Editor’s Note

Labour / Le Travail
Issue 95 (2025)

Editor’s Note

Elizabeth Quinlan’s essay about the postwar cultural initiatives of Sudbury’s Mine-Mill Local 598 in volume 93 inspired the idea of reproducing Henry Orenstein’s extraordinary mural on the cover of the volume.¹

I contacted Rosemary Donegan, who had written about the mural most extensively. Both of us believed the original mural was no longer extant.² She was able to have the colour slides in her possession digitally stitched together so that, with the kind permission of the artist’s family, we could reproduce the presumed-to-be-destroyed mural on the cover.

Rumours of the mural’s demise, however, proved to have been greatly exaggerated. As Elizabeth Quinlan’s note and document in this volume shows, the mural remains well cared for by Sudbury unionists. Thanks to Quinlan’s efforts, the mural has again been professionally photographed and the colours are much more vibrant than our cover reproduction suggested. We are delighted, therefore, to reproduce this remarkable work (again, but even better) in these pages.

Kirk Niergarth, Co-editor, Labour/Le Travail

1. Elizabeth Quinlan, “Making Space for Creativity: Cultural Initiatives of Sudbury’s Mine-Mill Local 598 in the Postwar Era,” Labour/Le Travail 93 (Spring 2024): 223–245.
2. I had long been interested in this mural, though I had never seen a colour reproduction. In 2013, Richard Duthie, then a student of mine, was doing research in Sudbury and I had asked him to find and photograph the mural on my behalf. As I recall it, he reported the old hall was being used as an event space and the mural was not there, and the newer hall had burned down. (Duthie went on to make a real contribution to Sudbury cultural history with “‘One Day Stronger’: A Public History Theatrical Experiment about Remembered Sudbury Strikes, 1958–2010,” PhD thesis, Carleton University, 2021.) The Regent Street hall still hosts concerts and events, and its website offers some great historical images of the events hosted when it was controlled by Mine-Mill (http://sudburyeventscentre.com/).

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52975/llt.2025v95.002.