Labourhistory 109 0149

“Good Riddance to the Stinkin' Place”: Deindustrialisation and Memory at Associated Pulp
and Paper Mills in Burnie, Tasmania

Author(s): Ruth Barton
Source: Labour History , No. 109 (November 2015), pp. 149-167
Published by: Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Inc.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5263/labourhistory.109.0149
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Labour History, no. 109 (November 2015): 149–67. ISSN 0023-6942
© 2015 Australian Society for the Study of Labour History
“Good Riddance to the Stinkin’ Place”:

Deindustrialisation and Memory at Associated Pulp and
Paper Mills in Burnie, Tasmania
Ruth Barton*
As areas have deindustrialised, the factories that once symbolised prosperity and constancy
are abandoned. These buildings are imbued with the memories of the workers and local people
and can become the site of contest over visions of the past, present and future. In Burnie,
Tasmania, the Associated Pulp and Paper Mills factory closed in 2010 and was demolished
in 2012. There was a sense of ambivalence around these buildings that had dominated Burnie
physically and economically for over 75 years. Their centrality to the town’s prosperity
and growth went largely uncelebrated and they were demolished to erase memories of the
industrial past and frame the future as post-industrial.
Since the 1980s, many Western societies have experienced waves of deindustrialisation.
The factory closures and relocations associated with this process have often been
contested by communities and unions but have inevitably resulted in defeat. This
phenomenon has sparked increasing academic interest in deindustrialisation,
industrial heritage and community responses. The focus of this interest was initially
on the underlying economic and political causes of deindustrialisation before
then shifting to the cultural meaning of deindustrialisation, where the lives of
workers in those communities became central. This change is evidenced by a recent
thematic issue on “Crumbling Cultures: Deindustrialization, Class and Memory”
in International Labor and Working-Class History which examined the experiences of
workers and working-class communities and the way that the disappearance of
industrial work affects individual and collective memory and identity.1
Deindustrialisation is, High argues, a “struggle over meaning and collective
memory.”2 In urban areas deindustrialisation is seen in terms of urban change
and gentrification whereas in isolated areas, often dependent on single industries,
deindustrialisation has a significant impact but one that is played out within
the confines of that area and largely ignored in the broader national context.
Deindustrialisation’s impact is therefore greatest in areas that are least visible.3
The town of Burnie, located on Tasmania’s North West coast, is one such place.
In the 1920s, the Tasmanian state government embarked on a process of hydro-
industrialisation and, through the offer of cheap electricity, attracted a range of heavy
* I am grateful to Labour History’s two anonymous referees and editors for their constructive
comments and to Cathy Brigden and Peter Fairbrother for commenting on an earlier draft. The
research was funded by the Australian Research Council grant DP14012389.
1. Steven High, “‘The Wounds of Class’: A Historiographical Reflection on the Study of
Deindustrialization, 1973–2013,” History Compass 11, no. 11 (2013): 994–1007; Carolyn Brown,
Jennifer Klein and Prasannan Partasarathi, “Senior Editor’s Note,” International Labor and Working-
Class History 84 (2013): 1–6.
2. Steven High, “Beyond Aesthetics: Visibility and Invisibility in the Aftermath of
Deindustrialization,” International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 84 (2013):140.
3. High, “Beyond Aesthetics,” 141; Alice Mah, Industrial Ruination, Community and Place: Landscapes
and Legacies of Urban Decline (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 7.
149

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150 Labour History • Number 109 • November 2015
industry that transformed the largely agricultural region into a relatively prosperous
area. One such factory established as part of process was Associated Pulp and Paper
Mills (APPM) at Burnie. It commenced operation in 1938 and at its peak employed
3,500 people from the North West coast before finally closing in 2010. At its peak,
the factory was Tasmania’s largest private sector employer.
The APPM factory was known as the Mill by the managers and the Pulp by the
employees, and dominated Burnie in a physical and economic sense for over 75
years.
Upon entering the township of Burnie, there is a sense that you’ve been
taken back to a time when industry was king. Before you even get close to
the vast complex … the immense size of some of its buildings loom large,
including the chimney stack that keeps a watchful eye over the entire site.4
Its decline and closure had a profound impact on Burnie and the broader North
West coast which has high levels of unemployment, low levels of labour market
participation and high levels of disadvantage.5
In 2012, most of the APPM buildings were demolished. At one end of the
site a Bunnings hardware store has been constructed but some three years later
the remainder lies vacant and unoccupied. The buildings have been lost from
the landscape and now exist only as memories. In this sense the preservation
or demolition of industrial buildings such as APPM is significant, as it reveals
narratives and memories that are created or suppressed about places and lays bare
their function.
Memory
Memory is a dynamic concept that is shaped by the past and the present. Memory,
Fentress and Wickham argue, is “the past shaped and adapted to the uses of the
present – and of the present then as well as the present now.”6 It is situated in place
and time and enables us to interpret the present and foresee the future. Memory
is socially constructed by groups who form an agreed version of the past through
communication and is structured by language, by place, by material symbols or signs
such as monuments, by collectively held ideas and by shared experiences.7 Such
memory is largely unaffected by its truth. All that matters is that it is believed. Social
memory is a source of knowledge and an expression of collective experience that
identifies a group and gives it a sense of its past. This means, according to Fentress
and Wickham, that we must “situate groups in relation to their own traditions,
asking how they interpret their own ‘ghosts.’”8 In this context place can be a source
4. Thomas Ryan, “57 Twentieth Century Burnie Paper Mill Buildings being Demolished,” Tasmanian
20th Century Modernism (blog), 4 October 2012, accessed September 2015, http://modernismtas.
blogspot.com.au/2012/09/57-twentieth-century-burnie-paper-mill.html.
5. Ivan Neville, “Labour Market Conditions in North West/Northern Tasmania and Burnie,”
Department of Education Employment and Workplace Relations Presentation, 12 September 2013,
accessed October 2015, http://docs.employment.gov.au/system/files/doc/other/north_west-
northern_tasmania_and_burnie_presentation.pdf.
6. James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), viii.
7. Ibid., 1–24; Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory, Volume 1: Past and Present in Contemporary
Culture (London: Verso, 1996), viii; Natalie Zemon Davis and Randolph Starn, “Introduction,”
Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 1–6.
8. Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, 26.

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Barton • Associated Pulp and Paper Mills in Burnie, Tasmania 151
A Worker at Associated Pulp and Paper Mills, Burnie, Tasmania, 1956

Photograph by Wolfgang Sievers
Courtesy National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an24429641
of memory with its past associations giving meaning and enabling the construction
of community identity.
But memory is dynamic and changing. Samuel argues that memory is historically
conditioned and experience and “the ruling passions of its time”9 cause it to change.
Memory, he argues, is a process and “even in its silences, [is] something which people
made for themselves.”10 Memories evolve and change through social processes
and, in this way, are given new meaning. The way that memories of the past are
9. Samuel, Theatres of Memory, x.

