Mud and Steel: The Imagination of Newcastle

According to James Docherty, modern Newcastle 'is widely regarded as an ideal place for market research because the people are considered statistically representative of Australians'. This may explain why the district's electoral swings are solemnly investigated for signs of health or morbidity in the Australian Labor Party's 'heartland'. While it is not clear what 'heartland' and 'typical Australian' connote, there is no doubt that Newcastle has borne a semiotic and poetic load to match its heavy industrial workload this century. The image of Newcastle reverberates with archetypes deep in our cultural unconscious.1 The semiotic and poetic load, moreover, has not diminished along with the city's industry. Just as Newcastle stood for Australia's shining future during the 'resources boom' of the early 1980s, it has been a major symbol by which Australians have understood the decline of manufacturing in the later deregulated economy. The retrenchments at the BHP steelworks, the closure of the state dockyards, the failure to win the shipbuilding contract for the new navy frigates: such blows to the Newcastle economy represented the demise of an old Australia and warned of life in the new banana republic. The point was apparently given cosmic confirmation in 1989 when an earthquake hit Newcastle. The broader story was understood by journalists, for they revived it months later when they discovered that 'earthquake survivors' were among those killed in a tour bus accident in southern Queensland. Another tragic blow for Australia's own part of the Third World! Stories about Newcastle combined the pity, fatalism and slight embarrassment that characterise stories of tragedy in places that represent tragedy. Without assuming, then, that Newcastle is 'statistically representative of typical Australians', much can be learned about Newcastle and Australia by looking at the city's significance as a signifier in Australian culture and politics. This exploration is the first purpose of this article. It will be carried out by studying Docherty's aforementioned history, Newcastle: The making of an Australian city, published in 1983, which is the only full-length academic history of the city. This book was not