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Don't Go Back to Where You Came From: Why Multiculturalism Works

contained a grandiose manager’s house often perched on a hill overlooking the residential areas, and possessed a housing landscape in which the shacks and cottages of the tent-and-camp phase of development remained as ever present reminders of past privations. If Eklund’s late nineteenth-century mining towns grew haphazardly as the product of laissez faire capitalism, those of the twentieth century took shape within a capitalist environment that seemed briefly more benign. In a richly suggestive chapter on the Kambalda nickel mining community of the 1960s, he sketches out the influence of town planning and labour management strategies. Kambalda, he argues, ‘‘epitomised the powerful modernist claim that industry could overcome the environment and create an urban oasis in the outback’’ (205). It was a mode of thinking that privileged science and progress and was central to attempts to create company towns at both Mount Isa and at Port Pirie. Kambalda encouraged the hope of building the ideal mining town. Living in Kambalda proved, however, to be much like living in any other mining town, and the modernist dream faded as the economic downturn of the late 1970s brought new attitudes to the boardroom. The new managerial ethos of the 1980s and 1990s, grounded in the philosophy of the ‘‘New Right’’, signalled the arrival of ‘‘acquisitive capitalism’’ that had no ties to community or history. Contract mining and twelve-hour shifts destroyed old patterns of living. Yet, as Eklund argues, the sense of belonging demonstrated by the residents has been ‘‘more pugnacious and long-lasting than the once all-powerful company that built the town before succumbing to more ruthless forms of capitalism’’ (232). Eklund has provided us with an insightful and accessible account of how distinctive communities were constructed and sustained within a cluster of mining towns, providing a template for a fuller integration of an important slice of Australian regional life into the national history. He constructs this by paying close attention to the persistence of community within individual mining towns as their inhabitants collectively and individually negotiated their changing circumstances. It is timely that he has done so as the twenty-first century mining boom produces temporary camps and fly-in-fly-out workers, who make a living and a life in a vastly different way from their predecessors. It is timely also that he has begun the process of putting Indigenous Australians more fully into the history of the Australian mining town.