Lucy Taksa

Machines and Ghosts : Politics, Industrial Heritage and the History of Working Life at the Eveleigh Workshops

Sydney's Eveleigh railway workshops operated for just over a century between the 1880s and the late 1980s when their railway operations were terminated. Since then Eveleigh has been recognised as one of Australia's important sites of industrial heritage. This paper examines the political, legal and administrative conditions that have shaped Eveleigh's adaptive re-use and heritage management. In doing so it highlights the processes by which industrial heritage is reduced to a narrow association with factory buildings, mechanical relics and technological history. At Eveleigh, I argue, this process is evident in the adoption of conservation strategies for its 'tangible' heritage and the failure to formulate and implement a comprehensive interpretation strategy, which could enhance popular understandings of the context in which Eveleigh's material culture was created and used, and also of its rich history of working life.

Introduction

The initiatives pioneered by the Green Ban movement and the Whitlam Labor Government during the early 1970s helped to raise public consciousness about the cultural significance and social value of Australia's labour and industrial heritage. Both left an enduring legacy still evident today in the continued existence of sites like the New South Wales (NSW) Eveleigh railway workshops in Sydney. The Bans imposed by the NSW Builders Labourers Federation and its members prevented large-scale developments in both urban and non-urban areas. They not only protected Sydney's inner-city suburbs of the Rocks, Woolloomooloo and Glebe, but also more generally encouraged popular appreciation of locales traditionally associated with working class people, as well as the houses in which they lived and the factories in which they pursued their livelihoods.¹ At the same time, the Whitlam Government's formal recognition that places of cultural heritage formed part of the National Estate, and its efforts to preserve them by legal regulation and administrative techniques, established the framework for heritage policies later adopted by State Governments.²

So how far have we come since those halcyon days of the 1970s? To what extent have the material vestiges of working life been preserved? What measures have been employed to define and assess the significance and value of industrial buildings and the artefacts contained in or associated with their use? Has attention been given to the context in which material culture was created and used, and its impact on everyday life and workers' identities, behaviours, customs, ideas and even memories? To what extent have such 'intangible' aspects of material culture been incorporated in conserved urban and industrial landscapes? Has heritage management provided public access to and enhanced popular understandings of what it was like to live in inner-city working class areas and to work in factories? Or has conservation simply led to the classification of 'industrial monuments' and what Iain Stuart calls 'object fetishism', which privileges technology over social history?³

I want to address these questions by focusing on the heritage management of the Eveleigh railway workshops. These workshops were among the largest and most advanced of their kind in Australia and they operated continuously for over a hundred years, becoming the 'heart of the NSW transport system' and the hub of a vibrant working class community whose members were renown for their industrial and political activism.⁴ The 62 and a quarter acre site occupied by the workshops was bought by the NSW Government in 1879 and it has remained in public ownership ever since. During the mid-1980s when it became clear that Eveleigh's industrial life was coming to an end, and after its operations were terminated in 1989, protecting its material culture became a cause celebre. Many heritage architects, engineers and administrators, historians, politicians, trade unions, and of course, those who once worked there and their families, mobilised to publicly express their concerns over Eveleigh's future. Their lobbying ensured that government funding was not limited to the site's redevelopment and adaptive re-use, but also extended to the conservation of its built fabric and its remaining machinery collection.

Eveleigh has been listed on Federal and State heritage registers.⁵ Since 1986 it has been the subject of nine heritage assessment reports and conservation management plans produced by or for the NSW Government. Mostly these have emphasised Eveleigh's architectural and technological significance.⁶ In addition, South Sydney Council's heritage study acknowledged the site's dominance of the surrounding localities and its impact on residential patterns.⁷ Such formal recognition has certainly helped to protect Eveleigh's more substantial buildings and its remaining machinery collection. In the early 1990s, most of its moveable heritage items were shifted into a couple of bays of the Locomotive workshops when this building was redeveloped as the Australian Technology Park (ATP). Their conservation was recently completed.

Such attention to Eveleigh's material culture has not, however, extended to its history. Funding for historical interpretation has been meagre in comparison with outlays on redevelopment and conservation and has only resulted in design concepts and plans that have been produced in a piecemeal fashion.⁸ Up to the present time no resources have been allocated for the formulation, let alone the implementation of a comprehensive interpretation strategy for the entire site. A few panels have been erected in the Locomotive workshops over the last few years to explain the more prominent machines and their functions, but these have been rough and sketchy. Trained historians have had no input into their production. In effect, Eveleigh's material culture has been disassociated from its social and labour history.

Overarching concern for the conservation of Eveleigh's 'tangible' industrial remains at the expense of attention to their 'intangible' social and cultural associations reflects the tension that exists between the fields of heritage and history all around the world.⁹ This tension has not been as successfully negotiated at Eveleigh as elsewhere in Australia or in other countries, where railway workshop buildings have been used to relate artefacts to the history of working life. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to explain the reasons for this difference, I refer to a few examples later in order to indicate what can be accomplished given sufficient interest and funding.

My main focus is on the local conditions that have influenced Eveleigh's adaptive re-use and the management of its heritage. To acquaint readers with the site I begin with an overview of its past operations and redevelopment. Both have, I argue, been dominated by an emphasis on technology. The importance of technology to Eveleigh's past significance has informed views about its heritage value and provided the rationale for conserving its built fabric and material culture. However, emphasis on these 'external forms' has not only been inspired by technology but as importantly by the politics of heritage management in this country. I use this term to refer to the interplay between a range of competing interests and the legal and administrative framework that guides assessments of significance. By identifying the nature of this phenomenon I provide a context for developments at Eveleigh. I then examine the production and reception of the Conservation Management Plan for Eveleigh's Moveable Items and Social History, as well as subsequent outcomes, to show how the politics of Eveleigh's heritage management has helped to privilege the material culture associated with technology.

This Report was commissioned by the government-owned City West Development Corporation (CWDC), the NSW State Rail Authority (SRA) and the NSW Department of Urban Affairs and Planning (DUAP). Godden Mackay heritage consultants were engaged to produce an Inventory of Eveleigh's machinery collection and they, in turn, hired my assistant, Joan Kent, and I to research and write a Social History, and also another consultant to develop options for interpretation. The project was conducted between November 1995 and July 1996 and managed by the NSW Department of Works and Services' (DW & S) Client Services Division. Progress reports were made to a Steering Committee composed of representatives from the above organisations and also the ATP and the NSW Heritage Office.¹⁰ Given my involvement, the following account is written from the perspective of a participant-observer.¹¹

There are three reasons why this Management Plan provides a valuable insight into the relationship between industrial heritage and the history of working life. First, it focuses attention on both tangible and intangible heritage. Second, it offers an opportunity to examine the way resources are allocated, outcomes are received and actions are taken to conserve and interpret heritage assets. Finally, it throws light on the nexus between technology and the politics of adaptive re-use because the ATP's aim to use the Locomotive workshops as a centre that would help to 'catapult Australian industries into world-leader class next century' necessarily affected the bays in which the industrial machinery was located, as much as the conservation of the collection.¹² This association between industrial heritage and technological advancement has produced a double subordination. Eveleigh's labour and social history has been submerged beneath the weight of the remaining industrial relics, which have themselves been transformed into sculptures that now form a backdrop for the latest information technologies being promoted by the ATP.

Background: History, Heritage and Redevelopment

Located four kilometres south of Sydney's Central Business District, the Eveleigh workshops are bisected by the main railway line between Parramatta and the Central Railway Station. Like the NSW railways, Eveleigh's operations and employees were managed by the NSW Department of Railways and Tramways. Clearing of the site began in 1880 and all major structures were completed in 1886. Full operations began the following year. From then on this place was used to build and overhaul railway rolling stock and locomotives, to manufacture various metal components and to upholster and paint train carriages. Eveleigh was 'a training centre for generations of skilled people who became the backbone of Australia's heavy engineering industry' and rail transport system. It provided employment for tens of thousands of workers not only from the surrounding inner-city or even outlying suburbs of Sydney, but from all over the country and all the corners of the globe. Its operations touched not only these lives but also the lives of hundreds of thousands of commuters.¹³

'1150 Men from the Loco Workshops, a unique group' Sydney Mail 27 September 1905, p. 803
Used with permission of State Library of NSW

Eveleigh's buildings and its operations reflected the grandeur and dominance of the steam era. During the 1930s, around 540 locomotives were overhauled there each year. Two decades later, when the spread of dieselisation challenged the power of steam, the site was transformed to accommodate this profound technological change. During the 1960s the Running Sheds used for steam locomotives were gradually demolished to make way for a new Maintenance Depot for air-conditioned diesel locomotives. Efforts to modernise the works were half-hearted and not well funded. By the time Eveleigh closed its doors, it was regarded as a technological backwater.¹⁴ From then until the present its 'evocative group of rambling buildings' has been a constant feature of Sydney's rapidly disappearing industrial landscape.¹⁵

