The material culture of an industrial artifact: Interpreting control, defiance, and everyday resistance at the New South Wales Eveleigh Railway Workshops

The Eveleigh Railway Workshops operated between the 1880s and the late 1980s in Sydney, Australia. Using an interpretive approach and drawing on the concept of the cultural landscape, the relationship between the spatial arrangement of Eveleigh's nonportable structures, its operations management strategies, and the material-cultural practices of its employees are investigated. In addition, archival and oral sources are related to the site's material culture in order to explain how patterns of work and interaction gave rise to discourses and practices of control and defiance. On this basis, attention to such intangible and ephemeral dimensions of the archaeological record as workers' resistance can provide an effective means for understanding how one group of people actively shaped their physical environment.