrial and mining towns. In the academic sphere, a cosmopolitan city-based focus and ethos infused researchers and research students. The cultural and geographical space for mining and industrial towns was often lost in the city-bush dichotomy. In this, historians were simply reflecting the broader assumptions of their age. From the early twentieth century, modernity found a place for these towns as sites of economic progress, but recessions, restructuring and environmentalism made this increasingly fraught. Industrial and mining towns became another one of Australia’s guilty secrets much like the stolen generations and frontier violence. These towns, and their inhabitants, slipped into the shadows of our national consciousness in the face of environmental criticism, economic decline, and powerful and broadly held national images of pathology and victimhood. 1 Colin Stanton, Hummock Hill to Whyalla: our hidden past, 1900 to 1970, Whyalla: Self Published, 1995, Preface. 2 Lousia Passerini, (ed) International Yearbook of Oral History and Life Stories Vol.1: Memory and Totalitarianism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 18. 3 Geoffrey Bolton, A Thousand Miles Away: A History of North Queensland to 1920, Canberra, 1963; J.W. Turner, Manufacturing in Newcastle, 1801—1900, Newcastle History Monographs No.8, Newcastle Public Library, Newcastle, 1980 and J.W. Turner, (ed) Newcastle as a Convict Settlement: The Evidence Before J.T. Bigge in 1819—1821, Newcastle History Monographs No.7, Newcastle Public Library, Newcastle, 1973. 4 For the experience at the Darling Downs College of Advanced Education see Maurice French, ‘Local history and a regional college: the Darling Downs experience’, Australian Historical Association Bulletin, no.23, July 1980, pp. 5-13. 5 Nancy Cushing, ‘Creating the Coalopolis: Perceptions of Newcastle, 1797 to 1935’, PhD thesis, University of Newcastle, 1995, p. 5. Historians of the North and the West of the continent have made similar points about the marginality of these histories. See, for example Regina Ganter, ‘The View from the North’, pp. 41-63 & Charlie Fox, ‘The View from the West’, pp. 81-97 in M. Lyons & P. Russell, (eds) Australia’s History: themes and debates, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2005. 6 Erik Eklund, Steel Town: The making and breaking of Port Kembla, Melbourne University Publishing, Melbourne, 2002, p. 2. 7 By ‘liminality’, I take Victor Turner’s definition of a state ‘betwixt and between often involving seclusion from the everyday scene.’ Victor W. Turner, The Anthropology of Performance, PAJ Publications, New York, 1986. 8 Margaret Kiddle, Men of Yesterday: A Social History of the Western District of Victoria, 1834— 1890. Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1962, Keith Hancock, Discovering Monaro: A Study of Man's Impact on his Environment, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1972; Duncan Waterson, Squatter, Selector Storekeeper: A History of the Darling Downs, 1859—93, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1968; G. Buxton, The Riverina, 1861—1891: An Australian Regional Study. Melbourne University Press, Sydney, 1967 & R.B Walker, Old New England: a history of the northern tablelands of New South Wales, 1818—1900, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1966. 9Buxton, for example, wrote that his study of the Riverina began ‘as a research project in which the initial aim was to discover, as far as possible, exactly what happened in the process of implementing the New South Wales land legislation of 1861...The final study…came inevitably to acquire an extended purpose by developing, in detail, a textured picture of Riverina society.’ See Buxton, The Riverina, p. 1. 10 The Australasian Digital Thesis Data Base can be accessed at http://adt.caul.edu.au/ [accessed 28th April, 2009] 11 Graeme Griffin, Mining the Past: The Mount Morgan Photographic Archive and the Uses of Photography, Cultural Policy Studies: Occasional Paper No. 9, Institute for Cultural Policy Studies, Griffith University, 1990, p. 6. 12 Geoffrey Blainey,. The Peaks of Lyell. (third edition), Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1967. See also Mines in the Spinifex: The story of the Mount Isa Mines and The Rush That Never Ended.. 