Eveleigh's demise was prefigured by the organisational reforms that were introduced to the NSW railways in the early 1980s. These responded to the economic recession of the times, the railways' massive and long-standing public debt, and a growing acceptance of economic rationalism and market-driven policies, which promoted privatisation and commercialisation of the public sector and extensive retrenchments. Following its election in 1988, the Greiner Liberal/National Government actively pursued such policies and outcomes. To undertake a massive restructuring of the state railways, the Government employed Ross Sayers who had, as Chair of the New Zealand Railways, cut 5,000 jobs and reduced services. Eveleigh's doors closed a year later. By 1991 the NSW railway authority's total control over the site had come to an end.¹⁶

The first major change occurred in May of that year when the NSW Government announced its plan to help three of Sydney's universities establish an advanced technology park at Eveleigh.¹⁷ The Australian Technology Park, Sydney Ltd (ATP) was subsequently formed as a registered company with a Board including both university and industry representatives. Its goal was to nurture technological innovation in Eveleigh's two Locomotive workshop buildings. Because both had been formally designated as being of heritage value, the ATP was also given some responsibility for the conservation of their built fabric and the remaining moveable heritage artefacts contained in them. In 1995 control of these two buildings was transferred from the SRA to the CWDC, which assisted and supervised most development and conservation work performed by or under the auspices of the NSW D.W. & S. Later, ownership of the machinery was also reassigned.¹⁸ The ATP's occupation of the Locomotive workshops marked an important starting point for other changes to Eveleigh's southern portion.

While the SRA retained the nearby Maintenance Depot and the Large Erecting Shop, the Housing Commission obtained the remaining land on this side of the railway line, along with the Alexandria goods yards, for public housing. The Depot was and still is used for railway purposes, while the Large Erecting Shop was leased to 3801 Limited, a community-based organisation whose members restore heritage trains and run tours around NSW. Subsequently, the Power House Museum also began using this shop for its conservation work. By contrast, on the northern side of the railway line the SRA retained greater control for longer. Here the Carriage Wagon and Paint shops, the Stores and Chief Mechanical Engineers' Office, either continued to be used for railway purposes or were left vacant. During the late 1990s, some were leased to a range of private companies.¹⁹

Given the high real estate value of this northern 8.6-hectare portion of the site, it was only a matter of time before redevelopment was put on the agenda. During the late 1990s the SRA engaged the Snowy Mountains Engineering Corporation to consider possibilities for the future. While some stakeholders favoured a proposal to sell a large proportion of the land for a major residential complex, members of the public called for a museum or a heritage centre to be established here. In response to the latter and also the need to conserve and re-use the heritage-listed buildings in a sympathetic manner, the NSW Government announced its intention to establish a Transport Heritage Park on 7 March 2000.²⁰ Two years later, however, this proposal was abandoned. The Carriage and Wagon shops will now be used for an arts and theatre centre. At present this development is under the jurisdiction of the NSW Ministry for the Arts. The future of the Stores building, Paint shops and the Chief Mechanical Engineer's Office is unclear. In the meantime, ownership of the Locomotive workshops and management of the ATP was transferred to the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority (SHFA).²¹

The Government's lack of support for a museum at Eveleigh stands in stark contrast with developments elsewhere in Australia and in other countries. In the United Kingdom (UK), the United States of America (USA), the Netherlands, Germany and Sweden, governments, commercial enterprises, community groups and historians have participated in railway heritage projects that have used railway structures and artefacts to highlight the railways' contribution to national destinies, to culture and the texture of daily life in ways that are accessible to the public.²² Such projects illustrate the way material culture can be used to provide an insight into social relationships, attitudes and behaviours, which 'reflect, consciously and unconsciously, directly or indirectly, the beliefs of the individuals who made, commissioned, purchased, or used them and, by extension, the beliefs of the larger society to which they belonged'.²³

The mission of Pennsylvania's Altoona Railroaders Memorial Museum, located in what has been described as America's largest and most sophisticated railway workshops, 'is to honour railroad workers and their significant contribution to the ... railroad industry'. In 1988, the Museum 'became a co-operating partner in the American Industrial Heritage Project (AIHP)', which was initiated by a federally appointed commission to identify sites of 'national significance' and to seek out 'private non-profit agencies' to develop them.²⁴ This partnership provided funding for the preservation of the Pennsylvania Railroad's Master Mechanics building, an extensive historical research project on Altoona and a comprehensive interpretation plan 'for the education, enjoyment ad enrichment of present and future generations'. On this basis, the museum has been able to tell the story of those who were engaged in 'conceiving, building and running the transportation system that transformed a nation'.²⁵ Similarly, the California State Railroad Museum (CSRM) in Sacramento focuses on those who built the railways and the adjacent Sacramento locomotive workshops. It is currently planning to transform these mainly derelict workshops into a 'living industrial museum', where vocational programs in traditional trade skills will support the CSRM's conservation work and exhibits will explain labour and local history and not just railway and engineering operations.²⁶

Such efforts also extend to the UK where the STEAM museum was opened in 2000 at Swindon's Great Western Railway (GWR) workshops. Unlike the earlier examples, STEAM is a 'social history' museum with a railway theme. Located in a building that originally manufactured the wheels for the GWR locomotives, its aim is to interpret manufacturing processes and to tell the stories of the workshops and GWR staff.²⁷ Efforts to link conservation and interpretation are also evident in Australia. In Queensland, the State Government has contributed $15 million for the $20 million railway museum recently opened in the boiler shop of the Ipswich railway workshops, the rest of which remain in operation. In Western Australia, the State Government is currently developing a strategy for a cultural heritage centre at the railway workshops in Midland. Both initiatives are emphasising the importance of the workers' experiences and stories. Their focus is not simply on material culture but also working life.²⁸

These examples illustrate the way public and community interest and historical scholarship can be harnessed to enhance popular understanding of both tangible and intangible heritage. The absence of such outcomes at Eveleigh does not reflect a lack of interest or scholarship. Articles on the site's heritage, redevelopment and re-use, and its meaning for past workers have repeatedly appeared in the daily newspapers.²⁹ Over the last decade thousands of people have flocked to the site whenever Open Days have given them an opportunity to do so.³⁰ Although few scholars investigated Eveleigh's history in its own right prior to its closure, many recognised its role in their broader studies of the railways and industrial relations.³¹ From the late 1980s postgraduates began producing work on the significance of Eveleigh's built fabric and material culture, as well as its heritage management.³² Since 1996, its history has received more concerted attention.³³ Yet none of this extensive historical knowledge has been used to interpret Eveleigh's material culture or to recognise and celebrate its history of working life. The reason for this can, in my view, be found in the politics of heritage management. To effectively explain how this phenomenon has helped to subordinate Eveleigh's history of working life to the conservation of its material culture and technology, I want to begin by defining the 'politics of heritage management' and identifying the processes it involves.

The Politics of Heritage Management

Heritage is a political concept and a political practice. It promotes public rights and interests over private interests in and claims over property. The ownership and management of heritage assets involves a wide range of stakeholders whose interests often vary widely. Heritage and its management involves competition for land use and struggles for urban space, technological changes, legislation and regulatory procedures, and some degree of government funding.³⁴ Certainly communal attachments to places under threat of redevelopment have been expressed in debates and conflict regardless of whether the heritage assets are owned by government or private enterprises.³⁵ But public ownership has created its own set of issues in Australia, particularly in relation to industrial heritage. Government ownership of transport and industrial infrastructure, coupled with government involvement in regulating heritage, has ensured the preservation and re-use of many no longer operational industrial sites.³⁶ In a democracy like ours, public ownership also affects the way popular opinion is expressed, received and acted on by governments. Most people expect a greater degree of openness from the politicians and Ministers they lobby in pursuit of their claims, than say from private enterprises. Of course some governments are more receptive than others and at some times more than others, as is shown by protection of the Rocks and other such working class suburbs in Sydney, and the extensive public funding provided for heritage reports and conservation management plans in NSW.

In negotiating such political pressures and processes, governments have adopted heritage management practices that rely on the definition of clear criteria for assessing cultural significance. Colley makes two important points about this approach to heritage management. First, it 'presumes no particular outcome' other than a series of consecutive assessment procedures and such general goals as 'preserving cultural heritage' and 'educating the public'. Second, it 'implies a certain degree of mechanistic neutrality'. In fact, far from being neutral, assessments of significance involve competing interests, assumptions and methods. Who are the dominant players in this process? Although cultural significance and social value is usually predicated on the sentiments and attachments of specific communities, it is not their members, but rather government heritage agencies and members of specific professions who are given the job of defining and applying assessment principles and criteria. The most important are those elaborated by the Australian Committee of the International Councils on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) and contained in its Charter for the Conservation of Places of Cultural Significance (generally known as the Burra Charter). Because this document 'was designed primarily to aid the preservation and management of European historic buildings', it promoted a 'somewhat Eurocentric view of cultural places' and laid greatest emphasis on built fabric and 'tangible or material heritage'. At least until 1997, when the Charter was revised, these premises and guidelines established the framework for conservation strategies and government funding.³⁷

As a result of legislative requirements and the Burra Charter guidelines, architects and archaeologists have tended to dominate Australia's heritage industry and the conservation of our industrial heritage. As Peter Spearritt pointed out in 1991 about the 'scores of consultancy reports on particular industrial sites' that had been produced over the preceding fifteen years, questions about the importance of built fabric were left to architects, while assessments of the machinery contained in factory buildings were the sole province of industrial archaeologists. By contrast, historians rarely had any input into the production of inventories of heritage buildings or the relics contained in them. Numerous scholars have explained this exclusion by suggesting that heritage managers and other heritage professionals have not appreciated the relevance and usefulness of the historian's expertise.³⁸ While it would be true to say that increasing numbers of historians have been engaged on heritage projects and involved in heritage interpretation since the 1990s, there is little evidence of their work outside of museums. Built fabric and material culture continue to be privileged in adaptive re-use of industrial heritage, while interpretation is marginalised allegedly as a result of funding constraints.

