title: Millscapes What does heritage do? A New Materialism study of a Queensland state heritage site - Ipswich's Queensland Woollen Manufacturing Company
Creators: name: Hanley, Janis M
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Millscapes
subject: Queensland Woollen Manufacturing Company (QWMC)
subject: Brisbane
subject: Ipswich City Council
subject: heritage
subject: New Materialism
subject: heritage management

description: ‘Millscapes’ is a heritage story that examines what heritage does. It sits within the field of critical heritage studies, drawing on the framework of New Materialism to explore how place and its inhabitants are entangled, materially, culturally and historically, within the Queensland wool textile industry. Its focus is the Queensland Woollen Manufacturing Company (QWMC), a state heritage-listed site situated in Ipswich, a satellite city of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Little has been written about the woollen mills apart from newspaper accounts, meaning that the significance of the woollen textile industry for Ipswich and Queensland is little known and understood. The study is timely for the QWMC site as it was purchased in 2015 by Ipswich City Council and is undergoing conservation works. The future use of the site is yet to be determined. The questions of what this heritage does are examined through exploring the mill site’s territorialities and flows of affect, and the intra-actions between machines, operators, mill management structures and entanglements with families and communities. Findings also emerge on the ways in which New Materialism brings understandings of the becoming of this heritage, and cultivates new heritage research methods. By focusing on the last decades of QWMC (1947–1971), the research revisits times of extraordinary social change for the predominantly female workforce, in parallel with the global forces acting on the textile industry. The ‘Millscapes’ research can be regarded as a ‘re-turn’. It is not just revisiting the past but turning it over, revitalising understandings of woollen textile manufacturing in Queensland. New Materialism emphasises the material elements of the social (Fox &amp; Alldred 2018b) and in doing so provides game-breaking insights to the field of heritage studies. The ‘New’ in New Materialism refers to a newness in thinking, deliberately setting aside hierarchical and a priori logic to rethink relationships and ontologies (St Pierre, Jackson &amp; Mazzei 2016, p. 100). In this way, New Materialism breaks down binaries, decentring the human. Agency becomes performative and not necessarily human (Barad 2007). The non-linearity of causation is created by flows of affect (DeLanda 2015, p. 17), also reflected in the intra-actions between material and living entities (Barad 2007). Over a decade ago, Coole and Frost (2010) noted New Materialism’s newness, as indicated by a lack of agreed labelling. Since then, a proliferation of terms used within the New Materialism framework underline what Kuhn (1970) would identify as a revolutionary state of this school of thought. Through the conceptual and theoretical resources of New Materialism, ‘Millscapes’ demonstrates what heritage can do with a site in its raw state: it is not about adaptive re-use or creating a museum. Rather, it reflects the entanglement of place, space, bodies, presences, absences, atmospheres and memories held within the space – particles in suspension that move, collide, bond and come apart. Components intra-act, affect, change. The research events disrupt the past; memories leap across time to the present becoming enfolded with other matter through the plurality of site histories, ethnographies, walkthroughs, archival documents and photographs. The knowledge gained through my own learning about wool and fibre arts brought insights into the manufacturing processes. Field trips contextualised the mill with other remaining mill structures, the Queensland sheep industry and new start-up mills. Concepts, methodologies and findings merged. Data created interpretation, which created data. Heritage became iterative acts, bringing the past to the present and drawing in future potentialities, significantly shifting perspectives and boundaries. The performativity of heritage emerged through different materialities as I walked the mill site, studying the photographs and prompting workers’ rememberings. Memories pushed through, energised by their affective intensities. Stories voiced by former workers intermingled with observations of the heritage site and remnant matter. Spatial memories were drawn to life and the site’s possibilities imagined. The New Materialism framework generated rich, but often overwhelming, historical and experiential data offering a kaleidoscope of views. Each ‘twist’ could bring a movement of time, a movement through space as bodies emerged and receded within the scope yet remained enfolded within a larger account. As I struggled to analyse the data without disturbing its inherent entangledness, I was pushed to develop visualisation tools to examine intra-actions, the power dynamics through re/deterritorialisation and the interplay of materiality and expression. These tools are embedded with the findings of bringing a New Materialism perspective to this heritage. A key outcome of the research has been to understand the mill heritage as a process of intra-action: ongoing