10. Ibid., 17.

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understood and generated directs a groups’ understanding of their position in the

present.11 In this way, memory can be seen as a social construction that is collective,
dynamic and changing and can be associated with place and identity.
Historians have been interested in the concept of mémoire ouvrière or working-
class memory and the ways that workers remember the past. Working-class memory
is seen as an active and selective process, is discontinuous and combines real and
imaginary elements. These collective memories form through the interaction of
networks of memories, with these networks formed from the commonality of daily
life experiences and often rooted in work. These memories are made working class by
workers’ collective experiences at work and relationship to authority. Memory can be
influenced by experiences of domination, solidarity and the material environment.12
Nora links memory with place with his concept of lieux de mémoire or sites of memory
that emerge because globalisation has wrought a break with the past and “there are
no longer mileaux de mémorie, real environments of memory.”13 These sites of memory
can be material, such as cemeteries or monuments, and provide links to the past but
can only do so if they have symbolism.14 In this sense although industrial sites may
be abandoned, they remain connected to the surrounding environment in terms of
the community, collective memory and with people’s livelihood, health and stories.
Mah uses the concept of “living memory” which she describes as “people’s
present day memories of a shared past” and argues that “sites and processes of
industrial ruination are deeply connected to the past and the memory contained
within it, as they are physical reminders of industrial production and decline, and
of the lives connected to them.”15 As Massey argues the identity of places is bound
by “the histories which are told of them, how these histories are told, and which
history turns out to be dominant.”16 In this way the identity and memories associated
with place are influenced by narratives and stories of history. While there has been
a significant amount of debate about the preservation of heritage sites as museums
and the meanings embodied in them, there appears to be relatively little about the
meaning and narratives surrounding the demolition of industrial buildings, although
there are exceptions such as Byrne and Doyle.17
The paper is structured as follows. In section one a brief review of analyses of
deindustrialisation, factories and identity is presented. Section two provides an
account of Burnie and the Pulp’s prominence in its history. The third section recounts
narratives and memories surrounding its opening, closure and demolition, bringing
out the way the site is both a place of memory, trepidation and commemoration.
Section four provides an assessment followed by a brief conclusion.
11. Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, 126, 200–201.

12. Marianne Debouzy, “In Search of Working-Class Memory: Some Questions and a Tentative
Assessment,” History and Anthropology 2, no. 2 (1986): 261–82.
13. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémorie,” Representations 26 (Spring
1989): 7.
14. Ibid., 12.
15. Mah, Industrial Ruination, 15.
16. Doreen Massey, “Places and Their Pasts,” History Workshop Journal 39 (1995): 186.
17. Samuel, Theatres of Memory; Lucy Taksa, “The Material Culture of an Industrial Artefact:
Interpreting Control, Defiance and Everyday Resistance in the New South Wales Eveleigh Railway
Workshops,” Historical Archaeology 39, no. 3 (2005): 8–27; David Byrne and Aiden Doyle, “The
Visual and the Verbal: The Interaction of Images and Discussion in Exploring Cultural Change,” in
Picturing the Social Landscape: Visual Methods and the Sociological Imagination, eds. Caroline Knowles
and Paul Sweetman (London: Routledge, 2004), 166–77.

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Deindustrialisation, Factories, and Identity

For much of the twentieth century, factories were associated with affluence and
modernity. They were symbols of order and progress and invoked a particular way
of life and a specific economic and cultural order. However, that order, certainty, and
life built around such factories can be disrupted when deindustrialisation occurs
and these factories close. The changing of this order is represented by the closure,
decay and demolition of factories. The factory ruins act as both a symbol of local
industry’s failure and of growth elsewhere, often overseas.18 They can be seen as the
footprint of capitalism, as places that are no longer profitable or have use value and
are “wasted places … left behind by an uneven nature of capitalist development”
and produced by capital abandonment.19 Deindustrialisation is presented as a natural
aspect of capitalism and part of an historic process that is inevitable and irresistible,
with blame for the closures sheeted home to the people of the region, rather than
being seen as a political and economic choice. It raises questions about the meaning
of an industrial culture built on illusions of permanence,20 and represents “a cultural
drama of communities in transition and ordinary people struggling to find a place
for the past in the present.”21
The effects of deindustrialisation can be especially profound in single industry
towns where that industry dominates the town’s economic, social and cultural
life. In these towns, the loss is economic and moreover creates a sense of loss of
place in the surrounding world. With the disappearance of work comes a sense of
loss over a set of ideas and norms that have shaped workers’ identity and the way
they conduct their lives. There is mourning that these ideas and feelings will not
be there to guide subsequent generations. These towns are often defined by what
they produce, and once that industry has left then deindustrialisation become the
community’s defining identity and associated with failure, decay and struggle.
Industry that had once symbolised prosperity and a working-class identity now
has its remnants seen as ugly reminders of a past era, of decay and decline and of a
place left behind in the move towards a post-industrial future. The loss of industry
leads to a reconstruction of the landscape that is both material and symbolic.22
18. Steven High and David Lewis, Corporate Wasteland: Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialization
(Ithaca: ILR Press, 2007); Caitlyn De Silvey, and Tim Edensor, “Reckoning with Ruins,” Progress in
Human Geography 37, no. 4 (2012): 465–85.
19. Alice Mah, “Memory, Uncertainty and Industrial Ruination: Walker Riverside, Newcastle upon
Tyne,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Studies 34, no. 2 (2010): 399.
20. Tim Strangleman, James Rhodes and Sherry Lee Linkon, “Introduction to Crumbling Cultures:
Deindustrialization, Class and Memory,” International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 84
(2013): 7–22; Michael Frisch, “De-, Re-, and Post-Industrialization: Industrial Heritage as Contested
Memorial Terrain,” Journal of Folklore Research 35, no. 3 (1998): 241–49.
21. Kathryn Dudley, The End of the Line: Lost Jobs, New Lives in Postindustrial America (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2007), xi.
22. Steven High, “Mapping Memories of Displacement,” in Place, Writing and Voice in Oral History,
ed. Shelley Trower (Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), 217–31; Timothy J. Minchin, “‘Just
Like a Death’: The Closing of the International Paper Company Mill in Mobile, Alabama, and
the Deindustrialization of the South 2000–2005,” Alabama Review, no. 59 (2006): 44–77; Tim
Strangleman, “Work Identity in Crisis? Rethinking the Problem of Attachment and Loss at Work,”
Sociology 46, no. 3 (2012): 411–25; Steven High, “Introduction,” Urban History Revue/Revue d’Histoire
Urbaine 35, no. 2 (2007): 2–13; James Rhodes, “Youngstown’s ‘Ghost’? Memory, Identity and
Deindustrialization,” International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 84 (2013): 55–77; Sherry Lee
Linkon, “Narrating Past and Future: Deindustrialized Landscapes as Resources,” International
Labor and Working-Class History, no. 84 (2013): 38–54.

