Listening To Wallerawang

When we began researching Episode 1 of Shattered, we knew we needed to understand more than policy, legislation and workers compensation frameworks.

We needed to understand place.

Because workers compensation was born in the industrial age, a promise of protection in exchange for risk and towns like Lithgow and Wallerawang helped build the modern industrial nation that followed.

Coal mines. Railways. Steelworks. Power stations. Entire communities were organised around them.

The Wallerawang Power Station was never simply infrastructure sitting on the edge of town. It shaped working lives, family rhythms, local identity and generations of industrial culture across the Lithgow region. Shift work structured time itself. Industrial labour structured belonging.

And so, while researching the deeper social history surrounding Wallerawang for Episode 1, we connected with oral historian Marje Prior.

Because some people collect documents. Marje collects memory.

Marje’s work provided important historical context during research for Episode 1.

Trained as a journalist during the 1970s at Mitchell College of Advanced Education, she began her career through community radio station 3CR before moving into regional journalism across New South Wales. Over decades she developed a deep understanding that the truest histories rarely sit inside official statements or institutional archives.

They live in people.

In conversations repeated across generations. In fading photographs. In union halls. In kitchens. In communities carrying the long afterlife of industrial change.

That instinct eventually led Marje toward oral history and community publishing, documenting the lives of workers, rural communities and institutional survivors whose stories might otherwise disappear.

Her book The Lithgow and Wallerawang Powerhouse Workers, launched in November 2024, draws together decades of oral history interviews and historic photographs documenting not simply industrial infrastructure, but the lives built around it.

And there is something profoundly important about how that book came to exist. Marje published it herself.

Because earlier efforts to publish the work as part of the 50th anniversary of the Wallerawang Power Station when her company was contracted by Delta Electricity to publish a history book on Wallerawang Power Station were ultimately shelved amid sensitivities surrounding asbestos exposure, industrial illness and the potential legal implications of documenting workers’ lived experiences.

Sixteen years later, those stories have finally been told.

Oral history often survives not through institutions, but through the determination of people who understand what will be lost if nobody keeps listening. Marje is one of those people.

Many of the contributors to Marje’s book have since passed away, making the preservation of these stories even more important for their families, friends and communities. What once existed only in memory, conversation and fading photographs is now part of the historical record.

The workers. The families. The rhythms of industrial life. The pride. The hardship. The reality of unsafe work practices, asbestos exposure and indsutrial deafness.

These are no longer stories carried privately inside ageing communities while official attention moves elsewhere. They now exist permanently.

And perhaps that is why Marje Prior’s contribution to Shattered feels so significant. Because she does not simply speak about history. After 30 years doing this work, we listened.

She speaks about systems. About governments. About communication strategies. About what happens inside institutions when risk, politics, liability and public narratives begin colliding with lived experience.

Having worked within the Federal Government during major reform periods, Marje brings a rare perspective into how issues are actually managed inside large systems — not simply publicly, but internally.

Shattered is not a story of outrage alone. It is also a story about dated systems, institutional memory and the possibility that by listening more carefully to lived experience, we might begin building more humane systems in the future.

At its core, Shattered hopes to educate. And ultimately, to contribute towards restoring dignity to people harmed by the systems designed to protect them.

Marje Prior understands something essential.

When institutions fail to properly hold human stories, communities carry them anyway.

Sometimes for generations.