This imbalance can, I believe, be explained by referring not just to the role played by different professions in the heritage industry, but equally to the way their methodologies are valued and employed. Unlike other heritage professionals, historians emphasise the context in which material culture was created. The conclusions they draw from the evidence contained in documents and oral sources about past uses and the relationships between people and places are not easily measured. By contrast, architects and archaeologists focus greatest attention on 'external forms', like built fabric and artefacts, which they then classify according to their own disciplinary taxonomic hierarchies. The 'scientific methods inherent in such narrowly based empiricist approaches' make it possible for the relative significance of various heritage assets to be measured and they create the impression that such measurement is neutral and 'objective'. Such methods more easily fulfil assessment guidelines and are therefore favoured by heritage managers. At the same time, however, this focus on things that can be measured ignores the 'intangible' dimensions of heritage places and the possibility that social value can reside 'in the spaces between the fabric', in traditional uses or in personal and collective associations. In short, the classification of material objects tends to reinforce existing professional biases, as well as prevailing ideological constructs and 'comfortable myths'.³⁹ This provides the basis on which technology and 'progress' become exalted while the history of working life remains concealed.

Yet as Michael Pearson and Sharon Sullivan point out, management of heritage resources requires more than general agreement about value and relative significance; the production of heritage assessment reports and conservation plans represents only the first step in a rather lengthy process. Organisational structures have to be created and funding has to be obtained to ensure that proposals for conservation are acted on and heritage assets are made accessible and understandable to the specific communities that value them, as much as to the public at large. Providing access is particularly critical when heritage assets are publicly owned and their conservation has been funded from the public purse. It is a process that requires what is commonly referred to as 'interpretation'.

'Heritage interpretation' is a term of art that is best defined as a communication process, which relies on a wide variety of approaches and techniques, including displays of material artefacts, reconstructions of entire settings, presentations of documentary and oral sources, the use of films and the internet, and even re-enactments. Its point is not simply to describe and entertain but to reveal meanings and relationships between different sorts of environments and human artefacts and activities, and to explain them. Its key, either obviously or obliquely, is historical evidence. Unfortunately, according to Pearson and Sullivan, relatively few historians have been involved in interpreting Australia's heritage places and artefacts. In their view, heritage interpretation has generally been sparse and disorganised, popular and celebratory, and it has often resulted in the disassociation of many heritage places from their social histories. This outcome reflects Stuart Macintyre's claim that history has 'an ambiguous status in' Australia's public culture. As he puts it, in relation to heritage, it is the poor cousin; history attracts less funding, is often 'ignored by those in public life who seek to shape the future', and it plays a far less prominent role 'as a source of public understanding'.⁴⁰

This point is not intended to deny the role played by those professional historians who have participated in heritage assessment or the quality of the thematic histories that have been produced for heritage studies. Rather, it provides an insight into the constraints under which they have had to operate. There is no doubt that a growing emphasis on social value and cultural significance has created a greater role for historians in the heritage industry; their approach is far more suitable for exploring and explaining past experiences of place and the way social meaning is attached to places. We see the benefit of this development in the numerous oral history projects that have been undertaken in relation to large industrial enterprises and sites.⁴¹ But while this trend is extremely heartening, it does not necessarily alter the prevailing emphasis on buildings that continues to dominate accepted approaches to the management of industrial heritage. The mere existence of oral testimonies does not ensure a role for the history of working life in the redevelopment of abandoned industrial sites and their transformation into convention centres, hotels and retail outlets, massive residential villages and new 'industrial parks' dominated by information technologies and call-centres. While existing built fabric has been retained in many such cases, albeit to varying degrees, representation of previous uses and labour history is either weak or missing all together.⁴²

Eveleigh basically conforms to this pattern despite general agreement about its social value. To identify the reasons for this outcome, I will now consider how the politics of heritage management has affected assessments of Eveleigh's significance, and approaches to the conservation and interpretation of its material culture.

The Politics of Eveleigh's Heritage Management

Eveleigh highlights the challenges that industrial heritage poses for its owners and managers. Some of these are common to all such sites not just in Australia but all around the world. Others are unique to this particular site. Ironically many of the factors that make industrial heritage worthy of preservation also pose the most serious problems. Because it tends to be associated with large-scale, derelict, contaminated industrial sites, industrial heritage requires substantial outlays for remediation or clean-up programs. At the same time adaptive re-use has to comply with modern building and safety standards and commercial imperatives. Such factors influence conservation and interpretative strategies. Most of Eveleigh's heritage reports and plans addressed this problem. Throughout 1998 remediation of the Locomotive workshops was undertaken by the NSW DW & S, under the watchful eye of the Eveleigh Locomotive Workshop Heritage Working Group, composed of government and community stakeholders.⁴³

The absence of a central overarching authority with responsibility over the entire site since 1991 has, however, hindered the remediation process. It has also precluded the emergence of a holistic approach to redevelopment, stalled conservation work on the machinery collection, and prevented a comprehensive approach to interpretation. The 1996 Management Plan for Moveable Items and Social History is the only public document that contains a broad treatment of working life at Eveleigh. Yet to this day, it is the Plan's Inventory that remains a constant reference point for the site's managers who continue to equate Eveleigh's heritage and cultural significance with its built fabric and machinery collection. No effort has been made to transform the interpretation proposals contained in this report into a coherent strategy. This outcome can be directly attributed to the politics of heritage management.

Eveleigh has been protected by legislative regulation and continued public ownership. It fulfils the basic tenets of the NSW Heritage Act, which came into force in 1977 to enable the conservation of 'buildings, works, relics or places of historic, scientific, cultural, social, archaeological, architectural, natural or aesthetic significance for the State'. Eveleigh's redevelopment and heritage management has been governed by the criteria and guidelines outlined earlier, while compliance with the terms of the above Act and its subsequent amendments has been administered by the NSW Heritage Office, acting on behalf of the NSW Heritage Council.⁴⁴ Architects and archaeologists have played a leading role in identifying and assessing Eveleigh's heritage assets. Historians have played a minor role.

Certainly all heritage studies and conservation plans commissioned for the site have included a small section on history. But for the most part these have relied on railway historians whose interest and expertise centres on railway technology and the technical aspects of work associated with it. Eveleigh's owners have favoured this orientation. It supports the traditional taxonomic approach to industrial heritage.⁴⁵ It also reinforces the teleological assumptions that underpinned views about Eveleigh's significance throughout its century of operations.

Technology and Eveleigh's Heritage Significance

At its height Eveleigh's significance was based on its association with steam-powered technology, its capacity for technological innovation, and the grand scale of its buildings, operations and machines. To all intents and purposes these same associations have been central to assessments of its heritage significance.

As an anonymous journalist put it in The Illustrated Sydney News in 1891, there was no equal to Eveleigh's machinery and appliances 'in the Southern Hemisphere', nor 'out of England'. Similarly in 1922, Sea, Land and Air published an article, which stressed that '[t]he collection of machinery at Eveleigh is magnificent'. In 1986, when the National Trust included Eveleigh on the Register of the National Estate, it was described as one of 'the finest examples of late nineteenth and early twentieth century industrial buildings' in NSW and the 'greatest monument to the' State's history of transport. Two years later, Robert M. Vogel, then a curator with the Smithsonian Institute's Engineering and Industry Division in Washington, suggested that Eveleigh was 'possibly the greatest industrial relic of its kind in the world' because 'turn-of-the-century railway shops' like these had become 'a great rarity world-wide'. In 1990, Don Godden, one of Australia's leading industrial heritage consultants, echoed this view.⁴⁶

The Eveleigh Railway Yards Locomotive Workshops Conservation Management Plan, produced by the NSW DW & S in 1995, responded to such conclusions by calling for the production of an inventory of moveable items and relics. At the same time it presented an important departure because it recommended the employment of an historian to undertake research and consult 'with former workers and managers and with long term residents ... over an extended period' in order to provide a historical context for the machines and 'an adequate basis for site interpretation'. This proposal recognised the need for both technological history and ... social history. But it privileged the former by stressing that research 'with former workers who operated machines' should elicit 'operational information and stories associated with ... [the] history of each machine'.⁴⁷ This orientation influenced the way the Management Plan for Moveable Items and Social History was conceived. This study throws light on the politics of heritage management and adaptive re-use because it draws attention to the assumptions that underpin resource allocation and expectations of outcomes, as well as how available resources affect subsequent actions.

