|
|
|
Book Review
| Terry Irving & Lucy Taksa, Places, Protests, and Memorabilia: the Labour Heritage Register of New South Wales, Industrial Relations Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2002. pp. xvi + 197. $30 paper;Jeff Sparrow & Jill Sparrow, Radical Melbourne: a Secret History, Vulgar Press, Melbourne, 2001. pp. 220. $44.95 paper.
|
| These two publications can be considered as labour history's pioneering forays into the heritage business. Each approaches the task differently. Terry Irving and Lucy Taksa have been the most ambitious. As the subtitle of their Places, Protests and Memorabilia indicates, their project has been to create a labour heritage register for New South Wales. This register has three parts: a list of moveable cultural heritage items; a list of sites of working-class housing, leisure and work; and a sequence of lists of 'labour precincts'. The information about items in each of the lists is simple, brief and disappointingly dry. It could not be otherwise in a register. |
1
|
|
In the first part, the list of moveable cultural heritage items related to labour history covers armbands, badges, banners, books, leaflets, newspapers, pamphlets, photographs, posters, ribbons, rule books, theatre programs etc. It was compiled from the responses to an appeal made to labour organisations and individuals and is the most unsatisfactory section of the register. It is clear from the relatively small number of custodians identified here that the moveable cultural heritage listed is likely to be but a tiny fraction of a rich resource residing in private collections. The book includes a further appeal for help in filling gaps in the register and this may flush out more treasures but the list also needs some analysis, some assessment of the breadth and depth of its coverage, some identification of its weaknesses. In their notes on 'how to use the register' the authors suggest that we would turn to the moveable heritage list if we were 'putting together an exhibition of union rule-books' or wanting 'to swap badges'. This suggestion seems to trivialise the material and sits uncomfortably with the authors' call for the creation of museums of labour history to preserve the artefacts associated with the labour movement. In that case we need to start preparing the foundations for collection development policies, eg developing bibliographic tools and curatorial questions. We need to identify types of 'memorabilia' that are not well represented in the current list and lay plans to locate them. Where, for example, are the silk-screened calico 'vests' that I remember wearing, courtesy of the CPA (or WILPF?), on anti-nuclear protests in the 1970s? They were worn by at least two 'generations' of activists because they predate the 70s; they are shown in Evelyn Healy's 1962 watercolour 'Suburban Peace March'. |
2
|
|
The second section of the register, the list of sites of working-class housing, leisure and work, is arranged alphabetically by suburbs and towns and was extracted from a survey of local government heritage studies. Inevitably the list reflects the uneven coverage of those studies. Public historians who have been engaged in the heritage industry for any length of time might be sceptical of the methodology used to compile the list; heritage studies have a poor track record when it comes to the identification of industrial sites let alone when it comes to identifying sites of working-class political activity. Labour historians will almost certainly want to add many places to this list. |
3
|
|
The third part of the register, the sequence of labour precinct lists, is the section closest to the authors' hearts. For this section they 'went back to the historical records of the labour movement between the late 1880s and the late 1970s, to make a list of sites that were associated, for a shorter or longer period, with labour organising and education'. Central to their project is the idea that labour heritage 'revolves around people, their connections and activities' as distinct from industrial heritage which most often relates to buildings and machinery. The two might sometimes share spaces but for Irving and Taksa the essence of labour heritage refers to the role played by the labour movement in developing citizenship among Australian workers. They argue that 'the trade unions especially, but also the social, political and cultural organisations of labour, have the longest and broadest record of inducting people into the routines of democratic citizenship of any voluntary organisation in the modern state'. They fear that the decline in industrial unionism will weaken the labour movement tradition of active and critical citizenship and they hope that an active appreciation of labour heritage can pick up some of the slack and stimulate the active citizenship that the labour movement has historically engendered. |
4
|
|
Irving and Taksa present the register as a source for historical research. There is plenty of scope for expanding the source itself as Bob Gould has already shown in his review of the book for The Hummer, the publication of the Sydney Branch of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History. The other form of response to the register requires labour historians to bring the qualities of historical imagination and understanding to the sources and take up the task of re-populating the labour precincts by retrieving their stories. |
5
|
|
This is more or less what Jeff and Jill Sparrow have set out to do in their book Radical Melbourne: a Secret History. They have a list of places, presented in the form of a walking tour: 50 short narratives linked to places within the Melbourne CBD, arranged geographically. The authors have chosen to limit the scope of their inquiry to the first 100 years of political radicalism in Melbourne and to concentrate on structures, streets and public spaces that still exist. The arbitrary number of 50 sites was selected as 'sufficient to provide an overview of the diverse forms in which protest and resistance have manifested at various times within the city'. |
6
|
|
The list includes buildings used by organisations like the Communist Party, the Melbourne Anarchist Club, the IWW, the Victorian Socialist League, the Unemployed Workers Movement, the Matteotti Club, and the Workers Art Club. Several of these organisations occupied premises in or near Chinatown in Little Bourke Street, taking advantage of cheap rents and thus forming a precinct of radical activity. The tour also includes places of power and privilege such as the Melbourne Club, the old City Court, and Parliament House where protesters have from time to time assembled to challenge that power and privilege. Other places on the tour fall into neither of these categories of radical precinct or place of privilege. These are really the places with a 'secret' history. The Sparrows use the notion of 'places with secrets' as a springboard for the imagination. Thus we are asked to look beyond the current incarnation of 201 Bourke Street as a KFC outlet and re-imagine the place at the time when it played host to Andrade's radical bookshop. When the story about a place is strong and the voice is clear we can make this leap but at some stops on the tour our imagination falters — sometimes through a lack of immediacy in the storytelling, sometimes stymied by an overly intrusive 'party line'. |
7
|
|
The geographical arrangement and the priority given to 'identifying the physical traces of radical Melbourne' was determined by the authors' hope that 'geographical familiarity will provide a bridge between the struggles of the past and the people of the present'. In this hope they share a commitment to the active value of labour heritage that is espoused by Irving and Taksa. |
8
|
|
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|