tag:theconversation.com,2011:/id/topics/griffith-review-state-of-hope-34266/articles
Griffith Review - State of Hope – The Conversation
2017-02-20T03:18:34Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/69988
2017-02-20T03:18:34Z
2017-02-20T03:18:34Z
Diminishing city: hope, despair and Whyalla
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152778/original/image-20170115-11834-r1ue2q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">With the steelworks under a cloud, Whyalla continues to fluctuate between hope and despair.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/sauer-thompson/9704697501/in/photolist-fMz7sH-2NB7jQ-57TVpm-57TTzh-57TUZU-57TVfS-57TUWh-57PGNr-57TVcb-57PFBt-2NvLci-mhQWMZ-57PFxe-9oe38A-2NvKmr-53QTn-53Q3X-57TTXd-57TUd5-57TUDm-57TTDo-57TUg9-57PFVP-57TU1b-57TUqA-57PGBM-57PH52-57TVt5-rrV4Zo-57TV83-2NwMmX-53Q41-57TUiU-57TUtL-HaPK8-57PGje-57PFRP-57PFY4-53QKQ-57TUzN-53Q3U-57PGav-57PGwc-53QKR-53QKT-53QKV-HaPKp-2NwJ5r-ak3oZc-2NAdwE">Gary Sauer-Thompson/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This piece is republished with permission from State of Hope, the 55th edition of Griffith Review. Articles are a little longer than most published on The Conversation, presenting an in-depth analysis of the economic, social, environmental and cultural challenges facing South Australia, and the possibilities of renewal and revitalisation.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Exactly 50 years ago, in the spring of 1966, my family left Pennington Migrant Hostel in Adelaide to drive up Highway 1 to Whyalla. Our destination, BHP’s Milpara hostel, was a full day’s journey away in a second-hand faded blue Ford Zephyr.</p>
<p>As recently arrived migrants from Britain, the drive would take us into an utterly unfamiliar landscape: the red-soil and saltbush country of South Australia’s upper Eyre Peninsula.</p>
<p>We were not alone. Whyalla was booming. BHP’s steelworks had opened the year before, the shipyard’s orders book was healthy, while ore from Iron Knob was being shipped from Whyalla in increasing quantities – my father was to work in BHP’s diesel locomotive repair shop. </p>
<p>The Stanleys – like many of Whyalla’s newcomers, working-class Britons (in our case Liverpudlians) – were optimistic about our future in a brand-new Housing Trust semi-detached in a dirt-pavement street on the city’s expanding western fringe: this was the new start in a new, sunny country for which we had left rainy, grey Liverpool.</p>
<p>We were surely not alone. Thousands of other migrants were arriving in the city. In our first year there the Housing Trust constructed over 600 houses. In the decade of the 1960s, Whyalla’s population doubled from 14,000 to 30,000. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/154659/original/image-20170129-29641-1ayh4qn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/154659/original/image-20170129-29641-1ayh4qn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/154659/original/image-20170129-29641-1ayh4qn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=253&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154659/original/image-20170129-29641-1ayh4qn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=253&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154659/original/image-20170129-29641-1ayh4qn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=253&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154659/original/image-20170129-29641-1ayh4qn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=318&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154659/original/image-20170129-29641-1ayh4qn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=318&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154659/original/image-20170129-29641-1ayh4qn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=318&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">BHP helped its employees to build substantial ‘staff’ houses as Whyalla expanded during the war years. These are in Bean Street, named after the compliant SA parliamentary draughtsman who produced the bill that met the needs of ‘The Company’ in developing Whyalla.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">BHP Archives</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The newcomers reflected an extraordinary ethnic diversity – booklets promoting the city to migrants spoke of 45 or more ethnic groups living there. The largest groups in the late 1960s came from the British Isles, from elsewhere in Australia and from Europe (mainly Germany, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Spain and Poland). </p>
<p>BHP and the City Commission aggressively promoted the city’s advantages. A 1964 BHP promotional booklet extolling its climate, facilities, community amenities and lifestyle (one my family almost certainly read) ended: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>This, then, is Whyalla: a place where a young community leads a busy, sunlit life, a city which is growing, always growing.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But the growth of the 1960s stopped in the following decade, when the population had reached around 34,000. In 1978, BHP launched the last of the 64 ships built in Whyalla, bringing to an end the 20-year boom begun with the construction of the steelworks. Between 1977 and 1983, the Housing Trust built only 120 houses. Whyalla began a gradual contraction, one that continues still.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/154656/original/image-20170129-30413-1svrw27.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/154656/original/image-20170129-30413-1svrw27.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/154656/original/image-20170129-30413-1svrw27.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=388&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154656/original/image-20170129-30413-1svrw27.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=388&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154656/original/image-20170129-30413-1svrw27.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=388&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154656/original/image-20170129-30413-1svrw27.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=488&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154656/original/image-20170129-30413-1svrw27.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=488&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154656/original/image-20170129-30413-1svrw27.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=488&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Construction of the blast furnace and associated wharf just before the second world war drew thousands of workers and later their families from the depressed Eyre Peninsula and the Mid North.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 1980, sociologist Roy Kriegler published <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Working-Company-Control-Whyalla-Shipyard/dp/0195505751">Working for the Company</a>, an analysis of “work and control” informed by his time as a labourer in the shipyard’s final years. He identified what he saw as an intractable dynamic of alienation among those who worked for BHP, a malaise of lack of commitment that infected the city as well as its industrial workplaces.</p>
<p>Kriegler, writing in the wake of the shipyard’s closure, ended his final chapter with a prediction: “Company Town to Ghost Town”. Reports of Whyalla’s demise were premature, but he was not alone in his pessimism.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152779/original/image-20170116-11792-vbpf5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152779/original/image-20170116-11792-vbpf5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152779/original/image-20170116-11792-vbpf5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152779/original/image-20170116-11792-vbpf5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152779/original/image-20170116-11792-vbpf5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152779/original/image-20170116-11792-vbpf5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152779/original/image-20170116-11792-vbpf5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152779/original/image-20170116-11792-vbpf5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The first of 64 vessels built at the shipyard before it closed is now the centrepiece of Whyalla Maritime Museum.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/waynethomas/465878074/in/photolist-HaKjA-HaPJX-HaKkQ-2NvJCk-HaPKa-HaKmJ-teXEFH-57TTR7-fSkU3R-fPxSYZ-dHZd12-dJ5DCG-dJ5Doj-9tXAdF-mTLMuC-dHZdfk-9Wj4ZX-szB8v8-j2v5DV-HaPKZ-HaKkE-2NB9jd-r69PRF-53QKS-2NAca3-2NvRZg-53Q3Y-41EK7h-53Q3V-41EMWu-2NvGuR-8Umqwd-8Umqxd-8jjdZo-8jg3z4-8jg4Bx-2NAebU-Heqwy-HeqwA-q99icU-Hqoa6m-Heqwu-8jjexy-axo9AP-a2UabG-9Wj4YK-mGYnk-oWKg3z-tw7MDj-j2vnro">Wayne Thomas/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The shipyard’s closure coincided with the growth to maturity of the children of the migrant generation of the 1960s like me. It became usual for young people to leave Whyalla. Among the 75 or so members of my own, very large matriculation class of 1974 many left Whyalla for work or study (as did I). At the 30-year reunion in 2004, no more than two or three still lived in Whyalla. </p>
<p>Many of those remaining found limited opportunities for work and little sense of fulfilment. A survey of drug problems in Whyalla by the Drug and Alcohol Services South Australia in 1985 found “no positive community feeling about Whyalla”, and that “the entire social life of Whyalla revolves around alcohol”. </p>
<p>Not surprisingly, one-quarter of the young people interviewed said they drank “because there is nothing better to do in Whyalla”.</p>
<h2>Living through times of hope and despair</h2>
<p>I came to know several of Whyalla’s incarnations. I had grown up there in the boom years, had worked at the steelworks in vacations, and while driving taxis became closely acquainted with Whyalla’s pub and clubs. I also wrote a Litt.B. thesis about the town’s voluntary war effort during the second world war, which the council published. </p>
<p>Through that research I gained an understanding of both the earlier wartime boom and of the insular little community it had disrupted. And because I continued to visit the city, over the ensuing 40 years I saw it diminish.</p>
<p>The shipyard’s closure hit Whyalla hard, but it went down fighting. Community workshops cast about for ideas to generate a sustainable economy. Ideas to diversify the city’s economy included rabbit farming, a ferry (or even a bridge!) across Spencer Gulf and exploiting the ever-elusive tourist dollar. None came to much. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155133/original/image-20170201-12659-1g10bi1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155133/original/image-20170201-12659-1g10bi1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155133/original/image-20170201-12659-1g10bi1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=329&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155133/original/image-20170201-12659-1g10bi1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=329&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155133/original/image-20170201-12659-1g10bi1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=329&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155133/original/image-20170201-12659-1g10bi1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155133/original/image-20170201-12659-1g10bi1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155133/original/image-20170201-12659-1g10bi1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Looking
up Patterson Street, the main street of ‘old’ Whyalla, to the second world war defence emplacements, one of the city’s many features that the council attempted to turn into tourist attractions.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Peter Stanley</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>From the 1980s, Whyalla became better known for providing a home for welfare recipients than for producing ships and steel – its Housing Trust stock allegedly enabled beneficiaries in Adelaide to be offered accommodation if they were willing to move to Whyalla. </p>
<p>With the arrival of Indo-Chinese, South American and East African refugees in successive decades, Whyalla maintained its ethnic diversity. This included a small community of Indigenous people, some Barngala, the region’s original inhabitants.</p>
<p>Looking back over the century since BHP renamed the little ore-shipping port of Hummock Hill Whyalla in 1914, we can identify cycles of hope and despair against the larger rhythm of expansion and then contraction. </p>
<p>For at least 50 years Whyalla has seen optimism and idealism but also, if not despair, then its close neighbours, alienation and apathy. The city has seen repeated contests between hope and pessimism. Both seem to be embedded in the city’s culture, in its people’s repeated responses to the challenges of their situation.</p>
<h2>Postwar boom upset the old stability</h2>
<p>Whyalla had been a tiny company town until the late 1930s. It was simply an ore jetty and a railway workshop, loading iron ore from Iron Knob, 50 kilometres away in the Middleback Ranges. </p>
<p>In its first incarnation as a small ore-shipping port, Whyalla had been remarkably stable. The 1934 federal electoral roll, for example, listed some 800 voters, but the surnames of five families accounted for a tenth of residents. Whyalla seemed free of the sectarianism endemic to Australia 80 years ago – the town’s Catholic and Anglican ministers played in the town’s orchestra. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152783/original/image-20170116-11834-hsc3qn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152783/original/image-20170116-11834-hsc3qn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152783/original/image-20170116-11834-hsc3qn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152783/original/image-20170116-11834-hsc3qn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152783/original/image-20170116-11834-hsc3qn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152783/original/image-20170116-11834-hsc3qn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152783/original/image-20170116-11834-hsc3qn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152783/original/image-20170116-11834-hsc3qn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Premier Thomas Playford opens the Morgan-Whyalla pipeline in 1944, ending years of water shortages and enabling residents to plant gardens to make the town more pleasant. As the Murray River’s salinity rose, the water quality declined, becoming virtually undrinkable.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/sawater/5928703906/in/photolist-a2Ua7S-dgTMPu-6r8FVY-5FBvhr-e3LHhn-68ZAFu-NBAqe-nWc8CS-H9K3fc-dmQv9x-ngmBFr-j2xsRE-72dQRG-u3CkTi-y2zEb1-E1cxqk-E9rF9z-E9rF9e-DGjVP1-Dc3YWc-DzXuev-DzXu8P-E9rFgD-E9rFfB-DbHAm1-E1cxAR-DGjVLq-E1cxz8-Dc3ZaD-DbHAoL-E1cxyr-E77DDw-CnBbZm-E1cxCp-Bd9gni-E9rF7k-CEbphN-E9rFbP-DbHAoA-D4ybDv-y2zEbw-rBehPq-j2uGjK-B2eMxW-vWY58e-Mz5Vac-LK4KLp-Mwpjk3-MwpfT3-MbPvkQ">SA Water/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the late 1930s, the Playford state government persuaded (and subsidised) BHP to build a blast furnace, and a shipyard followed in 1940. </p>
<p>The town’s expansion upset the old stability. During the second world war the town grew from fewer than a thousand inhabitants to nearly 7,000, most drawn from the economically depressed Eyre Peninsula and Mid North. </p>
<p>The war years brought hardship – many families attracted to the town by war work lived in tents and shacks in what was called “Siberia” – but also a sense of hope after years of worldwide, national and local economic depression. People built their own houses, bought them under the company’s scheme or sought Housing Trust homes – small, but well-built and secure after the rural poverty many had known. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/154658/original/image-20170129-29621-uddtjm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/154658/original/image-20170129-29621-uddtjm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/154658/original/image-20170129-29621-uddtjm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=197&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154658/original/image-20170129-29621-uddtjm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=197&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154658/original/image-20170129-29621-uddtjm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=197&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154658/original/image-20170129-29621-uddtjm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=247&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154658/original/image-20170129-29621-uddtjm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=247&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154658/original/image-20170129-29621-uddtjm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=247&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">These Housing Trust homes in Goodman Street were built to house the many people who migrated to Whyalla to work in the shipyard and the blast furnace in the early 1940s. Residents’ groups agitated to have the streets sealed, the cost of which was a factor in BHP accepting calls for elected local government in 1945.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">BHP Archives</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155127/original/image-20170201-12675-1xlqk9e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155127/original/image-20170201-12675-1xlqk9e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155127/original/image-20170201-12675-1xlqk9e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=326&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155127/original/image-20170201-12675-1xlqk9e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=326&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155127/original/image-20170201-12675-1xlqk9e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=326&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155127/original/image-20170201-12675-1xlqk9e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155127/original/image-20170201-12675-1xlqk9e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155127/original/image-20170201-12675-1xlqk9e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Houses in the same area of Whyalla South 60 years later show how Murray water helped ‘green’ the city. What will happen as the wartime housing stock ages is a pressing question.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Peter Stanley</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But the war also saw tensions between old residents and new. Established residents dominated the town’s social organisations, especially its voluntary war effort. Newcomers were, however, active in pressing for civic improvements and for improved working conditions in the company’s shipyard and blast furnace. </p>
<p>Under the leadership of trade unions and groups such as the Housewives’ Association, newcomers pressed for price controls, new schools, bread and postal deliveries, telephone and bus services, cheaper water and better housing. They expressed a powerful idealism characteristic of a generation that fought and worked for a better world.</p>
<p>While established residents accepted the company’s paternalism, newcomers (almost all from rural South Australia) pressed for representative local government. BHP, reluctant to pay for the larger, more expensive town services but equally loath to relinquish control, engineered a compromise in the form of a town commission. </p>