Allies or Uneasy Bedfellows? Material Culture and Social History

Funding and time are the two major factors that constrain the heritage management process. In this case, the latter proved to be the greatest problem. The three-month deadline set by the commissioning bodies was driven by the redevelopment process – only after the Plan was ratified by the NSW Heritage Council could a decision be made about the number of bays in the Locomotive workshops to be retained in their original condition for occupation by the moveable items. Not only did this period prove insufficient for identifying, classifying and tagging the machinery, but also hopelessly inadequate for conducting oral histories. In the event, the deadline was pushed back by two months. Even so this time frame had important consequences for the heritage interpretation proposals that were produced for inclusion in the Plan.

Plan of the Locomotive Workshop Building c.1955
© Richard Butcher (used with permission)

The heritage consultants showed their appreciation of public history, the value of combining alternative disciplinary methodologies, and the mechanics of historical research by allocating equal amounts of the project budget for the Inventory and the Social History. Yet this did not alter the traditional imbalance between material culture and the history of working life because the site's managers placed greatest value on the Inventory. Not only did it support assumptions about Eveleigh's technological significance, but it also had practical value for conserving the moveable heritage items because it defined and assessed them. By contrast, Eveleigh's managers had only very general ideas about the nature of social history and oral history and very little understanding of the logistics involved in historical research, let alone organising and conducting interviews, or transcribing and evaluating their outcomes. Finally, despite their interest in some aspects of Eveleigh's past life, they could not see how the Social History could be used, which reflected the lack of importance they attributed to heritage interpretation. These three factors affected the way the Social History was produced and received and also the interpretation options that were included in the final report. In examining these outcomes I want to show precisely how the interpretation of working life at Eveleigh has been subordinated to the conservation of its material culture. I also want to suggest that contrary to Davison's claim that 'heritage is the cuckoo in the historian's nest', it is history that is the cuckoo in the heritage manager's nest.⁴⁸

The Cuckoo in the Heritage Manager's Nest

As I mentioned earlier, growing recognition that the social value of heritage assets is tied to the meanings people attach to past experiences has encouraged heritage managers to include oral history in heritage project briefs. But being attuned to the importance of social value is not the same as understanding the vagaries of oral history or appreciating its costs. Indeed, few heritage managers have sufficient personal experience with the method to be able to judge the time and funds required. The short period of time allocated for the project assumed that oral history can be done quickly. Because Eveleigh's significance had always focused on technology rather than people, members of the Steering Committee had not entertained the possibility that finding retired workers might be a problematic or lengthy process. They seemed to presume that retired workers had nothing better to do than be available for interviews.

Recognising the implications of the project's time constraint, Joan and I began trying to locate interviewees straight away. At the same time we had to do a thorough search of the collections held by the Mitchell and State Libraries, the State Railway Authority Archives and State Records NSW because there were no secondary sources available specifically on Eveleigh's social history. This work began in November 1995 and continued until March 1996. In the meantime, interviewing commenced in January.

Both documentary and oral sources provided a wealth of information about Eveleigh's development and operations and also its skilled and unskilled blue-collar workers, engineers and managers. From them we learned that by the early 1890s over 2,000 people were employed at Eveleigh and after 1907, when manufacturing of locomotives was introduced as a supplement to imports, this number increased to over 3,000. We had neither the time nor the funds to investigate workforce fluctuations over subsequent decades or details about the women, migrants and Indigenous workers whose presence was mentioned in Eveleigh's rank-and-file newsletters, trade union journals and interviews. We did, however, discover that many employees worked at Eveleigh alongside their relatives for decades, that increasing numbers of migrants were employed from the early 1950s and that the total workforce was still around 3,000 in the mid-1950s before dieselisation took its toll on employee numbers. We also found that, contrary to popular belief, women were continuously employed at Eveleigh to perform a range of functions, like carriage upholstery, laundering, office cleaning, clerical work and typing, process work in Eveleigh's Munitions Annexe during World War II, and industrial nursing in the First Aid Stations after the war. From the 1950s they worked in Eveleigh's canteens and as train cleaners. During the 1980s small numbers taught English to migrant workers, while others obtained apprenticeships in occupations traditionally associated with men.⁴⁹

Our efforts to locate these different types of workers through newspaper advertisements, radio interviews and the Metropolitan Land Council bore little fruit. Although we did manage to find one member of the local Aboriginal community who had grown up on Eveleigh's Redfern boundary, it would take years rather than months to find the more marginal members of Eveleigh's workforce.⁵⁰ In the event only eight oral history interviews were undertaken and transcribed. I supplemented these with relevant transcripts that had been produced earlier for the NSW Bicentennial Oral History Project and for the Combined Railway Unions Cultural Committee's Oral History Project. But like most of the interviews that were conducted specifically for this project, these drew on the experiences and memories of white male workers. Besides having little understanding of the practical aspects of oral history, members of the Steering Committee made assumptions about the nature of social history and technology that were at odds with scholarly approaches to both subjects. While the brief to produce a Social History reflected the term's acceptance and currency outside of the academy, its close association with the Inventory indicated an expectation that it would be focused on the use of Eveleigh's machinery. My approach was more expansive and it drew on scholarly definitions, debates and conclusions not only in relation to social history but also technology.

I began with the premise that defining social history was a problematic endeavour given the difficulty of isolating and separating its subject matter from other aspects of people's existence; the way they 'get their living', 'their material environment' and their ideas. I was also aware that the term had been used to refer to three overlapping phenomena, notably: the poor, or working classes and their social movements; basic human activities (usually depicted as the 'manners, customs and everyday life' and 'history with the politics left out'); and finally, the impact of economic developments 'on the relationship between classes and social groups.'⁵¹ But because I recognised that this study was a work of Public History, I sought to address the needs and expectations of those who commissioned it by resolving such definitional conundrums to their satisfaction. I therefore used the opportunity offered by the Eveleigh Machinery Collection Interpretive Options Focus Group meeting held on 1 March 1996 to ask members of the project's Steering Committee to provide me with their definitions of social history. Their answers were most closely aligned with the first two definitions I outlined above; all present agreed that it referred to the history of ordinary people. But the questions asked at this meeting about the machines that had been mentioned by interviewees, what they had said about the way machines were operated and which were identified as most significant also indicated that this broad understanding of social history was mediated by an overarching interest in mapping and identifying 'the visible remains of the past', and relatedly in Eveleigh's technological history. Such interest was entirely in line with the 1995 Conservation Report that had initially recommended an oral history project and also the conclusion drawn by earlier heritage studies (as well as more recent ones) that technology forms the key to Eveleigh's significance.⁵²

My main problem with this conclusion was not simply that it neglected the social dimensions of working life but also that it equated technology with machinery and engineering operations and therefore failed to recognise that it is composed of software as well as hardware. In other words, it involves a range of human activities and relies on knowledge and skills. My approach also assumed that its use is shaped by cultural and political contexts and that technology has immense implications for work practices, workers identities and industrial relations.⁵³ As a result, I related most of the major tools and machines that had been acquired for the workshops to the economic conditions and political factors that had influenced Eveleigh's operations. I also focused on management, how workers responded to technological changes and their effect on working conditions, how administrative and organisational arrangements had shaped workplace identities and industrial mobilisation, as well as how the site's operations affected the local environment and life in the surrounding communities. Whereas previous heritage studies had stressed the site's layout and its architecture and technical operations, the Social History considered how national and even international developments had impinged on its evolution, and industrial and workplace conditions.⁵⁴

My approach was influenced by the interviews with retired workers. Most emphasised the impact of economic and political conditions on Eveleigh's operations. They also mentioned specific events, including industrial disputes, working conditions, workplace relations and also industrial, political and recreational activities, rather than the machines with which they had worked. Their testimonies added an important dimension to the documentary sources, which either provided administrative and operational information or emphasised Eveleigh's history of industrial activism.⁵⁵ The oral sources painted a much more complex picture. While fellowship certainly existed, it operated within limits. Most mentioned how multiple layers of attachment and division, based on occupation and skill, spatial and functional arrangements, religious and political affiliations, gender and ethnicity, had defined their workplace experiences. They all emphasised the dirt, smoke, noise, poor sanitation and danger that characterised Eveleigh's working conditions.⁵⁶ Because these aspects of working life had meaning for those who had once worked at Eveleigh, I gave them prominence in the Social History.

