“Our Tarkine, Our Future”: The Australian Workers Union Use of Narratives Around Place and Community in West and North West Tasmania, Australia

Abstract

The Australian Workers Union (AWU) represents the miners on the West Coast of Tasmania. When the future of mining on much of the West Coast was threatened by the environmentalists' proposed National Heritage listing of the Tarkine region, the union campaigned to prevent the listing. Through its embeddedness in place, the AWU was able to use a sense of place, memory and identity to construct a community campaign that moved beyond the West Coast into the North West Coast where many of the miners lived. The union was able to renew its narrative resources by moving work out of the workplace and into the Tarkine. In this way the AWU was able to mobilise community support and shift political power to the local where workers could regain control over their lives and the place where they lived and worked.

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“…Similarly, Henry and Prince (2018), in a theoretically sharp analysis of changing agricultural markets in New Zealand, devote a mere five lines to how their empirical material was gathered and analysed. And, in a lively discussion of union organisation and place, Barton (2018) weaves union official interviews together with other sources without telling the reader who had been interviewed or why. Examples such as these might be taken to suggest that qualitative geography researchers are right to be relaxed about their descriptions of method – the proof of the pudding is in the analysis, and no one needs to wade through all that dull procedural detail.…”

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