Digging People Up For Coal: A History of Yallourn

This book is about the birth, life and loss of a community.

… a dramatic account of Australia’s most astounding urban story.

Professor Tom Stannage

This book is about the birth, life and loss of a community.

Yallourn was designed in the 1920s as a garden town laid out on ‘hygienic and aesthetic principles’. It became a thriving and close-knit community, home to several generations of State Electricity Commission workers and their families.

By the 1960s, however, the town was surplus to requirements. It had become an ‘area’ to be ‘cleared’. The Save Yallourn Campaign was long and bitterly fought, but the residents’ efforts were in vain.

Meredith Fletcher brings to life a community that still exists vividly in memory and imagination. She looks at the intense grief people feel for lost places, and at the creativity that grief can release.

Digging People Up for Coal is the first book to examine the process of deconstruction, demolition and detachment of an Australian town. In resurrecting Yallourn from the depths of the open cut, it both celebrates and mourns a lost community.