<p>The commission, established by the state government in 1944, comprised three representatives each of company and residents, chaired by an independent commissioner, Charles Ryan (who held the position from 1945 to 1970). </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152775/original/image-20170115-11831-1ipjv3d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152775/original/image-20170115-11831-1ipjv3d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152775/original/image-20170115-11831-1ipjv3d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1196&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152775/original/image-20170115-11831-1ipjv3d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1196&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152775/original/image-20170115-11831-1ipjv3d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1196&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152775/original/image-20170115-11831-1ipjv3d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152775/original/image-20170115-11831-1ipjv3d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152775/original/image-20170115-11831-1ipjv3d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">BHP was ‘not very pleased with the results’ of the first town commission election – it later sacked an employee, Eric Stead, who had been elected as a residents’ representative.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/55873497">Trove/National Library of Australia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The commission reflected idealism, pragmatism and paternalism. The elections for the first town commission in 1945 revealed the extent to which many of Whyalla’s newcomers yearned for a better society. The three ratepayers’ representatives included Eric Stead, a member of the Communist Party and an embodiment of the “progressive” movements in the town. </p>
<p>“Naturally, we are not very pleased with the results,” the company’s director in Whyalla reported to head office in Melbourne.</p>
<p>Stead’s election reflected, of course, the Communist Party’s popularity generally at the end of the war. But it also disclosed the deep yearning for a better life among a generation traumatised by economic depression and war; Whyalla’s new houses and company-subsidised services could provide that life.</p>
<p>Many of those attracted in wartime moved on after 1945, but those who stayed formed an enlarged “old Whyalla” – notably loyal to the paternalist BHP (naturally, known to residents simply as “the company”). That stability was disrupted once more from the late 1950s. Again supported by a state government (still Playford’s), BHP built a steelworks at Whyalla. This created the boom that brought the Stanleys and tens of thousands of other newcomers to the city.</p>
<h2>A city of contradictions</h2>
<p>Whyalla’s sense of itself as a community – as distinct from the dismal catalogue of deprivation on a range of socio-economic indicators – has never been clearer than in the Australian Frontier report of 1973, at the height of the second boom. </p>
<p>Produced by a Melbourne social research consultant in response to a request by the new Whyalla City Council (which supplanted the commission in 1970), the report investigated the “Factors Influencing the Stability of Whyalla”. It drew on a “Community Self Survey” co-ordinated by a Congregational Church social worker, Don Sarre, notable because it reflected the views of residents rather than planners. </p>
<p>Sarre’s report documented two contradictory themes. One was of physical or social hardship and deprivation. It noted the concern of doctors and nurses at the incidence of boredom, isolation and depression, and that at least half – and perhaps two-thirds – of respondents had no firm intention to remain in Whyalla. </p>
<p>Sarre identified the “inadequacy of the nuclear family” as a key cause of instability – most newcomers to the city (over half migrants or their Australian-born children) had no extended families and the support they could offer. </p>
<p>But among those who remained (which included some of the Stanleys), people expressed yearnings for facilities and conditions that would enable them to make a home in a place not immediately seen as hospitable, or even (at the height of summer) habitable.</p>
<p>They valued “the ease of making good friends” in the city and its healthy climate, and they had aspirations and desires. Their wishes expressed a powerful positive vision. They wanted better educational opportunities for their children, more parks and gardens and, above all, better and more local control over their community. </p>
<p>Don Sarre, reflecting on the report 40-odd years later, recalled that the aspects that most struck him in retrospect were the energy with which Whyalla’s newcomers built a community and the quality of community leadership evident in the city’s expansionary period. </p>
<p>For example, teachers staffing the dozen primary and four high schools were often graduates, “bonded” or posted to the country and bringing a quality of youthful, professional enthusiasm that matched the aspirations of their pupils’ parents.</p>
<h2>Decline stretches over decades</h2>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152781/original/image-20170116-11806-123sqrs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152781/original/image-20170116-11806-123sqrs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152781/original/image-20170116-11806-123sqrs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=715&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152781/original/image-20170116-11806-123sqrs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=715&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152781/original/image-20170116-11806-123sqrs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=715&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152781/original/image-20170116-11806-123sqrs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152781/original/image-20170116-11806-123sqrs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152781/original/image-20170116-11806-123sqrs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">From a peak of 34,000 in the 1970s, Whyalla’s population had shrunk to 27,000 last decade and is now 22,000.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/9557815@N05/5092981590">Abi Skipp/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Despite this idealism, by the 1990s the city had slipped to be the state’s third-largest city (after Adelaide and Mount Gambier). This was a reflection of Whyalla’s decline rather than growth elsewhere. </p>
<p>Visiting at least annually, I observed how shops closed, shopping centres became increasingly shabby and houses and then entire blocks of Housing Trust houses fell derelict and were then demolished. </p>
<p>Signs of Whyalla’s decline were everywhere: driving in from the airport, my mother’s litany would be “there’s another Trust house knocked down”; but she’d also express pride at “the new leisure centre” or “the new Harvey Norman’s”. </p>
<p>The local newspaper, the Whyalla News, begun in 1940 as a weekly, went to twice weekly in the 1950s and thrice weekly in the 1970s. It then declined, losing pages, advertisers and readers. It now appears once a week again, like many country newspapers permanently on the brink of closure. </p>
<p>The decline of the city’s human infrastructure can be seen in the case of its Protestant churches. In the early 1970s, nonconformist congregations supported half-a-dozen clergymen and several other social and community development officers. Now the Uniting Church has one minister in the entire city, though arguably the need for the social and spiritual support that churches represent could not be greater.</p>
<p>On virtually any socio-economic measure in the 1990s, Whyalla scored more poorly than other cities in South Australia, even in the state’s “iron triangle”. Whyalla’s Department of Community Welfare office, a 1990 study revealed, had the highest per-capita number of “clients” in the state. </p>
<p>On an index of “relative socio-economic disadvantage”, Whyalla at 911 was below Port Pirie and its lead residues (at 921), Port August at 943, Mount Gambier at 957 and genteel Victor Harbour at 1,011. </p>
<p>The study also revealed shockingly high levels of domestic abuse, as suggested by the numbers of women seeking shelter. One area of just eight streets around Jenkins Avenue produced 201 “clients” (though a similar-sized area in the city’s east produced just one).</p>
<p>In the face of these grim realities, Whyalla had its boosters. The council remained resolutely positive, even though most initiatives failed to deliver the benefits promised. The Whyalla News seemed to have a generic news story permanently set, ready to be deployed, beginning with the headline “[insert name of company] plans will bring jobs”. </p>
<p>Sue Scheiffers’ privately published 1985 history of the city, A Ribbon of Steel, though appearing a decade after the shipyard’s closure, was sub-titled Whyalla Surges Ahead. Her book catalogued a relentless succession of development, urban amenities and civic progress. </p>
<p>As a serial grey nomad, in the 1980s and ’90s, my mother became a one-woman travelling embassy for Whyalla, persuading dozens of fellow caravanners in parks all over Australia that, regardless of its reputation, Whyalla was a paradise.</p>
<h2>Determinedly sunny despite it all</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152797/original/image-20170116-16922-l1p9zv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152797/original/image-20170116-16922-l1p9zv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152797/original/image-20170116-16922-l1p9zv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152797/original/image-20170116-16922-l1p9zv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152797/original/image-20170116-16922-l1p9zv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152797/original/image-20170116-16922-l1p9zv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152797/original/image-20170116-16922-l1p9zv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152797/original/image-20170116-16922-l1p9zv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">High rates of chronic illness keep Whyalla Hospital busy.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.sahealth.sa.gov.au/wps/wcm/connect/public+content/sa+health+internet/health+services/hospitals+and+health+services+-+country+south+australia/eyre+peninsula+western+hospitals+health+services/whyalla+hospital+and+health+service">SA Health/Government of South Australia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Of the migrants of the 1960s who remained, the environment in which they lived now actively harmed their health. Epidemiological surveys by the state’s Department of Health in 2005 established shocking figures of chronic illness. </p>
<p>Whyalla’s residents manifested significantly worse health than people in comparable towns. Rates of lung cancer were “significantly higher” – more than 50% greater – as were chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (77% more), alcoholic liver disease (70% more) and chronic hepatitis (330% more). The report had been prompted by long-standing concern about the red dust emitted from the steelworks, and especially its iron ore-processing “pellet plant”.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, the early 1990s brought yet another wave of consultants’ investigations, facilitated workshops and strategic planning, again with wildly optimistic outcomes. The report of a planning weekend among city council elected officials and employed officers in 1991 came up with extravagant ideas, such as developing a resort for Asian honeymooners and redeveloping the local racecourse and golf course to attract international punters and players. </p>
<p>The workshop considered several scenarios for Whyalla in 2001. While accepting its remote, hot and dry location and its “dirty” industry, participants nevertheless foresaw it at worst becoming a “pleasant backwater”. They even then thought that “ghost suburbs” might generate visitors. </p>
<p>One positive scenario for an “innovative, entrepreneurial, attractive human and humane” city sketched out a “green, almost tropical environment” based on recycled water and tourist attractions (such as a large sculpture park) that would, naturally, “put Whyalla on the international tourist circuit”.</p>
<p>Despite the city’s unpropitious situation and its precarious economic base, its people – and especially its city council – remained doggedly optimistic. In the 1990s, after two decades of decline, a brief and, as it turned out, almost fruitless movement aspired to make Whyalla an exemplar of the new “ecocity” movement.</p>
<p>The council, in association with the Adelaide-based Centre for Urban Ecology, endorsed plans to generate power from Whyalla’s abundant sunshine, creating a “green city”: a paradoxically enticing vision for a place that received only 270 millimetres of rainfall but over 300 sunny days annually.</p>
<p>An “eEcopolis”, as its proponents called it, involved “creating vibrant human settlements … shaping a healthy economy in keeping with ecological principles [and] promoting social justice and wellbeing”.</p>
<p>The ecocity push reflected Whyalla at its most optimistic. In <a href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/15403010?q&versionId=18099349">Whyalla Why Not?</a>, sustainable city theorist Paul Downton espoused the visionary idea that Whyalla could become “internationally renowned as a centre of the global solar industry, as well as being a major tourist destination”. </p>
<p>Downton wrote a short story, set 25 years in the future, painting a bold vision of a solar-powered city living in harmony with its environment and enriched by “green” industries. The ecocity idea set out to “reinvigorate the city, not only in environmental terms, but economically and culturally”. </p>
<p>The Whyalla of 2021 it envisaged would have “a seriously major rock music industry” and would have made multiculturalism work. Its population would have doubled but its jobless rate would be the lowest in Australia.</p>
<p>The vision of Whyalla as an ecocity offered an idealistic vision, as passionate as the boosters’ prophecies of growth 30 years before. It failed, killed by lack of investment. Its only reminder is a water-recovery plant near the city’s racecourse, its bare red-earth berms giving no idea of the passion that inspired it.</p>
<p>That the would-be ecocity’s economy remained fundamentally dependent upon mining and processing minerals, using coal-generated power and water brought from the ecologically failing Murray River, remains a sad and tragic irony.</p>
<h2>Quest continues in a new century</h2>
<p>In the early years of the 21st century there was a further burst of optimism, based on the <a href="http://150.101.83.163/page.aspx?u=89">promotional slogan</a> “Whyalla: Where the Outback Meets the Sea”. In 2005, the council was promoting the city hopefully: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Long a steel and ship-building hub, Whyalla is now experiencing a tourism renaissance based around its proud industrial history and natural phenomena.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In truth, tours of the steelworks attracted few visitors. The tourist promotion office was now putting its eggs in the baskets of the Whyalla Maritime Museum, itself based on the preserved second world war corvette HMAS Whyalla (the first ship built in the shipyard, launched in 1941 and in 1987 hauled ashore). </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152780/original/image-20170116-11834-kqu83h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152780/original/image-20170116-11834-kqu83h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152780/original/image-20170116-11834-kqu83h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=775&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152780/original/image-20170116-11834-kqu83h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=775&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152780/original/image-20170116-11834-kqu83h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=775&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152780/original/image-20170116-11834-kqu83h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=973&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152780/original/image-20170116-11834-kqu83h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=973&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152780/original/image-20170116-11834-kqu83h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=973&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Whyalla promotes the giant cuttlefish as a tourist attraction, but a cuttlefish-led revival is unlikely.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/southoz/3606759354/in/photolist-7rSFyL-6uHzU7-6uHAVY-6uHt7m-6uFwe4-6uDieT-6uDkr8-6uHFpU-6uDoGX-6uHxNd-6uHCC5-6uFmw4-6uHBuw-6uHEW3-6uDucD-6uHwpC-6uDnnV">southoz/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Even more, they hoped for a boon from fishing tourism, from the annual angling festival, and from the exploitation of the giant cuttlefish, which swarm in the waters of nearby False Bay. While the lure of Spencer Gulf’s snapper and kingfish has failed to attract gourmet travellers, the cuttlefish do attract a thousand or so divers each winter. </p>
<p>Successive mining or processing proposals, boosting the prospects and benefits of aquaculture, betalene (an algae used in food manufacture) or the processing of titanium dioxide, came to nothing; more is hoped from reports that Indian energy giant Adani might develop a solar-power plant in one of the city’s huge – but virtually unoccupied – industrial estates. Sometimes the city’s main product seems to be consultants’ reports and optimism in industrial quantities.</p>
<h2>Isolated, but no cultural desert</h2>
<p>For all that the city has become smaller and poorer, Whyalla remains (as the town commission’s 1965 booklet put it) “a city of contrasts”. Alongside the pub-club-bingo and poker-machine culture that seemingly characterises the city, it is also, paradoxically, a place with greater access to culture than comparable communities. </p>
<p>Partly because of its isolation and perceived disadvantages, the state government and other agencies have long made special efforts to bring culture to Whyalla. I first heard Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik live in the Nicholson Avenue primary school library, because South Australia’s arts council sent a string quartet on tour in about 1973. </p>
<p>The opening of what is now the Middleback Arts Centre in 1985 has given Whyalla residents an impressive program of theatre, music, ballet and other performances. </p>
<p>Nor is the culture all imported. The Whyalla Players have performed musicals annually since 1956, and not just the traditional Rogers and Hammerstein or Gilbert and Sullivan repertoire, but also complex and recent works such as Phantom of the Opera or Cats.</p>
<p>Again, this activity suggests a triumph of optimism over the city’s unpromising background of deprivation. Ironically, the Middleback Arts Centre is located in the same precinct that houses government and church employment and welfare offices.</p>
<p>This ambivalence can be detected in the reflections of resident writers published in anthologies produced by successive incarnations of the Whyalla Writers’ Group (WWG). In 2001, Julie Drogemuller, in her poem The Beauty of Whyalla, reflected lyrically:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Her eyes</p>
<p>are the lights</p>
<p>that shine</p>
<p>in the clear starry nights.</p>
