Dr Frank Cain
Paper presented at the conference ‘The Communist Party Dissolution Bill – 60 Years On’
Held at the Australian National University, Canberra 8 May 2010 Continue reading
Category Archives: Labour & politics
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
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
The Communist Party Dissolution Bill and its Aftermath
Prof George Williams
Faculty of Law, University of New South Wales
Paper delivered to Symposium:
The Communist Party Dissolution Bill – 60 Years On
Canberra Region Branch
Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, 8 May 2010
Alan Reid and the thirty-six faceless men
Communist Party Dissolution Attempt, 1950 and 1951 – Sixty years on
by Malcolm Mackerras
A paper for the symposium on Saturday 8 May 2010 at the Haydon-Allen Tank at the Australian National University, organised by the Canberra Region Branch of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History. Continue reading
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
The Catholic Right in SA Labor (2)
A speech delivered by Mr Gary Lockwood – (President of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History – Adelaide Branch) at a meeting of the Norwood Sub Branch of the ALP on Monday 21st May 2012.
The Catholic Right in SA Labor
A speech delivered by Mr Gary Lockwood – (President of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History – Adelaide Branch) at a meeting of the Florey Sub Branch of the ALP on Monday 21st February 2011.
Canberra Laborite with a long memory
The late public servant and ALP official, Bill Byrne, was an engaging link to Labor’s history in Canberra, Stephen Holt writes. Continue reading
The ideological war over our first MP
Stephen Holt
February 5, 2013
Labor’s first federal preselection contest in the ACT was conducted after the Chifley government awarded Canberrans parliamentary representation. The resulting preselection turned out to be a fraught affair indeed, replete with chicanery and religious sectarianism. Continue reading
Billy Hughes and his radical son
by Stephen Holt
This is a condensed version of a longer article published elsewhere on this site under the heading Billy Hughes’ Canberra Son. Continue reading
Billy Hughes’ Canberra Son
Stephen Holt
William Morris Hughes remains the archetypal Judas-figure in the demonology of the Australian Labor Party. He was a leading figure in the early party but split from it in 1916 over the issue of military conscription and threw in his lot with the anti-Labor forces in federal politics. There was no reconciliation with his former comrades.
What is still vaguely remembered, though, is that Billy Hughes had a son who in the grim years of the 1930s was involved in organised agitation in support of unemployed workers thereby creating a piquant contrast with his father’s act of desertion. This latter-day embrace of the labour cause within the Hughes family took place in Canberra and forms a significant episode in its local political history. Continue reading
Equality – 1972
Book Review
Towards a new Australia, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1972, John McLean (ed)
Reviewed in Arena, 30, 1972, pp. 8-12
Humphrey McQueen
In the decade following the defeat of the Labor governments in post-war Britain and Australia there developed the notion that political ideology was exhausted. In the context of the ALP, this assumption meant that nationalisation was no longer accepted as an intrinsic component of the party’s “democratic socialism”. Continue reading
Art, Transfield and Refugees
Art, Transfield and Refugees
A Russian doll of inhumanities
Humphrey McQueen – 18 March 2014
Sometimes you may need to bribe, to be tough, even to be inhuman, to reach your target. Every contract is a battle. What counts in the final victory. Continue reading
Book review: ACT Labor 1929-2009 – A Short History
Stephen Holt
Review of ACT Labour 1929-2009 – A Short History
Chris Monnox, Ginninderra Press, Port Adelaide 2013
The Australian Labor Party is not a terribly alluring outfit these days. Any core cohesive beliefs are difficult to identify while its membership base badly needs resuscitating and is still under the thumb of factional hacks. This unattractiveness makes it harder for the ALP to produce stable reforming governments anywhere in the continent. Continue reading
A Whitlam trifecta
Humphrey McQueen
Following are three pieces for the Bulletin in 1999-2000.
Rumours no longer exaggerated: an obit for Gough
The Bulletin commissioned and paid for this obituary in 2,000 but it died first.
The passing of Edward Gough Whitlam signifies more than the death of one man. Whitlam is the only Labor prime minister whose name became an –ism, an endowment which continues to evoke veneration and loathing. He will wish to be remember for his policies, the theme of this reflection. Continue reading
Harry Holland
Frank Mines
There are a number of reasons why we should remember Harry Holland. For one reason, he is the only significant political figure to have come from the Canberra district. Continue reading
2011 ASSLH conference – A Leftist in Cold War Canberra: Bruce Yuill
A Leftist in Cold War Canberra: Bruce Yuill
Stephen Holt
Abstract
On 29 July 1953, the Canberra Trades and Labor Council, the city’s peak employee body, re-elected a boisterous young Labor man named Bruce Yuill as its President. The Council’s vote of endorsement meant that Yuill, a flamboyant socialist, headed the trade union movement in Australia’s federal capital at a crucial time politically, with the Cold War well underway and the Australian Labor Party teetering on the historic schism of 1955.