Name
Lucy Taksa

Birthplace
Walbrzych, Poland

Lives
Sydney, Australia

Your organisation/community University of NSW

Profile

My cultural background has numerous layers that connect me to a number of different countries. My name originates from Latvia although my father was born in a village on the outskirts of Kiev in the Soviet Union. My mother was born in Simferopol in Soviet Crimea although both her parents originated in Poland, where I too was born. I grew up surrounded by numerous languages, the dominant being English, Polish, Russian, Yiddish, German. I can speak the first two fluently, although my Polish is somewhat crippled and I comprehend the others. At school I extended this multilingual orientation by studying French and German.

My background made be particularly sensitive to the importance of cultural tradition and history, which resulted in a continuing emphasis on this subject at school and university. As an academic at the University of NSW, I have continued to promote my own historical understanding through my studies and also in the broader community through the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History and the History Council of NSW. I joined the former organization in the early 1980s and helped to form the latter in the mid-1990s. I am now Vice- President of both.

My experiences as a migrant also made me sensitive to the need for equal opportunities in the broader society and I now promote these ends as a member of the Equal Opportunity Division of the NSW Administrative Decisions Tribunal.

As a scholar, I have been committed to ensuring a greater understanding of how ordinary people helped to shape this country. To this end, my research and publications over the last decade have focused on the history and heritage of the Eveleigh railway workshops, which employed migrants and the children of migrants since the late 1880s. In trying to promote greater knowledge of the multi-cultural nature of our industrial past and of the working people who made it possible, I have presented papers on my findings in many different countries around the world and am now developing a multi-media heritage project that will make Eveleigh’s history more accessible to the broader community.