The absence of 'operational stories', coupled with the breadth of information on working life ensured that the oral history was like the proverbial cuckoo in the heritage managers' nest. The vagaries of the subjective realm provided a stark contrast with the apparently 'objective' process of classifying Eveleigh's moveable items. Instead of presenting a narrative about the progressive march of technology, the Social History, together with the testimonies on which it relied, emphasised connections between impersonal economic and political forces and daily life in a railway workshop where people fulfilled their material needs, developed longstanding relationships with each other and struggled to improve their lot. Albeit to different degrees, the workers' stories challenged the teleological assumptions about technology that had shaped Eveleigh's operational life and that had justified its closure and redevelopment.

History, Historians and the Problems of Interpretation

The project's limited time frame not only had an impact on the production of the Social History report but also on the possibility of developing a comprehensive interpretation strategy. The heritage consultants responded to these circumstances by engaging a Tasmanian writer and historian to produce a range of interpretation options and it organised the earlier mentioned Focus Group meeting to identify 'the most important "messages" about the Eveleigh workshops' which could at some point in the future be presented to visitors.⁵⁷ Unfortunately, this consultant had no background knowledge of the Eveleigh workshops, nor did he have any time to obtain it. This was the only occasion on which he met with the historians who had just completed surveying the documentary sources and were still undertaking interviews. As he later wrote in the Report:

The project program required that the interpretative approach be prepared while the historical research was underway ... Subsequent review of the interpretative concept after the oral history was complete found that the concept had great potential to stimulate controversy and provide a challenging experience.⁵⁸

By considering some of these controversial proposals I want to draw attention to the way that interpretation can be reduced to a series of style 'options' for displaying artefacts rather than a means for explaining the context in which material culture was created and used, and its relationship to workers' identities, behaviours, customs, ideas and even memories.

The Interpretation Concept contained in the Management Plan stated that its 'central subject' was technology and it presented a number of themes for display panels and exhibits, which privileged Eveleigh's 'relentlessly masculine' environment and its 'muscular machinery'. The first two focused on railway technology and infrastructure. One called 'The Station' proposed the 'surrealistic positioning' of a railway station suspended on a mezzanine level, while 'All that is Solid Melts into air' centred on the display of a train carriage and locomotive engine. These proposals reflect the traditional orientation towards Eveleigh's heritage, without providing any means of addressing the political aspects of public ownership nor the railway's impact on urban life and suburbanisation.⁵⁹

The third exhibit, called 'Hearth and Home' focused on family and community. Its aim was to tell 'the story of the women and the children of the Eveleigh workers' through an 'Eveleigh worker's house – circa pre-War', 'suspended in mid air', which visitors could enter via a hole in the roof.⁶⁰ The assumptions implicit in this proposal are historically flawed. According to oral evidence residential patterns varied widely. Most workers, and especially those apprentices who came from the country, had little option but to live in the vicinity's many boarding houses. In fact, few Eveleigh workers were able to buy their own homes before the 1950s. More to the point, few ever described their living conditions in the warm glowing terms implied by the exhibit's title. One depicted the room he occupied with his father in nearby Chippendale as a brothel, while another called his 'my little Black Hole of Calcutta'.⁶¹ Likewise the connection between home, women and community reflects a superficial understanding of the occupational community that evolved around the workshops. Kinship and neighbourhood ties were certainly important, but so too were industrial and political networks forged in the workshops and through trade union and Labor and Communist Party membership.⁶²

Aptly called 'Tools', the fourth exhibit focused on machinery and engineering processes, 'industrial conditions, the process of work itself, the subdivision of labour within the plant' and 'the very definite divisions within the workers between casual labourers and craftsmen, and among craftsmen themselves.' One of its underlying aims was to make the point that Eveleigh 'never became a twentieth century style factory with mass assembly lines, but rather remained a nineteenth century workshop where individual pieces were made as required for repair and assembly.' Here, too, attention was to be given to 'the way women were brought in for munitions work, and kicked out after the war ended'. This exhibit included a number of proposed displays. 'Real Blokes' emphasised notions of physical strength, skill, 'masculine values' and 'the daily battle for bread', while a 'piece of machinery' formed the centrepiece for another, called 'Hard Yakka'.⁶³

These proposals reinforce prevailing myths and stereotypes about the gendered nature of industrial heritage. They fetishise material relics at the expense of context and intangible associations, and aestheticise the labour process.⁶⁴ They ignore the heterogeneity of Eveleigh's multi-cultural workforce and conceal the struggles waged for better conditions by its female and male employees. The suggestion that Eveleigh did not become a twentieth century factory indicates a lack of understanding of the processes involved in locomotive repair and maintenance, and the standardisation and mass production inherent in dieselisation, which occurred at Eveleigh from the 1950s.⁶⁵ Such lack of understanding also extends to recruitment and employment patterns at Eveleigh; other than times of economic upheaval, casual labour was extremely rare in this public enterprise.⁶⁶

Contrary to the guidelines for interpretation that were elaborated in the 1994 Eveleigh Precinct Conservation Policy, the proposals failed to address the conditions of working life or to acknowledge the wide range of skills, trades and occupations that were required for Eveleigh's operations.⁶⁷ More specifically, they implicitly challenged the masculinity of the middle class men who performed mental and managerial work. Women were not 'kicked out' of Eveleigh in 1945; the Munitions Annexe was closed in 1943.⁶⁸ As I pointed out earlier, women were not outsiders, or only temporary intruders; they were continuously employed at Eveleigh from 1887. There is no doubt that Eveleigh's workplace culture emphasised masculinity. But exclusive attention to this characteristic obscures what workers themselves valued about the place and what it meant to them.

To my mind the best insight into this intangible aspect of Eveleigh's past can be obtained from an article entitled 'the Heart of the NSW Transport System', written by Stan Jones in 1939 on behalf of the Eveleigh sub-branch of the Australian Railway Union. Stan's description of the 'throbbing energy' that pulsed 'forth to the accompaniment of the thump, thump, thump of giant presses torturing white-hot steel into servitude' suggests precisely the sort of masculine environment envisaged by the proposed exhibits. But for Jones it was 'the human element', rather than Eveleigh's '[r]ow upon row of drab smoke-grimed buildings' and the operations conducted in them, that were critical. Without the 2,600 workers who made it 'all possible', he added, 'the roaring giant would be but a whispering ghost'. As Jones concluded: 'We are more concerned with the men than the machines. They are important to the Labor Movement, politically and industrially'.⁶⁹

Stan Jones was admittedly a prominent union official who spent his whole life at Eveleigh struggling to improve conditions. Despite his sexist language, neither he nor his fellow officials were simply concerned to represent the interests of the Anglo-Australian men who formed the majority of Eveleigh's workers. On the contrary, they promoted equal pay for the female munitions workers, acceptance of the industrial nurses, the special needs of migrant workers and the rights of all Indigenous Australians, including those who worked at Eveleigh.⁷⁰ Of these struggles and experiences nothing remains at Eveleigh itself.

The production of the Management Plan for Eveleigh's Moveable Items and Social History and its acceptance by the Heritage Council in July 1996 certainly responded directly to the State's legal and administrative requirements. But such official recognition did not ensure that action would be taken to conserve the site's tangible relics or to interpret its intangible cultural heritage in ways that would educate the public about its social value. On the contrary, Eveleigh's heritage was quickly subordinated to the political and commercial imperatives of adaptive re-use. Although recommendations had been made for four bays of the Locomotive workshops to be excluded from redevelopment for the machinery collection and for heritage interpretation, the Heritage Council acceded to the ATP's request for the number to be reduced to two. Likewise, no funding was made available for machinery conservation or interpretation.

Machinery in Bays 1 and 2, Eveleigh Railway Workshops
Photograph: Peter Murphy ⁷¹

Architects, engineers and historians responded immediately by lobbying for funding to prevent further deterioration of Eveleigh's machinery collection and for an interpretation strategy. In 1997 the NSW Government responded by providing $300,000 for conservation on the understanding that the ATP would match this sum. This was an extremely positive development – it represented the largest grant ever made for heritage in NSW. But it also highlighted the subordinate position of history vis-a-vis material culture. While it enabled the employment of a conservator for the machinery restoration, only a minuscule budget was allocated at this time for an interpretation plan, which resulted in a six-page document focused solely on presentation styles that was later supplemented by a design concept.⁷²

Over the next two years the Eveleigh Locomotive Workshops Heritage Working Group, which had been set up to oversee the site's redevelopment, focused almost exclusive attention on built fabric and the machinery collection.⁷³ Although it acceded to my request for an interpretation sub-committee, it provided no funding or infrastructure for this purpose. Only when I applied for an Australian Research Council (ARC) grant to produce a multi-media interpretation strategy that would draw on different information technologies did various stakeholders allocate some funds for interpretation.⁷⁴ This project has certainly provided an opportunity to make the intangible historic aspects of Eveleigh's heritage more accessible to the public. However, its reliance on computer software and the Internet has tended to support, and perhaps also legitimate, the widespread assumption that technology forms the lynchpin of Eveleigh's heritage significance.

