Category Archives: Type

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 →

Beyond Medicare—Towards Wellness

Humphrey McQueen
Seeing Red, 2003 (slightly updated)

The current campaigns to defend and extend Medicare offer the opportunity to diagnose the commodification of life, both by merchandisers and by corporatised medicine. Whether health care is treated as a human right or as a commodity will always be the outcome of social action. Human rights are brought into existence through imagination and struggle. 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 →

The Real Battle for Australia

Defending Australia from the Pink Peril

Humphrey McQueen

From a lecture given in Australian History III, Australian National University, July 1972.
Printed in Woroni and then in National U.

In this lecture I want to lead you away from the notion of the Aborigine as a passive recipient of history, as no more than a victim. Instead, we shall recognise the Aborigine as an active agent in European history since first contact. Continue reading →

Asbestos

Humphrey McQueen

Extract from Framework of Flesh, Builders Labourers Battle for Health and Safety, Ginninderra Press, Port Adelaide, 2009, pp. 134-40

Between 1945 and 1955, Australian production of fibro sheeting from asbestos cement trebled from 8 to 23 million square metres. By 1961, one house in six was fibro. The self-builder favoured this material because it was cheap, easy to apply and available. The advertising said nothing about harms. 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 →

Taught to forget

 

 Humphrey McQueen

 If any question why we died,
Tell them because our fathers lied.
Rudyard Kipling (1919).

Did Melbourne’s Roman Catholic Archbishop Daniel Mannix allege, early in 1917, that the Great War was ‘simply a sordid trade war’, or did he but repeat as ‘a truism that the war was a trade war’? 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 – ‘A not unimportant role’: industry peak unions and inter-­union organising

 

‘A not unimportant role’: industry peak unions and inter-­union organising

Cathy Brigden

Abstract

Since the mid 1990s, there has been a significant expansion in the literature analysing peak unions. However, most of the research has focused on national, state and regional peak unions, with little attention given industry-scale peak unions. Just as peak bodies have long been part of the union landscape in many towns and cities, so too industry peak bodies have similar deep historical roots, evidenced by discussion by the Webbs. 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.

Continue reading →

2011 ASSLH conference – The Aftermath of the 1951 Waterfront Lockout

 

‘We never recovered from that strike’: The Aftermath of the 1951 Waterfront Lockout and Supporting Strikes

 Grace Millar

 

Abstract

The 1951 waterfront lockout and supporting strikes lasted five months and involved 20,000 workers.  As one of New Zealand’s largest industrial disputes it has received considerable historical attention, but the main focus of research has been on the beginning of the dispute. The limited historical work on the end of the dispute and the aftermath has focused on union structures, rather than the people of labour history.   Continue reading →

2011 ASSLH conference – Anti-­Communism Undermined: The Uncomfortable Alliances of W. C. Wentworth

 

Anti-­Communism Undermined: The Uncomfortable Alliances of W. C. Wentworth

 Lachlan Clohesy

Abstract

William Charles Wentworth, one of Australia’s most prominent anti-communist agitators, frequently linked both socialism and communism to Nazisim, on the basis of the perceived totalitarian nature of socialist and communist governments. To Wentworth, even the Chifley Labor government’s policies in the late 1940s would inexorably lead to a Soviet-style regime in Australia. Continue reading →