'Do you love the town you live in?' : narratives of place from Australian mining towns
- Authors: Eklund, Antoinette , Eklund, Erik
- Date: 2008
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences Vol. 3, no. 7 (2008), p. 53-58
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- Description: This article combines the authors' disciplinary locations in history and literary studies, exploring personal narratives as revealed in oral history from residents of Australian mining towns. These narratives operate as a kind of counter or vernacular history, presenting hidden stories not well represented in Australian national history and culture. We argue that regional vernacular knowledge, borne of local experience and culture some distance from the major cities, is somewhat difficult to access through predominantly city-based, profesional academic networks.
10 June 1931. Never again? The Great Depression changed a generation
- Authors: Eklund, Erik
- Date: 2008
- Type: Text
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A Living history of Fort Scratchley
- Authors: McIntyre, Julie , Eklund, Erik
- Date: 2008
- Type: Text , Book
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- Description: Fort Scratchley has many layers of history. The fort site was part of the lore of the Awabakal people & the site of Newcastles early convict-dug coal mines. It was a major coastal defence installation until its decommissioning in 1972. - See more at:
David Oldroyd, Estates, Enterprise and Inventment at the Dawn of the Industrial Revolution : Estate Management and Accounting in the North-East of England c.1700-1780
- Authors: Eklund, Erik
- Date: 2008
- Type: Text
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- Description: Book Review
Deeper Leads : New Approaches to Victorian Goldfields History
- Authors: Eklund, Erik
- Date: 2009
- Type: Text
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- Description: Book Review
Interview techniques in three different research scenarios
- Authors: Caprioni, Elena , Deiana, Manuela , Eklund, Erik
- Date: 2009
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences Vol. 4 , no. 7 (2009), p. 1-10
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- Description: This paper explores interviewing techniques in the three specific contexts separated in time and space. Manuela Deiana is utilising interview techniques to study Moroccan armed resisters during the colonial period between 1953 and 1956. Elena Caprioni is using field work and interview techniques for research on ethnic relations between Uyghurs and Han in China’s Xinjiang province, while Erik Eklund is interviewing residents in Australian mining towns about their family and community histories.
The hidden proletarian past of Canberra
- Authors: Bollard, Robert , Eklund, Erik
- Date: 2009
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Labour History for the New Century p. 103-110
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Herbert Vere Evatt, The Tolpuddle Martyrs : Injustice Within the Law
- Authors: Eklund, Erik
- Date: 2010
- Type: Text , Book review
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- Description: Book Review- Herbert Vere Evatt, The Tolpuddle Martyrs: Injustice within the Law, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 2009 (first published 1937). pp. xxi + 104. $25.00 paper Herb 'Doc' Evatt, is perhaps best known for his role in forging the United Nations, defending the Communist Party in the High Court, and for his failure to win office during his term as Labor leader (1951-60). The extent of Evatt's legal and historical scholarship is often overlooked. This new edition of his 1937 book, The Tolpuddle Martyrs, is a timely reminder of the brilliant and energetic intellect behind Evatt's more public activities. In 1834, in the midst of concerns over the rising tide of trade union and reform activity, six labourers from Dorset were charged under the 1797 Illegal Oaths Act and sentenced to seven years transportation to the Australian colonies.
Broken Hill: rethinking the significance of the material culture and intangible heritage of the Australian labour movement
- Authors: Reeves, Keir , Eklund, Erik , Reeves, Andrew , Scates, Bruce , Peel, Victoria
- Date: 2011
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: International Journal of Heritage Studies Vol. 17, no. 4 (2011), p. 301-317
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- Description: Taking Broken Hill as an exemplar of Australian, indeed global, labour heritage, this article, analyses the survival of labour heritage and union practices in the town that continues to the present. It examines the interpretation of successive layers of industrial and labour history as a means of revealing a culturally dynamic and enduring community with close connections to its built heritage. The authors challenge the application of two-dimensional and static models of heritage interpretations too often applied to contested heritage sites. The authors argue that Broken Hill is a community whose determined social and industrial character and distinct built environment has transcended changing patterns of investment and economic decline.
