A Natural Battleground: The Fight to Establish a Rail Heritage Centre at Western Australia's Midland Railway Workshops by Bobbie Oliver (review)

Reflections on heritage battles are usually written once some sort of resolution has been reached: a building saved or demolished, oral histories collected and display centre opened. Bobbie Oliver tells a different, and in many ways more illuminating, story here. A Natural Battleground reports from the ongoing struggle over the Midland Railway Workshops in Western Australia, the state's most important twentieth-century industrial site, and one whose future remains uncertain. The railway workshops had opened in 1904 and closed in 1994. Originally slated for demolition, the workshops eventually won a degree of protection under a Western Australian Labor government. A partnership between community activists, the Labour History Society and historians at Curtin University led to Australian Research Council grants and several really important outputs: a widely acclaimed history of the site, collections of artefacts, and a film and DVD. A display centre was opened at the workshops although, after just three years, it closed. Activists and researchers were then unable to make much progress towards their ultimate goal: a rail heritage centre. Instead, parts of the workshops have been demolished and another section now houses a medical centre.

Bobbie Oliver has not tried to tell a history of the workshops, nor revisit heritage conservation criteria. Endnotes direct readers to ample material exploring these issues. Instead this is a collection of essays about conservation struggles and one that emphasises the experiences of workers at Midland. One of the goals of the research project had been to "prioritise workers' own stories" (9) and this book does just that. The aspects of their story presented here include the British structure of the workforce and work roles, the culture of "pranking," and reflections on locations that, though not central to industrial production, had found a key place in collective memory: sites such as the flagpole where union meetings were held. The union structures and the role of communist activists are illuminated effectively. More broadly, reactions to the workshops' closure are explored.

In one sense, then, this is a story of partial success, since the workshops have not been flattened for housing, recollections are recorded, photographs collected, and heritage protection apparently prevents further demolition. It is at the same time the tale of a heritage campaign falling short of its main objective, and Oliver is able to suggest reasons for this.

The opening chapter of A Natural Battleground is headed "It's more than just the buildings; it's what they did inside," which more or less sums up the obstacles facing the Midland project, and the Left's engagement with urban conservation more generally. Left activists often appear suspicious of official state heritage structures–for good reason, since built heritage and reactionary nationalism can sit comfortably together. Industrial sites do find their way onto state registers, often, as with the Midland Railway Workshops, after long battles by community activists, unions and retired workers. When the workforce appears overwhelmingly male, white and Anglophone, then the wider liberal Left is likely to offer only muted support, at best. In responding to this challenge, labour historians are likely to agree with Oliver, and argue that heritage must always remain "more than just the buildings." But campaigns for displays recognising workers cannot get far without analysis of built structures. So, the second half of Oliver's introductory chapter title "what they did inside [the buildings]" is critical. Such a history would need to begin with the dialectics of space; the contradictions between the functional internal layout of built forms, and the shared consciousness of workers in reaction to spatial regulation. This is a very different task from recounting pranks and meetings at a flagpole.

Of course, it is important to highlight "workers' stories." But then, in moving quickly to recollections, photographs and artefacts, those left activists with an interest in heritage continually create dilemmas for themselves. Oral history projects...