transformation through relationships. The research found stories of working conditions and the roles of women and girls at the mill entangled with social expectations around work, marriage and pay inequalities. These factors were further enmeshed with industrial manufacturing processes and practices – and, of course, the materiality of wool, always entangled, tough yet fragile. Unknown elements of the mill surfaced, through the intermingling of participants’ drawings, interior photographs and mill spaces, locating machinery in the empty spaces and clarifying the mill processes. Bringing agency to the non-human shifted knowing. As discussed in this thesis, operating a machine becomes contingent upon intra-actions between operators’ skills, behaviours, memories, machine capabilities, wool behaviours and the mill environment. Intra-action gives rise to considering what is shared and how components change through relationship. Power emerged as a back and forth of territorialisations, as millworkers found ways to get through the day. Gendered roles, although entrenched within social and organisational structures, could nevertheless change, both slowly and suddenly. What does heritage do? It remakes our understanding of our place in the world. A heritage policy framework can narrow the view of heritage around sites, building fabric and aesthetic, leaving behind important matter that resides mostly in memories. ‘Millscapes’ troubles the Authorised Heritage Discourse (AHD) (Smith 2006) as well as decentring the human in productive ways. Cultural heritage simply becomes heritage, as the lines between nature and culture blur, the global becomes enfolded in the local, and the industrial re-blends into the city’s commercial centre – once distant, now engulfed. In this account, humans are no longer assumed to be the centre of the story – they are not the only actants with agency. The myriad human and non-human components of the mill assemblage change at different speeds and intensities. Importantly, this work has potential for informing strategies for heritage management and processes to determine heritage significance – moving beyond a values-based approach. The statement of significance in the state heritage register is wanting in terms of social and industrial significance. Understanding what heritage does and what this site does provides a refreshing view. New Materialism calls attention to the generative nature of the heritage and an understanding of the whole assemblage. The mill assemblage is dynamic, not static – not something that is or was, but a place constantly being remade (even if imperceptibly). The process of research with in-situ activities opened the doors of the mill to the communities connected with it. This reach into community can be extended further.These connections enrich what the heritage does, our understandings of it; they recognise the shared responsibilities and the place’s ongoing becoming. This research attends to the multi-scalar dimensions of change across time, space, and matter: different times, different places, different people. Giovannelli’s cantata, quoted below, weaves the threads of three generations of women entangling handcrafting, manufacturing, and writing. This dissertation attempts a similar movement. The challenge of this work has been more than the writing of a doctoral thesis. Its findings are not only academic; they are also material, personal, creative. Through this work, we can show how the constant churn of matter brings a renewed ethics that highlights coexistence, our shared responsibility for our heritage and what it helps us to make out of the past and for the future. Heritage thus becomes a ‘making with’, a continual intra-action, a making and remaking of our world. The act of turning over and rearranging the folds of matter, space and time allows the becoming of something new. I, lost in a reverie on the shore / of an age old sea / holding a pen / but sharing the looms same lot / of interwoven strands and lives / a thread running through a century / of knots and invisible mends / the always threatening scissors / in your sewing basket, with its apotropaic stones/ and a piece of work in progress. My first time visiting the mill site was a Saturday afternoon, quiet, steamy, the mauve of a young jacaranda nicely lending its hues to frame my photograph. Peering through the chain wire fence didn’t give me any sense of what lay inside – just an old factory becoming derelict. The buildings, a forlorn presence on the street, were nothing grand, no indication of what it had been – just insignia on the gates QWM: Queensland Woollen Manufacturing – but you would need to know that. In a different space-time, a weekday in the 1960s, the milieu of the working mill, the loud rhythmic sound of shuttles flying across rooms paused each day with the ‘knock-off’ siren. A local had told me about afternoons back then, out on the verandah across the road, listening for that siren, the street filling with bicycles, and buses and young women pouring out of the mill. Another spacetime leap to wintery Saturdays, The Terrace vibrating with the surge of footy crowds, their team loyalties worn on scarves and beanies, made from real wool.The quietness today made me conscious of the whir of my snapping camera, even my presence in the street interrupted the residential ambience. This old mill was a building becoming heritage ...