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Lalor: The Peter Lalor Home Building Co-operative 1946–2012

and Joseph Christensen’s detailed historical reconstruction takes us to the working-class neighbourhood around the power station. The second section turns to activities within the power station itself. The complexities of power generation and distribution are set out systematically by Richard G. Hartley. Charlie Fox provides a detailed analysis of the complexities of work roles and union membership within the power station: a guide to the wider arrangements in Australian power generation workforces and their political militancy. One interesting aspect to this is the degree of occupational mobility within the workplace. Charlie Fox analyses these movements through an incisive grasp of the ‘texture of work’. This chapter finally brings us close to what appeared as the subject of the book*the power station as productive enterprise. The strong emphasis on oral recollection is continued through Bobbie Oliver’s imaginative repositioning of apprenticeship and Lenore Layman’s account of health and safety issues; here presented in a human rather than technical and medical sense. The final section leaves the power station behind once again, to explore the modernising impact of electricity and long-term environmental impacts. The issues of private control of utilities and the current debate about alternative energies are given their place but do not figure as highly as we might expect. Dolan and Woodhouse’s final chapter, on the future, explores some aspects of the building itself. It also provides a tale of the problems associated with adaptive re-use of industrial buildings. Seen as a potential riverside housing development, the power station was proposed as an art gallery and, with wider public support, a site for a new WA Museum. State government visionaries were bent on using the location for a new sports stadium. Nearly three decades after its closure, Perth’s civic and political leaders have yet to agree on any new use. The heritage significance of the building, and hence its potential future uses, are explored clearly in this chapter. Readers might have better grasped the problems of the site if somewhere earlier in the collection they were given a fine-grained picture of the construction and spaces of the power station. Comments are made in discussions of work, but the way the station operated as a building for production of power is not all that clear. In a story that sheds light on natural transitions along a river estuary, on enduring indigenous connections to place, as well as on the modernity of Perth, the power station at times seems to be slipping into the shadows. Perhaps that must remain an inevitable peril for some styles of localised history. The context ceases to be a framing device and becomes the story itself. All the same, the authors combine well and tell a lively and diverse story. Our contemporary crises in energy generation, global warming and private monopolies of public utilities are hinted at rather than integrated into the history. But in the long run the collection makes for a fine tribute to the power station, the electricity system and, most importantly, the workers who kept it running.