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Within ten minutes I regretted my decision to walk to Creedon Street in the outback town of Broken Hill. At first, I thought it was the shoes. Stupid things I’d bought on the internet, they were little more than plastic-coated cardboard soles strapped to my ankles with nylon laces. The desert sand scratched between my feet and the sole, painfully reminding me I also had no arch support. There were spiky bindis the size of small tarantulas that I knew from experience to step around. They would pierce those stupid shoes – and my feet.
My destination, Creedon Street, was a site for public housing. There, families were crowded into an environment that one woman told me had been ‘set up to fail’ in the 1990s when authorities sought to move Aboriginal people out of the Sydney suburb of Redfern in time for the 2000 Olympics. As well as uncomfortable on my feet, the walk there was also boring. Broken Hill has fascinating architecture, extraordinary cultural heritage, a buzzing art scene and plentiful pubs (though fewer than the 70 it once boasted). Whether it was the day or the route I am not sure, but none of this seemed evident as I trudged. My allegorical ambitions dissipated with every boring block. I’d imagined myself like philosopher Michel de Certeau, for whom ‘walking in the city’ helped understand the relationship between our agency in everyday life, set against big structures like capitalism, which I was in Broken Hill to think about.[i] But as the dry, hot sun seemed to suck the life from me, walking in the desert seemed more like a parody of de Certeau’s agency. I soon feared it might also be making a mockery of my own intellectual pretensions.
Like others in this age of polycrisis, I wanted to think about the historical entanglements of race, labour and environment. Historically these have often seemed at odds. We see it where workers oppose the end of coal or logging, and when environmentalists fail to acknowledge that such people have a legitimate need for a job – and when the ‘true’ working class is imagined to be white and male. By walking I hoped to think about, perhaps even to feel with my body, how race, class and environment might be brought together in everyday life, via a shared history and politics.
Broken Hill seemed a good place to do it. The town, like many outback cliches, is like one big allegory for Australia, especially for our history with capitalism. I started my walk at the Trades Hall, the pride of Broken Hill and a historical touchstone for Australia’s union movement. Like sentries guarding against the labour rabble, however, directly across the road stand seven carved white busts depicting the ‘syndicate of seven’ who founded Broken Hill Proprietary, BHP. They were visible from the front door of the Trades Hall. On this street, the main symbol of labour literally opposes seven key founders of Australian capital.
Other representations of working-class politics in Broken Hill are nearly as ubiquitous as the dust, which is perhaps not quite as red as the town’s political history. Capital too looms, as present as the massive heap of slag (the by-product of mining and smelting) towering over town. These great black piles of the debris of industrial mining are known as the ‘line of lode’. It is spectacular in a Tolkienesque kind of way, though where we might expect the Eye of Sauron there is instead a memorial to miners killed extracting lead, zinc and silver from the hill. Next to the miners’ memorial there is the empty shell of what was once a world class restaurant.
Not everyone survives capitalism.
When I finally arrived at Creedon Street, hot and irritable, there was nothing to see. It was just another street, not noticeably different to the thousands that I felt I had stumbled through.
I chided my subconsciously racist self. What did I expect, non-stop corroboree? Perhaps I was guilty of ‘poverty porn’, taking my excessively educated arse where it did not belong, seeking to exploit First Nations suffering for intellectual gain.
Face-palming, I took stock. I noticed that the street was right on the edge of town. Behind that row of public houses was nothing. Stony desert littered (charmingly, in fact) with rusting junk.
This seemed important. I’d been talking to teachers’ aids, employment centres and the local high school careers advisor, himself an Aboriginal man, who all told me that young Aboriginal people often experienced racism, particularly when they seek employment. The geography of town seemed to bear this out: the town centre celebrates labour on every corner, but when a place was built purposely for Aboriginal people to live, it was far from the town’s working-class centre.
I took this to be a symptom of what settler-colonial studies historian Patrick Wolfe called the ‘logic of elimination’.[ii] Of course, some Aboriginal people did and do work for big capital and small capital, and some were and are members of Broken Hill’s famous union movement. But any sense of the centrality of First Nations claims to land and sovereignty posed – at least in recent decades – a threat to the Broken Hill establishment, and by extension to the rest of us.
First Nations sovereignty is by definition hard for a settler colonial society to acknowledge. But it is the truth. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were here first. Sovereignty was never ceded. This is First Nations land. Acknowledging this beyond the words we use at meetings, extending it to our hearts and practice demands something like turning the still-colonial world upside down. And from the centre of the battle between labour and capital, it seems easier to push the question, and the people connected to it, to the margins.