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Once these industries and the factories associated with them have closed, the
future of the buildings as industrial heritage can be a haphazard affair and more
likely to be determined by politicians’ taste and economic imperatives than historical
importance or cultural significance. Industrial heritage that has survived is usually in
a picturesque location, associated with mining or railways or lacks alternative uses
and is supported by the local community and sympathetic governments. Heritage
is a political concept and practice that encompasses a wide range of interests and
these politics affect assessments of the significance of industrial buildings. This is
often assessed through the scale of the buildings or technological history, with the
buildings’ cultural significance given less emphasis. The structures that are preserved
are often the white-collar office blocks that front large factories and offer conversion
opportunities.23
In Tasmania the preservation of industrial heritage has been uncontentious in
some ways because of a sense of difference and isolation. “Bass Strait still matters.
The coincidence of the state boundary with the encompassing shoreline reinforces the
sense of separateness … The scale of the land is quite different.”24 Within Tasmania,
there has been a privileging of wilderness as a cultural tradition, “a new aesthetic, a
morality, a religion, a political ideology”25 to the exclusion of any comparable myths
around history, urban values or the man-made environment. This, Daniels concludes,
has led to a “curiously deformed”26 conservation movement concerned with the
natural but not the urban or historic environment.27 There has been ambivalence
or even disdain shown towards Tasmania’s industrial history. As Roe argues, it is
difficult to celebrate where there are no architectural reminders.28 This has been
played out in Burnie and the APPM factory demolition where the industrial and
the urban are seen as having little significance or aesthetic value and are presented
as impediments to the inexorable march of progress.
Burnie as the Mill

APPM was established largely through the efforts of Gerald Mussen. In 1908, the
entrepreneurial Mussen was shown the large forests south of Burnie and was
impressed by their potential. In the 1920s the CSIRO’s scientific work enabled the
short eucalyptus wood fibres to be used in paper production. Impressed by the
ample supply of timber and water, Burnie’s deep-water port and Tasmania’s cheap
hydro-electric power, Mussen was convinced Burnie was the ideal site for a pulp
and paper mill. In 1924, Mussen purchased the forests from the VDL Company
23. Peter Spearritt, “Money, Taste and Industrial Heritage,” in Packaging the Past? Public Histories, ed.
John Rickard and Peter Spearritt (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press/Australian Historical
Studies, 1991), 33–45; Lucy Taksa, “Globalisation and the Memorialising of Railway Heritage,”
Historic Environment 21, no. 2 (2008): 11–19; Bobbie Oliver, “More than Just Locomotives: Re-
discovering Working Lives at the Midland Railway Workshops,” Historic Environment 21, no. 2
(2008): 20–24; Lucy Taksa, “Machines and Ghosts: Politics, Industrial Heritage and the History of
Working Life at the Eveleigh Workshops,” Labour History, no. 85 (November 2003): 65–88; Spearritt
“Money, Taste and Industrial Heritage.”
24. Henry Reynolds, A History of Tasmania (Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 290.
25. Roslynn Haynes, “Tasmanian Landscapes in Poetry, Painting and Print,” in Memory, Monuments
and Museums, ed. Marilyn Lake (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2006), 209.
26. Kay Daniels, “Cults of Nature, Cults of History,” Island Magazine 16 (Spring 1983): 4.
27. Ibid.
28. Michael Roe, “Commemoration: Tasmanian Slices,” in Lake, Memory, Monuments and Museums,
228–42.

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and 160 acres on the Burnie waterfront for the mill site. In 1935, he persuaded the
Collins House group to invest in the venture and Associated Pulp and Paper Mills
Ltd was formed and the factory subsequently built. APPM installed into its new
buildings paper machine Number 1, the largest fine printing paper machine in the
British Empire and, as the business expanded, subsequently built a second mill and
a hardboard mill and installed more paper making machines.29
APPM transformed the town. Burnie grew from a town of 3,000 people that had
been dependent on sending farm produce and mining materials out through its port,
to a major industrial town of 10,000 in 1945 and 20,000 in 1988 when it was awarded
city status. The Collins House group took an avid interest in industrial welfarism
and a paternalistic approach to their workforce. This saw the company provide a
range of worker amenities such as dentists, banking facilities, a gymnasium and 25
metre small bore rifle range. There were football teams for the men and baseball
and netball teams for the women. The work at the mill was well paid and keenly
sought by North West Coast people. Work in industrial settings such as this built
friendships and fosters a sense of community and meaning.30
As the town’s largest employer, the people and local businesses depended on
the mill both through direct and indirect employment. In 1939, the Pulp employed
530 people and from there employment steadily increased. The mill drew much
of its workforce from the broader North West coast and was a major employer of
women, employing 400 women in the Finishing Room inspecting the paper quality.
However, by the 1980s mechanisation had seen the end of these jobs and only a
small number of women were on the production floor, leaving the mill a largely
masculinised workplace.31
At its peak in the 1960s the Pulp employed 3,500 people but by the 1970s it
struggled to maintain profitability hampered by its aging and, by global standards,
low productivity paper machines, falling tariffs and relatively high labour
requirements. APPM embarked on a modernisation programme that assisted its
profitability but resulted in job losses. In 1983, North Broken Hill-Peko (NBH) made
a successful takeover bid for the mills and then stripped millions of dollars of capital
from the company and closed parts of the mills. Although production reached a
record 130,000 tons employment fell to less than 1,300.32
The Pulp was strongly unionised and dominated by two main unions, the
Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union Pulp and Paper Division and the
Australian Manufacturing Workers Union. Although there had been continued
restructuring with union cooperation, this had been too slow for management’s
liking. NBH had been associated with de-unionisation activities in its Robe River
mining operations in 1986–87 and in early 1992 maintained its “right to manage” by
29. Alan Jamieson, The Pulp: The Rise and Fall of an Industry (Hobart: Forty Degrees South, 2011); Paul
Edwards, “Associated Pulp and Paper Mills,” The Companion to Tasmanian History, Centre for
Tasmanian Historical Studies, University of Tasmania, accessed October 2015, http://www.utas.
edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/A/APPM.htm.
30. Jamieson, The Pulp; Ruth Barton, “The State, Labour Management and Union Marginalisation
at Electrolytic Zinc, Tasmania, 1920–48,” Labour History, no. 101 (2011): 53–70; Erik Eklund,
“‘Intelligently Directed Welfare Work’? Labour Management Strategies in Local Context: Port Pirie,
1915–29,” Labour History, no. 76 (1999): 125–48; Dudley, The End of the Line.
31. Kerry Pink, Campsite to City: A History of Burnie 1827–2000 (Burnie: Burnie City Council, 2000);
CFMEU Official, interview with author, 24 September 2013; Jamieson, The Pulp.
32. Pink, Campsite to City; Jamieson, The Pulp.

