North Coast Labour Heritage sites

Some years back Lucy Taksa and Terry Irving of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History published the Labour Heritage Register of NSW (citation below). It's now to be updated with, if the data is contributed, more entries on regional NSW. Sites include labour and union buildings, places of protest, locations or repositories of local labour history and labour artefacts.  So if you know of places that qualify for the register, post them here so that the info can be collated (and in the meantime shared on the blog), or send direct to the Society for forwarding to Lucy and Terry). rw.

Terry Irving & Lucy Taksa, Places, Protests, and Memorabilia: the Labour Heritage Register of New South Wales, Industrial Relations Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2002.

Comments

[Terry Irving]

Thanks, Rosemary and all the other comrades in the North Coast Labour History Collective for initiating this exciting blog. And thanks too for noting the forthcoming second edition of the Labour Heritage Register of New South Wales. I thought I might add to the note some information about how you can contribute, and what Lucy and I are looking for.

The Register has three parts.
Part 1 is a list of labour memorabilia, such as banners, badges, membership cards, posters, photographs etc. If you can contribute to this part we would like a brief description of the item, an assessment of its condition, and where it is located (the name and address of the person or organization).

Part 2 is a list of sites of working class housing, leisure and work. For example, for Wallsend we list the locomotive shed and give its address; for Lithgow we list Terrace Row, 1-23 Esbank Street as an example of working class housing; and for Kearsley we list the Kearsley Hotel, as a site of working class leisure. We found these sites by perusing local government heritage studies. Regrettably, the most northerly heritage study we examined was for the Hunter Valley. To assist the Register, please go to your local library and, using heritage studies undertaken by or under the auspices of you local government, list any sites that seem relevant to working class housing, leisure and work. We will need a precise reference: eg Railway siding, Billinudgel, the title of the study [for instance: Brunswick Heads Heritage Study], year of publication, volume number if appropriate, and page number.

Part 3 is a list of labour precincts for Sydney, the suburbs of Sydney, and towns in regional NSW. There is a big lack here too of sites on the North Coast: there is a single entry, for the Taree School of Arts, where according to 'The Worker' 4 February 1905. a branch of the Political Labour League was set up at a public meeting.

Part 3 is about events in labour history. Sometimes the information comes from oral history interviews or letters from participants, but mostly it comes from a careful reading of the press, especially of trade union and radical newspapers.
Each event is linked to a site, which might be a hall or office, a hotel where a meeting took place (pubs were frequently used for meetings by early trade unions), a co-operative store, a labour or radical printery or bookshop; a sporting field used for Labor Day carnivals, or a site of open-air meetings and processions.

For part 3, is you have information about labour history events, we will need an address for the site where the event took place (eg, School of Arts, ??? Street, Taree), a one-line description of the event and its date (eg, meeting to form branch of PLL, February 1905), and a reference for your source (eg, 'The Worker, 4/2/1905 - or 'communication from Fred Smith', and date, and location of the communication if possible, eg, Taree Library).

I know the detail we need seems daunting, but even if your information is a bit vague please send it to us, because we might be able to use our contacts to make it more precise. Our object is to make the Register as comprehensive as possible, and as accurate as possible, so that it can be used to protect the heritage of the labour and radical movements.

My email is: thirving@optusnet.com.au

Lucy's email is: l.taksa@unsw.edu.au

But of course, as Rosemary says, let's communicate via the blog, so that we can all be informed about the progress of the Register's second edition, which by the way the NSW Fabians are interested in publishing.

Comradely greetings,

Terry Irving