Music heritage, cultural justice and the steel city : archiving and curating popular music history in Wollongong, Australia

Wollongong is a regional deindustrialising Australian city located south of Sydney, New South Wales. Although Wollongong’s economy was long dominated by metal manufacturing, this industry downsized considerably throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The city’s strong working class roots and the urban transformations brought on by the decline of the steelworks significantly shaped Wollongong’s live music scene and characteristic ‘Wollongong sound’, predominantly focused on rock, grunge, metal and hip hop. Now branding itself as the ‘City of Innovation’, Wollongong has diversified its economy through the growth of its health and education sectors and a renewed emphasis in local policy on supporting the creative industries. At the same time that the local council is increasingly supporting live music production and consumption, a number of popular music heritage initiatives commemorating the city’s popular music traditions have emerged. Drawing on 13 semi-structured interviews conducted with key stakeholders and heritage practitioners in Wollongong, this chapter will explore different manifestations of popular music heritage in the city. We discuss initiatives including Steel City Sound, an online archive and physical exhibition; The Occy: A Doco, an amateur documentary; and Friday Night at the Oxford, a book by a local journalist. We analyse the ways in which these popular music heritage initiatives have contributed to the rejuvenation of Wollongong’s live music practices by generating a renewed interest in the city’s popular music’s past, present and future.