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announcing a series of reductions in pay, conditions and union rights. The unions
were, to some degree, prepared for the dispute having shared information and visits
with West Australian unionists associated with the Robe River dispute. They were
convinced the strategies management had adopted there would eventually spread
to NBH’s other subsidiaries, such as APPM.33
In early April 1992, the boiler operators refused to train management staff to
operate the boilers. This led to 11 of them being sacked, other workers refusing to
work and pickets set up around the factory. On 16 April, the company attempted
to import 6,200 tonnes of unfinished American paper as a form of insurance in the
industrial dispute. Protests, including a 200 strong rally and the crowd breaking
through police lines, meant it took 16 days to unload the ship. By mid-May, around
1,000 men were involved in the strike with around 300 people at the pickets during
the day and a smaller number at night. The pickets were described as a community
of families. The company had failed to appreciate that Burnie was a cohesive and
well organised community and the strike attracted widespread community support.
NBH, frustrated at the police failure to break the picket lines, took legal action against
the police and had obstructive, passive picketing declared illegal. On 4 June local
police, reinforced by officers from Launceston and other areas, broke the picket
lines, arresting 41 people and allowed 20 non-union workers to enter the site. In the
light of this a deal was struck between the ACTU, the peak union body, and APPM.
Although both sides claimed victory, the popular view in Burnie was that there were
no real winners. The strike had cost APPM $15 million in lost production and the
workers $3.5 million in wages.34
NBH continued to invest in the mill and a year after the dispute the workforce
was down to 700 people and productivity had increased by 30 per cent. However
the global pulp and paper industry was in the throes of restructuring. In developed
economies, such as Australia and Canada, the industry faced a number of challenges.
First the increasing use of digital communications meant reduced demand for
paper. Second governments in developing economies in Asia and South America
were providing support to expand their pulp and paper manufacturing capacity
using plantation eucalyptus that grew faster in their warmer and wetter climates.
Lastly there was increasing competition from imported paper. In 1993, despite
community protests, parts of the mills were progressively closed and there was
further restructuring and job losses. After an unsuccessful attempt to sell the mills
in 2009, the Burnie mill closed in 2010 with the loss of the final 270 jobs.35
33. Robert Tierney, “Class Struggle and the ‘Community of Families’: The 1992 Dispute at Associated
Pulp and Paper Mills,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies 4, no. 2 (1999): 64–80; David Baker,
“A Tale of Two Towns: Industrial Pickets, Police Practices and Judicial Review,” Labour History, no.
95 (2008): 151–67; Herb Thompson, “The APPM Dispute: The Dinosaur and Turtles vs the ACTU,”
Economic and Labour Relations Review 3, no. 2 (1992): 148–64; Pink, Campsite to City.
34. Tierney, “Class Struggle”; Baker, “A Tale of Two Towns”; Terese Henning and Rick Snell, “The
APPM Strike: An Exercise of Police Discretion: A Poor Example of Judicial Oversight,” Bond Law
Review 5, no. 1 (1993): 96–110; David Baker, “The Fusion of Picketing, Policing and Public Order
Theory within the Industrial Relations Context of the 1992 APPM dispute at Burnie,” Australian
Bulletin of Labour 27, no. 1 (2001): 61–77; Pink, Campsite to City; David Baker, “Policing Industrial
Conflict in Rural and Regional Settings: Local and ‘Outside’ Approaches,” International Journal
of Rural Crime, no. 1 (2007): 79–92; John Medwin (2009) “The 1992 Dispute that Stopped a City,”
Ramblings of an Old Goat (blog), 5 July 2009, accessed October 2015, http://john-c-medwin.
blogspot.com/2009/07/where-were-you-when-they-turned-off.html; Gwynneth Singleton,
“Political Review: April to June 1992,” The Australian Quarterly 64, no. 3 (1992): 309–21.
35. Pulp and Paper Industry Strategy Group, Final Report (Canberra, ACT: Commonwealth of

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The mill closed without any fanfare. The unions campaigned against the closure
and held stop work meeting to ensure the workers’ entitlements were protected
and pressured the government to establish a support and retraining programme
for the workers.36 The lack of community protest against the closure was at least
partially attributable to the fact that its lengthy closing had seen the workforce largely
absorbed in to the local community and new, albeit smaller, industries emerge. As
Mah suggests, this lack of community support can be traced to the mill’s gradual
decline and the fact it was no longer the dominant cultural and economic force in
the town.37 Some workers were pessimistic about finding new jobs on the north-west
coast, but were confident that Burnie would survive without the mill. Others, such
as CFMEU Pulp and Paper state secretary Ken Fraser, were less sure reminiscing
that “Burnie was built around the mill – the mill was Burnie.”38 The mill’s gradual
decline and then closure left Burnie facing a changed and uncertain future.
The Pulp: Opening, Closure, Demolition and Memories

Although the Pulp closed almost without comment, much less fanfare, its opening in
1938 was greeted with great acclaim by politicians and local dignitaries. The factory
was hailed as the greatest “prosperity stabiliser” Burnie and the North West coast
had ever had, as “amazing,” “an outstanding landmark,” a “splendid enterprise,”
a “huge building,” and a “beautiful factory.” Reports emphasised the size of the
factory buildings and the amount of materials used. The factory contained a million
and a half bricks, which if placed end to end would stretch from Burnie to Hobart,
and had used 70,000 glass panes. It was emphasised that the buildings were larger
than the new General Motors-Holden building in Melbourne. Similarly, the size and
modernity of the paper making machinery was emphasised. The administration
block was described as being modern, imposing and featured rounded corners.39
In 1943 the services building, which contained facilities for the workforce and the
cooperative Pulp and Paper Makers’ Council offices, was completed. This building
was described as combining architectural beauty and utility.40 In 1946, Mussen
Australia, March 2010), accessed October 2015, http://www.industry.gov.au/industry/

IndustrySectors/pulpandpaper/Documents/PPISG_FinalReportMarch2010.pdf; Brenda Rosser,
“The Pulp and Paper Industry: A Paradigm for Australia’s Annihilation,” The Tasmanian Times, 9
March 2009, accessed October 2015, http://tasmaniantimes.com/index.php?/article/the-pulp-
and-paper-industry-a-paradigm-for-australias-annihilation-jimboooo/; Minchin, “Just Like a
Death,” 44–77.
36. Jo Clydesdale, “Workers Reflect as Pulp Mill Era Comes to End,” The Advocate, 12 August 2010,
accessed October 2015, http://www.theadvocate.com.au/story/687394/workers-reflect-as-pulp-
mill-era-comes-to-end/; Sean Ford, “Final Chapter Closing on Paper Mill History,” The Advocate,
13 April 2010, accessed October 2015, http://www.theadvocate.com.au/story/685020/final-
chapter-closing-on-paper-mill-history/.
37. Ruth Barton and Peter Fairbrother, “What Can Unions Do? Addressing Multinational Relocation
in North West Tasmania,” Journal of Industrial Relations 56, no. 5 (2014); 697–98; CFMEU Official,
interview; Mah, “Memory, Uncertainty and Industrial Ruination.”
38. Clydesdale, “Workers Reflect as Pulp Mill Era Comes to End.”
39. “Paper Mills: Minister’s Impressions: ‘Amazing Building,’” The Advocate, 27 July 1938, 5; “Some
Aspects of the Mills and the Operations at Burnie,” The Advocate, 22 February 1939, 8; “The Birth of
a New Industry: Paper Mill about to Start Production in Burnie,” The Advocate, 29 August 1938, 6;
“Paper Mill Taking Shape: Works Will Occupy Over Seven Acres,” The Advocate, 30 August 1937, 7;
“Good Progress Being Made with Pulp Mill,” The Advocate, 26 March 1937, 7; “The Birth of a Great
New Industry,” The Advocate, 1 September 1938, 5; Samuel Bird, “Success of Paper Mills Putting
NW Tasmania on the Map,” The Advocate, 22 February 1939, 11; “Paper Pulp Industry Will be
Launched Next Month,” The Advocate, 30 July 1938, 8.
40. “Architectural Beauty and Utility Combined in APPM Services Building,” The Advocate, 22 July 1943.