Today, Eveleigh's heart pumps no more. The roaring giant has been silenced. The ghosts of the thousands who breathed life into the NSW transport system have been left to wander in a few corners of the various buildings that have escaped demolition as a result of adaptive re-use. Besides Eveleigh's major workshop buildings and machinery, little evidence can be found of their social history. No effort has been made to conserve the material culture associated with Eveleigh's women workers. The Locomotive workshops' First Aid Station is long gone. The Munitions Annexe was demolished in 1996. The First Aid Station and Shed adjacent to the Carriage and Paint shops, dating back to the late 1930s, remain derelict, but according to the 1999 Carriage Workshops Conservation Analysis, neither contain 'fabric of considerable significance'.⁷⁵

Washbasin display located in the National Innovation Centre
(originally the New Loco building). Photograph by Peter Murphy. ⁷⁶

A single row of washbasins now stands in the foyer of the National Innovation Centre, previously the New Loco building, adorned by a minuscule plaque – hardly adequate recognition of the long campaign that was fought to obtain these facilities in place of the dirty buckets in which workers had washed off the sweat and grime of their daily labours for many decades.⁷⁷ On 13 April 2003, the conservation of the machinery collection was finally completed and launched by the Minister Assisting the Minister for Infrastructure and Planning, Diane Beamer. On this occasion, too, the SHFA organised a Heritage Walk around the shops, albeit with no fanfare or publicity and no input from historians.⁷⁸

Conclusion

As the industrial era fades, Australians are gradually beginning to grapple with the cultural significance of their industrial heritage. While architects, archaeologists and heritage managers attach great value to the grand scale of Eveleigh's buildings, its collection of industrial relics and its technological history, these are not the sole attributes that have meaning for those who once worked there. Those who return to Eveleigh are drawn by their memories of work, struggle and achievement, as well as the relationships that they formed in the process. It is precisely these memories and emotional and social attachments that provide the key to understanding why and how ordinary people value Eveleigh as a heritage place.

Heritage interpretation represents a critically important medium through which such social value can be recognised. Potentially at least, it can provide access to historical knowledge about heritage places. But despite the growing recognition that industrial heritage and the history of working life are interdependent, the production of the Eveleigh Management Plan and Social History indicates that they are still uneasy bedfellows. Emphasis on the conservation of material culture, without adequate attention to and funding for interpretation, has concealed the workers' experiences beneath Eveleigh's tangible heritage. All that remains are ghosts and machines.

Endnotes

^1.� Richard J. Roddewig, Green Bans: the Birth of Australian Environmental Politics: a Study in Public Opinion and Participation, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1978; Pete Thomas, Taming the Concrete Jungle: the Builders Laborers' Story, NSW Branch, Australian Building Construction Employees & Builders Laborers Federation, Sydney, 1973; Meredith Burgmann and Verity Burgmann, Green Bans, Red Union: Environmental Activism and the New South Wales Builders Labourers' Federation, UNSW Press, Sydney, 1998.

^2.� Roddewig, Green Bans, pp. 72–3, 90–91, 96; Gough Whitlam, The Whitlam Government, 1972–5, Viking, Ringwood, 1985, pp. 546–50; Sarah Colley, Uncovering Australia: Archaeology, Indigenous People and the Public, Allen & Unwin, North Sydney, 2002, pp. 25, 27, 30–31.

^3.� Iain Stuart, 'Stranger in a Strange Land: Historical Archaeology and History in post contact Australia', Public History Review, vol. 1, 1992, pp. 137, 140.

^4.� Stan Jones, 'Eveleigh – The Heart Of The Transport System', Daily News: Feature for Transport Workers, 19 January, 1939; Lucy Taksa, '"Pumping the Life-Blood into Politics and Place": Labour Culture and the Eveleigh Railway Workshops', Labour History, vol. 79, November 2000, pp. 11–34; Lucy Taksa, 'Workplace, Community, Mobilisation and Labor Politics at the Eveleigh Railway Workshops', in Ray Markey (ed.), Labour and Community: Historical Perspectives, University of Wollongong Press, Wollongong, 2001, pp. 51–79.

^5.� The Eveleigh Workshops complex is listed (Database Number: 015903, File Number 1/2/ 033/0014) on the Register of the National Estate as a site of National significance (gazetted 26 April 1988). Seven buildings within the Eveleigh complex were listed as heritage items on the NSW Regional Environment Plan No 26 (gazetted 17 November 1995). After changes were made to the State's heritage legislation in the late 1990s the entire complex was listed on the State Heritage Register as an item of State significance (gazetted 2 April 1999). The Workshops are also listed on the SRA State Rail Section 170 Register as a heritage item of State significance and on the National Trust Register.

^6.� Don Godden & Associates, A Heritage Study of Eveleigh Railway Workshops, Sydney, 1986; Godden Mackay Pty Ltd, White Bay to Blackwattle Bay, Central to Eveleigh Heritage Study, vol. 1, Sydney, 1990; Schwager Brooks and Partners, Eveleigh Precinct Conservation Policy, NSW Department of Planning, Sydney, 1993; Wendy Thorp, Heritage Assessment: Archaeological Resources, ATP Master Plan Site Eveleigh, City West Development Corporation (CWDC), July 1994; Heritage Group State Projects Division of NSW Department of Public Works and Services (DW & S), Eveleigh Railway Yards Locomotive Workshops Conservation Management Plan, Sydney, 1995; Godden Mackay, Eveleigh Workshops Management Plan for Moveable Items and Social History, Sydney, 1996; Paul Rappaport, Chief Mechanical Engineer's Building: 327 Wilson Street, Chippendale, Eveleigh Locomotive Workshops Conservation Management Plan, Sydney, 1997; Heritage Group, NSW DW & S, Eveleigh Carriage Workshops: Conservation Analysis, Sydney, 1999; Simpson Dawbin, Large Erecting Shop Conservation Management Plan, Sydney, 2003.

^7.� Tropman and Tropman, South Sydney Heritage Study, Sydney, 1995, vol. 2.

^8.� Godden Mackay, Eveleigh Management Plan, vol. 1, 1996, p. 1; Peter Emmett, Eveleigh Locomotive Workshop Interpretation Plan, Sydney, June 1997, pp. 1–7; Peter Emmett and Gary Warner, Eveleigh Locomotive Workshop Interpretation Design Concept and Plan, Sydney, 1998; Paul Davies, Eveleigh Carriage Works Interpretation Plan, Sydney, 2000.

^9.� David Lowenthal, Possessed By the Past: the Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, New York, 1996, pp. 1–3, 121–2, 125; Graeme Davison, The Use and Abuse of Australian History, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2000, p. 115; Craig Heron, 'The Labour Historian and Public History', Labour/Le Travail, vol. 45, Spring 2000, pp. 179, 185; Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Vol. 1, Past and Present in Contemporary Culture, Verso, London, 1996, pp. 259, 263–66.

^10.� Godden Mackay, Eveleigh Management Plan, vol. 1, p. 1.

^11.� Lucy Taksa, 'Social and Oral History', in Godden Mackay, Eveleigh Management Plan, vol. 2.

^12.� Walter Brennan, 'On the Track of New Technology: Redfern Railway Shed Hosts Info Superhighway', Sunday Telegraph, 30 June 1996, p. 50.

^13.� NSW Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Assembly, 1879–1880, vol. 1, p. 32; 'The Origin and Growth of Eveleigh', The Staff, 18 February 1930, pp. 103, 105; Schwager Brooks, Eveleigh Precinct Conservation Policy, p. 1; Rosemary Annabel and Kenneth Cable, 'Historical Material', in Tropman and Tropman, South Sydney Heritage Study, vol. 2, p. 369; Annual Reports (An. Rep.) of the Commissioner For Railways for the Years 1879–82, State Rail Authority Archives (SRAA) R8\1, p. 11, R8\3, pp. 11–12, 29–31, R8\4; An. Rep., 1890–91, SRAA R9/3, pp. 19–20; John Glastonbury, 'Foreword', in R.G. Preston, The Eveleigh Locomotive Workshops Story, Australian Railway Historical Society, NSW Division, Sydney, 1997, p. 2.

^14.� Preston, The Eveleigh Locomotive Workshops, pp. 15–17.

^15.� Edmund Capon, 'Introduction', in David Moore, Railways, Relics and Romance: the Eveleigh Railway Workshops, New South Wales, Caroline Simpson, Sydney, 1996, p. 9.

^16.� Mark Hearn, Working Lives: a History of the Australian Railways Union (NSW Branch), Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1990, pp. 188–9.

^17.� The University of Sydney, the University of NSW and the University of Technology, Sydney.

^18.� The CWDC was the body responsible for the management and redevelopment of state-owned land in the City West region until it was subsumed by the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority (SHFA). NSW Department of Planning, Building Better Cities: a Newsletter for Eveleigh, no. 2, July 1993; no. 3, February 1994; no. 5, March 1995.