Representing militancy: photographs of the Broken Hill industrial disputes, 1908-20
- Authors: Adams, Paul , Eklund, Erik
- Date: 2011
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Labour History Vol. 101, no. (2011), p. 1-34
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- Description: The Big Strike of 1919-20 was Broken Hill’s greatest industrial battle but the photographic record of this militant era on the Barrier mines is dominated by pictures of the Great 1909 Lockout. Rather than cover the details of these well-known disputes, this article considers the value and power of photographs of the disputes – their presence, absence, production and presentation in major newspapers and in postcards – an area which has secured far less attention from Australian labour historians. Our concern is not only to read this visual material as evidence of industrial disputes but also to consider how the widespread circulation of such images affected contemporary perceptions of The Hill. We argue that images of a militant locality with a determined labour movement, popular after the 1909 dispute, may well have attracted militant organisers to the town who were important players in the major 1919-20 Big Strike. These images have dominated perceptions of Broken Hill as a bastion of unionism ever since
The margin as a centre: Memory and identity in Broken Hill and Mount Isa
- Authors: Eklund, Erik
- Date: 2011
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Outside country: histories of inland Chapter 16 p. 311-331
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Australian convict sites and the heritage of adaption: The case of Newcastle's Coal River heritage precinct
- Authors: Roberts, David , Eklund, Erik
- Date: 2012
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Australian Historical Studies Vol. 43, no. 3 (2012), p. 363-380
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- Description: The Australian Government's successful nomination of eleven ‘convict sites’ for World Heritage listing has again highlighted complex relationships between history and heritage. This article considers one convict site excluded from the nomination—the Coal River Heritage Precinct in the heart of Newcastle (NSW). While the site falls short of fulfilling conventional heritage criteria, the material remains having been so seriously eroded, its historical significance is nonetheless considerable. In fact, its significance lies in what has been destroyed, as much as in what has survived, because the site evidences a process of adaptation and transformation over time. This theme of adaptation, we argue, is an instructive reflection of the legacies of Australia's convict past, but is not so well embodied by the successfully-nominated convict sites. Drawing on the lessons from this particular case study, we suggest that more progressive and adventurous approaches may be needed to adequately reflect the historical significance of Australia's convict inheritance.
Mining Towns: Making a Living, Making a Life
- Authors: Eklund, Erik
- Date: 2012
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- Description: At any given moment in our history Australia has been in the middle of a mining boom. This book is a history of iconic Australian towns that have emerged as a result of these booms: Broken Hill, Mount Isa, Queenstown, Mount Morgan, Port Pirie and Kambalda.
Company and labour loyalties in a Central Queensland gold mining town, 1882 to 1908
- Authors: Eklund, Erik
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Australasian Mining History Vol. 11 , no. (Oct 2013) (2013), p. 24-42
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- Description: In 1905 the famous British socialist Tom Mann conducted his extensive investigation of the state of union organisation of Australia and New Zealand. In the North Queensland goldmining towns of Charters Towers Mann found the movement at a 'low ebb', but at Mount Morgan in Central Queensland it was nonexistent. One man he met reported that he was a member of the Rockhampton branch of the carpenters 'but I don't know of any other member of any union in Mount Morgan'. At first glance it would seem that Mount Morgan offered little cause for celebration for the labour movement. The Mount Morgan Gold Mining Company, which owned and mined the great orebody, was a powerful force in local society as was the staff who occupied crucial senior positions in the firm. But on closer inspection, as this article shall detail below, it is possible to discern a 'labour interest' emerging from the political contests for the local electorate of 'Fitzroy' and in the move of local working class candidates into municipal politics.
The problem of belonging : Contested country in Australian local history
- Authors: Bongiorno, Frank , Eklund, Erik
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: New Scholar: An International Journal of the Humanities, Creative Arts and Social Sciences Vol. 3, no. 1 (2014), p. 39-54
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- Description: There is a moment in travel writer Bill Bryson’s account of his travels in Australia, Down Under, when he comments on the large number of local histories he encounters in second‐hand bookshops. They ‘never fail to amaze,’ he reports, ‘if only because they show you what a remarkably self‐absorbed people the Australians are. I don’t mean that as a criticism. If the rest of the world is going to pay them no attention, then they must do it themselves surely.’ He continues: ‘There were hundreds of books ... about things that could never possibly have been of interest to more than a handful of people. It’s quite encouraging that these books exist, but somehow faintly worrying as well.’ Bryson doesn’t explain any further why it worries him, but he then goes on to review with genuine admiration a book he found among these volumes (126‐127).