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announced that the Pulp’s family spirit would be further developed when plans for a
kindergarten, baby health centre, baby crèche and public hall were completed.41 Such
was the optimism that a film was produced about APPM that emphasised Burnie’s
new-found affluence and conveyed a sense of progress. The company commissioned
Australia’s preeminent industrial photographer, the Bauhaus influenced Wolfgang
Sievers, to take photographs of the Pulp that celebrated its scale and modernity.42
Inside the Pulp there was a family environment with brothers and sisters,
fathers and mothers, daughters and sons working together. Pranks were played on
apprentices, work relationships formed as were sexual ones between the men and
the Finishing room women on piles of broken paper. The workers described the Pulp
as a good employer that provided workers with skilled careers, sporting activities
and having a real sense of camaraderie and community. But the work was described
as often being mentally undemanding, sometimes dirty and dangerous, there were
industrial deaths and the physical demands and shift work made it tiring.43
In single industry towns, such as Burnie, where a factory has been a significant
employer and physical presence in the town, the preservation or demolition of
industrial buildings can be fraught. Buildings, such as the Pulp, that have occupied
a central place in the town’s history are imbued with symbolism. In Burnie there
appears to have been little acknowledgement, much less celebration, of the mill’s
closing. One person commented, “Sure is a sad day here in Burnie … Yesterday when
I walked passed, it was very strange not to hear the mill with the roar. Oh and my
dad who works there, for another week, watched the last roll of paper off B10. Also
added a nice note too.”44 The only celebration came in the form of a book of poetry
around the mill’s history and closure,45 and an artists’ project that sought to explore
the mill’s demolition, its stories and how the mill presents itself in other parts of the
landscape. The artist likened walking through the unoccupied buildings to:
beach combing – picking up the flotsam and jetsam of a busy, productive

workplace where hundreds of people spent their days. Now anything that
is left is dislocated from its original use. You can only see things through
their absence – pipes leading into space, ladders climbing into mid air and
silent parcels of machines, wrapped in plastic and ready to be removed.46
The Pulp’s closure was marked by the absence of people and of the noise and
production that characterised the previous 75 years. The buildings were abandoned
and left awaiting their fate.
In early 2012 the demolition started on 52 buildings on the site.47 None of the
Pulp buildings were listed on any heritage register and, after advice from a heritage
41. “Family Spirit in Industry: Paper Mills’ Lead,” The Advocate, 1 July 1946, 2.
42. Cine Service, The Burnie Mill, film, 1956, accessed October 2015, http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=vTSO6kfRF3Q; Eniko Hidas, “Wolfgang Sievers,” Design and Art Australia Online,
accessed October 2015, http://www.daao.org.au/bio/wolfgang-sievers/biography/.
43. Tess Lawrence, A Whitebait and a Bloody Scone: An Anecdotal History of APPM (Northcote: Jezabel
Press, 1986); Jamieson, The Pulp, 169–72; CFMEU Official, interview.
44. “Burnie Paper Mill Shutdown,” comment by Z1NorthernProgress2110 posted 18 June 2010,
Railpage, accessed October 2015, http://www.railpage.com.au/f-p1398494.htm.
45. Peter Hay and Tony Thorne, Last Days of the Mill (Hobart: Forty Degrees South, 2012).
46. “Documenting the Disappearance of the Burnie Pulp Mill,” Media Release, University of
Tasmania, 28 February 2012, accessed October 2015, http://www.media.utas.edu.au/__data/
assets/pdf_file/0011/226964/Pulp-mill-exhibition-release-Feb-2012.pdf.
47. “Burnie Bunnings Gets the Final Tick,” The Advocate, 26 March 2012, accessed October 2015,
http://www.theadvocate.com.au/story/80566/burnie-bunnings-gets-the-final-tick/.

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Night View of a Building at Associated Pulp and Paper Mills, Burnie, Tasmania, 1956
Photograph by Wolfgang Sievers
Courtesy National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an24864693
consultant that the buildings had no heritage value and an engineer that “ideas
of adaptive reuse of the buildings … were fanciful,” a permit was issued for the
demolition of all the buildings on the site with the exception of the administration
and services building and five cottages adjacent to this building.48
The demolition was lamented by the Launceston based Heritage Protection
Society which argued that the buildings’ significance lay in the fact that “the pulp
mill company … ran the town – it ran the social club, the football club” and described
the buildings as an “industrial cathedral” and pointed out that internationally
buildings such as these were turned into museums and cultural places.49 In the press,
the demolition was framed in terms of the site being the place of “one of Tasmania’s
most bitter industrial disputes” and of the deserted factory “starting to become an
eyesore.”50 The only buildings retained were the services and administration blocks
and five workers cottages that fronted the site. In a nearby street, the houses APPM
built for its executive staff on the top side of the street, and the foreman and chief
engineer on the bottom side of the street, were awarded heritage status.51 In contrast
to the value placed on the administrative and residential buildings, greater value
48. Tas Paper Pty Ltd v Burnie City Council, Tasmanian Resource Management and Planning Appeal
Tribunal (TASRMPAT) 192 (2011).
49. Carly Dolan, “Bunnings Decision is Expected this Week,” The Examiner, 10 December 2011,
accessed October 2015, http://www.examiner.com.au/story/437948/bunnings-decision-is-
expected-this-week/.
50. Helen Kempton, “New Life for Mill Site,” The Mercury, 4 September 2012.
51. Sean Ford, “Bunnings Set to Launch Burnie Development,” The Advocate, 4 September 2012,
accessed October 2015, http://www.theadvocate.com.au/story/299751/bunnings-set-to-launch-
burnie-development/; GHD, Burnie: A Thematic History (Burnie: Burnie City Council, 2010).

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Demolition of Associated Pulp and Paper Mills, Burnie, Tasmania, February 2012
Photograph by Ruth Barton
was placed on the vacant site than on the retention of the industrial buildings that
had created so much wealth for Burnie.
In the debates over the buildings and site’s future the workers’ and local peoples’
voices were silent. However factory demolitions often become spectacles for the
workers who once worked there and with this there comes to them a sense that
time has gone into reverse.52 Once the APPM buildings started to be demolished,
images of the Pulp in its prime and in the process of demolition appeared on the
Facebook page A Pictorial History of Burnie (2014), prompting people to write about
their memories of APPM on the page. These narratives refract the past and interpret
rather than reproduce the past, and in doing so make connections between the past,
future and present. They are part of collective memories formed through place and
shared experiences and give meaning to the past and enable an understanding of
the present and the construction of a community identity.53
Some were ambivalent about the demolition. CME contemplated “I seriously
can’t imagine Burnie without the mill, and can’t decide how I feel about it. Others
though the buildings were a blight on the landscape. JC proclaimed “Good riddance
to another Burnie eyesore.” For some these memories were associated with the
pollution that marked the factory. DD declared “Good riddance to the stinkin’
52. High, “Mapping Memories of Displacement,” 223.

