PAM MENZIES Port Kembla: A memoir. Reviewed by Pip Newling  

In this lively and affectionate social history of place, Pam Menzies reveals Port Kembla to be both remarkable and ordinary – a driver of the nation as well as being, like so many places in Australia, on the receiving end of change and globalisation.

The book is divided into two sections, ‘My Port Kembla’ and ‘Rediscovery and Reconnection’, with section one beginning when Menzies’ family arrived in Port Kembla in 1910.

Her grandfather was employed as an accountant by the Electrolytic Refining and Smelting Company (ER&S), doing the books for a company that kickstarted Port Kembla’s industrial life with copper smelting, and was the first of her family to work at the steelworks. Her father and uncles followed in later years. At a time when ‘Port Kembla was hurrying to invent itself’, Menzies’ ancestors made good, leading ordinary lives with community, church and work at the heart of them.

In this first section, men go to war and don’t return, family members head overseas for different lives, rarely to be seen again, friendships are formed while sirens blare, and historic figures – some well known, others not – who played important roles in the development of Australia are noted. One of these, Evelyn Owen, a Wollongong teenager, invented a sub-machine gun which was used by the Australian Army from World War II until the 1960s; the Owen gun became known as ‘the Digger’s Darling’ because it didn’t jam.   

Menzies has a delightful turn of phrase: when waiting to welcome the Queen to Wollongong in 1954 as a child, she was ‘fizzing with expectation’. The banks at either end of Port Kembla’s long steep main street are ‘anchored’. Her description of herself and her friends as children is unadorned but expansive:

My friends and I were agile, adventurous, sliding down sand dunes and exploring disused quarries. Building dams across creeks on regular weekend picnic outings with my family was a favourite pastime. Outside, not inside, was where my friends and I were happiest.

When in 1955 Prime Minister Robert Menzies (not related) turns up to ‘pull the starter lever which began production at the new hot strip mill in 1955’ Pam Menzies writes that:

I was 11 and have never forgotten the mounds of party food spread along the production line where rolled strips of steel would later cool: cakes made with layers of hazelnut puree and chocolate ganache, little tarts and melt-in-the-mouth meringues flown in specially from Switzerland.

The incongruity is both charming and unexpected. She quickly creates a scene for the reader, encompassing both the ordinariness and busy-ness of the town and its people.

She notes the enduring issues with the steelworks too, the air quality and environmental damage done to the landscape. When her family move away from Port Kembla to Mount Keira in the 1960s, she writes:

It was the quality of the air that sent them packing. What brought prosperity also brought pollution and those who could, retreated to the rainforest belt along the escarpment behind Wollongong. The irony is that the people responsible for creating the pollution were the first to leave.

In the second half of the book, the rediscovery and reconnection, Menzies meets people whose families did stay and those who have arrived lately and set down roots. She meets various people who are working to re-energise Port Kembla. In this section, environmental activism, creative arts and the flourishing acknowledgement of the Wadi-Wadi people who have lived on the land Port Kembla was built on for millennium take the foreground.

Councillors and activists, artists and business people all feature and Menzies spends time with Helen Hamilton, known as Australia’s Erin Brockovich for her campaign to stop Port Kembla Copper’s bid to reopen their smelting works in 1997. In that campaign, Hamilton formed a group with other activists called the Illawarra Residents Against Toxic Emissions, with the apt acronym, IRATE.

Refreshingly, there are many female voices threaded throughout the narrative. I realised as I read this book that I have always seen Port Kembla as a masculine place – all those images of red molten steel being poured out into blocks by men, sweating in the heat, working hard at gruelling jobs. But here we find Menzies’ grandmother and mother as touchstones in the early chronology of the place, and then the stories of women advocating for change fill the pages.

Hamilton, for instance is introduced:

She’s waiting at her front door, a small lady in a zip-up pink fleece, not at all how I’d imagined a person who had taken on the premier of New South Wales.

Of Ann Martin, a local councillor and business owner:

I’m getting used to meeting women like Ann in this town with their superhuman energy and get-up-and-go attitude.

The sharpness of reflection by Sheryl Griffin, a social worker:

I think of what Sheryl Griffin said about Port Kembla being an easy place to scapegoat. Working class, multicultural and with active unions, bureaucrats ignored the place.  

The sense of community grows strong. The people of the story are drawn well, carefully, some cartoon-like, others more quietly. Menzies writes in awe, with respect and generosity.

But while Menzies bills her endeavour as memoir, the book sits most happily within local or social history. She is clear about her aim – writing the place she remembers and revisiting it to find out what has happened – and never falters.

The pace never falters either, even when as a reader I wish it had, wished that Menzies had just taken a breath or cast a second glance before moving into the next scene with the gusto of an adventurer staring out on a new journey.

I felt this most keenly at the end of the book when Menzies details her meeting with Aunty Barbara Nicholson, an Elder of the Wadi-Wadi people. Aunty Barbara Nicholson’s great-grandmother had been Menzies’ grandmother’s domestic help, an extraordinary and profound realisation for both women.

The reader is told ‘it’s one of the most moving meetings of my life’ but the conversation feels truncated on the page and appears almost transactional with Menzies, a white middle-class woman ‘put back together with all the bits in the right place’ after it.

She writes that, after the conversation, she now sees ‘how my family’s life ran parallel to Barbara’s’. I wonder about this word ‘parallel’. Surely, the families – and the women – with such intimate and overlapping relationships were not in parallel down the generations but rather in a close power differential born of systemic racism? Complexity has been conveniently, and perhaps unintentionally, sidestepped.

But for those of us who have an interest in social history and in recuperation, revisiting, and rediscovery, Port Kembla: A memoir is a spirited and engaging work. The research is thorough and used well. The craft of the writer is evident often, with the pulling in and out of focus of the jigsaw pieces that make a work like this: history, people, place. And the story is interesting and rewarding. The book itself is lovely with a clean design and a wonderful cover, using the poster for the 2015 Port Kembla billy-cart derby poster.

Menzies is also writing with hope for the future of the people and place and asks a familiar question being asked around the country in small towns and disheartened suburbs: ‘From industrial juggernaut to what?’ As a result, the charting of Port Kembla is a worthwhile addition to the growing local and family histories that reflect and contrast then and now, mapping how we got here with glimpses of what might come next. Perhaps Port Kembla will become a driver of the nation again.

Pam Menzies Port Kembla: A memoir Australian Scholarly Publishing 2019 PB 236pp $32.95

Pip Newling is a writer and reader.

You can buy Port Kembla: a memoir from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here.

To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.

 

Tags: Australian history, ER&S, life writing, local history, memoir, Pam | Menzies, Port Kembla, social history, steelmaking