Afterword
- Authors: Eklund, Erik , Fenley, Julie
- Date: 2015
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Earth and Industry: Stories from Gippsland p. 314-318
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Historical cultures of labour under conditions of deindustrialization, first conference of the European Labour History Network, Turin, 14-16 December 2015
- Authors: Wicke, Christian , Eklund, Erik
- Date: 2015
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: History Workshop Journal Vol. 82, no. 1 (2015), p. 293-298
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- Description: Deindustrialization is a global phenomenon but its effects have been more intense in some regions than others. The post-industrial age as heralded by Daniel Bell and Alain Touraine is possibly yet to come, but the widespread historical transformations societies have faced already in the second half of the twentieth century, in the course of often localized deindustrialization processes, deserve further attention. The history of deindustrialization is not only an economic history, it is also fundamentally political and cultural and has attracted an increasingly multidisciplinary scholarship in recent years. Prominent scholars in North America, the United Kingdom and Australia such as, for example, Steven High, Sherry Lee Linkon, Tim Strangleman and Laurajane Smith have emphasized the cultural dimension of deindustrialization and shown how representations of collective identity and memory have been transformed under such conditions. Contemporary ‘historical culture’, that is, ‘the practical articulation of historical consciousness’ (Jörn Rüsen) has been shaped in various ways by the historicization of the industrial past. The most illustrative example of such representation since the 1960s has been the construction and maintenance of ‘industrial heritage’ which, according to the International Committee for the Conservation of Industrial Heritage, ‘consists of the remains of industrial culture which are of historical, technological, social, architectural or scientific value’. The most paradigmatic region in Europe, where ‘industrial heritage’ has become an ‘authorized’ (though not uncontested) heritage discourse, is the Ruhr in Germany. And this is where the initiative for the foundation of a new network on the history of deindustrialization has begun.
Introduction : Earth and Industry Stories from Gippsland
- Authors: Eklund, Erik , Fenley, Julie
- Date: 2015
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Earth and Industry Stories from Gippsland p.
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- Description: There is a large part of south-east Australia which has a fascinating history that deserves a wider audience. This collection explores the theme of the region's environmental history, and in particular how societies related to it and perceived it over time. Looking through the lens of multiple authors as well as different industries, locations and perspectives, we build up a picture of a complicated relationship to the natural world, which changes over time. The collection starts from the premise that history can tell us much about our evolving relationships to the earth and its ecosystems. We consider the tensions which exist between the earth - by which we mean the natural environment in its broadest sense - and human industry, highlighting the complex and diverse historical relationships between society and the environment. The term 'industry' refers in this context to the ways of earning a living that were established in the region from mining through to pastoralism and fishing, but industry can also be an adjective, referring to the act:iVe way in whichpeople engaged with their environments. The Gippsland region in south-east ictoria, with all its diversity and fascinating history, offers an ideal case study of this interaction between humans and their natural surroundings. "From introduction"
Mining in Australia : An historical survey of industry-community relationships
- Authors: Eklund, Erik
- Date: 2015
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: The Extractive Industries and Society Vol. 2, no. 1 (2015), p. 177-188
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- Description: The article sets out to provide an historical survey of the industry–community relationship in the Australian mining industry. The mining industry had a vital role in encouraging population growth, regional development, and industrial diversification. The relationship is understood through three key themes. Firstly, the industry–community relationship was underpinned by geology. Since ore was often found across large areas, mineral ‘regions’ developed. Secondly, the industry–community relationship was specific to particular places in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. Mining towns became very distinctive communities that shared economic and social characteristics. Thirdly, the industry–community relationship did not finish at the town limits. The history of the mining industry in Australia offers a strong case for exploring the effects of both global and local impacts. Communities were heavily influenced by local economic and geological realities but as the twentieth century progressed the close geographical relationship between industry and community began to disperse with wider regional and interstate effects. The article posits ‘community’ as a description of a geographically specific social formation, but this final theme moves towards seeing ‘community’ as a wider concept transcending place and geography.
Novocastrian involvement in the One Big Union
- Authors: Eklund, Erik , Belic, Peta
- Date: 2015
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Radical Newcastle p.
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- Description: The Star Hotel in Newcastle has become a site of defiance for the marginalized young and dispossessed working class. To understand the whole story of the Star Hotel riot, it should be seen in the context of other moments of resistance such as the 1890 Maritime Strike, Rothbury miners lockout in 1929 and the recent battle for the Laman Street fig trees. As Australias first industrial city, Newcastle is also a natural home of radicalism but until now, the stories, which reveal its breadth and impact, have remained untold. Radical Newcastle brings together short illustrated essays from leading scholars, local historians, and present-day radicals to document both the iconic events of the regions radical past, and less well-known actions seeking social justice for workers, women, Aboriginal people, and the environment.