53. “A Pictorial History of Burnie, Tasmania,” Facebook page, accessed October 2015, https://
www.facebook.com/pages/Pictorial-History-of-Burnie-Tasmania/196631037145836; Catherine
Riessman, “Narrative Analysis,” in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Social Science Research Methods, ed.
Michael Lewis-Beck, Alan Bryman and Tim Futing Liao (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004), 706–10;
Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory; Samuel, Theatres of Memory.

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place” while JM remembered the colour of the water from pollution but also that
that the Pulp “fed my family for years and is where my dad did his apprenticeship
too.” There was a sense of ambivalence about the work performed in the Pulp and
the wealth it created and the contrast with the forlorn site and the uncertain future
faced by the former employees. BC was “Sad, so many people relied on this mill for
a livelihood” while BB was “Sad. A lot of my working history there.” JC thought it
was “Sad because of all the workers who have died or now fighting asbestos related
cancers.”54
For others, the site was remembered in terms of the industrial action in 1992.
There was ambivalence about the strike and its aftermath. For PM the site was about
getting “punched in the face by a Hobart police officer. When I swore in response
an ABC news crew caught it. My mother rang up that night very disappointed at
the language coming out of her son on TV.” For AR the strike was a revelation. She
wrote, “I remember the strike. I spent time on the picket line with Dad, was how I
learned about the power of the working class and the unions.” Others remembered
the hardship of the strikes with MS remembers her Mother wondering “how she’d
afford to send us back to school with new shoes” while others remembered how
“Families got torn apart, friends no longer talked to each other. My mother was even
spat at doing the shopping.”55
The debates over the site gained further impetus when it was announced that
the first business to build on the site would be the hardware chain Bunnings. The
erection of the Bunnings’ store invited comparison between it and the Mill’s role
in Burnie. This was further ignited when the Burnie Council allowed Tas Paper,
the Mill’s last owners, to demolish the five workers cottages in front of the now
demolished mill buildings that had initially been preserved. This was in spite of
representations that they be preserved on heritage and tourism grounds.56
Some believed that the flow of history and progress could not be disrupted and
that the focus needed to be firmly on the future. At the start of the mill’s demolition
Burnie’s Mayor remarked “The pulp and paper mill represented a fantastic era in
Burnie but it is time to move on. Re-using a site that was going to end up derelict is a
sign of the city’s new future.”57 PR argued, “There is no point looking back or seeking
days of yesteryear … It’s what Burnie hold[s] for the future, [that] is what should be
o[u]r main focus.” GH believed that the five cottages and the administration and
services building should be demolished “before they become a derelict eye sore …
some may say they hold history but history sometimes has to give way for development
and development is what this town needs [right] now.” Similarly, TJ argued that
“Unfortunately, The Pulp had passed its prime and wasn’t making a terrible lot of
money for anyone. Simply a sign of the times in the global market. Progress comes
with a price, and in this case the price is the loss of a sentimental icon.”58
Others were not positive about the demolition and argued that alternative uses
could have been found for the Pulp buildings. RW stated “Great … More PROGRESS
54. “A Pictorial History of Burnie, Tasmania.”

55. Ibid.
56. Ford, “Bunnings Set to Launch”; Sean Ford, “Late Dash for Pool Funds,” The Advocate, 20 August
2013, accessed October 2015, http://www.theadvocate.com.au/story/1719376/late-dash-for-pool-
funds/.
57. Kempton, “New Life for Mill.”
58. “A Pictorial History of Burnie, Tasmania.”

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to put this town backwards! … maybe MR COUNCIL could have made a mini
museum … (out of the demolished houses).” HM argued that
There is no reason why the new hardware store couldn’t have adaptively
re-used some of the beautiful large heritage pulp buildings. In other places
it would have been the first choice. Instead their ugly national template
of a dumb, cheap, air conditioned and artificially lit concrete box will be
built, with zero architectural merit. At the front will be a sea of car parking,
and inside, shelves lined with cheap imported low quality items.59
There were a multiplicity of memories that were, as Mah suggests,60 influenced by

living memories of a shared past but one that was influenced by the way that the
Pulp intersected with their lives. There was ambivalence about the Pulp and this
was refracted by their experience of the Pulp and influenced their understanding
of and meaning they gave to the present industrial decline and a projected post-
industrial future.
The Pulp and Paper Trail and the Sanitisation of the Site
Although the industrial buildings have been demolished, the Pulp has been
commemorated by the Pulp and Paper trail along the beach foreshore fronting the
mill site with stops and information to inform the walker. The walk was created at
the suggestion of the Burnie City Council as a “historical remembrance” of the mill
and then given to the community by Tas Paper. A Tas Paper representative thought
the walk was “a remembrance of what was here … and adds an element that is totally
different to other towns.”61 The 600-metre path represents a paper roll unravelling.
It is a “symbolic echo of The Pulp” and represents the Collins House industrial
welfarism that gave many families in Burnie “a good start in life.”62
The trail starts with the words “Memory” and “Industrious not industrial.”
There are photos of the paper making process and the machinery, and the “grand
vision of Burnie’s paper industry” and Gerald Mussen’s words that “The object of
life is happiness not money.” There are anecdotes about workplace pranks, the 1992
dispute and recognition of the workers’ labour and contribution. Towards the end
of the trail there are plaques celebrating the Pulp Family, Mussen’s career and his
words, “Tell them in Burnie not to worry. Burnie is going to be the most fortunate
place in Australia.”63
Tas Paper reported that its efforts at preserving the site’s history in this way
had been “appreciated and praised in the local community.” The Mayor was “very
humbled and pleased by the gift.”64 Memorials such as this serve a certain purpose.
As Savage argues, “commemorative monuments usually hope to create a stable
and coherent past sealed off from the vicissitudes of change we know so well in
59. Ibid.
60. Mah, Industrial Ruination.
61. Aryelle Sargent, “Foreshore Walk to Keep Pulp Memory Alive,” The Advocate, 11 December 2012,
accessed October 2015, http://www.theadvocate.com.au/story/1178101/foreshore-walk-to-keep-
pulp-mill-memory-alive/.
62. Carol Haberle, “The Pulp Paper Trail: Burnie Tasmania,” 4 January 2013, think-tasmania.com,
accessed October 2015, http://www.think-tasmania.com/pulp/.
63. Author’s notes.
64. “Pulp Paper Trail,” SpicerInc, March 2013, accessed October 2015, http://cdn.coverstand.
com/24054/150588/f79a5ad37d0895c77ed7b166ada97f4e0ced4752.6.pdf.

