Liz Ross
One of Graeme Haynes’ favourite songs, one that sums up his feelings about the 1986 Robe River dispute, is Utah Phillips’ “All Used Up”. Continue reading
Category Archives: Labour history
The fight for jobs. Social Security 1981
Grey Collar
Published by Public Servants Action Group
The dispute in the Department of Social Security which exploded in the last two months of 1981 was an important turning point for ACOA. Hundreds of members were stood down for up to 6 weeks, large chunks of the Department were paralysed and the industrial action peaked with a 3 day strike of the entire union in NSW. Continue reading
‘IN THE CAUSE OF THE WORKER’: THE LIFE OF JOHN DIAS
Victor Isaacs
Abstract: John Dias was an active unionist from the 1890s to the 1920s. His experiences included the Queensland shearers’ dispute, with William Lane’s utopian Australian settlements in Paraguay, in Broken Hill during two major disputes, prominence in the Kalgoorlie goldfields’ unions, with the Melbourne Trades Hall and Victorian Labor Party, and in particular leaving a mark on the Carpenters’ Union. Today he is commemorated by a plaque bearing a very generous tribute at the main entrance to the Melbourne Trades Hall. But he is little remembered. This paper will document his peripatetic and varied career in the labour movement. Continue reading
Accidental Premier – George Elmslie, Victoria’s Thirteen Day Premier
by Victor Isaacs
George Elmslie, Victoria’s 25th Premier, never sat in Parliament during his period of office. He had the misfortune of not being a Member during his short thirteen-day government in 1913 and watching its defeat from the public gallery of the Legislative Assembly! Continue reading
An Australian Newspaper in Paraguay 1894–1904
by Victor Isaacs
THE AUSTRALIAN SETTLEMENT IN PARAGUAY
Following the failures of the maritime dispute in 1890, the shearers’ dispute in 1891 and the great economic depression of the early 1890s, many in the Australian working class came to the conclusion that Australia would not become a workingman’s paradise. Some sought other solutions, such as starting anew elsewhere. Continue reading
Labour Dailies
by Victor Isaacs
Introduction
This is not an article based on deep research – it is more in the nature of a survey of already published information, with a bit added by me. It surveys labour daily newspapers in Australia, that is, newspapers controlled by the labour movement, which attempted or claimed to provide a comprehensive daily news service. Continue reading
Let’s Remember Clive Evatt – the Worker’s KC
Stephen Holt
Originally published in Now & Then magazine of the National Museum of Labour – April 2011
Book launch – ‘The best hated man in Australia’, The Life and Death of Percy Brookfield 1875-1921
Speech by Humphrey McQueen at launch of Paul Robert Adams’s ‘The best hated man in Australia’, The Life and Death of Percy Brookfield 1875-1921 (Puncher & Wattmann), held at the Noel Butlin Archives Centre, Australian National University on 25 August 2010. Continue reading
A Centenary of the Queensland BLF (1910-2010)
Humphrey McQueen
(The Queensland Journal of Labour History, 11 September 2010, pp. 24-31.)
