Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries: Labour History and Museum Studies

Abstract

The idea for a thematic issue of Labour History examining ways in which working culture is-or is not-interpreted in Australian museums and galleries arose out of the perceived absence of such material among labour history sources. Attempts to find this type of critique for teaching undergraduate students in a Cultural Heritage Studies course at Curtin University and involvement in a campaign to establish a rail heritage centre on the Westrail Workshops site at Midland, WA, were motivators. We were interested in crossing disciplinary boundaries between labour history and museum studies to ascertain the extent to which other scholars had considered the interpretation of working culture in a museum or gallery setting. Since the publication of John Rickard and Peter Spearritt's examination of public history over a decade ago, 1 there has been an increasing awareness of the historical and heritage value of industrial sites-Spearritt's paper on Woolloomooloo's Finger Wharf in the above volume being one example-but what of working culture itself? 'Halls of Fame' around the country have tended to emphasise the role of powerful, well-known individuals such as Sidney Kidman, the 'Cattle King', or generic types of workers (the miner, the prospector, the stockman, the timber cutter). Robyn Trotter has shown that, in the case of the Stockman's Hall of Fame-where the choice of the singular in the title is interesting in itself-it was very easy to 'valoris[e] … the "great man" of the outback' and difficult to move beyond stereotypes of 'women, Aboriginal station workers, Afghan muleteers, hawkers, mail carriers and even travelling entertainers …'. 2 Why should the interpretation of working culture on industrial sites and in other contexts be of consequence to labour historians? In making forays into the world of the curator, are we not departing from our own comfort zones and fields of expertise? Perhaps so, but there are many good reasons why we should be proactive in continuing to broaden the definition of 'labour history'. Firstly, we could perhaps reflect profitably upon why a discipline, which, at the end of the twentieth century, in the words of Irving and Scalmer, is 'a popular, collective, democratic, regional, and political form of history-writing [which has] grown out of the popular history written by labour activists earlier in the century' 3 has been so inadequately translated into the curatorial field. Beyond the random display of union banners-often for their 'artistic' or 'cultural' value as much as examples of working-class struggle, solidarity and pride-how often have museum displays attempted to represent the historic concerns and realities of organised working people? The answer is: not often. Work is impersonally defined as technology; machines are as conspicuous as working people are absent. The otherwise excellent STEAM Museum at Swindon (UK) provides an example of the down-playing of the industrial experience. While displays emphasise different classes, roles and skills of the workers, and the Museum's ef...

We Need to Talk about Class

“…Academic publications addressing socio-economic differences and working-class issues remain scarce, being primarily limited to work addressing curatorial and exhibition narratives (Carnegie 2006;Hill 2005) or issues of employment of working-class people in the UK cultural and museum sector (Brook, O'Brien, and Taylor 2017;Evans, Whiting, and MacKenzie-Davey 2020). Yet, the interpretation of working culture and labor history has attracted some attention (Oliver and Reeves 2003), pointing to the agency of working-class people in interpretating their heritage (Smith, Shackel, and Campbell 2011). If lately there is a growing interest in working-class issues, there is still a long road ahead.…”