Digging People Up for Coal
A History of Yallourn
This book is about the birth, life and loss of a community.
Awards
Shortlisted for the NSW Premier's History Awards, Community and Regional History Prize 2002
Opinion
'Meredith Fletcher's story of a town obliterated is a particularly important contribution to local history. Incisive and accessible, it covers the ideologies that influenced the creation and destruction of the town, conveys a sense of what it was like to live there, and elaborates the commemorative mythologies that have flourished since its demise. (The Age, 2 March 2002)
'Based on extensive oral, library and archival research, Meredith Fletcher's elegantly written study tells the story of Yallourn's rise and demise. (The Australian, 6 March 2002)
About this Title
. . . a dramatic account of Australia's most astounding urban story. Professor Tom Stannage
This book is about the birth, life and loss of a community.
Yallourn was designed in the 1920s as a garden town laid out on 'hygienic and aesthetic principles'. It became a thriving and close-knit community, home to several generations of State Electricity Commission workers and their families.
By the 1960s, however, the town was surplus to requirements. It had become an 'area' to be 'cleared'. The Save Yallourn Campaign was long and bitterly fought, but the residents' efforts were in vain.
Meredith Fletcher brings to life a community that still exists vividly in memory and imagination. She looks at the intense grief people feel for lost places, and at the creativity that grief can release.
Digging People Up for Coal is the first book to examine the process of deconstruction, demolition and detachment of an Australian town. In resurrecting Yallourn from the depths of the open cut, it both celebrates and mourns a lost community.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Genealogy
2 Building a Garden City in Gippsland
3 Living and Working in the Machine
4 Control and Resistance
5 Legitimate Dissatisfaction
6 Fabricating and Prefabricating the Postwar Landscape
7 Dismantling a Garden City
8 Yallourn as a Brigadoon
Epilogue
Abbreviations, Conversions
Notes
Select Sources
Index
About the Author
Dr Meredith Fletcher is Director of the Centre for Gippsland Studies at Monash University's Gippsland Campus. Her books include Avon to the Alps: A History of the Shire of Avon (1988) and Strathfieldsaye, A History and Guide (1992) and she is the editor of the innovative Gippsland Heritage Journal.
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