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Book Review
| Erik Eklund, Steel Town: the Making and Breaking of Port Kembla, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2002. pp. xii + 236. $39.95 cloth.
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| In 1942 Commonwealth authorities removed a group of Aboriginal families from their living space on Hill 60 overlooking the steel works, smelters and wharves of Port Kembla as part of defensive preparations for an anticipated Japanese attack on the nation's industrial heartland. The attack, of course, never eventuated, but the forced relocation is emblematic of the many collisions of socio-spatial scales and meanings that are documented in this superb study by labour and social historian, Erik Eklund. On that day in 1942, Hill 60 was the site of a simultaneous clash between Koori space and European space and between the global and the local. In the town itself, other socio-spatial tensions were also being acted out: between male space and women's; between bosses' space and workers'; between locality and region. These spatial frontiers and fracture lines are the stuff of Eklund's study. |
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Taking the tension between the local and the regional as his central organising theme, and choosing 1900 as his point of departure, the author takes the reader on a remarkable and at times immensely poignant journey through the consolidation, hegemony and decline of industrial society in Port Kembla; a century-long process in which local class, gender and race relations were played out in at times quite paradoxical and unpredictable ways. The argument, in essence, is that during its years of emergence and consolidation (1900–40) industrialism occupied an uneasy coexistence with local outlook and sentiment. The 1920s marked the apogee of a cross-class localism embraced by local workers and the local petit-bourgeoisie and underpinned by the paternalist style of the local management elite at the then dominant industrial site, the Electrolytic Refining and Smelting Company, established in 1907. The opening of the Hoskins-owned Australian Iron and Steel Company Limited plant in 1928, the infusion of American management techniques following its takeover by BHP in 1935, and the privations of the Great Depression unravelled the localist compact, while the post-war boom, mass migration and the transport and administrative consolidation of the 1940s and 1950s saw regionalism emerge triumphant. The subsequent process of deindustrialisation, argues Eklund, has done little to reverse the decline of local identity. |
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Yet such a bald summary hardly does justice to the book's sophisticated structure or to its subtlety — for here is text which is both unapologetically theoretical and thematic in approach and readable to boot. At the conceptual level, Eklund's approach, like that of others working in the genre, is strongly influenced by the work of Marxist and feminist economic geographers, particularly Doreen Massey and David Harvey. The text opens with a chapter overviewing the influence of global economic forces in the shaping of industrial society within the locality down to the mid-century. Along with the vagaries of global demand for copper, iron and steel, the flow of capital, technology, management ideas, and labour, first from Britain, then from the United States, provided the crucial backdrop to developments at the local scale. From 1945, the existing local Anglo-Celtic social formation was transformed utterly by mass migration from continental Europe. Here, as elsewhere, we are reminded that the local, the regional and global are not mutually exclusive or arranged in some inevitable evolutionary sequence; rather, they are in constant interplay and contestation. The local, like the global, is ever-present; at times dominant; at others, overshadowed by forces operating on a wider scale. |
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Four thematic chapters dealing with the era of industrial consolidation follow: one on the town's formal (ie waged, predominantly masculinised) economy to 1940; a second on the informal (ie non-waged, casual, chiefly feminised) economy (in my view one of the most perceptive chapters in the book); a third on the patterns and structures of local residency and social relations; and a fourth dealing with the dance of class and local politics to 1930. The Koori experience is considered in a separate chapter which quite legitimately transects the periodisation applied to the white experience. The final three chapters consider the long-term challenges to locality (including transportation, labour mobility and local government consolidation), the post-war supremacy of industrial society, and its disintegration over the past three decades. |
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One of the great challenges of the historian's craft, of course, is striking a meaningful balance between narrative and theme and, while the book's privileging of theme is certainly to be welcomed, the treatment is to my mind a little uneven at times. In particular, the discussion of role of Labor and anti-Labor party politics in local affairs in the 1910s and 1920s is less than satisfying, while the account of working-class mobilisation and militancy post-1935 deserves a more generous consideration (or am I just being old-fashioned here?). Similarly, we learn very little about local social and political relations during the two world wars, despite the obvious effects of war economy on the locality. I would also have liked more on the role of religion and sectarianism in local affairs, especially between the conscription referenda of 1916–17 and the Great Depression. More attention might also have been paid to the nature and impact of 'unionateness' in the locality (al la the work of British geographer Jane Wills). For instance, one is left wondering what organic links may have existed between the earliest unions in the area (the United Labourers, Coalminers, and the Waterside Workers) and the later unions (especially the Ironworkers). In the absence of supplementary detail, the uninitiated reader might also find it more than a little difficult to follow the twists and turns in the internal politics of the Federated Ironworkers Association during the Cold War. As to sins of commission, some readers may also wish to take issue with the author's contention that Port Kembla was the first Australian town whose origins and growth was linked solely to the process of industrialisation (p. 2). |
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Yet these things detract only marginally from the book's undoubted qualities. Eklund's work elevates the study of labour and locality in Australia to a new level of sophistication and subtlety. It also has the added bonus of being crafted in a prose style that is easy on the senses. While the text draws on an impressive range of documentary sources, the author's careful invocation of oral testimony enlivens and enriches the account. There are also occasional references to his own family's experiences of local life and labour extending back to the locality's first years of urban-industrial development. Indeed, the author's own formative years were spent in Port Kembla so, in a very real sense, this is also a personal narrative. And we are all the richer for his having shared it with us. |
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For space cadets, the book is a must; for the unconverted it demonstrates quite brilliantly what can be achieved by taking space not as a geographical given but as the contested field on which the social relations of work are played out. |
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| University of Sydney |
JOHN SHIELDS | |
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