<p>And her name is Whyalla.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Contributors to another WWG anthology, Iceblocking in Red Haze, expressed the disaffection seemingly endemic among the city’s “youth”. In a piece featuring a sustained diatribe beginning “I hate Whyalla”, an anonymous author ended her piece, paradoxically, by writing fondly of:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… the red sand, the saltbush, the desert … the RED HAZE, my home Whyalla.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152785/original/image-20170116-16945-1hxh7p0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152785/original/image-20170116-16945-1hxh7p0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152785/original/image-20170116-16945-1hxh7p0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152785/original/image-20170116-16945-1hxh7p0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152785/original/image-20170116-16945-1hxh7p0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152785/original/image-20170116-16945-1hxh7p0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152785/original/image-20170116-16945-1hxh7p0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152785/original/image-20170116-16945-1hxh7p0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The red sand, the saltbush, the desert, the RED HAZE … not everyone loves Whyalla’s setting.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/mikecogh/27249910836/in/photolist-fMz7sH-fAaUfN-oWKg3z-csX3zC-fzVQVP-csX5aA-oWtFjP-2NwLFa-eXiMKf-HRCmHm-eX7yLx-fSbuut-eXiGXs-2NBa6u-37mBSe-r3yHJj-rH7mJr-NPA6c7-NPzZ3o-NPzV1W-N2KNyK-N32Uqy-MzKoNh-HTWZSc-HTWUYV-HzTP8u-HvYV7U">Michael Coghlan/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Ideas, we’ve had a few</h2>
<p>As this suggests, while arguably a community in perpetual crisis, optimism can be found – not least in the pages of the city’s newspaper. Jan Vrtelka, a Czech migrant, wrote dozens of letters to the Whyalla News in the mid-noughties. He later published a selection of over 60 of them under the telling title of All for Whyalla. </p>
<p>Vrtelka’s optimism for Whyalla’s potential seemed boundless. He too advocated developing coastal resorts and remaking the railway to Port Augusta – which had carried passengers for only two years before closing in 1978 – to ship cattle to Darwin for export to Asia. He also proposed desalination plants, a medical school and university to make it the “education hub of western South Australia”. </p>
<p>The coastal track to Port Augusta, he claimed, could rival Victoria’s Great Ocean Road, if only it were sealed. He urged the introduction of dog-sledding (on sand) and land yachts (on mudflats near the city).</p>
<p>Whyalla, he thought, should plan for a city five times its present size: entice refugees to settle, he argued – perhaps having himself fled Soviet oppression.</p>
<p>Jan Vrtelka’s pride in Whyalla was not unique. Like my mother, he regarded Whyalla’s heat as invigorating and its generally fine weather as without parallel. It was as if the authors of BHP’s boosting booklets of the 1960s lived on. </p>
<p>Vrtelka’s optimism was at least rooted in an awareness that things really were pretty crook. He knew that the city’s population had declined more rapidly than in any comparable second city in any state in the world. He understood the notion of “a diminishing city” – an oft-used catchphrase – but he struggled against it.</p>
<h2>Still defying the uncertainty</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155130/original/image-20170201-12664-u8g7kp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155130/original/image-20170201-12664-u8g7kp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155130/original/image-20170201-12664-u8g7kp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=521&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155130/original/image-20170201-12664-u8g7kp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=521&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155130/original/image-20170201-12664-u8g7kp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=521&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155130/original/image-20170201-12664-u8g7kp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=655&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155130/original/image-20170201-12664-u8g7kp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=655&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155130/original/image-20170201-12664-u8g7kp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=655&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dating from 1940, the frieze on the Hotel Spencer depicts the blast furnace, a relic of Whyalla’s first industrial boom.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Peter Stanley</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Whyalla’s economic decline appears to be terminal. Ore mining in the Middleback Ranges brings modest benefits; as did the Santos natural gas development at Port Bonython on nearby Point Lowly in the 1990s. The development of BHP Billiton’s copper and uranium mines at Olympic Dam has not contributed much to Whyalla’s economy. </p>
<p>BHP divested itself of the steelworks in 2000 to OneSteel, later taken over by Arrium Steel, with each transfer costing jobs. Over the decade the total workforce in the steelworks – once 6,000-strong – fell to around 1,600. In April 2016, Arrium called in administrators and offered the plant for sale. </p>
<p>Today, the future of the steelworks remains uncertain. If it were to close, not only would Australia lose its only manufacturer of “long steel” products, but without its principal employer Whyalla would be mortally wounded, economically and socially. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152786/original/image-20170116-16949-15sk3pi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152786/original/image-20170116-16949-15sk3pi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152786/original/image-20170116-16949-15sk3pi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=289&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152786/original/image-20170116-16949-15sk3pi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=289&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152786/original/image-20170116-16949-15sk3pi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=289&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152786/original/image-20170116-16949-15sk3pi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=363&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152786/original/image-20170116-16949-15sk3pi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=363&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152786/original/image-20170116-16949-15sk3pi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=363&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Whyalla, where the outback meets the sea … or where the steelworks used to be?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/9557815@N05/5186939954/in/photolist-q1Mihq-pTwSCL-dJ5DCG-Hqoa6m-fPxSYZ-8Umqwd-fSamSy-8Umqxd">Abi Skipp/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Fundamentally, the question is whether an industrial community can survive in the harsh environment of the upper Eyre Peninsula. Arrium Steel’s collapse may reflect the structural impossibility of attempting to make steel in such a place, rather than merely chronic mismanagement and a worldwide glut of steel.</p>
<p>But amid the predictions of economic collapse and the social dislocation that would inevitably follow, optimistic voices are also heard. </p>
<p>The city council’s 2015–16 strategic plan predictably aims to create “a vibrant, attractive city offering our community a diverse range of sustainable economic, social, environmental and cultural opportunities”, creating “an energetic, harmonious, integrated community actively involved in shaping Whyalla for current and future generations”. </p>
<p>Just as deprivation and despair are an ineradicable part of Whyalla’s inheritance, so too are optimism and hope. A recent visit to the city disclosed new homes privately built where Housing Trust units had been demolished and, as well as many “For Sale” signs, new businesses opening (a perennial triumph of optimism over economic reality in the city). </p>
<p>Amid forebodings of doom, quixotic headlines characterise the Whyalla News: “Afloat with hope”; “City on the mend”, “Whyalla expands to great future” and, of course, “Jobs boost for region”. </p>
<p>The local council has launched a rebranding that will, they hope, attract tourists. (The Whyalla News cartoonist – who happens to be my elder brother – suggests that instead of “Where the outback meets the sea” it adopt “Where the steelworks used to be”). With the death in 2016 of Jim Pollock, long-term mayor named in obituaries as a “Whyalla warrior”, no fewer than seven candidates are standing for election as mayor: they all have positive visions for the city’s future. </p>
<p>On the way to the airport I stopped off at a magnificent exhibition of quilts by the Whyalla Quilters. The group’s members had produced over a hundred pieces, a startlingly characteristic expression of the creativity that Whyalla’s people can display.</p>
<p>No-one is really sure what “Whyalla” means in the language of the Barngala people: they were devastated culturally before anyone thought to ask. It may mean “place near water” (“Where the outback meets the sea”), or it may mean (in the classic Indigenous response to a white questioner) “I don’t know”.</p>
<p>Whyalla: I don’t know.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>The author is grateful to Don Sarre, Ingrid and Stephen Stanley, Naomi Haldane and Ana Morris of the Whyalla Library Service, and Teresa Court of the Whyalla City Council. His work has also been published in Griffith Review 9 and 48.</em></p>
<p><em>You can read other essays from Griffith Review’s latest edition <a href="https://griffithreview.com/editions/state-of-hope/">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/69988/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Stanley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Decades of expansion for Whyalla were followed by decades of contraction. Whyalla has seen optimism and idealism but also, if not despair, then its close neighbours, alienation and apathy.
Peter Stanley, Research Professor in the Australian Centre for the Study of Armed Conflict and Society, UNSW Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/70265
2017-02-09T02:39:13Z
2017-02-09T02:39:13Z
God bless the footy: dissent and distractions
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150226/original/image-20161215-2529-10jzqkr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Before the AFL, there was the much better, much cooler, much more local SANFL.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/heatherw/15303946066/in/photolist-pjmHZ5-grh2p4-8FVYjk-dhN86T-pm7wMM-p4TLxy-dhN83u-grgZEH-grggR4-dhN5bd-dhN3SL-dhN5ZU-dhN2Rc-dhN7EJ-grgGUb-8FZ9YJ-p4UAgX-dhN6UW-dhN6DY-grfKH7-dhN8gE-8FZaod-dhN49u-8FZ9MA-dhN3Z8-dhN4DT-dhN75u-dhN4qK-dhN5qX-pm7pQv-p4UarY-8FZ9G3-8FVY2n-dhN7t5-dhN7yF-dhN3pw-grgi9p-p4UesU-dhN6rm-grgFw1-pmmYyQ-grgttJ-dhN3yN-grgzfU-dhN3Gb-dhN5VK-grgDqY-grgaFi-8FZazq-grgC1U">heatherw/flickr</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This piece is republished with permission from State of Hope, the 55th edition of Griffith Review. Articles are a little longer than most published on The Conversation, presenting an in-depth analysis of the economic, social, environmental and cultural challenges facing South Australia, and the possibilities of renewal and revitalisation.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>When it comes to colourful and controversial views, the long-time mayor of Port Augusta, Joy Baluch, set elite standards. She <a href="http://www.slsa.sa.gov.au/archivaldocs/oh/OH862.pdf">said in 2008</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I hate sport.</p>
<p>I’ve never had time for it, been too busy looking after a family, you know, surviving. It’s a waste of time. I hate football and tennis and golf … and if ever the Asians are going to come in it’s going to be on grand final day … And they’ll just take over peacefully.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’m not sure exactly which Asians she imagined would swarm South Australia on grand final day, destroying our white-bread, white-skinned way of life. Perhaps all the Asians – the Chinese and the Indonesians, the Japanese and the Koreans, the Vietnamese and the Thais – slaughtering innocent women and children with nothing but the power of kung fu, riding their Suzuki motorbikes, eating butter chicken and guzzling Chang beer after a solid day’s conquering.</p>
<p>The term “Asians” – whether she used it here thoughtlessly, provocatively or jokily – is symptomatic of Baluch the plain-speaking dissenter. But so too is her attack on sport. Few things are more shocking and inexplicable to huge numbers of South Australians (<a href="http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/09/08/1062901996932.html">weird murders notwithstanding</a>) than someone willing to have a dig at the footy.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.saints.com.au/news/2013-05-29/the-man-with-the-killer-approach">Alan Killigrew</a>, a Victorian who came to Adelaide in 1959 to coach the Norwood Football Club, offers a more <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=my-4EKn2SiEC&pg=PA75&lpg=PA75#v=onepage&q&f=false">conventional and comforting view</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>After all, what is a football club? It is grass in the middle, posts at the ends, and bricks and mortar. It’s people that give it soul. A football club is a living body.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’ve heard family and friends describe their church in exactly these terms. Footy isn’t just the dominant spectator sport and topic of conversation in South Australia. It’s a salve. It’s a community binding agent. It’s the best entertainment going, even in the digital age. </p>
<p>It’s a mass obsession, especially when one of the local AFL teams – the Crows or the Power – sits high (or low) on the ladder.</p>
<h2>A love for Norwood</h2>
<p>Before the AFL, there was the much better, much cooler, much more local SANFL.</p>
<p>When I was nine years old and living in the lead-smelter city of Port Pirie, not too far from Baluch’s Port Augusta, Norwood made the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_SANFL_Grand_Final">1978 SANFL Grand Final</a>. Never mind Asians: little green men from outer space could have landed their spaceship while Dad and I watched the last quarter on the TV in our lounge room on Three Chain Road.</p>
<p>Norwood – the mighty Redlegs – were 29 points down at three-quarter time against Sturt, who had only lost once all season. The ’Legs were only so close because Sturt had kicked poorly in front of goal. </p>
<p>Norwood’s then coach, Bob Hammond, <a href="http://www.redlegsmuseum.com.au/ON_FIELD/PREMIERSHIPS/1978.aspx">told his players</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>You can win it if you believe you can win. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Inspired – enraptured, perhaps – the players surged. In the chaotic final minutes, umpire Des Foster awarded Norwood’s Philip Gallagher a mark – or was it a free kick? – the legitimacy of which Sturt supporters still dispute. On a tight angle, “Gags” kicked the winning goal.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8q3u_7YN_h4?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The ending to the 1978 SANFL Grand Final.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the nearly 40 years that have passed, I have never strayed far from that spot in front of the TV, too tense to breathe as the clock ticked down: nothing could have mattered more. </p>
<p>I can still feel the disbelief, the ecstasy, as the final siren went and Dad lifted me off the ground and over his shoulder. Most especially, I will never lose my righteous fury at Mum and Dad, who had refused to let me get the train down to Adelaide to go to the game. My older brother Matt witnessed history that day from the concrete terraces of Footy Park, and that’s the reason he has done so well in life.</p>
<p>Norwood’s 1984 premiership was even more memorable, although I wasn’t even in the country. By then, I was a painfully shy teenager living with my parents in Logan, Utah, in a valley between two stunning mountain ranges and surrounded by Reagan-hugging Mormons. </p>
<p>That year, Norwood came from fifth, winning three knockout finals to make the grand final against Port Adelaide. On the Monday after the final, the family back home mailed us a VHS tape of the game. While we waited for it to arrive, nobody would tell us whether we’d won. Finally, Grandma Allington, under extreme pressure from her loving son and grandson, muttered down the phone in her faux grumpy way:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I promised I wouldn’t tell you who won. But if I did tell you, you’d be very happy.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>When the tape finally arrived in the mail, we couldn’t play it because the US used the NTSC television display system. At a friend’s place – we had no video player ourselves, although we had access to something like a billion TV stations – we fast-forwarded the tape and, with electronic snow for vision, listened to the commentator’s distorted voice call the final seconds, his voice slow and deep:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Theeeeere … itttttt. Issssss … it’sssssss … alllllll … ovvv-errrrrr.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It was a couple of weeks before we found a kind stranger with a set-up that allowed us to watch the game.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mzU06TU781U?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Highlights of the 1984 SANFL Grand Final.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Footy embedded itself in my childhood life in deeper ways than winning games and the occasional premiership. I researched everything about football. More importantly, I felt everything. I cried one night in 1980, when Port Adelaide’s Russell Ebert won his fourth Magarey Medal and so deprived Norwood’s Michael Taylor of what was rightfully his.</p>
<p>I wasn’t only consumed by the season in progress. One day, Dad took me to meet an old man called “Wacka” Scott, who let me hold his two Magarey Medals (1924 and 1930). </p>
<p>Another time, I traipsed around a suburban cemetery to find the grave of “Topsy” Waldron, who played in Norwood’s first year in 1878 (Norwood were premiers on debut). In his book commemorating the centenary of Norwood, <a href="http://www.blaqbooks.com.au/index.php?route=product/product&path=64_129&product_id=600">Red and Blue Blooded</a>, Mike Coward wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Waldron died a pathetically lonely man. He believed only his Norwood Football Club loved him.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But perhaps most of all my love for footy and for Norwood was about family. I loved reading old newspaper clippings of my grandpa’s football exploits. Harold Allington was a defender who played 56 games for Norwood between 1931 and 1935; he won the 1934 best and fairest; he played for the state; he had a clean pair of hands.</p>
<p>He was also – and this was the part I loved the most – injury-prone. The Advertiser reported on May 17, 1935:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This year he is still the shuttlecock of misfortune. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>He broke his collarbone, missed ten games from a single concussion, did an elbow, badly bruised his hip, and more.</p>
<p>My favourite clipping detailed the day Grandpa cut off the middle toe of his right foot while chopping wood in the backyard: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Allington, who was wearing slippers at the time, limped into the kitchen unseen, and despite great pain prepared some hot water in which to bathe his foot.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>How he managed to chop off one toe – why not two toes? why not half his foot? – was forever a mystery to me.</p>
