Steel Town
The Making and Breaking of Port Kembla
The story of Port Kembla illuminates our understanding of the processes of industrial and social change.
Awards
Winner of 2003 NSW Premier's History Awards--Community and Regional History Prize.
Opinion
A 'superb study . . . Eklund elevates the study of labour and locality in Australia to a new level of sophistication and subtlety.' He 'demonstrates quite brilliantly what can be achieved by taking space not as a geographical given but as the contested field on which social relations of work are played . . . both unapologetically theoretical in approach and readable to boot.' (Labour History, (87) 2003: 266-8).
Steel Town 'may become a touchstone for those who explore locality elsewhere in Australia.' (Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, (89) 2003: 191-3.)
About this Title
The sun moves across the narrow coastal plain that borders the range to the north . . . It shows once separate places now merged into one suburban entity, a ribbon of residential, commercial and industrial development . . . There is a commercial centre whose tall metallic and glass structures reflect the light, and celebrate an industrial heritage. And to the south, an area where a mass of industrial buildings converge around a large harbour. This area stands as a telling symbol of the regions's golden industrial age.
To most Australians Port Kembla is a grimy, polluted, industrial wasteland located down the coast from Sydney. Such images were formed over fifty years ago when industrial development in the town was at its height, and when the expanse of breathtaking coast had been colonised by the stacks and furnaces of heavy industry.
Yet the vision of stacks and pollution from furnaces was never the whole story--there was always more to Port Kembla. Although these ideas persist even today, they obscure the real experiences of the people of the port.
Steel Town illuminates our understanding of the processes of industrial and social change. Port Kembla was unique in Australian terms--an urban environment where industrial society shaped local life and politics like nowhere else. This book explores the advent and implications of industrial society--and the impact of economic decline and deindustrialisation.
In his comprehensive and persuasive account of local life Erik Eklund draws together themes of migration, gender, class and identity. Using archival records, oral history interviews and company documents, Steel Town charts the relationship between economic change and the human experience of that change.
The story of Port Kembla is the story of the 'big issues' of Australian history writ small on the lives of three generations of local people.
The legacy of industrial society is a mixed one; its experiences and consequences are full of contradictions. And that, of course, is the beauty of history.
Table of Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Conversions
Introduction
1 Port Kembla: The Global and the Local
2 The Formal Economy to 1940
3 The Informal Economy to 1940
4 The Structures of Locality, 1900 to 1920
5 Class, Locality and Politics, 1900 to 1930
6 Kooris and Port Kembla, to the 1970s
7 The Challenges to Locality, 1890 to 1947
8 Industrial Society Supreme, 1945 to 1970
9 The Dissolution of Industrial Society? 1970 Onwards
Conclusion
Notes
Select Bibliography
Indexa
About the Author
Erik Eklund is a lecturer in Australian History at the University of Newcastle.
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