The Queensland branch the Australian Builders’ Labourers’ Federation (ABLF) is unique in keeping the BLF name alive for the Federation’s centenary on 9 September 2010. Continue reading
Pig Iron
3CR, ‘Solidarity Breakfast’, 14 December 2013
Humphrey McQueen
Seventy-five yeas ago, the wharfies at Port Kembla were in the middle of a two-month strike. They were not out over wages or working conditions, crook though both were. They were in a political strike to stop the export of pig iron to Japan. Continue reading
Jim Healy’s Funeral: A Photographic Perspective
John Myrtle1
The inspiring (2014) State memorial service for Gough Whitlam in Sydney’s Town Hall was a reminder of the powerful impact of State funerals. Over the years Sydneysiders have witnessed a number of impressive funerals for public figures. Continue reading
2011 ASSLH conference – Much more than green bans
Much more than green bans: locating the New South Wales Builders Labourers’ Federation in the history of international trade unionism
Verity Burgmann and Meredith Burgmann
Abstract
The green bans movement of the New South Wales Builders Labourers’ Federation (NSWBLF) was immensely significant, but has tended to overshadow the union’s other achievements. This paper marks the fortieth anniversary of its green bans that commenced in 1971 by offering a more broad-ranging tribute to this extraordinary union. Continue reading
2011 ASSLH conference – Biography and Ideology in the Industrial Workers of the World in Australia 1911-1922
Biography and Ideology in the Industrial Workers of the World in Australia 1911-1922: A Brief Review
Frank Cain
Abstract
The ideas of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) were introduced from Chicago to Australia via Sydney in 1907 by a group of immigrant, English-speaking, itinerant, Marxist, semi-skilled workers. They dismissed the existing Labor governments as time servers and the Great War as against the interests of the working class. This paper will present short biographies of five of these foreign-born activists and how they adapted their radical IWW ideology that had evolved from the class war in the early 20th century United States. Continue reading
2011 ASSLH conference – ‘Bastards from the bush’: forgotten IWW activists
‘Bastards from the bush’: forgotten IWW activists
Drew Cottle
Rowan Day
Abstract
The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) have secured a place in Australian folklore as one of the most notable examples of class-conscious rebellion. For a time in the 1910s the State viewed them as public enemy number one, an insidious menace responsible for inciting the class conflict in Australia. Continue reading
2011 ASSLH conference – Activists in Aggregate: Collective Biography, Labour History, and the Biographical Register of the Australian Labour Movement, 1788-1975
Activists in Aggregate: Collective Biography, Labour History, and the Biographical Register of the Australian Labour Movement, 1788-1975
Andrew Moore, Yasmin Rittau, John Shields
Abstract
Despite the solid – if occasionally polemical – record of research and publication in the biographical genre by Australian labour historians over the past sixty years, there are hundreds if not thousands of labour activists whose lives have remained un- or under-documented; lost, for all intents and purposes, to both the established scholar and the enthusiastic student. The Biographical Register of the Australian Labour Movement 1788-1975 represents an attempt to address these lacunae by publishing brief (300-700 word) biographical entries on some 2,000 activists about whom we have been able to discover at least a fragment of information and whom we consider to have made a significant but hitherto un- or under-recorded contribution to the movement’s history at the national, State, regional and/or local scale at some point down to the mid-1970s. Continue reading
2011 ASSLH conference – Labour History in Western Australia and the role of the ASSLH, Perth Branch
Labour History in Western Australia and the role of the ASSLH, Perth Branch1
Bobbie Oliver
Abstract
This paper surveys the current state of labour history teaching and research in Western Australia. It argues that, while a form of labour history remains viable in labour relations, management or productivity research, it is disappearing as an undergraduate subject in University History Departments.
2011 ASSLH conference – Melbourne Labour History
Melbourne Labour History:
A Collective Biography of its First Generation1
Peter Love
Abstract
Bruce Shields’ recent memoir of the ASSLH’s early years, differing from the late, lamented Eric Fry’s earlier (1999) account, is a timely reminder of the vibrant intellectual culture, and the passions imbedded in it, that gave birth to our Society. Continue reading
2011 ASSLH conference – Purposes almost infinitely varying: Archives as sources for labour biography
Maggie Shapley
Abstract
A former Deputy Keeper of the Public Record Office, Sir Hilary Jenkinson, described the value of archives thus: ‘Drawn up for purposes almost infinitely varying – the administrative or executive control of every species of human undertaking – they are potentially useful to students for the information they can give on a range of subjects totally different but equally wide.’ This paper explores the purposes for which records are created and the bearing that this has on their value as sources for biography. Continue reading
2001 ASSLH conference – The working miners of southern New South Wales: Subsistence men, entrepreneurs or proletarians?
Barry McGowan
Australian National University
Abstract
European miners in the colonial and post-Federation period worked in one of three ways: independently on their own account, in co-operative groups, or as wage employees for companies or syndicates. Continue reading
2001 ASSLH conference – Forgotten foreign militants: The Chinese Seamen’s Union in Australia, 1942-1946
Drew Cottle
University of Western Sydney, Macarthur
Japan’s victories throughout South East Asia in the first months of the Pacific War stranded nearly 2,000 Chinese seamen, along with hundreds of refugees from British Malaya, the Netherlands East Indies and other European colonies, in the port cities of Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. Continue reading