<p>I was almost as proud of Dad, who played a couple of trial games for Norwood in the early 1960s. He could have made it – or so I’ve always believed – but he was at theological college at the time. One day the coach, Alan Killigrew, spoke to Dad after training. He said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You’ve got to choose between football and God.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>To my everlasting regret, Dad chose God.</p>
<p>It’s been several years since I’ve been to a Norwood game, although I occasionally watch them on television. I have followed the Crows, the made-up club <a href="http://www.afl.com.au/news/2014-02-05/crows-to-don-sa-jumper">“for all South Australians”</a>, since their first game in 1991, but never with the same messianic fervour with which I followed Norwood. </p>
<p>Perhaps most importantly, being a Crows fan allows me to retain my culturally embedded and familial hatred of Port Adelaide. I go to the occasional game at the cathedral otherwise known as the new Adelaide Oval (South Australians will line up to tell you it’s a “world-class stadium”), and I watch replays of high-quality matches. </p>
<p>But despite my fading fervour, I retain a version of a football-is-everything mentality. Partly, I’m nostalgic for my childhood. Partly it’s because it’s still, on a good day, a magnificent spectator sport. And partly it’s because I miss my grandpa.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150224/original/image-20161215-2539-5m3fbf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150224/original/image-20161215-2539-5m3fbf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=391&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150224/original/image-20161215-2539-5m3fbf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=391&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150224/original/image-20161215-2539-5m3fbf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=391&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150224/original/image-20161215-2539-5m3fbf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150224/original/image-20161215-2539-5m3fbf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150224/original/image-20161215-2539-5m3fbf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In South Australia, you’re traditionally either a Port Adelaide fan or you hate them.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The off-field reigns supreme</h2>
<p>These days, though, I find myself more interested in footy analysis, rumour and realpolitik than in actual games. </p>
<p>The AFL is a legitimate and sometimes compelling space in which to consider a range of political, cultural and social issues, including racism, reconciliation, sexism and misogyny, the deification of the alpha male, the profile of elite women’s sport, the use and misuse of “team first” philosophies, the carnivalised meaning of Anzac Day, the sanctity of Good Friday, performance-enhancing drugs, illicit drugs, gambling, the proliferation of sledging in public and workplace discourse, and more. </p>
<p>The AFL’s own approach to these issues is sometimes awkward, sometimes PR-driven and sometimes tokenistic. But, at other times, they display some sophistication. Often, it’s a bit of both – and in any case, footy fans are hardly the only subset of Australian citizens who struggle to engage constructively with complex issues.</p>
<p>But my interest in off-field matters goes deeper still, by which I mean shallower still. The AFL’s trade period in 2016 threw up its usual mix of players trying to leave clubs and clubs trying to push players out. For a week in October, I was transfixed by <a href="http://www.afl.com.au/news/2016-10-10/carlton-star-bryce-gibbs-requests-trade-to-adelaide">the possibility</a> that Bryce Gibbs might leave the Carlton Football Club, even though he has three years to run on his contract, and come home to Adelaide. </p>
<p>I worried about what player or draft picks the Adelaide Crows would give up to get him. Not Mitch McGovern, surely, who could be anything; not Charlie Cameron – please, no – who Eddie Betts has taken under his wing. In the end, Gibbs <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/afl-trades-2016-bryce-gibbs-stays-at-carlton-after-adelaide-trade-falls-through-20161020-gs6v0p.html">stayed put</a>, with the Crows <a href="http://www.afc.com.au/news/2016-10-20/crows-decline-to-meet-carltons-demands">announcing</a> they “were not prepared to meet Carlton’s unrealistic demands”.</p>
<p>These are the sorts of footy issues that capture my interest: which coach is about to get sacked? Which player has filmed himself snorting a white substance and whacked it up on the internet? Was Norwood’s 1984 premiership – coming from fifth when the finalists came from a top five only – a greater achievement than the Western Bulldogs’ <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-01/western-bulldogs-break-the-drought-with-22-point-win-over-swans/7895386">2016 AFL triumph</a> from seventh to premiers?</p>
<p>Only parochialism can deal with an unanswerable question: Norwood is by definition better than the Western Bulldogs or Footscray or whatever they’re calling themselves this week, and South Australia is by definition better than Victoria.</p>
<p>All this is harmless fun, innocent downtime. But think back to Joy Baluch, who suggested that we’d be too distracted on grand final day to notice an Asian invasion. </p>
<p>Leaving aside Asians, Baluch is onto me – but the situation is more insidious than she suggests. Footy chat doesn’t <em>distract</em> me. I don’t find myself wondering why I am listening to Trade Radio – yes, for a couple of weeks after grand final day, there’s such a thing as a digital nine-to-five talkfest on club negotiations over player movements, real and imagined. </p>
<p>I seek out Trade Radio, specifically seek it out to avoid confronting other, harder, messier things. I’m a political junkie who can’t bear to hear things I don’t want to hear, just as a kid I couldn’t bear to watch Norwood lose.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150033/original/image-20161214-18914-vp1glh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150033/original/image-20161214-18914-vp1glh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=363&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150033/original/image-20161214-18914-vp1glh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=363&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150033/original/image-20161214-18914-vp1glh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=363&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150033/original/image-20161214-18914-vp1glh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150033/original/image-20161214-18914-vp1glh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150033/original/image-20161214-18914-vp1glh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Carlton’s Bryce Gibbs (right) requested a move home to Adelaide in the recent AFL trade period.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Joe Castro</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Politics and footy</h2>
<p>As Cory Bernardi, senator for South Australia, has grown in prominence, he has begun to remind me of the giant Christ the Redeemer statue that looks down on the city of Rio de Janeiro. </p>
<p>But chiselled Cory is fully animated. He is a faith-fuelled greed-is-good humanoid who invites and incites ridicule, allowing him cover to get on with the business of saving souls; bringing the national budget back into balance; keeping heathens offshore; <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/cory-bernardi-to-be-sent-to-united-nations-20160301-gn7al2.html">fixing the UN</a>; making his (now-former) Coalition colleagues appear more centrist and moderate than they are; and scaring people silly.</p>
<p>As political activism goes, whinging about Bernardi is an increasingly lame act. This is a bloke who offers his opponents fresh ammunition every time he aggressively expresses his unpleasant and anachronistic ideas. </p>
<p>But when, say, Jacqui Lambie <a href="http://theaimn.com/day-day-politics-house-shambles-no-just-chaos/">tees off at Bernardi</a> – “prostitutes are far more honest, sincere, humane and compassionate, and better bang for buck than Senator Bernardi will ever be able to deliver” – I laugh, but then I cringe (and not only because sex workers can surely be humane and compassionate human beings).</p>
<p>Taking a stand against Bernardi means – or might mean – taking a stand against family, neighbours, friends, colleagues. It means being willing to scratch at a veneer of community conviviality and solidarity.</p>
<p>At a certain point, I want to get through my day in a good mood, without feeling the need to scream “Who the hell did you vote for?” at the bloke in the car next to me at the lights. I want to deny Bernardi’s public existence, just as I want to avert my gaze from youth unemployment rates, just as I want to pretend that the bodies in the barrels murders didn’t happen in a suburb in the city I call home. </p>
<p>Instead, I want to think about something truly unjust, like why Norwood never got its own team in the AFL. And so – very often – that’s exactly what I do. It’s a free country, after all.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150032/original/image-20161214-18885-1dmaxm2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150032/original/image-20161214-18885-1dmaxm2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=395&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150032/original/image-20161214-18885-1dmaxm2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=395&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150032/original/image-20161214-18885-1dmaxm2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=395&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150032/original/image-20161214-18885-1dmaxm2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=496&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150032/original/image-20161214-18885-1dmaxm2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=496&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150032/original/image-20161214-18885-1dmaxm2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=496&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">As political activism goes, whinging about Cory Bernardi is an increasingly lame act.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Mick Tsikas</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>South Australia and dissenters</h2>
<p>Privilege, distractions, parochialism, state pride, complacency, conformity, passivity: these are natural resources that South Australia has in abundance. We can put a positive spin on them too. </p>
<p>In <a href="http://www.wakefieldpress.com.au/product.php?productid=207">Drawing the Crow</a>, his book about South Australia in the 1950s and ’60s, academic Adrian Mitchell says that Adelaide’s long-time moniker as the City of Churches:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… identifies not a freak nor architecture nor a rampaging wowserism, either current or in the past, but a lifestyle of civic steadiness, regularity and propriety, the values of its founding settlement, in both its English and German constituency.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I recognise my Adelaide – I recognise myself – in Mitchell’s description. And it leaves me deeply uneasy.</p>
<p>In 1957, the year Port Adelaide beat Norwood by 11 points in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1957_SANFL_Grand_Final">grand final</a>, historian Douglas Pike published <a href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/10713883">Paradise of Dissent: South Australia, 1829–1857</a>. Pike’s book – at times riveting, at times dense, at times tedious – opens with these resonant lines:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>South Australia was settled in 1836 by men whose professed ideals were civil liberty, social opportunity and equality for all religions. Though each of these ideas was moulded in England, each was a protest against English practice. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The first colonists, Pike says, arrived harbouring dissatisfaction with the pace of reform in England: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Only the impatient departed.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The South Australian self-perception of exceptionalism – a “sense of difference”, as historian Derek Whitelock puts it – emerges from these origins and this origin story. </p>
<p>And South Australia has indeed had its fair share of dissenters. There is Catherine Helen Spence, the feminist, electoral reformer, social activist, preacher and writer. Spence thought:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>My work on newspapers and reviews is more characteristic of me, and intrinsically better work than I have done in fiction. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Maybe, but her politically charged fiction resounds still, not least a foray into science fiction in which her terminally ill protagonist trades the last couple of years of her life for “one week in the future”.</p>
<p>South Australian dissenters, including Baluch and Bernardi, have often operated within the political sphere. My favourite colonist is <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/finniss-boyle-travers-2044">Boyle Travers Finniss</a>, who, in 1856, was the first premier of South Australia under responsible government, when the local Legislative Council revised South Australia’s constitution to achieve self-government. </p>
<p>In 1864, Finniss led an expedition to select a site for the capital of the Northern Territory. After he insisted on surveying a swamp, some of his men sailed for Singapore, while six others acquired a seven-metre boat and floated all the way to Champion Bay in Western Australia. </p>
<p>Finniss straddled a line between dissenter and misguided visionary, between principled outlier and dogmatist, between self-confidence and delusion. </p>
<p>American legal scholar Cass Sunstein argues that democracies need dissent; he warns against an excess of conformity. But he also condemns “political correctness” – which he calls “squelching those who reject left-wing orthodoxy” – while acknowledging, correctly but unhelpfully, “we do not need to encourage would-be dissenters who are speaking nonsense”. </p>
<p>Is Bernardi speaking nonsense on behalf of South Australians? It depends who you ask.</p>
<p>And then there is the grand political dissenter of the 20th century, premier and superhero Don Dunstan, who dragged the state – and, to a lesser extent, the Labor Party – into the modern world, and towards something much more resembling a just world, a fair world, a diverse world, a creative world, a food-loving world.</p>
<p>But in time, the phrase “paradise of dissent” has become a slogan, detached from the complex and messy history Pike told. We don’t need Pike’s observation that conformist tendencies kicked in early in the new colony. We don’t need to think about the practical limits of the religious, cultural and political freedoms imagined by the new establishment.</p>
<p>And it’s best, still, that we don’t think too deeply about our treatment of the land’s original inhabitants. In our complacency, we need only know that South Australia was planned (like a kit home), was convict-free (at least in theory) and that it has produced a bumper crop of dissenters (like a tomato plant in a Mediterranean climate). </p>
<p>We need only bask in the afterglow of the Dunstan era, not protect and extend its legacy. We need only know, or believe, that we are exceptional. According to Mitchell:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What South Australians have done, perhaps more doggedly than those in any other region, is to veil or reserve their own regional identity – not because of any sense of inadequacy or unfitness, but because that is the particular character of the South Australian. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Again, I recognise this South Australia; again, I recognise myself in this South Australia. But such recognition offers us a hole to crawl into that is deep and deceptively warm. </p>
<p>It offers us the chance to pretend that South Australia, in its distinctiveness, is merely the sum of its better parts. It offers us the chance to imagine that South Australia, a place that exports uranium and has a long association with defence industries, stands aloof from the world.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150223/original/image-20161215-2509-rf3ac.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150223/original/image-20161215-2509-rf3ac.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150223/original/image-20161215-2509-rf3ac.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150223/original/image-20161215-2509-rf3ac.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150223/original/image-20161215-2509-rf3ac.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150223/original/image-20161215-2509-rf3ac.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150223/original/image-20161215-2509-rf3ac.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">As premier, Don Dunstan dragged South Australia into the modern world.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Portrait Gallery/Anthony Browell</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The best dissenter of all …</h2>
<p>In the end, in the neoliberal and memed world we have created, everything’s a competition. So I’ll call it: the best-ever South Australian dissenter isn’t Catherine Helen Spence or Don Dunstan or Cory Bernardi. The best South Australian dissenter is also the best footballer ever. </p>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garry_McIntosh">Garry McIntosh</a> was a small, muscled, goateed, hairy, unkempt rover who threw himself into packs, didn’t mind a bit of violence for a good cause, and who changed the course of history with his hardball gets and his handballs: premierships, Magarey Medals, an altered perception of the Norwood Football Club.</p>
<p>In 1982, the North Melbourne Kangaroos drafted “Macca” into the VFL, but he stayed home. When the Crows were formed, eight years before Macca eventually retired, he still wouldn’t shift from the SANFL. </p>
<p>Did he shun the AFL out of love of the local, out of parochialism, to make a stand against a national league, or as a lifestyle choice? Or did he understand his own limitations: was he just too slow to play in the best competition in the land?</p>
<p>When Macca was added to the SA Football Hall of Fame, <a href="http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/sport/afl/loyal-macca-in-a-league-of-his-own/story-e6freckc-1226445148911">he insisted</a> he had no regrets because he’d got to play for Norwood:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>But if I were an 18-year-old kid now – with the mentality there is now – things would be different. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Macca hasn’t yet been inducted into the Australian Football Hall of Fame. Now there’s an injustice, or a distraction, worth protesting about.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>A full version of this essay, along with others from the Griffith Review’s latest edition, is available <a href="https://griffithreview.com/editions/state-of-hope/">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/70265/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Patrick Allington does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Footy isn’t just the dominant spectator sport and topic of conversation in South Australia. It’s a salve.
