"To Those Who Lost Their Lives": Reading a Labour Landmark in Sydney, Nova Scotia

• Published in: Labour (Halifax) 2013-09, Vol.72 (72), p.101-128
• Main Author: MacKinnon, Lachlan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Appreciation; Australia; Canada; Collective memory; Conceptualization; Deindustrialization; Design and construction; Fatalities; History; Industrial plants; Iron and steel workers; Labor standards; Labour collectives; Labour relations; Memorials & monuments; Monuments; National memory; New South Wales; Nova Scotia; Occupational safety; Public spaces; RESEARCH NOTE / NOTE DE RÉCHERCHE; Social aspects; Social behaviour; Steel industry; Steel-works; Workers; Working class
• ISSN: 0700-3862; 1911-4842

In Sydney, a city that continues to deal with the social and economic effects of deindustrialization, the Steelworkers' Memorial Monument embodies both the "social memory" of the workplace among former steelworkers, and the "individual memory" of those who personally knew the men commemorated on the memorial. Social memory, according to Edward Casey, is held within a network of kinship, community, or common engagement (which can include a common workplace), while individual memory is uniquely personal. When these types of memory are expressed in public space, whether through commemoration, performance, or re-enactment, they become manifestations of "public memory." Sites or performances of public memory influence how the public conceptualizes particular past events. These "multiple remembrances" of a particular event or theme, which can exist among people who may or may not be known to one another, have been termed "collective memory"; there is no need for overlapping experience, Casey writes, "all that matters [for collective memory] is commonality of content."4 One narrative that has emerged since the 1980s is that of unmitigated environmental and medical catastrophe, a "toxic legacy."121 Many people have been hurt by the steel industry in Sydney. The high cancer rates and early mortality among steelworkers and those who lived in the areas surrounding the steel plant are a disastrous consequence of years of toxic pollution. When children are found with high levels of arsenic in their blood, as they were in Sydney in 2001, it is clear that there is a severe problem.122 The narrative of "toxic legacy" is one that Maude Barlow and Elizabeth May reflect in their book, Frederick Street. The authors' speak only in discourses of exploitation when they present the lives of Sydney's steelworkers as "Hobbesian ... nasty, brutish and short," albeit among a people with "indomitable spirits." They assert, "in 1968, the steel plant should have closed ... many lives would have been spared. But this was a steel mill that would not die, even if it killed everything around it."123 This comes perilously close to ignoring, or denying, the agency of workers and their families in their opposition to the planned shutdown of the steel plant. The Steelworkers' Memorial Monument offers a public memory of the steelmaking past that is centred upon the memorialization of the dead, the advances in workplace safety made possible through unionism, and finally, the end of the steel indu