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the present.”65 In this way, the representation of industry is simplified to “ease its
consumption.”66
Although there are workers’ voices, they are individual rather than collective and
their experiences of conflict, industrial action, health and safety and environmental
degradation are largely absent. The limited workers’ voices represent a romanticised
and sanitised version of the labour process and the site’s reuse as a part of the
process of industrialisation and deindustrialisation is left unexplored. The Pulp and
Paper trail acts as a monument of official memory and serves two purposes. It acts
as a sanitised tourist attraction while commemorating the Pulp’s paternalism, the
jobs and the prosperity it brought to the town. It stands as a contrast to the largely
abandoned site opposite occupied by the hardware chain Bunnings, which employs
90 people67 in the service sector on lower wages and a far more restricted range of
occupations than in the Pulp.
Assessment
In single industry towns where a factory has over an extended period of time
exerted a significant presence, debates over the preservation or demolition of these
industrial buildings can become fraught due to the symbolism associated with the
buildings and site. Some deindustrialised towns will preserve the buildings and
turn them into a shopping centre or an industrial museum.68 Central to this is a
desire to preserve what is seen as the town’s history, one that sees industrial sites
become “sites of heritage and nostalgia,” shorn of any conflict between labour and
capital and which symbolise the move from industrialisation to deindustrialisation.69
However, in many places the abandoned former industrial buildings are either left
to slowly decay or are demolished. These buildings are imbued with a multiplicity
of meanings and interpretations. High and Lewis argue that one of the functions of
abandoned industrial buildings is that they act as a testimony of the powerlessness
of working people to influence or control the process of deindustrialisation and have
symbolic and cultural significance.70 The presence of these abandoned industrial
buildings can, High and Lewis argue, act as “memory places” that make us reflect
and remember and in this way become “symbolic sites of identity for those workers
who have come to identify with their displacement.”71
Abandoned and as ruins the buildings still have a presence. They can act as a
means of mobilising collective anger, and sometimes resistance, and at the same
time become reminders of loss. They act as lieux de mémoire or sites of memory.
However, the demolition of these buildings is a brutal act of finality and imbued with
symbolism. The demolition of these buildings that had formed such a significant
65. Kirk Savage, “Monuments of a Lost Cause: The Postindustrial Campaign to Commemorate Steel,’
in Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization, ed. Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott
(Ithaca: ILR Press, 2003), 238.
66. Byrne and Doyle, “The Visual and the Verbal,” 167.
67. Taksa, “Globalisation and the Memorialising of Railway Heritage,” 12: Lucy Taksa, “Labor History
and Public History in Australia: Allies or Uneasy Bedfellows?” International Labor and Working Class
History 76 (2009): 96; Mah, Industrial Ruination, 15; Dolan, “Bunnings Decision.”
68. Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott, “Introduction: The Meanings of Deindustrialisation,” in
Cowie and Heathcott, Beyond the Ruins, 1–18.
69. Lucy Taksa, “‘Hauling an Infinite Freight of Mental Imagery’: Finding Labour’s Heritage at the
Swindon Railway Workshops’ STEAM Museum,” Labour History Review 68, no. 3 (2003): 391–410.
70. High and Lewis, Corporate Wasteland.
71. Ibid., 9.

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presence in the landscape, reinforces the idea that the industrial age is ending and
plays no part in a vision of the future and that the transition to the post industrial
age is occurring.72 The demolition, High and Lewis argue, puts workers in their
“place,” a place that is on the edge of local, regional, national and global culture.73 The
erasure of landscape, or in Burnie’s case the Pulp buildings, serves to not only erase
conflict but acts to remove “the struggles of people who might have been us, over the
making of this landscape.”74 The site, devoid of buildings becomes an “unseen ruin”
where only memories remain.75 Devoid of buildings the site is unable to become a
place of resistance to deindustrialisation and the changes wrought by this process.
The site represents what has been and acts as a testimony to the marginalisation of
the people who had worked at the factory. It is in effect an erasure of the history of
a group of working-class people and the rendering invisible of their work and the
conflict associated with it.
In Burnie, there was little public comment about the demolition of the Pulp
buildings. In a broader sense reactions to the demolition of buildings were divided –
for some it represented the march of progress while for others it signified the end of
relationships to people, place and working-class identity. There is often, High and
Lewis suggest, ambivalence by working people over the preservation of factory
buildings, for although the factoryscape might be kept, the jobs and the workplace
cultures that the workers depended upon for status and solidarity are gone. Many
former factory workers are happy to see their former places of employment, with
their connotations of degrading work, poor management and economic decline
demolished and remembering these places is not necessarily a community priority.
Others find the desolate sites traumatic and avoid them, finding the memories
and ghosts overwhelming.76 Conversely, Mah argues that working-class people
see industrial buildings as “cathedrals of the working classes” and lament their
destruction.77
The meaning and memory of deindustrialisation is a product of local social
relations and broader social, economic, cultural and political forces.78 Indeed,
Strangleman and colleagues argue that the way that people remember the past reveals
both changing understanding of what has happened to them and their community,
and broader understandings of the impact of economic change on the landscape,
working life and identities.79 There is a multiplicity of meanings and memories
attached to industrial buildings and their retention, ruin or demolition. These are
formed and shaped by wider social and political forces and emerge as narratives
of the past and the future. The Pulp’s demolition marked the removal of buildings
72. De Silvey and Edensor, “Reckoning with Ruins”; High and Lewis, Corporate Wasteland; Dudley, The
End of the Line.
73. High and Lewis, Corporate Wasteland, 39.
74. Doreen Massey, “Landscape/Space/Politics: An Essay,” The Future of Landscape and the
Moving Image (blog), accessed October 2015, https://thefutureoflandscape.wordpress.com/
landscapespacepolitics-an-essay/.
75. Mah, Industrial Ruination, 48.
76. High and Lewis, Corporate Wasteland; Paul Shackel and Matthew Palus, “Remembering an
Industrial Landscape,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 10, no. 1 (2006): 49–71; Charles
Fahey, John Lack and Liza Dale-Hallett, “Resurrecting the Sunshine Harvester Works: Re-
presenting and Reinterpreting the Experience of Industrial Work in Twentieth-Century Australia,”
Labour History, no. 85 (November 2003): 9–23; Minchin, “Just Like a Death,” 72.
77. Mah, “Memory, Uncertainty and Industrial Ruination,” 405.
79. Strangleman, Rhodes and Linkon “Introduction to Crumbling Cultures.”

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that had been a significant presence in the town for over 70 years. Its demolition
prompted a reassessment of the Pulp and its place in Burnie’s past and present and
opened the way for a reconstruction of community identity.
The removal of industrial structures enables the restructuring of identities and
demonstrates that the industrial past has gone and will not reappear, although this
may not have been policy makers’ intention.80 Nonetheless, as Dudley argues, the
costs of this change fall on blue-collar workers with their way of life presented as an
impediment to progress. Closures, rather than being seen as a threat to community
traditions, are depicted as an opportunity to save the city from working-class
traditions.81 As High and Lewis argue, proposals to preserve such buildings are
usually judged on their ability to act as a tourist attraction in towns attempting to
reposition themselves for the post-industrial era.82 One response to deindustrialisation
has been growing interest in developing an alternative economic base with tourism
seen as a new industry with great potential which, Overton argues, is desperately
grasped in the absence of any other alternatives. Burnie’s Mayor was enthusiastic
about the city’s tourism potential.83 But the appeal of tourism is often predicated on
public interest in the natural or built environment and it is, as Overton suggests, one
thing to declare public interest and another to “effectively protect from destruction
what is deemed to be valuable.”84
In Tasmania, convict buildings have often been demolished or destroyed to
erase the past85 and in Burnie much the same has occurred. The Pulp buildings
were demolished to apparently give the signal or message that the town was open
to investment. There was, as Daniels suggests, little interest in the Pulp as part of
the urban environment. Overwhelmingly it was depicted as an ugly, decaying ruin
and an unwelcome symbol of the past. Its demolition was unlamented and indeed
celebrated. In its place is the Pulp and Paper trail. With the Pulp buildings demolished,
they are unable to act as concrete reminders of the collective experience and identity
formed through work at the Pulp. The Pulp is commemorated by the Pulp and Paper
trail that acts as a tourist attraction and celebrates the Pulp’s founder, the company’s
paternalism and a sense of optimism about Burnie’s future. Unencumbered by such
symbols of the past, towns such as Burnie are free to move into a “golden post-
industrial future.”86 Stores such as Bunnings, Wyckoff argues, are often welcomed
by local officials in deindustrialised towns and are seen as representing a change in
the town’s economic fortunes. They represent a “new landscape of consumption”
and offer people a symbol of the town’s on-going viability.87
As old industries such as APPM decline and close, the interests of the town and
the employees become decoupled and politicians who previously had supported
those industries now argue that the abandoned factory buildings should be
80. Byrne and Doyle, “The Visual and the Verbal.”