Patrick Allington, Lecturer in English and Creative Writing, Flinders University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/72058
2017-02-02T19:06:25Z
2017-02-02T19:06:25Z
Friday essay: the silence of Ediacara, the shadow of uranium
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155075/original/image-20170131-3259-1d7av1s.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Marcoo was a 1.4 kilotonne ground-level nuclear test carried out at Maralinga in 1956. The contaminated debris was buried at this site in the 1967 clean-up known as Operation Brumby.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>As an archaeologist working in the remote areas around Woomera and the Nullarbor Plain, my understanding of South Australia was first informed by rocks and soil. This was a landscape of fossils and <a href="http://paleoportal.org/index.php?globalnav=fossil_gallery&sectionnav=taxon&taxon_id=109">trace fossils</a> – the preserved impressions left by the passage of a living body through sediment – jostling for attention. On this land surface, SA presents an arc extending from the “death mask” fossils of early multicellular life to the human leap into the solar system. Sure, you might say, this could be said of other locations on Earth. But here it seems laid bare for any who can read the distinctive pattern of signs.</p>
<h2>The silent shore</h2>
<p>This was once a shoreline in a silent world. Throughout some terrifying ice ages, when glaciers reached almost to the equator, microscopic single-celled creatures held on to life in the freezing oceans. As the ice sheets retreated, warmer shores opened up on the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gondwana">Gondwana supercontinent</a>, including what would later become the Flinders Ranges. Microbes swarmed together in mats to colonise the sandy sea floor. Wind and water were the only sounds, but there was nothing yet with ears to hear them.</p>
<p>The rhythm of the waves created undulations on the sea floor, to which the microbial mats cleaved. For millions of years the green ocean carpet flourished in the shallow waters. Around 635 million years ago, new forms of multicellular life appeared as additional tiers in this simple ecology. Creatures similar in appearance to fern fronds anchored themselves in the mats by a round root-like hank. Others took the form of segmented worms squashed into round pancakes. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155079/original/image-20170131-3251-w7wzf7.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155079/original/image-20170131-3251-w7wzf7.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155079/original/image-20170131-3251-w7wzf7.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155079/original/image-20170131-3251-w7wzf7.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155079/original/image-20170131-3251-w7wzf7.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155079/original/image-20170131-3251-w7wzf7.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155079/original/image-20170131-3251-w7wzf7.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155079/original/image-20170131-3251-w7wzf7.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Fossil of an Ediacaran worm.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Far from “<a href="http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/red-in-tooth-and-claw.html">nature red in tooth and claw</a>”, this was nature basking in the sun, in no hurry to change. Storms were the most dramatic events to occur over millions of years. The surges of water these produced would drag the button holdfast of the fronds across the sandy ocean floor, leaving a crackled trace until the wave passed and left it swaying again. In one of these storms, a sudden influx of loose sediment was dragged over some fronds, knocking them flat and covering them with silt. There was too much weight to break free and these limbless, toothless creatures had no way to burrow out.</p>
<p>Gondwana drifted, split, folded and, around 540 million years ago, uplifted, raising the ocean floor to form the slopes of a mountain range.</p>
<p>The fossilised fronds and pancake worms of the fauna from the <a href="http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/vendian/ediacaran.php">Ediacaran geological period</a> (635–542 million years ago) are now on display at the South Australian Museum. The ripples in the stone cast shadows that allow you to almost see the shimmering of the shallow water. The “elephant skin” texture – where the hank of a single fern frond was dragged in the storm surge – is visible in the stone, as is the wiggly path or trace fossil of a small worm that escaped burial.</p>
<p>In effect, South Australia is the trace fossil of an earlier continent, or an earlier planet – perhaps not even this one. The Ediacara fauna are vastly different to present life on Earth, and may provide an analogue for life elsewhere in the solar system.</p>
<h2>The dust giants</h2>
<p>In the <a href="http://www.livescience.com/40311-pleistocene-epoch.html">Pleistocene era</a>, starting from about 1.8 million years ago, the ice sheets advanced again. With so much water locked away in the ice, vast plains were exposed on the continental shelf. Plant communities died off and soil formation slowed as temperatures and rainfall decreased. No longer consolidated by vegetation, sediments were blown away in the cold winds. <em>Aeolian</em> is the word, like a harp with a dry rustling sound. The sand traversed huge distances and settled into waves of dunes reflecting the wind direction. The leaching of iron stained their quartz sands Martian-red.</p>
<p>Low saltbushes and bluebushes were studded across the dunes at the edge of the ranges, with occasional forests of large saltbush. Giant kangaroos, three metres high, were as tall as these forest canopies. They loped along the dunes with their smaller cousins, sometimes venturing to the open grasslands that stretched to the distant coast of Sahul.</p>
<p>The carnivore <em><a href="https://australianmuseum.net.au/thylacoleo-carnifex">Thylacoleo carnifex</a></em> roamed the plains, stalking <em><a href="https://australianmuseum.net.au/palorchestes-azeal">Palorchestes azael</a></em> and other herbivores. Waterholes were perilous places where the giant snake <em><a href="http://www.prehistoric-wildlife.com/species/w/wonambi.html">Wonambi naracoortensis</a></em> coiled in wait. Taking shelter from the cold wind in a limestone cave, Aboriginal people might have looked out to see the huge shadows of a herd of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diprotodon">diprotodons</a>, the marsupial “rhinoceros”, or <em><a href="https://theconversation.com/a-case-of-mistaken-identity-for-australias-extinct-big-bird-52856">Genyornis</a></em>, the two-metre-tall flightless bird. If these animals were reptiles, we would call them dinosaurs.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155266/original/image-20170201-29911-m4jdoj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155266/original/image-20170201-29911-m4jdoj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155266/original/image-20170201-29911-m4jdoj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155266/original/image-20170201-29911-m4jdoj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155266/original/image-20170201-29911-m4jdoj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155266/original/image-20170201-29911-m4jdoj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=493&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155266/original/image-20170201-29911-m4jdoj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=493&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155266/original/image-20170201-29911-m4jdoj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=493&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Wallaby skin water carrier.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Stuart Humphreys © Australian Museum</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>At the height of this cold, dry period – 30-19,000 years ago – a person might have seen the ocean only a few times across their lifespan. A nacreous abalone shell, excavated at <a href="https://www.academia.edu/27094779/A_Technological_Analysis_of_Stone_Artefacts_from_Allens_Cave_South_Australia_Thesis_Abstract_2016">Allen’s Cave</a> on the Nullarbor Plain and dated to 18,000 years ago, speaks of a journey hundreds of kilometres overland to the shore. Specialist knowledge was needed to travel far from permanent or regular water sources: how to find water-bearing roots, rock wells, and Artesian springs. Perhaps more was needed too: <a href="https://australianmuseum.net.au/wallaby-skin-water-carrier-pre-1885">kangaroo-skin water bags</a>, the endurance to carry a coolamon of water for miles without spilling a drop. The desert sands and the porous limestones of the Nullarbor don’t hold water reservoirs, and the aridity turned the lakes to the west and north of the Flinders Ranges into salt.</p>
<p>Aboriginal people would have noted but passed over the sedimentary rocks that preserved the Ediacara fauna. Instead, they searched for <a href="https://www.mindat.org/min-960.html">chalcedony</a>, <a href="https://www.mindat.org/min-994.html">chert</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silcrete">silcrete</a>. With an understanding of how these stones fracture, you can make a cutting edge sharper and more sterile than a metal surgical blade. Glassy veins of such stone, nacreous in their own way, occur throughout the Nullarbor plain.</p>
<p>Countless scholarly papers describe the climatic conditions and biological record of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Maximum">Last Glacial Maximum</a>. Between the lines of these papers we can catch a glimpse of how Aboriginal people may have experienced these landscapes. In the field, I look for traces of their life where the red dunes are exposed – a stone tool or the ashes of a hearth, perhaps. Mining companies, however, would mostly prefer these traces vanished.</p>
<h2>A line in the sand</h2>
<p>The ice melted again, and water inundated the great coastal plains. The megafauna were long gone, leaving the regular kangaroos, emus and wombats behind to compete with new migrants: sheep, cattle, camels and rabbits. The livestock, particularly cattle, thrived on saltbush.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155082/original/image-20170131-3274-18q8gdx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155082/original/image-20170131-3274-18q8gdx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155082/original/image-20170131-3274-18q8gdx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=866&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155082/original/image-20170131-3274-18q8gdx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=866&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155082/original/image-20170131-3274-18q8gdx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=866&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155082/original/image-20170131-3274-18q8gdx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1089&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155082/original/image-20170131-3274-18q8gdx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1089&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155082/original/image-20170131-3274-18q8gdx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1089&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">George Goyder.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It was still arid out in the north and centre, though droughts lasted just a few years instead of thousands. The years 1863–66 were particularly severe. The Surveyor-General of SA, <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/goyder-george-woodroffe-3647">George Goyder</a>, was sent out in 1865 to define the area where reliable rainfall divided agricultural from grazing land. In the absence of rainfall records, he observed geology and vegetation to create a line stretching over 3000 kilometres, from Pinaroo on the Victorian border to Ceduna in the far west. South of the line was dominated by mallee scrubs, and the north by saltbush and other chenopods.</p>
<p>A few years later, seasons had improved. The bold bought land above the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goyder's_Line">Goyder Line</a> for cropping. This line was not, however, just a mark on a map; as successive drought oscillations continued, farmers were forced back south, abandoning homesteads and even whole towns, the crumbling remains of which are still visible today.</p>
<p>In the process of settlement, trees were cut down for fence posts, telegraph poles and firewood. On the treeless Nullarbor Plain, soil was stabilised by delicate <a href="http://www.soilcrust.org/crust101.htm">biological crusts</a> formed from lichens and bacteria. The hard hoofs of the livestock cracked them like the toffee shell on a crème brûlée, and the dust blew again.</p>
<p>In 1945, the CSIRO scientist RW Jessup was sent to investigate soil erosion in arid areas of South Australia. He noted the degeneration caused by the combined effect of rabbits and stock. When rabbits reached plague proportions and began to run out of food, they ate the young shoots and ringbarked trees. Fast growing species could bounce back, but slower trees like mulga and myall suffered the most, especially in the absence of Aboriginal firing regimes to germinate seeds. Jessup noticed the Precambrian rocks but did not stop to look for fossils. He was more focused on the windblown sands: evidence of how pastoralism was recreating the arid conditions of the Pleistocene.</p>
<p>The same year saw the end of the Second World War. Far away in another hemisphere, a <a href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/wernher-von-brauns-v-2-rocket-12609128/">rocket capable of reaching outer space</a> had been built and <a href="http://www.atomicheritage.org/history/bombings-hiroshima-and-nagasaki-1945">two atomic bombs deployed</a>. These events would shape the world for decades to come, and leave their imprint in the outback of South Australia.</p>
<h2>Uranium and rockets</h2>
<p>In 1946, there were many people roaming the South Australian deserts. One was geologist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reg_Sprigg">Reg Sprigg</a>, searching for uranium to supply the growing demand for nuclear weapons. He started with the old <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Hill">Radium Hill</a> mine in the east, and surveyed Mount Painter in the Flinders Ranges, before coming to the Ediacara Hills in the north of the ranges. On the gentle slopes, he was struck by ancient sandstone slabs, generally a poor type of stone for fossil preservation. But he’d seen fossils in this sort of rock before. The round impressions that he saw looked like flattened jellyfish and large segmented worms, but the rock was clearly Precambrian – an age when only single-celled animals were supposed to exist.</p>
<p>The discovery was initially received with scepticism. Some argued that the shapes were natural phenomena. Others disputed the dates. It wasn’t until the discovery of similar fossils in Namibia, Siberia and other locations, and the support of some University of Adelaide academics, that the Ediacara fauna were acknowledged to be genuine. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155084/original/image-20170201-3265-13oq03n.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155084/original/image-20170201-3265-13oq03n.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155084/original/image-20170201-3265-13oq03n.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=779&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155084/original/image-20170201-3265-13oq03n.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=779&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155084/original/image-20170201-3265-13oq03n.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=779&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155084/original/image-20170201-3265-13oq03n.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=979&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155084/original/image-20170201-3265-13oq03n.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=979&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155084/original/image-20170201-3265-13oq03n.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=979&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Spriggina fossil.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The creatures then received names. <em><a href="http://paleoexhibit.blogspot.com.au/2015/02/dickinsonia-from-ediacaran-biota.html">Dickinsonia</a></em> was the flat pancake worm. The jellyfish turned out to be mostly the discoid holdfast of the frond-shaped <a href="https://museumvictoria.com.au/melbournemuseum/discoverycentre/600-million-years/timeline/ediacaran/charnia/">Charnia</a>. Reg Sprigg lent his name to the mysterious segmented <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spriggina">Spriggina</a></em> species – maybe a worm, maybe a frond, maybe something like the later trilobites. </p>
