Industrial Heritage Agents, Actors and Outcomes: Regional Case Studies from Broken Hill and the Latrobe Valley

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article considers the comparative standing of industrial heritage in two distinctive Australian regional contexts. With a focus on the agents and actors in the heritage-making process, we outline the development of a case for heritage in the mining town of Broken Hill in far western New South Wales, which gained momentum soon after the local mines began a steady decline in the early 1970s. Broken Hill has, to some extent, adapted its mining and labour heritage to form a viable element of the town’s current identity and economic base, especially by seeing those individual sites as part of a heritage landscape. We also consider industrial heritage in the Latrobe Valley in Victoria, a brown coal mining and electricity-generation hub where industrial and mining employment has declined much more recently. Reflecting on these changing political policies and industry privatisation in the early 1990s, we examine the impact on industrial heritage in a region typified by mining and power generation.