Creedon Street, by this logic, was certainly not aligned with those founders of BHP, whose profit relied on supplanting First Nations economies and claims to land. But why was Aboriginal sovereignty not, on the whole, protected by the Trades Hall?
Feeling stupid, I turned right and walked along the street, soon arriving somewhere familiar. The closest famous landmark to Creedon Street was the cemetery.
Broken Hill cemetery might be one of the most important in Australia. The burial site of revered members of the Australian union movement, the cemetery is an important monument to colonial and working-class history. Black crosses of the religious orders who sent teenagers from Ireland to serve in the outback offer a poignant memorial to what must have been an utterly dislocating experience. Artist Pro Hart’s grave is there, a massive, crazy expensive, marble thing engraved with his signature golden dragonfly – recently defaced by vandals. But the cemetery is mainly a memorial to labour. A pamphlet guides visitors to graves of historical significance to Australian unionism. Headstones list labour leaders’ CVs, while others honour the Red Flag Forever.
It is an outback cemetery, so small cages cover many graves, protecting burials from animals. Protecting the dead this way seems some sort of perversion of what sociologist Max Weber described as the ‘iron cage’ of capitalism.[iii] Capitalism failed to protect workers from the lead dust or the work that maimed, killed and riddled many with diseases, often deadly. But now, iron cages protect the dead.
The cemetery reminds us that capitalism kills.
Up on the line of lode, the miner’s memorial documents the tragedy. In 1887, capitalism killed 21-year-old Samuel Spears, who tumbled down a ladderway in the pursuit of ore that would profit BHP shareholders. Spears was already not the youngest to die since the discovery of ore on the broken hill in 1883. Just a year earlier, John Vaugh, aged 14, fell down BHP’s ore heap, to his death. The following year, 25-year-old Charles Apple died in a rock fall, 36-year-old Alfred Neiring died in an explosion of shot and Alfred Polgreen, 21, was killed by a rock drill.
Mine safety improved, largely by union agitation, supported by local medical practitioners who helped alert the public beyond Broken Hill, to the dangers of industrial mining. The resulting public pressure drove engineering innovation and safety procedures. Many safety measures were hard won by strike action, like the number of minutes workers were to wait between blasting and heading back into mine shafts newly polluted with lead-laden dust.
Such improvements were far too slow for 16-year-old Charles Shannon, who was electrocuted in the BHP mine in 1910. It did not help Ronald James who at 18 years old was also electrocuted in 1979, as was 22-year-old John Collison in 1988. Mining in the 2000s slowed to such an extent that homes in Broken Hill could be purchased on a fairly modest credit card – and meant there were no deaths to record. When mining resumed, so did death. Capitalism killed again in 2007, when 30-year-old James Symonds was crushed by machinery. So was Andrew Bray, aged 47, as recently as 2019.
Capitalism kills, and the working class unites against it.
The graves of union leaders at the cemetery not only remind us of this, but they also act as a kind of mirror image to the mock graves that union members made of ‘scabs’, who refused to join strike action, in 1909. A photograph of one of those graves reads “Here Lies Peter Corney 1909 Scab”. Imagine Peter Corney’s trepidation, seeing his own name on the tomb. His death, however, was fictional. It was a tough strategy, but one that highlighted the value of solidarity as the only path to improved working conditions, and perhaps more broadly to liberation itself. For those listed in the miners’ memorial, death was not a ploy, but a central logic of the operation. Human lives – their lungs, their broken bones, their hopes, even just their time, so precious and short as it is for us all – was exchanged for profit.
This profit was not only the foundation of big mining in Australia, but it also underpinned the fledgling stock exchanges, and large finance enterprises like Collins House in Melbourne. Added up, exploitation pays – but only for a few.
Since colonisation, a significant portion of the middle class has considered education to be the answer. In the 1990s it became economic doctrine, systematically shifting the population to ‘better’ jobs. And yet for those of us in white collar work it is little different. Capitalism colonises every moment of our lives in the name of a rewarding, and often well-meaning, career. While industrial accidents are less common for professionals, ever-increasing productivity demands and decreasing autonomy under a managerial class is also killing us slowly – if perhaps mainly spiritually – as it converts our very selfhood into profit-making stuff. Even when the surface seems cleaner, the logic on display at Broken Hill applies to us all.
[i] De Certeau, Michel (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life Berkely: University of California Press.
[ii] Wolfe, Patrick (2006) ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’ Journal of Genocide Research Volume 8, No.4, pp.387-409.
[iii] Weber, Max (1904) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Vintage Edition, 2002. The ‘iron cage’ was not what Talcott Parsons’ famous translation of weber’s ‘shell as hard as steel’. Like others I have used it here as it more evocative of what I mean, and possibly what Weber meant too.
