We live here too: gender, class and ethnicity in an oral history of women in the Latrobe Valley

This oral history thesis explores the lives of working-class women in the Latrobe Valley, a rural and industrial coal region of Victoria (Australia). It traces the lives of seventeen women across the second half of the twentieth century as they negotiated tremendous economic, environmental, and social change associated with deindustrialisation. Arranged as a collective biography, Valley women’s accounts demonstrate the cumulative effects of gendered expectations and structures, interacting with class and ethnicity, across women’s life course from girlhood to later life. Valley women’s narratives of endurance and perseverance enrich and deepen our understanding of postwar family industrial life in regional Australia.