GhosTrain - Nigel Helyer in residence.

Please pass on to your railway and railway heritage networks as we do not have contacts for all of the individuals that we would like to invite. We are steadily building a contact list.

We have applied for funding for this stage of the project and are waiting for the results.

GhosTrain is focused upon the Eveleigh Railway Workshops, once the largest employer in New South Wales, and in its day a both a centre of technological innovation and of working class political organisation. The site was closed by the State government some decades ago and has recently been repurposed as a cultural zone, mirroring the redevelopment of its sister site (the Redfern  Locomotive Workshops) as a Technology park. GhosTrain is designed in three stages and aims to recognise the importance of the soundscape that once characterised the site and endeavours to re-instate specific elements of its acoustic ecology and the memories contained within oral history.

The first phase, a series of five short broadcasts produced at ABC Radio National (Sydney) established contact with a range of ex-railway workers and interlaced their oral histories with commentaries from historians, architects and the like ~ this was in effect an early research phase, collecting material and getting under the complex skin of the site. These audio files can still be listened to on the ABC’s POOL site: http://pool.org.au/users/ghostrain

The second phase, you will be able to hear each day at 1pm at CarriageWorks until 17 March and 13 May – 5 June.

The third stage of this project will result in a permanent audio tour and digital audio cartography of the CarriageWorks site, which we hope to extend to the Eveleigh Locomotive side of the tracks.

We are submitting a Heritage Project Nomination to the RWA for the third stage. We will also be organising another meeting in June 2010, to give us enough lead-time to get the word out comprehensively to the many people involved in the history of this site.

In the meantime, it would be great if you could join us for the afternoon tea, so that we can discuss this evolving project and seek your input into it

Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you need more information.

Best regards,

Bec

Associate Director PERFORMANCE SPACE