"There needs to be something there for people to remember" : Industrial heritage in Newcastle and the Hunter Valley, Australia
- Authors: Eklund, Erik
- Date: 2018
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Industrial Heritage and Regional Identities (Routledge Cultural Heritage and Tourism Series) Chapter 8 p. 168-189
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- Description: Newcastle is located on the east coast of Australia in the state of New South Wales (NSW). Coal mining began in the early 19th centrury, and from the 1850s encouraged the development of pit-top towns gathered around an increasingly busy river port. Coal mining shifted west into the Hunter Valley where there are still vast amounts of open pit coal production. Mining also encouraged industrial development in engineering, transport and, from 1915, iron and steel production. Deindustrialization in Newcastle dates from the mid-1970s and plant closures accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s as the steel works and other related manufacturing industries closed down.
'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 'program of such potential' : The Australian Assistance Plan
- Authors: Scott, Joanne , Oppenheimer, Melanie , Eklund, Erik
- Date: 2018
- Type: Book chapter , Text
- Relation: The state of welfare : comparative studies of the welfare state at the end of the long boom, 1965-1980 Chapter 5 p. 85-104
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- Description: The Australian Assistance Plan (AAP) was an innovative programme of social welfare reform. Foreshadowed in the late 1960s, launched in 1973, and abolished in 1977, it was the subject of substantial commentary during and immediately after its brief existence. Attracting more brickbats than bouquets, the AAP was variously described as ‘a feasible and indeed exciting approach’, ‘the most random of random experiments’, ‘welfare on the cheap’, ‘a confusing program’ and ‘good news’.2 In contrast to other major initiatives of the Whitlam Labor government, it has attracted almost no scholarly analysis since the 1970s.
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:
A post-carbon future? Narratives of change and identity in the Latrobe Valley, Australia
- Authors: Holm, Antoinette , Eklund, Erik
- Date: 2018
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: BIOS - Journal of Biographical Research, Oral History and Life Course Analysis Vol. 2, no. (2018), p. 67-79
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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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Afterword: Voice and agency from the geographical and academic edge
- Authors: Eklund, Erik
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Educational Researchers and the Regional University Afterword p. 215-16
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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.
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.
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.
Creating a global industry? geology, capital, and company formation on the goldfields of the industrial age
- Authors: Eklund, Erik
- Date: 2018
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: A Global History of Gold Rushes (part of the California World History Library series) Chapter 8 p. 184-205
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- Description: Gold was a precious metal, a commodity, a currency, and a powerful force encouraging globalization. The appeal of gold and its identification as a precious and valuable metal have been near universal—ranging across time, cultures, and empires. Gold provided a common tradable currency enabling international trade and commerce. By the late nineteenth century its importance was such that a gold standard was introduced, which pegged the value of different currencies to an ounce of gold. The financial gold standard operated on and off for the next one hundred years, but the term gold standard has remained in the English language as a way to describe best practice or a thing of high value.
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
Forum : Industrial sites and immigrant architectures. A case study approach
- Authors: Pieris, Anoma , Lozanovska, Mirjana , Dellios, Alexandra , Miller-Yeaman, Renee , Eklund, Erik , Beynon, David , Tuffin, Richard
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Fabrications Vol. 29, no. 2 (2019), p. 257-272
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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.
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.
Industrial heritage agents, actors and outcomes : regional case studies from Broken Hill and the Latrobe Valley
- Authors: Eklund, Erik , Holm, Antoinette , Reeves, Keir
- Date: 2021
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Australian Studies Vol. 45, no. 4 (2021), p. 524-542
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- Description: This article considers the comparative standing of industrial heritage in two distinctive Australian regional contexts. With a focus on the agents and actors in the heritage-making process, we outline the development of a case for heritage in the mining town of Broken Hill in far western New South Wales, which gained momentum soon after the local mines began a steady decline in the early 1970s. Broken Hill has, to some extent, adapted its mining and labour heritage to form a viable element of the town’s current identity and economic base, especially by seeing those individual sites as part of a heritage landscape. We also consider industrial heritage in the Latrobe Valley in Victoria, a brown coal mining and electricity-generation hub where industrial and mining employment has declined much more recently. Reflecting on these changing political policies and industry privatisation in the early 1990s, we examine the impact on industrial heritage in a region typified by mining and power generation. © 2021 International Australian Studies Association.
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.
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"