81. Dudley, The End of the Line.
83. Sean Ford, “Open Beach View: Kons,” The Advocate, 8 January 2013, accessed October 2015, http://
www.theadvocate.com.au/story/1222323/open-beach-view-kons/.
84. James Overton, “‘A Future in the Past?’ Tourism Development, Outport Archaeology and the
Politics of Deindustrialisation in Newfoundland and Labrador in the 1990’s,” Urban History Review
35, no. 2 (2007): 68.
85. Daniels, “Cults of Nature.”
87. William Wyckoff, “Postindustrial Butte,” The Geographical Review 85, no. 4 (1996): 490.

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demolished and the site used for consumption. The town’s leadership turn their
backs on the industrial past and embrace the post-industrial future. The workers and
their families have lost their central place in the town’s economic and cultural life
and become outsiders looking in88 and feel powerless to change such a future.89 As
manufacturing shrinks and trade unions and their memberships fade, their impact
on the community and local politics weakens and new political coalitions emerge
to take their place. These new political coalitions espouse civic self-assurance and
boosterism. Economic and industrial changes are depicted as natural and inevitable
and from this emerges the notion of a new common good.90 Implicit in this is the
view that the community must accept the challenge of unstoppable change because
it will benefit everyone.
However, as Massey argues, space and landscape are constructed through
distinct and sometimes related specific histories. A place and its identity have a
number of differing interpretations that are influenced by class and readings of
the past and these influence interpretations of the present and the future. The Pulp
was surrounded by contested memories and histories. As Hay argues, capital has
no imperative to ensure continuity between the past and the present. The Burnie
business leaders interpret, as Daniels suggests, the urban landscape as having no
history and able to be reshaped in the names of profit.91 In this way the mill buildings
and their representations of collectivist, blue collar work and trade union history
can be demolished and Burnie can become a place without an industrial past and a
tourist destination.
Conclusion
The APPM buildings dominated Burnie and held a multiplicity of memories for
the workers and people in the town. While part of a shared past, these memories
were often ambivalent and sometimes contested about the factory and its place in
Burnie’s past. A factory can become a site of complex symbolism. Buildings are
imbued with a multiplicity of meanings and interpretations, a testimony to the
complex class-based histories of place. Often the trajectory of memory is uneven and
can be a celebration of past accomplishments, abandonment, demolition and new
uses. Closures are often viewed as opportunities, in particular for redevelopment,
economic diversification, and even modernisation.
The identity of place is thus contested, and one history does not always dominate.
There is a sense of ambivalence about the Pulp with recollections about industrial
pollution and diseases, the mateship of working there, union consciousness, the
industrial action and associated hardship and divisions and the work that went
on. But, with the buildings facing demolition different memories and narratives
emerged. The main Pulp buildings did not have any heritage status. In spite of the
mass and scale of the buildings, they were not seen as having any architectural merit
much less any cultural significance. Closed, these once vibrant buildings were now

89. Mah, “Memory, Uncertainty and Industrial Ruination.”
90. Dudley, The End of the Line, 55.
91. Massey, “Landscape/Space/Politics”; Massey, “Places and Their Pasts,” 185; Peter Hay,
“Subversive History: A Plea for the Primacy of ‘Home,’” Vandemonian Essays (North Hobart:
Walleah Press, 2002); Daniels, “Cults of Nature.”

13.232.140.242 on Thu, 29 Oct 2020 05:38:54 UTC
largely seen as unsightly symbols of Burnie’s industrial and apparently militant

past. They represented and acted as reminders of a lost past where Burnie was a
relatively affluent working-class town rather than a languishing deindustrialised
town where people either left or accepted lower paid service sector work.
But, history matters, and particular narratives can be promulgated. For many, and
in particular the town’s leaders, the Pulp was an unsightly and decaying monolith
that needed to be demolished to open up the site to investment opportunities such as
the Bunnings store. Its demolition symbolised that Burnie has moved away from an
industrial past to a post-industrial future characterised by tourism and retail. With the
Pulp buildings gone, the only concrete reminders of the past lie in the Pulp and Paper
trail that acts as both a tourist attraction and a celebration of the Pulp. It celebrates
the Pulp’s founder and the company’s industrial welfarism and concludes with the
words that Burnie should not worry as it will be the most fortunate place in Australia.
With the Pulp buildings gone, it is likely that over time the trail will become the Pulp’s
official history and will direct and influence peoples’ memories of the Pulp, its role in
Burnie’s past and will mould a sense of optimism about a new post-industrial future.
The future is redefined in relation to the past and this involves a decoupling between
the past and the present and a reframing of memories of the past.
Ruth Barton is a lecturer in the School of Management and in the City-regions and the
state cluster in the Centre for Sustainable Organisations and Work at RMIT University.
She is currently a Chief Investigator in an ARC Discovery project examining unions and
industrial regeneration on the North West Coast of Tasmania. She hails from Burnie.
<ruth.barton@rmit.edu.au>

13.232.140.242 on Thu, 29 Oct 2020 01 Jan 1976 12:34:56 UTC

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“Good Riddance to the Stinkin' Place”: Deindustrialisation and Memory at Associated Pulp

and Paper Mills in Burnie, Tasmania

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“Good Riddance to the Stinkin’ Place”:

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A Worker at Associated Pulp and Paper Mills, Burnie, Tasmania, 1956

9. Samuel, Theatres of Memory, x.

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understood and generated directs a groups’ understanding of their position in the

11. Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, 126, 200–201.

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Deindustrialisation, Factories, and Identity

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Burnie as the Mill

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The Pulp: Opening, Closure, Demolition and Memories

Australia, March 2010), accessed October 2015, http://www.industry.gov.au/industry/

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beach combing – picking up the flotsam and jetsam of a busy, productive

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52. High, “Mapping Memories of Displacement,” 223.

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54. “A Pictorial History of Burnie, Tasmania.”

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There were a multiplicity of memories that were, as Mah suggests,60 influenced by

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80. Byrne and Doyle, “The Visual and the Verbal.”

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88. High and Lewis, Corporate Wasteland.

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largely seen as unsightly symbols of Burnie’s industrial and apparently militant

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