<p>While Reg Sprigg continued his search for uranium deposits, men from the Army’s Survey Corps were on the gibber plains around Mount Eba, mapping an area the size of England to enclose a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woomera_Test_Range">rocket test range</a>. The Anglo-Australian Joint Project was established to develop weapons for Britain, and Australia hoped, through this arrangement, to gain a greater defence capacity to fend off Asia. The German V-2 rocket, which had devastated London in the last months of the war, would form the basis of this new weapon system.</p>
<p>Senior British military personnel took a flight to see the proposed area for themselves. They flew over the Central Aborigines Reserve on the borders between South and Western Australia, the direction in which the future rockets would be launched. To their eyes, the red desert recalled another: the white sands around the <a href="http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/trinity-atomic-bomb-site">Trinity site in New Mexico</a>, USA, where the first atom bomb was exploded in 1944. The Australian author <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Southall">Ivan Southall</a> described this view later in 1962: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Here it was, one of the greatest stretches of uninhabited wasteland on earth, created by God specifically for rockets.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Hidden in plain sight</h2>
<p>Aboriginal people became a trace fossil in the land deemed empty – hidden in plain sight. <a href="http://www.kokatha.com.au/">Kokatha</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitjantjatjara">Pitjantjatjara</a>, <a href="http://nativetitle.org.au/profiles/profile_sa_adnyamathanha.html">Adnyamathanha</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barngarla_people">Barngarla</a> people lived on missions around the state, and gathered in coastal towns that offered them the employment that the rocket range had promised but didn’t deliver.</p>
<p>At this time, white Australians thought Aboriginal occupation had been a few thousand years at most, and many believed Aboriginal people were dying out – the inevitable result of the “stone age” being superseded by the “space age”.</p>
<p>Ironically, it would take American chemist <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1960/libby-bio.html">Willard Libby’s</a> invention of radiocarbon dating in the 1940s – an idea that came to him when working on the atomic bomb for the <a href="http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/einstein/peace-and-war/the-manhattan-project/">Manhattan Project</a> – to establish the much deeper antiquity of occupation. <a href="http://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/vale-emeritus-professor-john-mulvaney">John Mulvaney’s</a> 1962 excavation of Kenniff Cave in Queensland used radiocarbon to obtain a date of 19,000 years ago, during the Last Glacial Maximum.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155078/original/image-20170131-3279-gjdmlr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155078/original/image-20170131-3279-gjdmlr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155078/original/image-20170131-3279-gjdmlr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=957&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155078/original/image-20170131-3279-gjdmlr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=957&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155078/original/image-20170131-3279-gjdmlr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=957&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155078/original/image-20170131-3279-gjdmlr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1203&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155078/original/image-20170131-3279-gjdmlr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1203&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155078/original/image-20170131-3279-gjdmlr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1203&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Black Arrow rocket, Woomera.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 1947, on the first reconnaissance for a place to build the township that would service the rocket range, surveyors found tens of thousands of stone tools at Phillip Ponds. Recognising that evidence of Aboriginal occupation also meant the presence of water, they selected this location for the <a href="http://homepage.powerup.com.au/%7Ewoomera/town.htm">Woomera Village</a>, named after the wooden spear-thrower used by Aboriginal people in many parts of Australia. The street names in the new town were sourced from a vocabulary compiled by HM Cooper, published in 1948 as <a href="http://digital.slv.vic.gov.au/view/action/singleViewer.do?dvs=1485930873895%7E603&locale=en_US&metadata_object_ratio=10&show_metadata=true&VIEWER_URL=/view/action/singleViewer.do?&preferred_usage_type=VIEW_MAIN&DELIVERY_RULE_ID=10&frameId=1&usePid1=true&usePid2=true">Australian Aboriginal Words and Their Meanings</a>.</p>
<p>In the following decades, Australian scientists designed sounding rockets for upper atmosphere research and worked on British long-range ballistic missiles like the <a href="http://www.armaghplanet.com/blog/blue-streak-uks-cold-war-rocket.html">Blue Streak</a>. They also collaborated with the US in establishing another new technology: tracking the satellites that were planned for launch in the <a href="http://www.nas.edu/history/igy/">International Geophysical Year</a> of 1957–58. In 1957, the world’s first satellite, Sputnik 1, sent its distinctive beep into the ether. The Space Age had begun.</p>
<h2>Radioactive</h2>
<p>My trips to the <a href="http://www.defence.gov.au/woomera/about.htm">Woomera Prohibited Area</a> are sometimes to advise mining companies about heritage issues, and sometimes to do my own research on Australia’s space program. One day, I’m taken out to the derelict structures once used as launch pads for a unique hybrid rocket.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pvcHO4WieV0?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>The satellite launcher <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_(rocket)">Europa</a> was a collaboration between six European nations and Australia in the early 1960s. The two launch pads stand on the edge of a blindingly white salt lake. Rock art sites can be found on outcrops and boulders around the lower edge of the steep shores. Against the wind, I imagine the tremendous roar of the rocket’s engines and think of Ivan Southall’s description of the landscape in his 1962 book, Woomera:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s almost like you are living in another world, just as though you had been shot off in a spaceship and let down on some strange planet where men had never been before.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Writing about Woomera and Maralinga, Southall constantly emphasises the silence of a landscape where, he avers, even Aboriginal people speak in undertones. This seems supremely ironic when you think of rocket engines roaring, or the more sinister blast of an atom bomb. From 1956 to 1963, Australia supported Britain in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_nuclear_tests_at_Maralinga">a series of nuclear tests</a> at two locations outside Woomera’s perimeter, Maralinga and Emu Field. Southall visited Emu Field in 1962 where</p>
<blockquote>
<p>sprayed with yellow paint, and silent in the sand, are abandoned trucks and jeeps and weapons once too hot to handle. There, near the bomb towers that vanished, the very surface of the desert has become as glass.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155072/original/image-20170131-3244-j4qjj0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155072/original/image-20170131-3244-j4qjj0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155072/original/image-20170131-3244-j4qjj0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155072/original/image-20170131-3244-j4qjj0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155072/original/image-20170131-3244-j4qjj0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155072/original/image-20170131-3244-j4qjj0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155072/original/image-20170131-3244-j4qjj0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155072/original/image-20170131-3244-j4qjj0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Green-tinged nuclear glass at Maralinga.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The vitrified sand is the same iron oxide-coated sediment of the Pleistocene aeolian dunes, now with a greenish tinge like a cheap wine bottle. Such nuclear glass is highly collectible, and is sometimes called trinitite after the glass from the Trinity site in New Mexico.</p>
<p>The resonances of these tests aren’t fading any time soon. Generations of Aboriginal people and white Australians still suffer the effects of exposure to radiation. The shadows of the radioactive fallout – the “black mist”, as many Aboriginal people call it – are almost inescapable when you travel west in this state.</p>
<p>At Woomera, I go to look at the grave monuments in the cemetery on the hill outside the town. There are multiple still births and infant deaths, often in the same family. People don’t like to talk about it, but there are stories of women wailing in the streets, driven by unassuagable grief. A local urban myth held that if a pregnant woman stood on the hill facing Maralinga during a bomb test, the sex of the foetus would be revealed in x-ray silhouette.</p>
<p>On the far west coast we’re walking through the saltbush and tyre-piercing bluebush to a rock hole, where some of the traditional owners want to carry out maintenance by clearing the accumulated weeds and dirt. On our way we pass an unusual farm shed. It’s made of radiation-proof lead, scavenged from Maralinga by the landowner. I learn that such scavenging has distributed the artefacts of rockets and bombs all over the state.</p>
<p>On another day, the women are driving up the Ooldea track towards the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Australian_Railway">transcontinental railway line</a>. One roasted a wombat the night before and distributes chunks to us. As we gnaw on the bones, the women point out campsites off to the side of the track. You can’t necessarily see anything from the road, but the locations are loaded with memory. These are places where they camped during the trek from the Maralinga lands down to the coast. It wasn’t safe to stay, but leaving creates its own devastation.</p>
<p>Finally, I’m here at Maralinga. Despite four phases of remediation, there is so much to catch the archaeologist’s eye. No doubt the last people in white radiation suits to leave the site after the 2000 <a href="https://industry.gov.au/resource/Documents/radioactive_waste/martac_report.pdf">clean-up</a> thought all the residues of the hot yellow machines and bomb towers were safely interred in the burial mounds. I’m used to working at the scale of stone tools, though, and find the surface is scattered with small artefacts like broken ceramics and beer cans. </p>
<p>What really sticks in my memory are ephemeral traces of human presence. Along the wire of a perimeter fence, someone has looped bits of metal and twist ties in a line. A square grid has been drawn in the gravel near a radio tower. The tyre tracks of earth-moving machinery around and over the large burial mounds make me think of rover tracks on Mars.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155071/original/image-20170131-3269-1meucf2.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155071/original/image-20170131-3269-1meucf2.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155071/original/image-20170131-3269-1meucf2.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155071/original/image-20170131-3269-1meucf2.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155071/original/image-20170131-3269-1meucf2.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155071/original/image-20170131-3269-1meucf2.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155071/original/image-20170131-3269-1meucf2.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155071/original/image-20170131-3269-1meucf2.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Decorated fence at Maralinga.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This land is already a nuclear waste dump. The locations and proposals change, but the same apparent “emptiness” that brought rockets, nuclear tests and detention centres now attracts commercial interest in storing nuclear waste from other nations. It’s the end of a cycle that starts with the mining and export of Australian uranium. The redistribution of uranium is a very <a href="https://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/workinggroups/anthropocene/">Anthropocene</a> process, part of the dismantling and reassembling of the planet.</p>
<p>In the end it will all be buried, all become an archaeological site. Long after the molecular structure of the human-made materials has broken down, the uranium and plutonium will still be decaying. Future archaeologists may find it difficult to determine if these radioactive deposits are natural or cultural. Maybe the distinction will be irrelevant.</p>
<h2>Epilogue: the wind</h2>
<p>The story isn’t quite over yet, though. The Ediacara fauna gave their name to a new geological period, and while their relationship with contemporary species is still hotly debated, they have changed the way life on Earth is viewed.</p>
<p>The megafauna had largely disappeared by 10,000 years ago. The role of Aboriginal people in their extinction is also hotly debated, though archaeological evidence does not support the “overkill” hypothesis. New genetic studies are now pushing back the date of Aboriginal arrival in Australia to more than 60,000 years ago.</p>
<p>The Goyder Line is <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-02/goyders-line-climate-change-wheat-wine-grapes/6919276">shifting south</a> under the impacts of climate change.</p>
<p>Reg Sprigg, who died in 2008, established the Arkaroola Sanctuary in the Flinders Ranges. The Mars Society of Australia selected it as their primary <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2004/03/23/1071845.htm">Mars analogue landscape</a> to pursue both planetary science and practical aspects of Mars colonisation.</p>
<p>After becoming the fourth nation in space with the launch of the <a href="http://homepage.powerup.com.au/%7Ewoomera/wresat.htm">WRESAT-1 satellite</a> in 1967, Australia’s ambitions have languished. Woomera is still a busy test range, but we are no longer at the forefront of space exploration.</p>
<p>Maralinga has been handed back to its traditional owners. You can visit as a tourist.</p>
<p>The wind has been a constant theme. Once the dominant sound in the Ediacaran world, now it drives giant wind turbines supplying power to the state.</p>
<p>One planet’s past may be another’s future. The Ediacarans have vanished from South Australia, but deep time is always waiting to burst through the crusts of the surface. In the words of Ivan Southall:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the most barren regions, the most lifeless regions, strange things happen after rain. Primitive crustaceans suddenly stir in the saline mud, reminding one of the dawning of time.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p><em>This essay first appeared in Griffith Review State of Hope, the 55th edition of Griffith Review.</em></p>
<p><em>The author thanks Hilda Moodoo, Wanda Miller, Eileen Wingfield, Andrew Starkey and many others who have generously shared their knowledge.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/72058/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alice Gorman is a member of the Advisory Council of the Space Industry Association of Australia and the Alternate State Delegate for the South Australian Chapter of the Australian Association of Consulting Archaeologists Inc</span></em></p>
History is writ large in the remote areas around Woomera and the Nullarbor: from the fossils of microscopic, cell-like creatures to ancient stone tools to the deitrus of rocket tests and the painful legacy of the Maralinga atomic blasts.
