The Second Rush: Mining and the Transformation of Australia. By David Lee (Redland Bay, Qld: Connor Court, 2016), pp.463. ISBN 978‐1‐925501‐14‐8. AU$49.95 (cloth).
The city of Newcastle commemorated two bicentenaries within the space of seven years. In 2004, the city marked 200 years since the permanent establishment of the settlement on 30 March 1804. But 2004 was not the city's first bicentennial. In 1997, Newcastle celebrated the 1797 journey of Lieutenant John Shortland, who named and sketched the Hunter River and brought back samples of coal to Sydney. These anniversaries, and earlier ones such as Newcastle's centennial in 1897 and its sesqui-centennial in 1947, were crucial moments of history making in the public sphere. History was evoked to celebrate progress, encourage civic loyalty and, more recently, to emphasise the city's transition into a post-industrial era. This article will explore the way in which commemorative dates in Newcastle's history were interpreted, utilised and presented to the general public. It will examine how history, heritage, politics and policy come together to use the past in a public way. Utilising US historian John Bodnar's terms, the shift in the themes and tenor of public history in Newcastle over this period has been from an 'official' to a more 'vernacular' style. Official public history emphasised unitary notions of progress while vernacular styles presented more diverse and occasionally more critical versions of public history. By the time of the 2004 commemorative events there was more scope for active popular participation. Newcastle public history was being nourished by community groups often with conflicting notions of public history, generating a multivalent, multilayered sense of the past, though older themes persisted with remarkable durability. In a city where 'history' has such an ambivalent position, large-scale historical commemorations make for intriguing analysis. After a review of the principal themes in the Newcastle commemorations of 1897, 1947, and 1997, I consider the 2004 'Newcastle 200' programme. In particular, I will be considering my own movement from an apparently objective historical analyst of the earlier commemorative events to a participant in the history-making process in the 2004 program.
This article is a comparative analysis of the labour management strategies of two base metal refineries: the Electrolytic Refining and Smelting Company of Australia (ER&S), Port Kembla, and the Sulphide Corporation, Cockle Creek. During the period 1895—1930 both companies adopted aspects of an industrial welfarist strategy but at different times and in different forms. ER&S developed a broad‐ranging industrial welfarism that included workplace and community‐based initiatives such as cooperative stores and benefit funds. Long‐term financial security, inaccessibility to outside labour, and interest in North American developments propelled ER&S's interest in welfarism. The Sulphide Corporation was less interested in such long‐term strategies. The smelter at Cockle Creek was more marginal to the Corporation's business and had less secure markets. The British‐owned company was also influenced by a dominant British tradition of management that was less interventionist and less experimental. However, following major economic and political reorganization of the industry brought about by the onset of war in 1914 the Corporation slowly came around to 'on the job' welfarism by 1919. A comparison of these two firms can isolate the specific and general factors that account for this management diversity. Furthermore, it highlights how particular management styles such as industrial welfarism had implications beyond the workplace to the towns and communities where workers lived.
The Latrobe Valley, Australia, is a resource community in transition. The post-carbon future has yet to be realised, and the immediate future is one of economic uncertainty. A state and national economy was built upon energy production from brown coal (or lignite) since the early 1920s, but the realities of changing international and national markets and economies for coal-fired electricity are seeing its value diminish. The consequences of mining and power generation, of course, were left to be experienced by the residents of the Valley. The 2017 closure of Hazelwood Power Station and the Morwell or Hazelwood open-cut mine (as it has been called since the 2014 mine fire) proved to be the Valley's tipping point for a future without brown coal generation. This article uses the case study of the Latrobe Valley to explore government and corporate renderings of the transition, and the closure of Hazelwood Power Station in particular. We introduce the concept of "extractive meaning" to understand and theorise the way that narratives are evoked by government and coal-related corporations that use the structures of collective memory and oral history, but that appear to be more akin to practices that seek to codify, confine, and strip popular and local experience of its meaning. Regional memory and oral history are blanketed under a powerful set of discourses. In this exploratory analysis, we contend that in this version of regional restructuring neo-liberalism is given full rein, history and heritage are in flux with strong Government and corporate direction to assist current policy priorities, even whilst dissonant elements of a vernacular interpretation of regional changes are still discernible.
