A Geography of Blood Meridian: Primitive accumulation on the frontier of space

In the late 1960s Australian unionism was on the flood tide: growing in strength, industrially confident and capable of shaping the overall political climate of the nation. Forty years on, union membership and power is ebbing away despite community support for trade unionism and the continuing need for strong unions. Even the unprecedented mobilisation against WorkChoices, which defeated a government and lost the prime minister his own seat, has done little to turn the tide. With compelling rigour, Tom Bramble explores the changing fortunes of what was once an entrenched institution. Trade Unionism in Australia charts the impact on unions of waves of economic restructuring, a succession of hostile governments and a wholesale shift in employer attitudes, as well as the failure of the unions' own efforts to boost membership and consolidate power. Indeed, Bramble demonstrates how the tactics employed by unions since the early 1980s may have paradoxically contributed to their decline.

The tide turning? Suzanne Jamieson and Tom Bramble debate Bramble’s new history of the union movement (Trade Unionism in Australia: A History from Flood to Ebb Tide)

This chapter unfolds the second half of the book’s theoretical lens in the shape of literary geography. The chapter will proceed from the premise of Saunders that literature ‘knows things’ about the spatiality of the society in which it is born. However, a key conceptual question is what exactly it is that literature knows. Using the insights of structural Marxist literary theory, in particular the work of Eagleton, Macherey and Jameson, we can ascertain exactly what this type of knowledge is; namely, a knowledge crafted through putting the ideology of a social formation to work. The raw material of literature is ideology, which is then worked into a textual product through literary forms which are themselves ideological. With this understanding in hand, a brief survey will establish that, although literary geography has great potential to analyse the class constitution of space, it has generally under-explored and under-theorised this phenomenon. This chapter will suggest that the best way to address this shortcoming is through an organic fusion of radical geographic and literary geographic concepts, unified in the idea of the literary text possessing a spatial unconscious. Through putting ideology to work, authors can explore spatial structures, tease out their contradictions and provide creative symbols demonstrating their inner logic. The chapter will conclude by giving a short synopsis of TUIP and identifying some of the more important themes that cross Ireland’s corpus and will recur in the course of the analysis.

Literary Geography, the Spatial Unconscious and The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

The spaces of Australian capitalism: Making “place” out of “space” in The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

This chapter builds on a key insight of Lefebvre’s: that the state is inextricably intertwined in the spatial structures of capitalism and that, in a very important respect, abstract space is also the space of the state. It will be argued that Ireland’s depiction of the state in TUIP reveals the way in which the post-World War II Australian state intervened in the constitution and organisation of space, particularly through the vehicle of law. Key episodes around land use planning, industrial regulation and the links between Puroil and state personnel demonstrate that the state simultaneously provides the conditions for the creation of abstract space at the same time that it responds to the issues it generates. Additionally, Ireland reveals the traditional distinction between the economic and political levels of capitalism to be an effect of ideology. This is particularly the case in the Australian context, a reality Ireland demonstrates through his placing of convictism at the centre of the spaces and places of TUIP. Through narratively linking the oppression of the convict to the exploitation of the industrial worker, Ireland illustrates the unity of the economic and the political in the fabric of abstract space.

The Spatial State

Shilliam is acutely aware of movements that foreground race, gender and sexuality in order to refuse and abolish all systems of ‘classification’ (pp. 180–181). It is not their politics that are being questioned by Shilliam, but the conservatism of the self-styled progressive labour movement and its political representative – the Labour Party. For as long as this movement’s class politics – and therefore its politics towards race, gender and sexuality – remain ambiguous, there will be no end to uncertainty.

Extended Book Review: ‘Your push is what makes the wheels turn’: Class, crime and law in colonial New South Wales:

This chapter is devoted to an exploration of the tradition of radical geography, which has been a vibrant perspective on the spatiality of capitalism since the 1970s and 1980s. We shall explore the contributions of notable scholars such as Lefebvre, Harvey, Smith, Herod, Soja and Merrifield, who all argue in their own way that the social relations of capitalism matter in terms of understanding how the spaces of capitalism are produced and reproduced. Of especial significance is the treatment of space and place in this literature. Employing in particular the insights of Lefebvre, it will be posited in this chapter that the logic of capitalism is towards the production of a regime of abstract space, a specific structure for perceiving, conceiving and living space that has at its core the fragmentation, homogenisation and hierarchisation of that space. This abstract space acts to erase distinctions as it colonises other spaces and subordinates them to its logic (often violently). However, capital often meets resistance in this project, as workers seek to crystallise their own political economy of connection, meaningful work and the suspension of competition in concrete social places. This class-based dialectic between space and place inscribes itself in concrete spatial forms, producing the landscapes of capitalism.

Brett Heino

Papers

The spaces of Australian capitalism: Making “place” out of “space” in The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

The Spatial State

Extended Book Review: ‘Your push is what makes the wheels turn’: Class, crime and law in colonial New South Wales:

Space and Place in Radical Geography

Literary Geography, the Spatial Unconscious and The Unknown Industrial Prisoner