Alice Gorman, Associate Professor in Archaeology and Space Studies, Flinders University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/70266
2017-01-31T19:05:33Z
2017-01-31T19:05:33Z
Dunstan, Christies and me: growing up in the ‘Athens of the South’
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150664/original/image-20161219-24307-1qnfi34.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Chris Wallace (centre) in 1966 with brother Ron and father Arch.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Chris Wallace</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This piece is republished with permission from State of Hope, the 55th edition of Griffith Review. Articles are a little longer than most published on The Conversation, presenting an in-depth analysis of the economic, social, environmental and cultural challenges facing South Australia, and the possibilities of renewal and revitalisation.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Adelaide’s golden age began when the Beatles flew into town on June 12, 1964, electrifying the citizenry out of their country-town torpor into a screaming mass on the streets. It ended when a <a href="http://www.milesago.com/people/dunstan-don.htm">dressing-gowned</a> Don Dunstan resigned office on February 15, 1979 – the last day of the most exciting state government Australia has ever seen. </p>
<p>I spent most of that period in South Australia’s excellent state education system, basking in the glow of a premier who seemingly made the earth move and stars pan gloriously across the heavens in a small city that, for once in its life, felt like the very centre of the universe. No joke.</p>
<p>In the “infant industry” era of the 1950s and 1960s, South Australia had its economic development policy down pat: subsidise big manufacturers to set up shop, and support them with state-funded infrastructure. A continuous flow of <a href="https://museumvictoria.com.au/immigrationmuseum/discoverycentre/your-questions/ten-pound-poms/">“ten-pound Poms”</a> arrived to fill the production lines.</p>
<p>Cherry farmer and conservative premier Tom Playford brought – and sometimes outright bought – industrial development that otherwise had no business being in a place as beautiful and isolated, and economically irrelevant to the rest of Australia, as Adelaide.</p>
<p>Thus Chrysler and General Motors were there (forever after on the public teat). Chrysler nestled alongside Port Stanvac in the south, while General Motors Holden set up plant to Adelaide’s north.</p>
<p>GM Holden’s workers lived in Elizabeth: hot, flat and poor. Chrysler (subsequently Mitsubishi) workers lived in seaside Christies Beach, working-class winners in the geographic lottery of immigrant blue-collar work.</p>
<p>In March 1965, Frank Walsh beat Playford despite the latter’s gerrymandering – or <a href="http://www.sahistorians.org.au/175/documents/the-playmander-its-origins-operation-and-effect-on.shtml">“playmandering”</a>, as it was dubbed – and became premier. Walsh may have led Labor to victory for the first time in 32 years, but industry policy continued the Playford way.</p>
<p>Two years after Walsh’s victory, Dunstan, his attorney-general, succeeded him. For 12 years under Dunstan – briefly punctuated by two years of conservative government under Steele Hall early on – Adelaide was the “Athens of the South”, and Don its philosopher-king.</p>
<h2>A working-class enclave</h2>
<p>Port Stanvac oil refinery brought my family from Cronulla to Christies Beach, newly designated by town planners to become a working-class enclave in the midst of the beautiful Fleurieu Peninsula. </p>
<p>My parents had been match-made by workmates at Kurnell Oil Refinery in Sydney. Arch worked in the field, Bobbie in the mailroom; Arch was divorced, Bobbie widowed with two sons and a house in Cronulla. Arch disliked his Kurnell boss, a bad-tempered Welshman who borrowed £20 and never repaid it. It wasn’t the £20 but the principle, Arch would say. </p>
<p>So, when in 1962 the chance to work on the new refinery start-up of Standard Vacuum Oil Company – the Far East joint venture of Standard Oil of New Jersey and Mobil – he grabbed it. Arch fell in love with the Fleurieu’s stony coastline, wild St Vincent Gulf waters, stunning vineyards and almond groves, and pure Mediterranean climate.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150666/original/image-20161219-24274-1psgzqe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150666/original/image-20161219-24274-1psgzqe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=586&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150666/original/image-20161219-24274-1psgzqe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=586&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150666/original/image-20161219-24274-1psgzqe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=586&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150666/original/image-20161219-24274-1psgzqe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=737&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150666/original/image-20161219-24274-1psgzqe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=737&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150666/original/image-20161219-24274-1psgzqe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=737&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Chris Wallace arrives in Adelaide in 1962.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Chris Wallace</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>At Port Stanvac, Standard Vacuum Oil not only got naming rights to a bit of the South Australian coast but an adjacent public housing estate laid on as well. When we arrived in Christies Beach, forerunners of the tens of thousands of families who would move there in ensuing decades, it was golden paddocks as far as the eye could see, all the way down to the sea – part of Lambert and Rosa Christie’s 1895 farm established on the traditional lands of the Indigenous Kaurna people. </p>
<p>The first six Housing Trust homes had been built, and we moved into one. A supermarket and doctor’s surgery went in soon after, as hundreds of other Housing Trust houses sprang up around us. The speed was astonishing. </p>
<p>Opposite the shops is a little park with a bronze sculpture by John Dowie from 1965 of two seated Aboriginal warriors, called The Rainmakers, donated by immigrant German businessman Eugen Lohmann – the only pointer to the producer of the near-instant and, for the time, highly liveable mass housing all around it.</p>
<p>Lohmann’s company Wender and Duerholt made prefabricated camp accommodation (<em>Baracken</em>) during the second world war, and afterwards switched to making pre-cut timber-framed houses at high speed to replace houses razed in the war. </p>
<p>Lohmann, watching Berlin being divvied up and wanting a safe haven, moved his business to South Australia in the 1950s. He won contracts to build 500 houses at a time in the rapidly expanding city – including, in the early 1960s, Christies Beach. </p>
<p>As a small child, that Dowie bronze seemed to me like a miracle from the outside world, the only original artwork for miles and seemingly the only visible Aboriginal reference on land on which, until relatively recently, the <a href="http://adelaidia.sa.gov.au/subjects/kaurna-people">Kaurna people</a> had still lived.</p>
<p>In fact, the school teacher next door and her family had Aboriginal heritage. Across the road was a German engineer, his Austrian ex-opera-singer wife and their children. Arch had been in the RAAF in the second world war, Rudy a pilot in the Luftwaffe; now they were workmates at the refinery and the sons of both families were in the RAAF air cadets together.</p>
<p>There was a cop and his family, and an old petrol tanker driver and his wife. There was a secretary from the refinery and her husband. </p>
<p>Everyone had kids, sprinklers and front porches. On summer nights – stinking hot in a way only Adelaide can be – people would sit in the dark on their front steps and have street-wide conversations, yelling from front step to front step, quaffing local d’Arenberg and Pirramimma wines poured from glass flagons while their kids frolicked. </p>
<p>Andy from up the road and I would tear along the pavement on our trikes and, when one of us yelled “bomb!”, stack them sideways onto the grass, enacting obliteration in a Cold War nuclear strike. We were five years old.</p>
<p>Arch collected the flagons, acid-etched circles around them and popped the bottoms off to make individual glasshouses for seedlings. Our backyard became an Eden of homegrown vegetables, bountiful fruit trees and well-loved pets. Nature was everywhere in that patch of suburbia rapidly assembled in the service of industry, surrounded by the Fleurieu’s stunning beauty. When the next-door cat broke into the hutch housing our baby rabbits, my brother stuck his air gun out the kitchen window and shot it. </p>
<p>Every so often, a refinery workmate would drop off snapper in a bucket of seawater just caught from his boat in St Vincent Gulf. Come winter, there was mushrooming – strolling through green, wet Willunga paddocks with eyes peeled, knife in hand. </p>
<p>In summer it was off to the farm of Dutch friends, the Boerema family, on the Onkaparinga River in Old Noarlunga to pick the warm, sweet strawberries thriving on the river flats. </p>
<p>And there was swimming and burning and peeling at the beach, home to grey nurses and white pointers that had food enough to leave us alone. And always, trips to McLaren Vale cellar doors, yarns with the winemakers, discussions about the last vintage and the next.</p>
<p>All year round, lanky lads came round to work with my two teenage brothers on their hotted-up bombs. Arch put in a garage with a pit so the boys could work standing up under their engines. Bobbie made sandwiches, a whole sliced loaf at a time, and ferried them out to the amateur mechanics. </p>
<p>The local police knew my brothers. After all, they lived among us. Their knocks on our front door were mostly to complain about, and sometimes to issue a summons over, noisy exhausts or drag-racing – and once because one knocked over a power pole, taking the Christies Beach electricity supply with him.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150667/original/image-20161219-24263-dljik5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150667/original/image-20161219-24263-dljik5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150667/original/image-20161219-24263-dljik5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150667/original/image-20161219-24263-dljik5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150667/original/image-20161219-24263-dljik5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150667/original/image-20161219-24263-dljik5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150667/original/image-20161219-24263-dljik5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Arch Wallace (second from left) at Port Stanvac Refinery, 1970.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Chris Wallace</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Don Dunstan’s first crack</h2>
<p>There was submerged racism too – but only against the English. </p>
<p>The ten-pound Poms quickly swamped our half-dozen houses on all sides as Wender and Duerholt popped up houses quicker than our Sunbeams popped up toast. “Whinging Poms” was heard muttered under the occasional breath, but not too loudly because they were everywhere and, in any case, many became our mates.</p>
<p>Politics was a rolling discussion. Arch had been a shop steward in his youth, talent-spotted but not tempted by an invitation to join the Communist Party while a 20-something shale miner in the Capertee Valley – now a World Heritage site, and the second-largest canyon in the world.</p>
<p>Bobbie’s mother, whom we visited annually on our trip “home” to Sydney, was a Tory with a vicious set against Gough Whitlam. She was convinced he dyed his eyebrows. </p>
<p>On the 1,395-kilometre drive from Christies Beach to Cronulla in the unairconditioned, seatbeltless Holden, with Arch chain-smoking Kool cigarettes and Bobbie wrangling damp flannels for our necks, I anticipated the political discussions to come. </p>
<p>Grandma got some pushback, not least because Gough and Margaret Whitlam were shire residents too when we lived in Cronulla and gave Arch and Bobbie their own children’s no-longer-needed bassinet for me.</p>
<p>I learnt that politics could be complicated. Arch leaned left, yet argued swing voters were the only smart ones since they make and break governments. Grandma may have been a Whitlam-hating Tory by temperament, but at the same time was a fierce Australian nationalist of the England-hating kind. </p>
<p>Over slices of passionfruit sponge and hands of euchre – she was a terrific card player – Grandma recounted bitter stories from her Lancashire childhood, before her father moved the family to New South Wales. Her own grandfather had been killed down the mines, a hundredweight of coal the compensation; her father was a coalminer too, risking the same fate, or at least <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-black-lung-and-why-do-miners-get-it-51649">“black lung”</a>. </p>
<p>As a child, half her day was spent in school, the other half working in a Wigan cotton mill – this in the early 20th century. Walking home from church on Sunday mornings, the whole town reeked of boiled cabbage, she said with vaudevillian disgust. </p>
<p>England is a terrible place, she would say – a terrible, terrible place. The briny air and blue skies of Cronulla were tonic indeed. But NSW had Bob Askin as premier, simultaneously a dull and shifty man. I knew that when we got back to Adelaide – though it would never truly be home since it seemingly took five generations to become a local – exciting Don Dunstan would be there.</p>
<p>Arch taught me to read from newspaper headlines starting with those in the biggest, simplest font. Unsurprising, then, at eight years old for me to argue the case for Dunstan and Labor in the run-up to the 1968 election at a neighbour’s barbecue. </p>
<p>Dunstan was the one. He cared about, and spent money on, health, education and the arts. He was a moderniser, a thespian, a poet, cook, fashion plate, policy wonk, tastemaker and defender of rights for women, Aboriginals and people from other cultures. </p>
<p>He recognised – he embodied – difference. He was smooth. He was from “now”. He made Adelaide exciting. He made us exciting by association. Exciting people moved to Adelaide because of him and what he did to the place. They all came at once and gave exciting locals context. We didn’t realise they would all leave at once after the Dunstan party was over, and that many of us would leave too – though, to be truthful, I started planning my getaway at four years old. </p>
<p>After decades of South Australian slumber, he stirred hope. Our futures seemed limitless. Today we would say he was cool, a rock star. Too good to be true? Too good to last? We didn’t ask.</p>
<p>But having succeeded Frank Walsh during the previous term of government, in 1968 Dunstan had to be elected premier in his own right to continue leading Adelaide out of the musty, late 19th-century cupboard it had been locked in, further into the contemporary world.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150670/original/image-20161219-24299-uohpvu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150670/original/image-20161219-24299-uohpvu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150670/original/image-20161219-24299-uohpvu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150670/original/image-20161219-24299-uohpvu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150670/original/image-20161219-24299-uohpvu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=763&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150670/original/image-20161219-24299-uohpvu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=763&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150670/original/image-20161219-24299-uohpvu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=763&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Chris Wallace with the family dog Brandy, 1971.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Chris Wallace</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Toward a more cosmopolitan society</h2>
<p>All good drama requires reversals, however, and at the 1968 election the gerrymander delivered Dunstan’s, despite my backyard advocacy. Votes in country seats were worth multiples of those in the city. </p>
<p>Dunstan Labor’s comfortably superior vote translated into a hung parliament, which the Steele Hall-led Liberal and Country League controlled with support from a lone conservative independent promised the speakership. </p>
<p>Dunstan railed publicly, rallying huge crowds against the gerrymander. Hall – himself a small-l liberal – was sufficiently embarrassed to make electoral reforms presaging Dunstan’s election <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Australian_state_election,_1970">in 1970</a>, at which point the Dunstan decade proper began.</p>
<p>It is difficult to convey how conventionally narrow and “white bread” mainstream life was in Adelaide. There was an Italian restaurant in Hindley Street with red-and-white-check tablecloths where you could get good spaghetti, considered the height of cosmopolitanism. Eventually, a Chinese restaurant opened on the esplanade at Christies Beach. Revolutionary. </p>
<p>The parochialism of most locals was something of a wonder to we blow-ins. Not that we were sophisticated cosmopolitans – far from it. But we had tuned into South Australia’s powerful sensory pleasures. </p>
<p>The salt, the sea, the maritime air, the lush green grass burnt to pale straw under the bluest skies and brightest sun in the Southern Hemisphere; fresh fish from seas bordering the whitest sand, like something from Homer.</p>
