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Canberra Today 25°/28° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Untold stories of working on the railways

WITHOUT doubt, the latest exhibition at the National Archives of Australia is one of its more unusual in a long time.

Track gang using air hammer, dog spikes and fish plates on the Moura Project 1967
Track gang using air hammer, dog spikes and fish plates on the Moura Project 1967
“Aboriginal and Islander stories: I’ve been working on the railway,” tells the story, in pictures, music, video, artefacts and words, of Torres Strait Islanders, Aboriginal people and Australian South Sea Islanders who worked on the national railways in the mid-20th century.

Curated by Rob Shiels, the collection manager from the Workshops Rail Museum in Ipswich, it looks at the contribution of these cultural groups to the development of rail across Australia, focusing on their hard work, their living conditions, including where they slept or what they ate, while at the same time revealing the sense of camaraderie and the egalitarianism of working on the railway.

Shiels told “CityNews” that  his researches had led him to believe the railways were one of the first genuinely equal opportunity employers. He pointed to a newspaper clipping from 1965 that offered jobs  on the railways to Torres Straight Islanders, famed for their hard work ethic, at £78 a week, a very high wage for that time and enough to tempt them away from their families for as much as two years at a time.

Laying tracks on the Upper Swan,  WA Standard Gauge Railway Line project, 1965. Photo courtesy of West Australian News Archive.
Laying tracks on the Upper Swan, WA Standard Gauge Railway Line project, 1965. Photo courtesy of West Australian News Archive.
Make no mistake about it, they earned every penny of their wages, laying down miles of track a day.

This is an exhibition that asks you to look, listen and think. I found myself returning again and again to the map of the Australian Railways to guess how the development of all one-gauge railway system throughout the country helped break down some of the barriers of earlier times.

Moura Project, Fettler Using Air Compressor & Amp; Dog Spike Drivers, Track Laying  1967.
Moura Project, Fettler Using Air Compressor & Amp; Dog Spike Drivers, Track Laying 1967.
Central to the exhibition are moving  stories of individuals and families, some of whom travelled with the men, living a camp existence along the railway tracks, while far more, left behind, survived and prospered on the earnings of the husband and father. There’s even a model of the typical accommodation in which they lived, flimsy and easy to pack up when the time came to move on.

A staffer from the National Archives pointed out to “CityNews” that it was the job of the archives to tell Australian stories. These are certainly stories many of us have never heard before.

“Aboriginal and Islander stories: I’ve been working on the railway,” Queen Victoria Terrace, Parkes, until  May 18, 2014. Free entry.

 

 

 

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Helen Musa

Helen Musa

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