13 Brian Kennedy, Silver, Sin and Sixpenny Ale: A social history of Broken Hill, 1883-1921, Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1978 & John Lack, A History of Footscray, North Melbourne : Hargreen Publishing in conjunction with the City of Footscray, 1991. 14 S.M. Blumin, ‘Two Decades of Urban History in the Journal of Urban History’, Journal of Urban History’, Vol. 21, No. 1, November, 1994, p. 12. See also his comments on p. 8. The current statement of the Journal of Urban History’s brief is ‘The editors of Journal of Urban History are receptive to varied methodologies and are concerned about the history of cities and urban societies in all periods of human history and in all geographical areas of the world.’ See http://www.sagepub.com/journalsProdAims.nav? currTree=Subjects&level1=F00&prodId=Journal200943 [accessed 6th April, 2009]. For a recent survey and analysis of Australian urban history see Lionel Frost & Seamus O’Hanlon, ‘Urban History and the Future of Australian Cities’, Australian Economic History Review, Vol. 49, No. 1, March, 2009, pp. 1-18. 15 See, for example, from Sydney, Shirley Fitzgerald, Rising Damp: Sydney, 1870-1890, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1987, and from Melbourne, Andrew Brown-May, Melbourne Street Life: an itinerary of our days, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Kew, 1998. 16 Calculated from ABS cat. no. 3105.0.65.001 Australian Historical Population Statistics TABLE 17. Population, major population centres(a), 30 June, 1911 onwards(b) at www.abs.gov.au/ [accessed 14 April, 2009]. 17 See, for example, the ABS cat. no. 3105.0.65.001 Australian Historical Population Statistics TABLE 17. Population, major population centres(a), 30 June, 1911 onwards(b) at www.abs.gov.au/ [accessed 14 April, 2009]. All the towns covered in this table are those that have grown in size over the period 18 J.W. McCarty, ‘Australian Regional History’, Australian Historical Studies, Vol. 18, No. 70, April, 1978, pp.88-105. See also A. Mayne (ed) Beyond the Black Stump: Histories of Outback Australia, Wakefield Press, Kent Town (Adelaide), 2008, pp. 6-10. 19 Ferdinand Braudel, Civilisation and Capitalism Volume One: The Structure of Everyday Life (Translated by Sian Reynolds), Collins, London, 1981, p. 481. 20 John Allen, Dorreen Massey Allan Cochrane et al, Rethinking the Region, Routledge, London 1998, p. 10. 21 Rob Shields, Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity, Routledge, London and New York, 1991, p. 265 & A. Eklund & E. Eklund, “Do you Love the Town you Live in?”: Narratives of Place from Australian Mining Towns’, International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, Vol. 3, Issue No. 7, 2008, pp.53-58. I am indebted to Laurie Johnston for the reference to the work of Rob Shields. 22 Russell Ward, The Australian Legend, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, (first published 1958), 1987, pp. 1-2; Richard White, Inventing Australia, p. 83 & Graeme Davison, ‘Sydney and the bush: an urban context for the Australian legend’. Historical Studies Vol. 71, No. 18, October, 1978, pp. 191-209 & S. Magarey, S. Rowley, & S. Sheridan, (eds) Debutante Nation: Feminism Contests the 1890s. Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1993. 23 A.J. McMichael, et al. ‘Port Pirie cohort study: environmental exposure to lead and children’s abilities at the age of four years’, New England Journal of Medicine CCCXIX (1988), pp. 468-475; Fowler R. & P. Grabovsky, ‘Lead Pollution and the Children of Port Pirie’ in Stains on the White Collar ed. P. Grabovsky & A. Sutton pp. 143–159. Sydney: Federation Press, 1989; Living with Lead [videorecording] ABC TV, Reporter, Mark Colvin; producer, Mick O’Donnell, 1992. 24 Census of Population and Housing: Selected Education and Labour Force Characteristics for Statistical Local Areas, 2001: ABS Doc. 2017.3. 25 See, for example, P. Davies P, N. Mitchell N & L. Barmuta, ‘The impact of historical mining operations at Mount Lyell on the water quality and biological health of the King and Queen River catchments, Western Tasmania. Mount Lyell Remediation Research and Demonstration’, Office of the Supervising Scientist, Report No. SSR 118, 1996, Department of Environment, Water and the Arts. 26 Colin Warrington in W. Davis, (ed), Our Memories Your History: An Oral History of Port Kembla. Wollongong Technical and Further Education, Wollongong, 1984, p. 33. See also Eklund, Steel Town, [find page] 27 Interview with Paul Richardson, p. 13. 28 Interview with Janice Redman, p. 6.