Book Review

The Wollongong region has a special appeal for labour historians. Whatever our tastes may be—unions, industrial relations, occupational health and safety, working class politics, multiculturalism—the region has something to offer.	1
The editors of A History of Work and Community in Wollongong avoid the confusion that surrounds the concept of community by use of the qualifier 'workforce'. While people form a range of personal and formal relationships in the workplace and in their villages or suburbs (through churches, clubs and sporting bodies), they do not form a workforce community until they identify a threat to their livelihood and act collectively to protect themselves. The personal and formal relationships are necessary parts of a workforce community, but the threat is the crucial ingredient. It consolidates common values and priorities and binds both men and women. Workforce communities are unforgiving of those who did not conform, particularly during industrial disputes, but they offer their members a sense of belonging, support in hours of need, and, through well practiced codes of behaviour, a certain amount of beneficial social control.	2
Contributors to this book have written about coal mining and dairying workforce communities. The broad outlines of the former have been sketched before, but the material presented here adds considerably to our understanding of how such communities evolved and eventually declined. The social systems that are coal-mining workforce communities, and the industrial disputes and political action for which they are famous, are shown to be more complex than might be inferred from analyses that rest entirely on the idea of class warfare.	3
To my mind, the treatment of dairy farming workforce communities is more impressive. At one level the common threat for the mining workforce communities was market forces. More directly it was the local representatives of market forces, the mine managers. Dairying workforce communities were in a similar position, in their case market forces being represented by middleman. But whereas the impact of market forces on coal mining ebbed and flowed, dairy farmers seem to have been under almost constant pressure. Only labor governments conscientiously tried to help them, yet the inhabitants of these dairying workforce communities could never bring themselves to vote enthusiastically for Labor candidates. There are other ironies. The dairy farmers were wedded to individualism and to making their own way in life, yet they were forced to establish cooperatives and to adopt other forms of collective action. Labour historians have not shown much interest in workers outside of unions or urban areas, despite the fact that Labor Parties once had strong support in some rural electorates and, in New South Wales at least, did far more than their political rivals to help small farmers and graziers. It is heartening to see Hagan, Lee and others discussing this ambivalent relationship between small rural entrepreneurs and political Labor. Labour history can surely extend to studies of industrial subcultures and the ideologies they generate.	4
Both the mining and the dairying workforce communities disappeared after World War II under the disintegrating forces of sustained prosperity, population growth, the new mass consumerism and technological change. The Port Kembla steelworks began a period of expansion in the late 1930s that continued throughout the long post-war boom. Labour attracted to Port Kembla, or directed there under Commonwealth migration schemes, needed housing. New suburbs developed in dairying areas and dairying was pushed to the southern most portions of the region. Postwar technological change progressively reduced employment in the industry. The coal mining workforce communities lasted longer, buoyed by the expanding steelworks and by Japanese demand for coal, but they, also, were undermined by technological change. Employment in mines fell, at first relatively and then absolutely. Mining villages, too, disappeared and the remaining miners and their families were dispersed among the suburbs of greater Wollongong.	5
Workforce communities of steel workers and their families never replaced what was lost. While the steel workers were involved in industrial disputes and Labor politics, they were also scattered, to a greater degree than the miners, throughout Wollongong's suburb. Thus they were unable to reproduce the texture of workforce community life, especially in times when market forces tended to favour them. Their motor cars and their TVs gave them an opportunity to escape from their surrounds that the inhabitants of coal mining and dairying workforce communities never had. In the 1980s, the steelworks experienced hard times and unemployment levels in the Wollongong region reached disastrous heights. Even then, the old workforce community remained a distant memory.	6
The obvious virtue of a History of Work and Community in Wollongong is that it adds new dimensions to the history of a region that has already attracted a good deal of attention from labour historians. Less obvious, but more important, is the contribution it makes to Australian historiography. Sir Keith Hancock often said that local historians should relate the parish pump to the cosmos. Hagan, Lee and the other contributors have come close to meeting this demanding requirement. Their extensive knowledge of life in the Wollongong region is placed in the broader context of a changing Australian society. Well-delineated connections between local events and national, at times international, developments are a testament to their skill and professionalism as historians. The result is a history that has far more than local significance.	7
Bywong, NSW JOHN MERRITT

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