^19.� Schwager Brooks, Conservation Policy, p. 1; 'Spotlight on the Eveleigh Housing Project', Community Housing Forum: Quarterly Newsletter of the National Community Housing Forum, vol. 2 Issue 7, June 2, 1998; NSW State Heritage Inventory; Ken Hocking, 'Travel: Highland Fling', The Sun-Herald, 27 December 1998; NSW DW & S, Carriage Workshops Conservation Analysis, p. 214.

^20.� Government Press Release, 7 March 2000; Lucy Taksa, 'Not Simply a Geographic Location: the Future of Eveleigh', The State of History, no. 2, May 2000; Nadia Jamal, 'Railyards Brought Back to Life under Eveleigh Facelift', Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), 24 April 2001.

^21.� Bryce Hallett, 'Railyard Becomes Arts Central as Theatre Companies Roll in', SMH, 21 March 2002, p. 5.

^22.� Rob Shorland-Ball (ed.), Common Roots – Separate Branches: Railway History and Preservation, Proceedings of an International Symposium held at the National Railway Museum, York, from 8 to 12 October 1993, Science Museum for the National Railway Museum, York, 1994; Neil Cossons, Allan Patmore, Rob Shorland-Ball (eds), Perspectives on Railway History and Interpretation, National Railway Museum, York, 1992.

^23.� Mary C. Beaudry, Lauren J. Cook and Stephen A. Mrozowski, 'Artifacts and Active Voices: Material Culture as Social Discourse', in Randall H. McGuire and Robert Paynter (eds), The Archaeology of Inequality: Material Culture, Domination and Resistance, Blackwell, Oxford, 1991, p. 150; Jules David Prown, 'Mind in Matter: an Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method', in Robert Blair St. George (ed.), Material Life in America, 1600–1860, North Eastern University Press, Boston, 1988, p. 19.

^24.� The AIHP is a nine county organisation in western Pennsylvania that was 'formed to commemorate and celebrate the industries of coal mining, iron and steel fabrication and railroad transportation'. Peter D. Barton, 'Horseshoe Curve and the Altoona Railroaders Memorial Museum, Altoona, Pennsylvania', in Shorland-Ball (ed.) Common Roots, p. 44.

^25.� Barton, 'Horseshoe Curve', p. 43, pp. 45–6.

^26.� Stephen E. Drew, Kylie Williams Wyatt, and Catherine A. Taylor, 'North American Perspective: Development of the California State Railroad Museum and its Final Phase: the Railroad Technology Museum at the Historic Southern Pacific Railroad Sacramento Shops', in The Institute of Railway Studies (IRS) and the Heritage Railway Association (HRA), Slow Train Coming: Heritage Railways in the 21st Century, Joint Conference held at the National Railway Museum, York, 20–23 September 2001, pp. 16–1 to 16–12; 'Documenting Our Workplaces: Historic American Engineering Record Project under way at Southern Pacific Sacramento Shops', On Track: California State Railroad Museum, no. 2, Summer/Fall 2000, pp. 1–2.

^27.� Keith Falconer, 'Swindon's Head of Steam: the Regeneration of the GWR's Works', in Louis Bergeron (ed.), Industrial Patrimony: Resources, Practices, Cultures, The International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage, no. 3, 2000, pp. 21, 26–27; Tim Bryan, 'Steam Synergy', Newheritage, March 2000, p. 28.

^28.� Destination Ipswich', http://www.premiers.qld.gov.au/sectorwide/october2002; 'The Workshops Rail Museum Queensland – Ipswich', http://www.heritagetrails.qld.gov.au/attractions/ ipswich2.html; Midland Redevelopment Authority (MRA), Draft Concept Plan, August 2000; West Australian Government Media Statement, 'MRA Report Shows Strong Support for Rail Heritage Centre', 11 April, 2001; MRA, 'Heritage Plans Take Shape', The Midlander, Winter 2001, p. 1; 'The Metamorphosis of Midland', The West Australian, 27 September 2002; West Australian Government Media Statement, 'Wall of Names to Honour Workshops Workers', 18 October 2002; West Australian Government Media Statement, 'Artworks Interpret the Stories from the Historic Midland Railway Workshop Site', 11 December 2002.

^29.� Katrina Creer, 'Ghost Trains Rattle into History ... but Their Grand Old Workshops Take a New Track', Sunday Telegraph, 24 March 1996; Brennan, 'On the Track', p. 50; Graham Williams, 'History Repeats with Best Features: Innovation and Imagination have Lifted a Building from the Steam Age to the Space Age', SMH, 12 November 1996; Anna Patty, 'Losing Track of an Opulent Relic', The Sun Herald, 7 July 1996, p. 27; Neville Gruzman, 'Eveleigh Treasures will be Lost Forever', SMH, 8 July 1997; Geraldine O'Brian, 'Change of Luck for Rail Workers' Wishing Wall', SMH, 29 March 1997; Lucy Taksa, 'Preserving the Eveleigh Railway Workshops in Cyberspace', Transnews, Official Journal of the Australian Services Union, NSW and ACT Services Branch [Transport Division], March 1999, pp. 10–13; Lucy Taksa 'Using the Information Superhighway to Interpret the Heritage of the Eveleigh Railway Workshops', Rail and Road:the Magazine of the NSW Branch of the Rail, Tram and Bus Union, vol. 91, no.3, July 1999, pp. 13–16; Geraldine O'Brien, 'From Sweatshop to Hard Labor, Their Station in Life', SMH, 30 August, 1999; John Stapleton, 'Rail Staff Roll Up for Reunion', The Australian, 30 August 1999; Mr. K. Rozzoli, 'Eveleigh Heritage Railway Workshops', NSW Legislative Assembly Hansard Extract for 5 April 2000; Eveleigh Railway Workshop Private Members' Statement Clover Moore, Independent Member for Bligh, NSW Parliament, 31 October 2002; Hallett, 'Railyard Becomes Arts Central', p. 5.

^30.� Australian Technology Park (ATP) Tour 21 March 1996; Back To Eveleigh Day organised by State Projects, NSW DWS, 21 April 1997; Back to Eveleigh for Apprentices of 1941, 6 March 1998 organised by the ATP; Celebrating Eveleigh's Heritage – Open Day and Launch of the Eveleigh Employees Register by the NSW Premier, The Hon. Bob Carr, held on 29 August 1999, organised by Dr Lucy Taksa and Brian Dunnett together with the ATP, the Power House Museum, the Public Transport Union and the NSW Folk Federation; Eveleigh Community Weekend: Launch of STEAM POWER video produced by Lucy Taksa and Summer Hill Media, held on 21 April 2001 and organised by the ATP and the SHFA.

^31.� R.F. Wylie, 'The Rise and Decline of the Eveleigh Running Shed', The Australian Railway Historical Society (ARHS) Bulletin, no. 299, September 1962, pp. 140–141; G.A. Patmore, A History of Industrial Relations in the NSW Government Railways: 1855–1929, PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 1985; David Burke, Man of Steam: E.E. Lucy – A Gentleman Engineer in the Great Days of the Iron Horse, Iron Horse Press, Mosman, 1986; John Gunn, Along Parallel Lines: A History of the Railways of New South Wales, 1850–1986, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1989; Robert S. Lee, The Greatest Public Work: The New South Wales Railways, 1848 to 1889, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1988; Hearn, Working Lives; Lucy Taksa, All A Matter of Timing: The Diffusion of Scientific Management in New South Wales Prior to 1921, Unpublished PhD, University of NSW, 1993; David Burke, Making the Railways, State Library of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 1995.

^32.� Pui Shven Cheong, The Eveleigh Railway Locomotive Workshops at Redfern, Sydney: Significance and Recommendations, Unpublished Paper, School of Architecture, University of NSW, 1988; Richard K. Butcher, A Report on the preservation of Eveleigh Railway Workshops, Redfern, Unpublished Paper, Architecture, University of Sydney, 1992; Cameron White, Eveleigh Railway Yard: The Adaptive Re-Use of Heritage, Research Report, Masters of Heritage Conservation, University of Sydney, December 1995.

^33.� Preston, The Eveleigh Locomotive Workshops; Lucy Taksa, 'Scientific Management and the General Strike of 1917: Workplace Restructuring in the New South Wales Railways and Tramways Department', Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, no. 4, September 1997, pp. 37–64; Lucy Taksa, 'All a Matter of Timing: Managerial Innovation and Workplace Culture in the New South Wales Railways and Tramways prior to 1921', Australian Historical Studies, no. 110, April 1998, pp. 1–26; Lucy Taksa, 'Handmaiden of Industrial Welfare or Armed Combatant? Considering the Experience of Industrial Nursing at the Eveleigh Railway Workshops', Health and History, vol. 1, no. 4, December 1999, pp. 298–329; Lucy Taksa, 'The Heart of the NSW Transport System – the Eveleigh Railway Workshops', in Lucy Taksa (ed.), Industrial Heritage Special Issue, Locality, vol. 10, no. 1, 1999, pp. 11–21; Taksa, 'Pumping the Life-Blood', pp. 11–34; Lucy Taksa, 'Citizenship and Locomotive Manufacture at the New South Wales Eveleigh Railway Workshops', in Greg Patmore and Mark Hearn (eds), Working The Nation: Working Life and Federation 1890–1914, Pluto Press, Sydney, 2001, pp. 203–223; Taksa, 'Workplace, Community, Mobilisation', pp. 51–79; Lucy Taksa, 'Spatial Practices and Struggles over Ground at the Eveleigh Railway Workshops', in Phil Griffiths and Rosemary Webb (eds) Work, Organisation, Struggle: Proceedings of the Seventh National Conference of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Australian National University, Canberra, 2001, pp. 231–237.

