Respect versus division (Edition Introduction)
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 15: Divided Nation
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Julianne Schultz
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Julianne Schultz's biography and other articles by this writer
For some years, once upon a time, I lived in a little house on a cliff in a coal-mining village north of Wollongong. The spectacular views along the rugged coastline drew the eye to the industrial city's bustling harbour, the steaming and flaming chimneys of the factories that earned the city its "steel city" moniker. Million dollar views, guests would gush, as they lingered on the balcony, spotting albatrosses and sea eagles, dolphins and giant schools of fish just below the surface. Even the occasional whale.
During the resources boom at the start of the 1980s, the horizon was also dotted with container ships. Giant rust-encrusted vessels with utilitarian names from far-off ports waited to take the coal out, and bring the iron ore in. Ten, twenty, thirty ships could sit high in the water waiting a turn at a coal-loader that could not keep up with demand, just as they now wait off the coast of Central Queensland and Western Australia.
Once loaded, the ships would sink deeper in the water and we would watch them head north on the long journey to deposit their bounty and power the Japanese wonder economy.
Then one day it stopped. Where there had been scores of ships queuing to take away the dense black coal – which had provided just enough warmth and income for three or four generations of miners, and thousands of generations of Dharawal who found both physical and spiritual sustenance on the escarpment and in the ocean – all of a sudden there were none.
No ships waited to take the coal away, hardly any ships waited to deposit the iron ore destined to trundle along the conveyor belt and become girders and rooves and fences and pipes. The economy shuddered as the long legacy of the oil shocks of the 1970s continued to reverberate locally and globally. Steel and coal industries were in crisis everywhere – caught in the pincers of shrinking demand, under-investment, atrocious productivity, rigid work practices, poor planning and half-baked policy. The domestic market collapsed. As orders fell away, jobs went with them. Tens of thousands lost their jobs, in the mines and factories and in the businesses that had grown up to service them. These were not glamorous jobs, but reliable, regular work that needed to be done, paid tolerably well and provided a constant stream of migrants with their first work in Australia.
The enormity of the crisis was clear and personal. My neighbour had the gruesome task of putting on his policeman's cap and investigating suicides of blokes he once drank with, who had found life unbearable.
Watching the disintegration of a community from a distance seemed inadequate, so I set out to write a book – Steel City Blues (Penguin, 1985) – about what was happening and why. Every day for months, I trundled down the highway, talking to tearful managers, a mayor (later murdered) with a vision, women who had fought for jobs in the steelworks only to be the last on first off, sons of men from Yugoslavia and Italy and England and a dozen other countries whose apprenticeships were cut short and who blamed the "slopes" [Vietnamese boat people], old men who had taught themselves English waiting in line in the steelworks canteen ("a milkshake please"), others who couldn't imagine what else they could do but go down the mines, kids who left school at fifteen and dreamed of becoming famous and successful, union officials with an agenda, management consultants with a plan, activists who wanted to foment revolution.
And there was a revolution of sorts. Those most affected fought to be taken seriously, to be treated with respect and decency. In October 1982, a group of miners stayed underground for sixteen days and won better redundancy payments. Thousands travelled to Canberra in a protest that culminated in breaking through the barricaded doors of Parliament House and flooding into Kings Hall. It was the beginning of the end of the government of Malcolm Fraser, who lost to Bob Hawke in March 1983.
AS I SAID, ALL OF THIS HAPPENED ONCE UPON A TIME, in a distant age, when the notion of a million dollar view was a ridiculous joke. Now it is a statement of fact, the little house we built for $35,000 and sold for $110,000 has grown and is now actually worth millions. The view remains the same, but the neighbourhood is richer and tidier – a tourist destination; coal mines closed, steelworks beautified, a university the largest employer in the city.
Once upon a time, before the social reforms that encouraged cohesion, creativity, multiculturalism and reconciliation, before the economy was deregulated, the dollar floated, industry restructured and the economic framework that facilitated the long boom of the last fifteen years established.
For many years, the fruits of these policies were highly contested and unevenly distributed. Pockets of high unemployment lingered well into the 1990s – despite spectacular growth, the transition from an economy underpinned by mining with a significant overlay of manufacturing to one where more people were likely to work in services was hard. Economic and social reform was the order of the decade from the mid1980s, and it paid off for most people – but not without some resentment.