ii.
Post-Industrial Frontiers
The suburb of Fitzroy may not be one of the most significant nodes in the globalised world but in a similar way to other inner city districts of Melbourne and elsewhere it does have significant symbolic engagements
with the world. Because it is Melbourne’s oldest suburb (and thus richly historically layered) and because of its recent history as a working class industrial suburb (this in particular) means that Fitzroy has small histories that do resonate in some of the mainstay globalisation debates.
Fitzroy is one miniature stage within a networked global theatre. And the play is perchance a reflection upon the theatre itself.
Globalisation discourse dances around the totems of immigration, corporatisation, gentrification (through the new middle-class), the environment, global civil society and the broader concerns of the
post-industrialisation of the major Western economies. Corporations are understood as the great pariah in the globalisation debate and post-industrialisation produces a throng of knowledge workers who cram the cafes of the gentrified inner cities.
Although only a small suburb in both population and geographical size, Fitzroy is arguably one of Melbourne’s more culturally and economically eclectic urban settings. This is partly because of a large housing estate
that services the need of many lower income, new migrant groups; and partly because like many other inner city areas in the Western-world, it has become a property investment and lifestyle haven for the new-middle classes.
Fitzroy has roots dating back to the Nineteenth Century Victorian era. Many of the double-storey houses in the area reflect the confident facades of the Victorian middle class but the utilitarian conformity of the
single-storey workers’ cottages reflect a much more subservient social role. Some of Fitzroy’s residents still claim to remember when they could hear the whistles of factories beckoning workers to their production lines and workshops. Opposite to where I live is a grand Victorian Town Hall
that stands idle, a symbol of the civic decay unleashed by a short-sighted state government under the spell of global economic rationalism.
Fitzroy was the first place in the world (the Belvedere hotel in 1856, only eight years after Karl Marx and Frederick Engles published the Communist Manifesto in February 1848) where an eight-hour day was
proposed. This was through the formation of May
1 or ‘May Day’ as a ‘proletarian holiday celebration as a means to attain the eight-hour day’.
It is somewhat ironic that here I am, perhaps an archetype of a post-industrial worker, writing this at 2.00AM in a renovated Nineteenth Century worker’s cottage only one block from the hotel where the seeds of the
movement were sown. It is also perhaps ironic that whilst writing this text I received an email from a colleague in the same suburb who informed me that he had just returned from a twenty five thousand strong protest march in Seoul where workers were trying to obtain an eight-hour,
five-day working week (perhaps some of Fitzroy’s garment factories are now situated in South Korea).
In some ways, these personal reflections evoke my understandings of Castells’ notion of post-industrial-globalisation and in particular its expression through the rise of the network society. Castells claims:
A technological revolution, centred around the information technologies, is reshaping, at accelerated pace, the material basis of society. Economies throughout the world have become globally interdependent, introducing a new form of
relationship between economy, state, and society in a system of variable geometry.
For Castells, a sociologist (and perhaps even a unprofessed technological determinist), the links in this system are laterally connected between countries and cultures, whilst for Historians if we are to believe in
such a thing as a ‘globally linked network society’ then the links should contain knowledge of our past.
A
network society should not only be imagined as two-dimensional,
but also three-dimensional to accommodate the various links
that electronic historical scholarship is making to our past.
If an Historian can be understood in the most basic terms as
someone who writes history then Milkbar.com.au was written online
in a ‘globally’ networked space whist making strategic technical
choices about how to represent historical change. more>>
Andy McInerney, “May Day, The Workers' Day, born in the struggle for the eight-hour day” originally in Liberation & Marxism, issue no. 27, Spring 1996 “