^34.� Graeme Davison, 'The Meaning of "Heritage"', in Graeme Davison and Chris McConville (eds), A Heritage Handbook, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1991, p. 7; Samuel, Theatres of Memory, p. 306; Colley, Uncovering Australia, pp. 22–3.

^35.� Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: the Antiquarian Imagination in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1996, p. 238, pp. 248–51.

^36.� Peter Spearritt, 'Money, Taste and Industrial Heritage', in John Rickard and Peter Spearritt (eds), Packaging the Past: Public Histories, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1991, p. 43; Colley, Uncovering Australia, pp. 25–30; Sheryl Yelland, 'Heritage Legislation in Perspective', in Davison and McConville (eds), A Heritage Handbook, pp. 43–61.

^37.� Chris Johnston, What is Social Value: a Discussion Paper, Technical Publications, series no. 3, Australian Heritage Commission, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1994, pp. 1, 19–22; Colley, Uncovering Australia, pp. 32–5, 37–39.

^38.� Colley, Uncovering Australia, pp. 17, 24–5, 58; Spearritt, 'Money, Taste and Industrial Heritage', pp. 35, 37; Graeme Davison, 'Paradigms of Public History', in Rickard and Spearritt (eds), Packaging the Past, p. 8; Max Nankervis, 'Some Recent Directions in the Conservation of the Built Environment', Journal of Australian Studies, no. 30, September 1991, p. 52.

^39.� Chris McConville, 'In Trust? Heritage and History', Melbourne Historical Journal, vol. 16, 1984, pp. 68–9, 308; Johnston, What is Social Value?; Michael Pearson and Sharon Sullivan, Looking After Heritage Places: the Basics of Heritage Planning for Managers, Landowners and Administrators, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1995, pp. 138–41, 168–9, 291–2, 308–9. See for example: Grace Karskens, 'Public History – Academic History: the Common Ground', Public History Review, vol. 1, 1992, p. 21; and Grace Karskens, 'Crossing Over: Archaeology and History at the Cumberland/Gloucester Street Site, the Rocks, 1994–1996', Public History Review, vols. 5/6, 1996–97, pp. 30–48.

^40.� Pearson and Sullivan, Looking After Heritage, pp. 16–17, 288–90, 292–3; Stuart Macintyre, The Necessity of History, The Inaugural History Council Lecture, 1996, History Council of NSW, Sydney, 1997, pp. 11–12. See also: Davison and McConville (eds), A Heritage Handbook; Graeme Davison, 'Heritage', in Graeme Davison, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre (eds), The Oxford Companion To Australian History, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1998, pp. 308–9.

^41.� Johnston, What is Social Value?, pp. 1, 7–11. See for examples: Pat Mathew, 'An Oral History of Tasmania's Hydro-Electric Commission', Oral History Association of Australia Journal (OHAAJ), No. 15, 1993, pp. 116–7; Rosemary Block, 'Everybody had a Cousin at Colgates: the Community of the Colgate-Palmolive Factory, Balmain Sydney: the Colgate-Palmolive Oral History Project', OHAAJ, no. 18, 1996, p. 78; Rosemary Block, 'Can the Doers Talk? Crossing Borders and New Technologies: the Institution of Engineers' Oral History Project' OHAAJ, no. 19, 1997, pp. 66–72.

^42.� Cindy Martin, 'Gasworks Sparks Village for 5,000', The Sun-Herald, 12 November 2000, p. 70; Anthony Radford, 'New Recipe for Old Arnott's Site', The Inner Western Suburbs Courier, vol. 116, no. 49, 4 December 2000, p. 1.

^43.� Drew, Wyatt, and Taylor, 'North American Perspective', pp. 16–1 to 16–12; Barton, 'Horseshoe Curve', p. 45; Schwager Brooks, Eveleigh ... Conservation Policy, 1993; NSW DW & S, Minutes of the Eveleigh Locomotive Workshop Heritage Working Group, 1998.

^44.� Yelland, 'Heritage Legislation', p. 55; Colley, Uncovering Australia, pp. 25, 30.

^45.� See for example: Eveleigh Carriage Workshops Conservation Analysis, 1999; Large Erecting Shop Conservation Management Plan, 2003.

^46.� Anon., 'The NSW Railway Workshops at Eveleigh: a State Enterprise', The Illustrated Sydney News, 18 July 1891, pp. 11, 13; Hamilton Hyde, 'The Australian Engineer: Splendid Work at Eveleigh Workshops', Sea, Land and Air, 1 June 1922, pp. 176, 179; Letter from Robert M. Vogel to Carl Doring, 20 June 1988 (Courtesy David Sheedie); Don Godden, 'Eveleigh: Sydney's Rail Era Relic of World Standing', The National Trust Magazine, no. 54, April 1990.

^47.� NSW DW & S, Eveleigh Railway Yards ... Management Plan, Section 2.8, p. 6.

^48.� Davison, 'The Meaning', p. 12.

^49.� Government Gazette Employee Lists, 1887–1939 and Railway Personal History Cards, originally held by SRAA now State Records NSW, Series: 11/16552 to 11/16745, and SRAA; Mr. Guthrie, 'History of Eveleigh Workshops', Unpublished Notes, c.1955, SRAA, A88/44 – Box 3, p. 7, and Correspondence: Assistant Chief Mechanical Engineers to F.P.H. Fewtrell, Works Manager, 14 April, 1955, SRAA, A88/44 Box 3, p. 5; Interviews with: Joyce Hitchen, 15 October 1996; Ann Patrick, 5 January 1999; Elisabeth Wheatley, 28 September 1999; Pat Holdorf, 17 May 1999.

^50.� Interview with Alan Madden, 16 April 1996, in Godden Mackay, Eveleigh Management Plan, vol. V, Oral History Transcripts. In 1998 I received a Large ARC grant for a project entitled, Technology, Work, Gender and Citizenship at the Eveleigh Railway Workshops Precinct: an Historical Interpretation of Landscape, Identity and Mobilisation, which provided the resources necessary to follow up on the discoveries made during 1995–6.

^51.� Eric Hobsbawm, On History, Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1997, pp. 75; also pp. 71–73.

^52.� Davison, 'Paradigms', p. 9; Samuel, Theatres of Memory, pp. 277, 303; NSW DW & S, Eveleigh Railway Yards ... Management Plan, Section 2.8, p. 6.

^53.� Judy Wajcman, 'Technological A/genders: Technology, Culture and Class', in Lelia Green & Roger Guinery (eds), Framing Technology: Society, Choice & Change, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1994, p. 6; Evan Willis, 'Introduction', in Evan Willis (ed.), Technology and the Labour Process, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1988, p. 2; Daniel R. Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940, Oxford University Press, New York, 1988, pp. 9–13, 52, 304–7, 316; Sol Encel, 'Social Implications of Technological Change', in Russell D. Lansbury & Edward M. Davis (eds), Technology, Work and Industrial Relations, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1984; Melvin Kranzberg, 'Overview, Technology and History: "Kranzberg's Laws",' in Terry S. Reynolds and Stephen H. Cutcliffe (eds), Technology and the West: a Historical Anthology from Technology and Culture, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1997, p. 6.

^54.� Taksa, 'Social and Oral History'.

^55.� Railway and Tramway An. Rep.s; The Railroad, 1928–1947; Eveleigh News, 1954–1982.

^56.� Godden Mackay, Eveleigh Management Plan, vol. 5.

^57.� Godden Mackay, ibid., vol. 6 – Appendices: Appendix J – Richard Flanagan, 'Interpreting the Eveleigh Workshops', p. 1.

^58.�Ibid., vol. 1, 10.0 'Interpretative Concept', p. 103.

^59.�Ibid., pp. 109–12

^60.�Ibid., pp. 112–3.

^61.� Interviews with: Bob Matthews, 20 February 1996; Jeff Aldridge, 16 March, 1999; The Lamp, November 1948, p. 7.

^62.� Lucy Taksa, 'Rethinking Community: Social Capital and Citizenship at the Eveleigh Railway Workshops', in Robert Hood and Ray Markey (eds), Labour and Community: Proceedings of the Sixth National Conference of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, 1999, pp. 183–190.

^63.� 'Interpretative Concept', p. 114.

^64.� Samuel, Theatres of Memory, pp. 278, 303, 308.

^65.� Albert J. Churella, From Steam to Diesel: Managerial Customs and Organizational Capabilities in the Twentieth-Century American Locomotive Industry, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1998, pp. 10, 16–20, 97.