<p>Meanwhile the world, in the form of the pragmatic multinational meritocracy of the refinery, sat around our dining table. A Texan executive, a Jewish chemist, an African-American engineer, the Native American wife of the refinery co-worker who brought us snapper, a young Australian engineer just “finished off” at Mobil’s expense at Princeton. </p>
<p>Then there were the two Malaysian-Chinese women, Hoe Yee and Hoi Mee, who lived with us for a while, sponsored by a local service organisation to fortify their nursing education for use back home. Hoi Mee brought a suitcase stuffed with rice and matches with her, fearing shortages in little-known Australia. </p>
<p>With my parents, two brothers and me, Hoe Yee and Hoi Mee made seven people in a 100m² house with three bedrooms and one bathroom. No-one thought twice, the density of living not a matter for remark. The then-exotic aromas of Malaysian cooking wafted from our kitchen and up the street to the fascination of neighbours.</p>
<p>In 1970, the same year Dunstan’s continuous nine-year run in power began, we moved from Christies Beach to Old Noarlunga – from Housing Trust territory to the bucolic beauty of the southern vales proper. </p>
<p>Arch and Bobbie bought three blocks of land on the banks of the Onkaparinga, and produced endless bounty: organically grown fruit and vegetables from the chocolately, sun-blasted loam built up over millennia as the Onkaparinga flowed, flooded and subsided again and again. </p>
<p>Indigenous Kaurna women had legendarily hid in the riverbank to avoid the raiding parties of neighbouring tribes. By 1970, the only Indigenous residents in Old Noarlunga were a family who lived in the one public house inside the Onkaparinga’s horseshoe-shaped riverbend. I didn’t understand why, when I tried to talk to their daughter at school, I got short shrift.</p>
<p>My paternal grandmother told me tales of riding horses through swollen creeks and otherwise playing in the bush with the Aboriginal kids she had grown up with in Far North Queensland. Why not us? I get it now. Wish I had then.</p>
<p>Our Christies Beach neighbours bought the adjacent block. Each family built new homes – ours 120m², theirs 130m² – fantastically large compared to the old ones. It was still the era of one bathroom per house, but the creep had begun: instead of lounge-dining rooms, each house had a separate lounge and a kitchen dinette. The neighbours put in a ten-metre in-ground pool, an unheard-of luxury – even above-ground pools were rare. </p>
<p>The two families wore a path dubbed the “Birdsville Track” across the vacant block between them, going back and forth to poolside barbecues at their place, barbecues under the cotoneaster tree at ours – bottles now, not flagons, of wine from Coriole and Seaview just over the hill tucked under the adults’ arms. </p>
<p>The sentimental favourite at ours was when Arch picked the summer’s first corn cobs, Bobbie stripped off their papery sheaths and silky hair and served them hot, smothered in wedges of melting butter and grainy salt – a peasant ritual of the deepest satisfaction. </p>
<p>Similarly basic, and sometimes more exotic, pleasures were to be had at the homes of new best friends “Vicky” and “Old Pred”, charming and cultivated Eastern Europeans – Russian and Hungarian respectively and, in retrospect, possibly living under assumed names. </p>
<p>If you wanted to get lost in the world, becoming organic fruit and vegetable farmers on a few acres of river loam in the crook of the Onkaparinga River was and remains hard to beat. </p>
<p>The juxtaposition of Vicky and Pred’s sophistication with the old stone house and beat-up peasant farming clothes they wore was stark, Pred’s beret the only gesture to the old life, whatever that old life might have been. The political chat, domestic and international, was always good.</p>
<p>Dunstan measured up well. Reform after reform rolled through, anticipating the Whitlam government’s social democratic push. Dunstan cut a dash, up the front steps of Parliament House on North Terrace in pink shorts, reciting poetry atop an elephant at the zoo, pioneering “living apart together” when he and his second wife married but chose to live in separate, nearby houses. </p>
<p>Adelaide during the golden years gave one licence to be different. Don was different, different from any premier before or since. I was always going to be different, but if he could be different that made it so much more OK for the rest of us to be different too.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150673/original/image-20161219-24307-g8npdl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150673/original/image-20161219-24307-g8npdl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=586&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150673/original/image-20161219-24307-g8npdl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=586&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150673/original/image-20161219-24307-g8npdl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=586&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150673/original/image-20161219-24307-g8npdl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=737&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150673/original/image-20161219-24307-g8npdl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=737&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150673/original/image-20161219-24307-g8npdl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=737&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hoe Yee, Hoi Mee and Chris Wallace in 1968.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Chris Wallace</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Struggles with education</h2>
<p>I skipped a class at Christies Beach Primary School, doing Year 3 and 4 in the one year: 1968, the year of my first Dunstan advocacy.</p>
<p>The teachers were good, the school well led, the classes orderly and standard of education decent. Nearly everyone’s father, and some of their mothers, worked at the refinery or Chrysler. There were few obvious social problems, though I did wonder why April, who sat in front of me in Year 5, shaved her legs. There was bullying but it was survivable. </p>
<p>The school inspector was diligent and liked to even things up in class. Once he posed me a spelling question I would likely fail – a lesson in humility – then posed an easy one to a struggling classmate, to build his confidence. </p>
<p>In a working-class school, this boy was from one of the poorest families. Awed at being singled out by the school inspector, he sat stunned, red-faced, and wet his pants. The sight and sound of that trickle of urine falling from his shabby grey school trousers to the shiny lino floor beneath his bench seat still tugs at my heart. I hope things turned out well for him. We all had to learn how to survive somehow.</p>
<p>I survived through truancy. I was a regular truant from Year 5 on. I had bad hay fever, or bad whatever-it-took, and would stay home and listen to my brothers’ LPs on the stereogram. The Beatles’ Rubber Soul and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band were favourites. </p>
<p>It wasn’t the school’s fault. It was the days before stretch tasks or opportunity classes. They did their best to make school lessons less boring, jumping me ahead to later-year English classes, but it wasn’t enough. </p>
<p>Home was more interesting. The music. The political chat. Older brothers to roughhouse with after they came home from their apprenticeships in the afternoon. Monday Conference, Four Corners and This Day Tonight on black-and-white ABC TV. The world came into our living room. Change was afoot.</p>
<p>High school loomed. I won a half-scholarship to an establishment grammar school in Adelaide: motto, <em>Virtute et Veritate</em>. The local doctor sent a short typed note of congratulations to my parents – to me, an astonishing gesture of personal recognition. </p>
<p>The grammar school posted the uniform list. I read it with anthropological fascination: gloves, hat, prescribed shoes and socks, prescribed underwear even. Another world. </p>
<p>But there was a rock musical coming up at Christies Beach High School. I went. It was fantastic – long hair, loud music, kids hanging from the rafters, making it all happen. Goodbye grammar school scholarship, hello Christies Beach High: motto, Work, Life, Play.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150674/original/image-20161219-24276-1j7l0kj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150674/original/image-20161219-24276-1j7l0kj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=873&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150674/original/image-20161219-24276-1j7l0kj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=873&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150674/original/image-20161219-24276-1j7l0kj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=873&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150674/original/image-20161219-24276-1j7l0kj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1097&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150674/original/image-20161219-24276-1j7l0kj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1097&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150674/original/image-20161219-24276-1j7l0kj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1097&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Chris Wallace with her parents, 1976.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Chris Wallace</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The world changes</h2>
<p>I began at Christies Beach High in February 1972. That month I saw Led Zeppelin play at Memorial Drive Tennis Club, accompanied by one of my brothers. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Led_Zeppelin_IV">Led Zeppelin IV</a> was so new that when the band played Stairway to Heaven hardly anyone knew it. </p>
<p>At the other end of the year, in November, Dunstan danced onstage in the finale of Hair. </p>
<p>In between, his government passed legislation establishing the South Australian Theatre Company and the South Australian Film Commission, passed the Age of Majority (Reduction) Act, the Corporal Punishment Abolition Act, the Ombudsman Act, the Daylight Saving Act, the Community Welfare Act and the Coast Protection Act, as well as consumer protection laws and occupational health and safety laws, among a raft of other initiatives.</p>
<p>That same month, the federal opposition leader, Gough Whitlam, delivered his 1972 federal election campaign speech at Blacktown Town Hall in Sydney. Arch brought home a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder and I taped the great man’s words:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Men and women of Australia … </p>
</blockquote>
<p>It was electrifying. Even the promise to sewer Sydney’s western suburbs seemed visionary when the words fell from Whitlam’s lips. </p>
<p>When we took the tape recorder back to the refinery, not even the pervasive sickly sweet hydrocarbon vapours could dampen my mood. The world was a huge and beneficent place of endless hope and opportunity, where the state was a force for good if only conservatives would get out of the way. Or so it seemed.</p>
<p>Christies had nearly 2,000 students on two campuses with a huge, treeless oval in between. It had a rough reputation. </p>
<p>Years later, when I was a young journalist working in (Old) Parliament House, the local MP would point across King’s Hall and proclaim:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Her! See her? She went to Christies High and survived! </p>
</blockquote>
<p>But really it was just working class, with all the attendant difficulties, including homes with few or no books and little tradition of reading. There were teenage pregnancies, drugs – but remarkably few given the size of the school. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150671/original/image-20161219-24303-8a3xqk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150671/original/image-20161219-24303-8a3xqk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150671/original/image-20161219-24303-8a3xqk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=948&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150671/original/image-20161219-24303-8a3xqk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=948&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150671/original/image-20161219-24303-8a3xqk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=948&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150671/original/image-20161219-24303-8a3xqk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1191&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150671/original/image-20161219-24303-8a3xqk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1191&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150671/original/image-20161219-24303-8a3xqk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1191&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bobbie Wallace, 1978.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Chris Wallace</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The outstanding things about Christies were the incredible teachers and systematic encouragement to get you to make the most of what you had – when you weren’t surfing, that is.</p>
<p>Sometimes that encouragement simply came through trust and decent resources. The art teachers, whom we loved, for example, trusted us to hang out in the art rooms at lunchtime. </p>
<p>One break I was flicking through H.H. Arnason’s <a href="https://www.pearsonhighered.com/product/Arnason-History-of-Modern-Art-Paper-cover-6th-Edition/9780136062066.html">History of Modern Art</a> – I’m not sure whether it was a school resource or belonged to the teacher, but it was out in the open where, had we really been delinquents, it would have been nicked.</p>
<p>I came across Paul Klee’s <a href="http://www.artinthepicture.com/paintings/paul_klee/sinbad-the-sailor/">Sinbad the Sailor</a>: it flicked a switch in my head. Art was it. </p>
<p>The following year I began painting large, hard-edge abstract minimalist artworks. Teachers bought them. At the end of Year 11 I decided to drop out of school to go to Paris and be a painter. Arch refused to sign my passport application. Reluctantly, I returned to school for Year 12. That’s when Christies Beach High came into its own.</p>
<p>You can cage a questing student and create trouble for everyone, or you can give them their head and see where it leads.</p>
<p>Each morning in Year 12, I would go to school and get my name ticked off the roll. Then often, upon the bell for first period, I would walk out the gate and grab a train at the station across the road into the city. </p>
<p>First stop: State Library of South Australia, to read. </p>
<p>Second stop: Art Gallery of South Australia, to look at art. </p>
<p>Third stop: Adelaide University Bookshop, or perhaps the Mary Martin Bookshop in Gawler Place – then still owned by Mary Martin and Max Harris – to read books for free, careful not to bend the spines; then the train back to Christies Beach. </p>
<p>There was a lot of thinking time each way. How civilised having the train station right next to the high school. How intelligent of the school to let me regularly walk out that gate when the mores of the day said I should be locked up.</p>
<p>How kind the teachers were who let me sit, after a few weeks’ diligent swatting, the exams at the end of the year anyway – except perhaps the art teacher who asked archly, when I came to deliver my portfolio of works for Year 12 art:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Are you still enrolled?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The world had changed by then. The Whitlam government had been dismissed; constitutional coup author Malcolm Fraser was prime minister instead of electrifying Gough. The state had ceased being an unequivocal force for good. </p>
<p>I was shocked – but then, I was young and naive. Finding out life was not entirely just, like discovering that life is not entirely meritocratic, was essential learning. </p>
<p>And, by now, a strange animus had begun to swirl around Dunstan. The conservatives got him in the end, a miasma of rumour undermining a good man and excellent premier, destabilising and corroding his government. The dressing-gowned resignation was still some way ahead, but you could sense it coming.</p>
<p>I had left town by then. At 16 years and 51 weeks old, I got on a bus to ANU in Canberra and too rarely returned. Adelaide’s golden age left an enduring imprint.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150672/original/image-20161219-24303-3dq28p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150672/original/image-20161219-24303-3dq28p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150672/original/image-20161219-24303-3dq28p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150672/original/image-20161219-24303-3dq28p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150672/original/image-20161219-24303-3dq28p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150672/original/image-20161219-24303-3dq28p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150672/original/image-20161219-24303-3dq28p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Chris Wallace takes a selfie, 1976-style.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Chris Wallace</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p><em>You can read other essays from Griffith Review’s latest edition <a href="https://griffithreview.com/editions/state-of-hope/">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/70266/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Chris Wallace receives funding from the Australian Research Council. </span></em></p>
For once in its life, under the premiership of Don Dunstan, South Australia felt like the very centre of the universe.
Chris Wallace, ARC DECRA Fellow, Australian National University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.